This article was downloaded by: [University of Stockholm] On: 22 August 2011, At: 17:09 Publisher: Routledge Informa

Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccam20

Entropy and the trajectory of world politics: why polarity has become less meaningful
Randall L Schweller
a a

Ohio State University

Available online: 10 Feb 2010

To cite this article: Randall L Schweller (2010): Entropy and the trajectory of world politics: why polarity has become less meaningful, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1, 145-163 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557570903456374

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 23, Number 1, March 2010

Entropy and the trajectory of world politics: why polarity has become less meaningful
Randall L Schweller Ohio State University
Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011
Abstract The random and indeterminate nature of the current unipolar world suggests a condition of increasing entropy. There are two reasons for this claim. First, relative capability advantages under unipolarity do not translate as easily as they once did into power and inuence over others. Second, systemic constraint is a property that limits actors freedom of action by imposing costs and benets on certain kinds of actions. Unlike past multipolar and bipolar systems, the current unipolar system exerts only weak, if any, systemic constraints on the unipolar power and all other actors as well. Thus, polarity has become a largely meaningless concept. Today, system process rather than structure best explains international politics, and this process is one of entropy. Finally, I suggest two pathways from unipolarity to a more balanced system: one is fairly consistent with standard balance-of-power realism but adds an ideational component; the other restores equilibrium by means of entropy. Introduction1 There is something about the current international system, its chaos and randomness, that suggests entropy.2 Since its inception, unipolaritys sui generis nature has tempted observers to describe and explain its unique dynamics.3 Its apparent lack of general properties and predictability, however, have frustrated most if not all who have sought to describe its workings.4 It does not behave in predictable ways like traditional multipolar or bipolar systems. Under most conditions, multipolarity breeds a classic balance of power system, in which several great powers compete and struggle with each other for power, prestige, and security. Such a system exhibits many behavioural regularities that can be
I am grateful to A. Burcu Bayram, Bear Braumoeller, Julie Clemens, Eric Grynaviski, Ted Hopf, Robert Jervis, Jennifer Mitzen, Xiaoyu Pu, Gideon Rose, David Schweller, Jack Snyder, Alex Thompson, Alexander Wendt, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper, and to the participants in the Research in International Politics Seminar at Ohio State University and at the 18 May 2009 United States National Intelligence Council meeting where I presented versions of it. 2 The current international systems overall lack of energy, uniformity and boredom are also characteristics of entropy. 3 For a fairly early and successful attempt see Kapstein and Mastanduno (1999). 4 Conversely, many who have written about unipolarity have underplayed or failed to recognize its truly unique characteristics. For an exception see Brooks and Wohlforth (2008).
ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/10/01014519 q 2010 Centre of International Studies DOI: 10.1080/09557570903456374
1

146 Randall L Schweller reasonably explained by the interactions among the subset of great powers at the systems core. Bipolar systems are even easier than multipolar ones to understand and predict. All the action centres on the two poles or superpowers, which do all of the important balancing on their own. The rest of the world, though viewed by the superpowers in highly competitive zero-sum terms, becomes largely superuous to the stability of the global system. For the most part, the behaviour of the two poles, the rigidity of their alliance systems and the exibility of their foreign policies are structurally determined. This is not to suggest that conventional bipolar and multipolar structures explained everything that went on in international politics; rather they told us a small number of big and important things (Waltz 1986, 329). Under unipolarity, by contrast, structural constraints are weak or nonexistent. With no great power rivals, the unipole makes choices unfettered by structural imperatives and constraints. It enjoys unprecedented freedom to choose, for instance, with whom to align and how tightly. Consequently, the United States (US) should be more likely today than past great powers to form coalitions based on ideology (fellow democracies), economics, or any other idiosyncratic interests of its choosing. Alternatively, the US may prefer to go it alone or to put together ad hoc coalitions of the willing with the mission determining the coalition, as US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, declared in 2001.5 On the downside, the unipoles overwhelmingly large capability advantage does not easily translate into actual power over others. Indeed, the so-called hyperpower may have less capacity to change or inuence others behaviour than poles in a bi- or multipolar system. The unipoles dilemma is that the relationship between relative capabilities and relative power is not a linear one. Just as the unipolar power is largely unconstrained by the need for others, weaker powers, in turn, have less need for a polar-power patron than they would normally have under more traditional balance-of-power structures. I say less need rather than no need because many states still face local threats for which American protection and assistance is valuable if not necessary. Moreover, there may be other ways in which the US can be extremely helpful to states and, thereby, get inuence over them. Nevertheless, leadership requires followers. If the unipole is seen as unnecessary or incompetenthere, the recent economic downturn as a result of US bank deregulation and export of toxic assets comes to mindits leadership will be unneeded and unwanted. Obviously, nobody wants to follow an incompetent leader. What is unique about unipolarity is that lesser powers have fewer reasons than in the past to do so. Unipolarity exemplies the problematic relationship between relative capabilities and usable power and inuence. The extra resources that a unipole possesses over normal polar powers found in other structures are akin to what is called useless energy associated with entropy. In international politics, bigger is not always better. But perhaps these weak effects of international structure in the contemporary era are due not to unipolarity per se but rather to liberal hegemony and nuclear weapons. Imagine, for instance, that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War. Its unipolar system would likely have been dominated by brute force and coercion,
5 Rumsfeld made this comment at a US Department of Defense News Brieng, 23 September 2001.

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Entropy and polarity 147 not legitimate authority, and it would have pressured secondary and lesser states far more heavy-handedly than the US currently does. This suggests that the social structure (or social purpose) of a given unipolar system, not its material structure, determines the kind of politics that take place within the system and the constraints exerted on the actors (see Finnemore 2009). Imagine further that such a nonliberal unipole existed in a world without nuclear weapons, the possession of which make states difcult to conquer and coerce. In this now offence-dominated world, the unipoles overwhelming advantage in conventional brute force would put at risk the survival of not only all other states but the states system itself. Recognizing these alternative unipolar scenarios, the foregoing analysis of unipolar dynamics claimed both too much and too little about the predictability of such systems. It claimed too much because a predatory unipole operating in a nonnuclear world could be expected to exert signicant coercive constraints on subordinate actors. It claimed too little because it is not the unipolar structure that determines whether states will be constrained but rather the unipoles specic unit-level characteristics and the military technology of the day. If the unipoles attributes and military technology so dramatically affect the properties of the given system, then unipolarity exerts even weaker effects than I have already suggested. The upshot is that polarity does not tell us much about how a unipolar system will operate. What may be more important than polarity is the increase in the number and kinds of state and nonstate actors that can affect the systems outcomes. That is to say, the systems process variables, not its structure, may be driving the current dynamics of world politics. Claiming that we have entered a nonpolar age dominated by dozens of state and nonstate actors, Richard Haass describes the tendency of this radically new international system to become more chaotic over time: [e]ntropy dictates that systems consisting of a large number of actors tend toward greater randomness and disorder in the absence of external intervention (2008, 52). Entropy may indeed be a useful concept for understanding the current system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy The Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts that a systems total energy consists of two separate parts: energy that is available for work (useful or free energy) and energy that is unavailable for work (useless or bound energy). Thermodynamic entropy measures the disorganization in a system. It governs the direction of all physical changes taking place in the universe. Over time, the energy contained in a closed system becomes distributed in the most probable pattern with all individual particles engaged in random, disordered motion. As collisions cause bodies to exchange heat, this most probable pattern is actually a state of equal energy among particles. The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system cannot decrease; it may only remain the same or increase; and so, by implication, the entropy of the universe tends to increase. The concept of entropy, however, is better understood outside the domain of thermodynamics. The Second Law is essentially a common sense law of probability: events with a high frequency occur more often than events with low frequency; thus, systems proceed from initial states of low probability to nal

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

148 Randall L Schweller states of highest probability or nal equilibrium (Ben-Naim 2007, chapter 6). Once equilibrium has been reached, the system stays there forever and never returns to its initial state.6 The nal distribution is one with minimum information. What precisely does this mean? When a system is in a given macrostate or dim conguration (say, the number 7 as the outcome of throwing two dice), entropy measures the degree of uncertainty or ignorance about the particular microstate (that is, whether a given role of the dice that totals 7 is the specic conguration {3,4}, {4,3}, {2,5}, {5,2}, {1,6} or {6,1}) by counting the number of bits of additional information needed to specify it, assuming all microstates as equally probable. Entropy measures this change in the amount of missing information: a gain in entropy means a loss of information. Thus, entropy is often associated with disorder and chaos because random congurations have a larger probability of occurring than more ordered ones. Randomness can be found in virtually unlimited combinations of specic congurations, whereas order implies a specic combination of a relatively small number of congurations. Consider, for instance, an egg rolling off a table. The spattered egg represents a condition of maximum entropy; the pristine egg signies a condition of negentropy. The former dim conguration (or macrostate) does not tell us much about the specic conguration, whereas the latter one does. To understand how entropy moves closed systems towards disorder, consider the example of shufing a deck of cards with a well-dened initial order. For the sake of simplicity, the act of shufing will consist of removing the top card and placing it back in the deck at random. After one shufe, the deck has changed to one of 52 alternatives, each strongly resembling the original order. After many repetitions, however, the original order will have been completely destroyed. This process of increasing disorder in a deck of playing cards after n shufing is a statistical example of the thermodynamic law of increasing entropy. The decrease of free energy refers to the loss of information or order. The notion that information has the capacity to do work is a rather strange one, however, from the perspective of the natural sciences. How are information and order associated with free energy and the capacity to do work? To answer this question, we must recover a tradition of cause and effect that preceded standard Newtonian imagery. It is the tradition of Anaxagoras, in whose cosmology Cosmos is born of Chaos by the sorting action of Mind (Hawkins 1964, 206); one that associates cause with reason and the order of nature with the order of thought. The performance of useful work, therefore, means providing or transferring some order or information to a system, to produce a situation having a certain order (216). This denition of useful work as the transference of form or information for the purpose of creating a certain order necessarily injects subjectivity and, more directly, choice and purposive behaviour into the equation. The essential point is that purposive behaviour means more than merely having goals; it is constructing goals and then acting in such a way as to bring about the initial thought or description of purposive activity, namely the goal. Purpose, therefore, becomes a kind of cause.
6

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

For very large N, more frequently equates with always! (Ben-Naim 2007, 144).

Entropy and polarity 149 The Second Law recast the whole 17th- and 18th-century framework of scientic thought by introducing the direction of time in the form of irreversible processes. As David Hawkins puts it:
The second law had one peculiarity that distinguished it from all previous formulations of physical law since the time of Galileo: it took account of time direction, and they did not . . . The second law implied that physics, by its own means, was nally moved to acknowledge one of the most pervasive features of experience, the difference between before and after. (1964, 191)

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Once a state of entropy has been reached, there is no going back. Imagine two separate containers of the colours blue and yellow with a valve or control device connecting the two closed systems. When the valve is opened, molecules of each colour advance to the other side. Over time, the two colours will blend together to form a uniform colour of green. Once the system reaches an equilibrium of greenness, there is no going back to the initial states of separate yellow and blue; these colours become lost information. The foregoing discussion suggests two essential points: 1. Entropy explains why closed systems inevitably proceed towards disorder and uniformity of energy; that is, why matter and energy tend to degrade to more probable, less informative states. Entropy is a measure of the amount of missing information in a system. 2. Entropy is a time-dependent variable not only of heat ow but of all closed systems in disequilibrium. There is no going back once entropy has set in. The initial conditions of the system are lost forever. The direction of time is towards decreasing order, and so time has no direction at all. To determine whether it makes sense to apply the concept of entropy to international politics, we must rst answer a basic question: can international politics be accurately described as a closed system? In my view, it is essentially a closed system in at least two ways. First, there are huge barriers to entry into the major-power system. The universe of states that have been poles or can ever hope to become a pole is extremely small; only a handful of states have achieved or can dream about achieving great-power status. The very concept of polarity implies oligarchic or, in the case of unipolarity, hegemonic rule over the international system. It is rooted in the notion that international politics are shaped by vast inequalities among states; that only a few powerful actors matter. In terms of potential polar membership, then, there is a nite amount of useful or free energy in the system. In this limited but fundamentally important sense, international politics is a relatively closed system. Second, the question of whether international politics is a closed system can be applied to the state system as a whole. Taking this broader view, the international system now subsumes the entire earth, such that nothing remains outside it. Thus, Sir Halford Mackinder proclaimed at the turn of the 20th century that, because the Age of Discovery witnessed European expansion across the oceans to new lands, we shall again have to deal with a closed political system and this time one of world-wide scope (2004 [1904], 299). Mackinders observation goes to the core of a very important question: why should increasing entropy be invoked now to explain international politics? Presumably, the second law of thermodynamics is valid always and everywhere. It must have been valid at the time of early civilizations 4000 1000 BCE; at the

150 Randall L Schweller time of the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty in China; and during the era preceding the First World War, when the British Empire reigned over the globe and competed with other European great powers. So why now? Two responses. First, I am attempting to explain the modern states system, so the analysis would not predate 1648. Second and more important, the Second Law only applies to closed systems. International politics became a closed system at the turn of the last century. Thus, the process of increasing entropy as it applies to changes in world politics began roughly 100 years ago, a relatively brief time frame. If, indeed, we can apply entropy to the international system, this raises the question: what precisely does entropy measure in international politics? It measures change in the degree of systemic constraints on the units: as entropy increases, constraints weaken. When systemic constraints are high, the system will operate in a predictable manner; when systemic constraints are low or nonexistent, the system will behave in a random and chaotic manner. This occurs because, as entropy increases, the macrostate is composed of more and more specic congurations, and so the former reveals less and less information about the latter. The logic is straightforward and mere commonsense: events of higher frequency appear more often than those of lower frequency. Entropy and international structure Consistent with entropy, unipolar dynamics are random because the structure neither constrains the choices of the unipole nor solely determines the degree of constraints on anyone else. Boundless freedom breeds randomness. Thus, the idiosyncratic beliefs of unconstrained US leaders tell us far more about recent American foreign policy choices than the structure of the international system. Moreover and as mentioned, unipolar systems have less glue to hold things together than other international structures. This is because, while capabilities are concentrated under unipolarity, power and threats are diffused throughout the system.7 Global politics matter only for the unipolar power, the sole actor with global reach and interests. For everyone else, all politics are local. Borrowing an old term from Morton Kaplan (1957), unipolarity is essentially subsystem dominant: regional subsystems follow their own logic and that is where the action is. Conversely, in multipolar and bipolar systems, the poles form a ruling oligarchy, interacting with each other in fairly predictable ways; for example, balancing each other through arms and allies, controlling regions through spheres of inuence arrangements etc. This produces predictable state behaviours and system dynamics that govern the overall workings of international politics. This predictability can be seen in Kenneth Waltzs (1979) notions of emulation and socializationtwo processes that generate uniformity of the units and their behaviours through positive feedback mechanisms. What Waltz does not consider
7 Under bipolarity, in contrast, threats are concentrated in the two poles, whereas damage is diffused throughout the system. Because bipolarity encourages the two poles to view the world in zero-sum terms, they compete ercely on a global scale. Twenty million people were killed in the periphery under bipolarity (damage was diffused), as two titanic forces competed with each other for world supremacy (power and threat were concentrated in their hands).

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Entropy and polarity 151 (but Robert Gilpin 1981 does) are the returns to scale, clustering of innovation and other processes that tend to whittle down the number of poles until only one remains standing. So far this process, which curiously began around the turn of the last century when international politics became a closed system, has worked in only one direction: from many poles to two poles to one pole. It remains to be seen whether this process can be reversed. Is this entropy? Does unipolarity represent a stable and permanent loss of variation in the system? Perhaps. If so, than the current unipolar world is even more stable than William Wohlforth (1999) realizes. As I will argue below, however, I believe that maximum entropy (nal equilibrium) will be reached when power capabilities diffuse to other actors and none has any incentive to move from this condition; that is, when there is equal energy among the primary units of the system (the poles). At this point, the system will have reached a very unique form of multipolarityone that has never been seen before but whose arrival has been predicted since the early 18th century. Entropy and system process Information Theory is the mathematical theory of communication that is used to nd out the speed and quantity of information transmission. It uses statistical concepts of probability to compute the extra information (redundancy) necessary to counteract the distortion and losses that may occur during transmission from one information source to another. Entropy within this theory is the measure of the rate of transfer of information in that message. Information entropy is the degradation of information. As Orrin Klapp asserts, matter and energy degrade to more probable, less informative states. The larger the amounts of information processed or diffused, the more likely it is that information will degrade toward meaningless variety, like noise or information overload, or sterile uniformity (1986, 2 3). People deluged by a ood of information, which may be described as meaningless variety, noise, or overload, quickly reach a saturation point where, as a means of self-defense, they develop the capacity to ignore much and become selective (Pye 1963, 126); worse still, they tend to become jaded, blase and callous. In contrast, people bombarded by redundant information (sterile uniformity) come to view life as banal, colourless, insipid, boring and characterless. These two types of increases in information entropygains in either noise or redundancygenerate, in turn, a consequent meaning loss and boredom that put limits on social and political progress and human potential. For instance, excessively bored people have a proclivity to turn to drug abuse, religious cults, hyperconsumerism, crime, thrill seeking or gambling. Moreover, they typically suffer from low self-esteem, pathologies, alienation and anomie. Information entropy, because it describes the tendency of all objects within closed systems to move from least to most probable patterns, necessarily implies a loss of information (in statistical language, the most probable dim event provides the minimum amount of information about the specic events that constitute it). Oddly enough, therefore, information entropy manufactures the twin ills of: (1) an acute sense of disorder, randomness, chaos and uncertainty; and (2) a movement from difference to likeness, from independence to conformityfor example, the notion of cultural homogenization or a global monoculture as the nal state of

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

152 Randall L Schweller sameness in global society, captured by the neologism, Westoxication. Regarding the latter point, Francis Fukuyamas (1992) end of history argument is a classic statement of entropy in world politics, although the word is never used. More broadly, information entropy suggests a world in which wisdom does not come from gains in knowledge, and gains in knowledge do not come from increased information. To the contrary, increased information can result in decreased knowledge and wisdom. This hypothesized negative relationship between information and knowledge stems from informations most basic property: its division into signal and noise. Since we cannot adequately process all of its possibilities, information must be sorted into bits that are signicant and those that are not. And because human memory is nite, many pieces of information must be discarded. How is this playing out in the current world system? Consider the effects of the information revolution. The logic of information entropy suggests that, rather than producing greater global understanding, intersubjectivity and consensual knowledge, the dramatic increase in global information ows has decreased intersubjectivity, consensual knowledge bases and the ability to reconcile various world views. Limiting the scope of enquiry for the moment to the US, the new million-channel media universe, consisting of talk radio, cable television and the Internet (YouTube and the blogosphere), offers so many contradictory facts, truths and informed opinions that people everywhere can essentially select and interpret facts in a way that accords with their own personal, idiosyncratic and often at wrong versions of reality (Manjoo 2008). In this modern infosphere, Farhad Manjoo (2008) argues, knowledge no longer rests on objective facts but rather on true enough facts and arguments (what Stephen Colbert calls truthiness, which means you choose). A truth pocked with holes but one that is true enough will nonetheless hold sway over those who choose to believe it for motivated reasons, whether political, religious or otherwisefor example, claims that the US government carried out the 9/11 attacks, Republicans rigged the 2004 election and HIV does not cause AIDS. With so many competing news outlets and opinions, we can now seek out and nd the kind of political views that please us, no matter how absurd; news that tells us what we want to hear, that indulges our political preconceptions and belief systems, and that is told by people who think exactly the same way we do. The problem is no longer national conglomerates that have consolidated press ownership into the hands of a few (though this remains a problem for some media). Rather, it is too many choices and too much information from seemingly credible sources that appears true but is misleading and, in many cases, downright false. The infosphere generates seductive facts to t any political or religious point of view; everyone can now feel comforted in whatever they believe. But this comfort comes at the expense of truth (or some reasonable approximation to it) and of societys ability to deliberate and reconcile in a sensible way competing beliefs in the public sphere. Taken to the global level, information overload and entropy suggest increased fragmentation, policies and inferences driven by hardcore ideological beliefs, and rigid and uncompromising political views that are fact resistant. In short, the infosphere leads to disarticulation of both national and international narratives. It is as if we are entering a new social landscape composed of personal worlds, where each individual, at least in developed countries, can construct his or her

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Entropy and polarity 153 own unique intersubjective space. This free-for-all view of reality should eventually have real political implications, but not in the direction one might at rst suspect. I will return to this subject in my discussion of global equilibrium as a product of increasing entropy later in the article. Two ways that unipolarity might end If we will soon see the emergence of a multipolar world, as many observers for very different reasons believe (see Waltz 1993; Layne 1993; Kupchan 1998; Mearsheimer 2001; Posen 2006), how precisely will unipolarity end? In my view, there are two pathways from unipolarity to a balanced system: (1) contenders for polar status deliberately undermine the current order and then replace it with a new one by means of balancing behaviour; or (2) a spontaneously generated equilibrium develops not from balancing behaviour but from uneven rates of growth among egoistic actors seeking wealth, not power. The rst pathway to system equilibrium assumes that the future will resemble the past, and so it is mostly consistent with standard balance-ofpower realism but with an added ideational component. The second route assumes that the current unipolar system signals increasing entropy in international politics, and so it predicts a restored global equilibrium emerging by means of this irreversible journey to maximum entropy. Each pathway is discussed in turn. The traditional method of restoring balance If the foregoing discussion of entropy under unipolarity is incorrect, then multipolarity will likely emerge and do so in a familiar way: powers will eventually rise to check unbalanced power. That said, a crucial obstacle to balancing behaviour under unipolarity has gone virtually unnoticed: unipolarity is the only system in which balancing is a revisionist, not conservative, strategy. Any state or coalition seeking to restore a balance is, by denition, revisionist in an essential way: it seeks to overthrow the established order of unbalanced power and replace it with a balance-of-power system. The goal is a change of system, not a change within the system, and so it will alter the very structure of international politics from unipolarity to bipolarity or multipolarity. Because balancing under unipolarity is revisionist, any state intent on restoring system equilibrium will be labelled an aggressor. These ideational hurdles along with the huge power disparity inherent in unipolarity have been the main obstacles to balancing behaviour. What this implies is that, for balancing to occur under unipolarity, it has to be preceded by a delegitimation phase. States must rst come to see US hegemony as so incompetent and dangerous that its rule must be overturned. Otherwise, the risks and high costs of attempting to restore a global balance will be prohibitive. Of course, delegitimation does not occur in a vacuum, and so US attitudes towards international organizations, laws and treaties will play a major role in the future stability and legitimacy of American hegemony. The interplay of international politics in a unipolar setting is an example of the more general phenomenon of relations of domination and resistance. James Scott

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

154 Randall L Schweller observes that most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective deance of power holders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites (1990, 138). Unipolar systems, by denition, have yet to undergo signicant deconcentration of power. Secondary states, therefore, do not have the capabilities to balance against the unipole. This does not mean that they simply obey the hegemons every wish. Rather, they practise the arts of resistance, for relations of resistance always coexist with relations of domination. Two mutually sustaining types of resistance occur in a delegitimation phase: discourses and practices of resistance. They represent two sides of the same coin. Regarding the discourse of resistance, James Scott points out that subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity . . . such activity was dangerous, if not suicidal (1985, xv). The purpose of competing ideologies (the conservative ideologies of the rulers and the deviant ones espoused by the weak) is to control by convincing or persuasion (23). Here, the relationship between thought and action is the key to understanding how delegitimation of hegemonic authority works. Thoughts inform consciousness, infusing the words, symbolic language, deviant ideologies and discourses with shared values and pathways for action, which will be taken if and when the power situation changes. As such, the dreams, intentions, symbols, ideas and language of subordinate actors not only presage future rebellions (blows against the established order) but are necessary precursors for them. Acts and thoughts of resistance engage in regular conversation; taken together, they pose an alternative or imagined world, a vision of what could be, and the ways and means to achieve this goal. It all begins, however, with symbolic sanctions: The rich, while they may be relatively immune to material sanctions, cannot escape symbolic sanctions: slander, gossip, character assassination (25). It is this type of process to which I am referring when I say delegitimation. In addition to competing visions of global order (the discourse of resistance), subordinate actors may adopt cost-imposing strategies (the practice of resistance) ` vis-a-vis the unipolar power that fall short of balancing against it.8 There are many ways that states (weak ones included) and even nonstates can impose costs on a unipolar powerranging from the mere withdrawal of goodwill to actual attacks on its soil.9 In the current world, cost-imposing strategies include diplomatic friction; foot-dragging;10 blackmail; denying US military forces access to bases;11 terrorist attacks against the US; aiding, abetting and harbouring terrorist groups; voting against the US in international institutions; preventing or reversing the forward-basing of US military forces; protectionism and other coercive economic policies; conventional uses of force such as a blockade against US allies;12 threats
8 What I am calling cost-imposing strategies others have called soft balancing. For a complete treatment on the concept of soft balancing see Brown et al (2009). 9 Regarding the withdrawal of goodwill, I am grateful to John Mueller for pointing out this British phrase. 10 For example, Israel said that it will dismantle its settlements in occupied territories but did so very slowly, simultaneously expanding others without notifying the US. 11 For example, Turkeys refusal to give the US access to its bases prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 12 For example, a Chinese blockade of Taiwans trade through the destruction of ports or shipping.

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Entropy and polarity 155 to pivotal states that affect regional and international security (see Chase et al 1996); and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction among anti-Western states or groups. The important point here is that states need not catch up with the hegemon in order to impose costs on its actions, to make its life miserable (see Christensen 2001). We are not currently in a full-blown delegitimation phase. If it comes, it is probably decades away. But there is some evidence of deconcentration and a potential new challenge to the existing order. Recently, the staggering costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the nancial bailout and stimulus packages in response to the subprime mortgage and nancial credit crises have battered the US economy, opening the door for peer competitors to make substantial relative gains. Indeed, the current bear market ranks among the worst in history, with the Dow and Standard and Poor down almost 50 per cent from their 2007 peaks; it is the worst bear market since 1973 1974, when the Dow fell 45 per cent in two years. Will 2008 be remembered as the onset of a non-American century? The cause of US troubles, both in the short and long term, is debt: the US is borrowing massively to nance current consumption. History shows that it may take 10 30 years for the market to revive. The latest cascading stockmarket crash may not only portend the beginning of the end of American unipolarity but also momentous global political change. Just as the Great Depression ushered in fascism, Stalinism and, of course, the Second World War, the current nancial crisis is of sufcient proportions that we should expect deep and far-reaching political repercussions. The origins of these political repercussions will likely come from the Wests old Cold War rivals, China and Russia, which are now both operating as economically successful authoritarian-capitalist great powers (see Gat 2007). Such states have been absent since the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, but they seem poised to make a comebacka big comeback. Russia and China are much larger in terms of population, territory and resources than Imperial and Fascist Germany and Imperial Japan ever were or could have hoped to become.13 The return of authoritarian-capitalist great powers, therefore, represents not only a viable alternative path to modernity but, more important, the rebirth of a nondemocratic Second Worldone that will directly confront the First World and compete with it in the Third World.14 There is a fundamental difference this time around, however. Whereas the old Second World operated outside of the global capitalist system,
At the present time, contemporary China is certainly not following the same path as these or other past rising powers. In the eyes of Chinese strategists, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany failed precisely because they focused on militaristic expansion, and so China must continue to chart a peaceful path towards great-power status (see Bijian 2005). For the view that China poses an unfamiliar challenge to the US because its growth has been more dramatic in the economic and political spheres than the military one, see Lampton (2008) and Zakaria (2008, 127 128). 14 This use of the phrase, the Second World, is consistent with how the term was used during the Cold War. This should not be confused with Parag Khannas (2008) use of the term the Second World, which refers to countries in transition or emerging countries. Khannas Second World consists of what has traditionally been called middle powers or the semiperiphery in the international relations literature. Most of Khannas Second World countries were in the Third World during the Cold War.
13

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

156 Randall L Schweller the new one is now fully integrated within the global economy with its members participating on their own terms, just as their nondemocratic-capitalist predecessors did prior to 1945. If the current global economic meltdown weakens the liberal consensus, the appeal of this alternative authoritarian-capitalist Second World will increase, especially in Asia, Latin America and Africa where support for liberal democracy is recent, incomplete and easily shaken. It is too early to tell whether nondemocratic capitalism will someday loosen liberal democracys hegemonic grip, let alone cast doubt on liberalisms ultimate victory and future dominance (see Deudney and Ikenberry 2009). At this early stage, one cannot even say whether China and Russia will retain their authoritarian characters into the near future or that either or both will become truly revisionist powers in the long run. What can be said is that, if the future resembles the past, then unipolarity will eventually end and its demise will be preceded by some sort of delegitimation phase. This is one of the few things that the structure of unipolarity does seem to set in motion. But the future may not resemble the pasta subject to which I now turn. Equilibrium from entropy: not your great grandfathers multipolarity As entropy increases, available energy within the system dissipates and becomes distributed in the most probable pattern: a state of equal energy among particles. This spontaneous deconcentration process offers another pathway from unipolarity to multipolarity. It is noteworthy not because of what states do to get there but rather what they do not do: balance and seek relative military power. To be clear, I do not have in mind the well-known spontaneously generated balance of power that arises as an unintended consequence of states seeking power.15 Nor do I mean to suggest the cyclical war and international change processes described by Robert Gilpin (1981), in which power disperses over time after a hegemonic war. Gilpins deconcentration process is driven by standard realist mechanisms (for example, uneven rates of growth due to technological innovations with military implications, imperial overstretch, and overconsumption). Moreover, Gilpin associates the emergence of multipolarity not with system equilibrium but rather a crisis of disequilibrium rooted in a widening disjuncture between prestige and actual power. Hegemonic wars, so the theory goes, resolve the crisis and restore system equilibrium. In contrast, the entropy path to equilibrium that I propose is brought about by enervationthat is, an absence of dynamism and power politics within the systems core. Major power war becomes barely conceivable, let alone, the likely consequence of a return to deconcentrated global power.
This view of how equilibrium (balance) emerges from entropy is similar to how it occurs in the automatic version of balance of power theory. Both are spontaneously generated balances. The difference is that, in the latter, balanced power is an unintended consequence of the coaction of states seeking (intending) not equality with others but domination over them by means of power-maximization strategies. Conversely, in the former case, states are not essentially positional but rather egoistic in nature; they do not intend to do much of anything with respect to others. Thus, although system equilibrium as a result of entropy is unintended, this does not imply, as it does in balance of power, that the system thwarts actors primary strategies and aims.
15

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Entropy and polarity 157 Though rarely mentioned, system equilibrium can emerge without balancing or power-seeking behaviour. This should not come as a surprise; for we know that a Concert system existed during a multipolar phase, roughly between 1815 and 1853. That system, however, arose from the ashes of war, the purpose of which was to defeat an aspiring hegemon before it rolled up the system. The current system, however, has already been rolled up for all intents and purposes. So how could a balance of power be restored without deliberate balancing against the US? The answer is that uneven rates of growth among states seeking merely to get rich (wealth, not military power, security, or political inuence over others) can produce a rough equivalence in capabilities among several states, none of which feel particularly threatened by each other or seek relative gains at the expense of one another. In other words, the major actors in the system are strictly egoistic, and they interact cooperatively, not competitively or strategically in a military sense, with each other. It is essentially an orthodox liberal world, in which international politics becomes a positive-sum game and the concept of equilibrium is, by denition, a Pareto optimal condition that no actor has an interest in changing (see Callinicos 2007, 546). Here, global equilibrium means maximum entropy. What has changed? Simply put, there is no longer an expectation of violent expansion among the great powers. Balance of power is built on the assumption not only that war is a legitimate instrument of statecraft (Jervis 1986, 60) but that states will settle their differences by ghting. This expectation exercises a profound inuence on the types of behaviours exhibited by states and the system as a whole (Lasswell 1965 [1935], chapter 3). It was not just the prospect of war that triggered the basic dynamics of past multipolar and bipolar systems. It was the anticipation that powerful states sought to and would, if given the right odds, carry out territorial conquests at each others expense that shaped and shoved actors in ways consistent with the predictions of Waltzian balance of power theory. Without the very real fear of Soviet expansion, why would bipolarity have compelled the US to adopt a grand strategy of containment and deterrence? Without the traditional expectations of great power war and conquest, why would the added complexity and uncertainty of multipolar systems make them unstable? Why would states form alliances in the rst place, much less worry about who aligns with whom? When war is unthinkable among the great powers, it is hard to see how polarity exerts the constraints predicted by structural balance of power theory. To the extent that this driving force of history is no longer in play, the system will experience increasing entropy. The current systems ideational or social structures also seem to be pushing in the direction of greater entropy, suggesting that the world may be reaching an endpoint of sorts. This view of history is consistent with Kants (2005 [1795]) perpetual peace, Richard Rosecrances (1987) rise of the trading state, Francis Fukuyamas (1992) end of history and, for slightly different reasons, John Ikenberrys (2001) vision of a constitutional order rooted in liberalism. Regarding the latter, a multipolar constitutional order would not be all that different from the current world because: (1) constitutional orders place limits on the returns to power, so presumably a switch from unipolarity to multipolarity would not be terribly signicant; (2) the system, though multipolar, would retain the basic foundations of the American liberal order, its underlying social values would remain intact, and (3) there would be, just as today, no balancing behaviour among the major powers against each other, and major power war would be

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

158 Randall L Schweller virtually unthinkable. That noted, Ikenberrys view of order is more centralized, structured and deliberate than the one I have in mind. An entropy version of Ikenberrys order would be a watered-down, more decentralized and spontaneously generated liberal orderbut one that still devalues power. Liberals are not the only ones making such claims. Several prominent realists have also acknowledged that the world has fundamentally changed to the point that, if and when unipolarity ends, we will not likely see a return to traditional great power politics among the core states. Robert Jervis (2005), for instance, stresses the unprecedented development of a Security Community among all the leading powers as the dening feature of todays world politics. The existence of this security community means not only that major power war has become unthinkable but also that bandwagoning and balancing will not map on the classical form of the balance of power (Jervis 2005, 31). Similarly, Jonathan Kirshner (2008, 335) sees fewer prospects for great power war as a consequence of globalization. Along these lines, Fareed Zakaria (2008, 243) predicts a post` American world governed by a messy ad hoc order composed of a la carte multilateralism and networked interactions among state and nonstate actors. The provision of international order in this future world will no longer be a matter decided solely by the political and military power held by a single hegemon or even a group of leading states. The bottom line is that, if war no longer lurks in the background of great power relations and if strong states must share power with institutions and nonstate actors, then to say that the world is becoming multipolar is, if not meaningless, grossly misleading. The dynamics of this new multipolar world will be signicantly different from those of past multipolar systems. When great powers built arms in traditional multipolar settings, they did so under the belief that it was not only possible but probable that their weapons would be targeted and used against each other. Likewise, when they formed alliances, they targeted them at one another. A Community composed of the most developed states in the international system was not on the menu of traditional alliance politics under multipolarity. Of course, international politics can change rapidly and the mere prediction that the Community will survive into the foreseeable future, no matter how compelling it appears to us today, does not mean that the Community will not dissolve sooner than later. Even so, it is difcult to see how major power war becomes thinkable again given the intolerably high costs of war and the obvious destructiveness of nuclear weapons, the benets of peace grounded in the perceived decoupling of territorial conquest from national prosperity, and the shared values and beliefs about how the world works among the leading states (Jervis 2005). To be clear, the key point is that polarity (that is, the systems material structure) is no longer as important as it once was in determining the behaviour of the great power system. Instead, changes in the systems processes and social structures are driving international politics. To see this, let us return to the earlier discussion of information entropy. My purpose is to specify the micro-foundations that underpin the particular politics or lack thereof that characterize this system. Information entropy tells us that the main political effect of the infosphere and the post-fact society it engenders will not be an increase in violent conicts but precisely the reverse: a more durable peace rooted in apathy, jadedness and boredom. When everything and its opposite are claimed to be true, most people

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Entropy and polarity 159 stop trusting what they hear and the people from whom they hear it. They either tune it all out or heavily discount the information they receive. Witness the precipitous decline in generalized trust among Americans from 60 per cent in 1960 to only 32 per cent in 2006, as well as the steep drop in voluntary civic and political participation (the decline in social capital famously documented by Robert Putnam 1995; 2000). Citizens in the US and, more generally, the developed world have become increasingly atomized and distrustful of society and politics. Thus, while the infosphere allows people to maintain increasingly rigid beliefs, the associated information overload and miscellaneous treatment of facts more than offset this trend by producing disinterested, cynical, antiempathetic, solipsistic citizens, who scarcely t the mould of potential warriors for various political causes. And because an information environment characterized by randomness and chaos tends towards inert uniformity, the political centre, not the extremes, will dominate the action (or, more accurately, nonaction) within the systems core. This infosphere-driven entropy has yet to spread to the developing world, as indicated by the recent pink tide of socialist-inspired movements and state-led projects currently taking place across signicant parts of Latin America (most notably, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador). The infosphere increases entropy not only by making it harder to cull meaning and truth from the seas of signal (the more connections, the more chaos, the more entropy) and by decreasing trust and social capital but also by demanding our attention. Americans watch an average of six hours of television a daya habit that drains both their time and energy to respond to what they see. Plugged into the infosphere, they have become an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers who, statistics show, mostly watch alone (Wallace 1997, 34 35). As voyeurism becomes an addiction, the infospheres power is to disconnect and deactivate, to increase social and political entropy. At this point, many readers are probably confused and troubled because I am advancing two seemingly contradictory claims, namely, that the international system is becoming both more peaceful and more disordered as a result of increasing entropy. This logic associates: (1) peace with boredom, uncertainty, bounded or useless energy, disorder, disorganization and randomness; and (2) war with order, predictability, organization and dynamism or useful energy. Other than the link between war and dynamism, which is a traditional view, these associations seem illogical and counterintuitive. How can they both be true? The confusion arises over the terms order and disorder. These are subjective qualities, to be sure, but a working denition can and must be provided to make sense of the theory being advanced. Many international relations scholars associate order with a high level of global institutionalization. I do not. To the contrary, institutions when viewed through the lens of entropy represent a stable equilibrium, which is the macrostate (or dim conguration) of maximum entropy (most missing information). That noted, war requires a signicant amount of complex organization at both the state and system levels. War is not a random or disorganized behaviour. By order I mean something quite specic: macrostates that provide maximum information (minimum missing information) about a given microstate (specic conguration or event). A system of increasing order moves from less informative to more informative macrostates. A war-prone international system (by which I mean great-power wars) exhibits many predictable system-wide and

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

160 Randall L Schweller domestic-level characteristicsfor example, states build arms, form alliances, increase their diplomatic activity, become more extroverted in their foreign policies, ramp up state extraction for war mobilization, whip up domestic unity (through ingroup/outgroup dynamics) and the system exhibits increased polarization. In other words, there are a limited number of specic and predictable microstates (or events) associated with the macrostate (or dim conguration) of war. In contrast, peace can have many specic congurations or microstates. Peace is a normal state of affairs; war is abnormal. Normal situations are more frequent and probable than abnormal ones. The randomness, uncertainty and disorder of peace refer to the multitude of specic events that are associated with this condition that makes it very difcult to guess the specic microstate from the observed macrostate (peace). A systemic transformation from war to peace, therefore, increases entropy or, more concretely, the amount of missing information. In this sense, peace is a more disordered, less predictable, and more random condition than war. Finally, if I am correct that rising entropy in the form of a liberal order and perpetual peace will cause chaos and enervation at the system level, this logic should apply to the development of liberalism at the domestic level as well. On the subject of war and its relationship to state and societal development, Hegel wrote:
War is not to be regarded as an absolute evil . . . Just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from foulness which would be the result of a long calm, so also corruption in nations would be the result of prolonged, let alone perpetual, peace. (Hegel 1967 [1821], 76)

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Here, Hegels still-seas metaphor for international peace is entirely consistent with the concept of maximum entropy. Moreover, his assertion that peace produces internal corruption has been supported by Mancur Olson (1982) in his study of the rise and fall of nations. Olson claims that stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and special-interest organizations for collective action over time. These rent-seeking groups reduce the societys economic efciency and aggregate income and slow down its capacity to adopt new technologies and reallocate resources in response to changing conditions. Foreign invasion and military occupation, by breaking apart specialinterest groups (rent-seeking distributional coalitions and cartels) and disrupting social rigidities, result in comparatively higher rates of economic growth for those countries that have been invaded than for those that have not. More recently, Tanisha Fazal (2008) has argued that the norm against conquest, annexation and occupation permits and even encourages state failure and civil war. These logics all support the notion that maximum entropy in the form of stasis leads to internal underdevelopment, stagnation, state failure and a general deterioration of society. When domestic inertia is disrupted, good things happen. Conclusion If forced to choose one of the two pathways from unipolarity to multipolarity, I would bet on entropy as the more likely route than the traditional balance-ofpower one. I simply do not see anything on the horizon that will change the record-setting long peace among the major powers (see Mueller 2004). Great powers seem determined to do two things more than anything else: get rich and

Entropy and polarity 161 avoid catastrophic military contests with each other for reasons of territorial aggrandizement. Of course, some unforeseen event could dramatically and very quickly change these current incentives. Nevertheless, and much as it pains this hard-boiled realist to admit, I am placing my bet on more of the same. The birth of this new multipolar system, if it should occur, would signal that either maximum entropy has set in or that the ultimate state of inert uniformity and unavailable energy is coming. For it would suggest that time does have a direction in international politics, that there is no going back because the initial conditions of the system (variation in its information) have been lost forever. If and when we reach such a point in time, history will have ended. Or, at least, international politics as we know it will have ended. Such an order, however, would not so resemble domestic politics that there would be no need for a separate discipline to study it. Although its consequences would be dramatically altered, the deep structure of anarchythe lack of a sovereign arbiter to make and enforce agreements among stateswould distinguish the workings of international politics from those of domestic politics. The former would remain a more random, uncertain and disorganized realm than the latter. I fully appreciate that a future order among the major powers built on the expectation of the peaceful resolution of conictregardless of its downsides at the domestic and systemic levels and its boring, undynamic naturewould be unreservedly welcomed by most everyone. They are most probably right to do so. After all, peace and calm are wonderful things. The problem remains, however, how to manage peaceful evolutionary change in a way that promotes social justice and progressvalues that, hitherto, have been normally advanced through dramatic and sometimes brutal wars of revolutionary change. We should neither confuse peace with justice nor forget that, although it may be a distasteful truth of history, radical change has often required violent conict.

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Notes on contributor
Randall L Schweller (PhD, Columbia) is Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. He is also an editorial board member of International Security, Security Studies and the Studies in Asian Security series published by Stanford University Press. He is a former John M Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in National Security at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.

References
Ben-Naim, Arieh (2007) Entropy demystied: the second law reduced to common sense (Toh Tuck Link, Singapore: World Scientic) Bijian, Zheng (2005) Chinas peaceful rise to great power status, Foreign Affairs, 84:5, 8 24 Brooks, Stephen G and William C Wohlforth (2008) World out of balance: international relations and the challenge of American primacy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press) Brown, Michael E, Owen R Cote Jr, Sean M Lynn-Jones and Steven E Miller (eds) (2009) Primacy and its discontents: American power and international stability (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press) Callinicos, Alex (2007) Does capitalism need the state system?, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:4, 533 549 Chase, Robert S, Emily B Hill and Paul Kennedy (1996) Pivotal states and US strategy, Foreign Affairs, 75:1, 33 51

162 Randall L Schweller

Christensen, Thomas J (2001) Posing problems without catching up: Chinas rise and challenges for US security, International Security, 25:4, 5 40 Deudney, Daniel and G John Ikenberry (2009) The myth of the autocratic revival: why liberal democracy will prevail, Foreign Affairs, 88:1, 77 93 Fazal, Tanisha M (2008) State death: the politics and geography of conquest, occupation, and annexation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press) Finnemore, Martha (2009) Legitimacy, hypocrisy, and the social structure of unipolarity: why being a unipole isnt all its cracked up to be, World Politics, 61:1, 58 85 Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The end of history and the last man (New York: Avon Books) Gat, Azar (2007) The return of authoritarian great powers, Foreign Affairs, 86:4, 59 69 Gilpin, Robert (1981) War and change in world politics (New York: Cambridge University Press) Haass, Richard N (2008) The age of nonpolarity: what will follow US dominance, Foreign Affairs, 87:3, 44 56 Hawkins, David (1964) The language of nature: an essay in the philosophy of science (San Francisco, California: WH Freeman) Hegel, George (1967 [1821]) Philosophy of right, transl by TM Knox (London: Oxford University Press) Ikenberry, G John (2001) After victory: institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of order after major wars (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press) Jervis, Robert (1986) From balance to concert: a study of international security cooperation in Kenneth A Oye (ed) Cooperation under anarchy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 58 79 Jervis, Robert (2005) American foreign policy in a new era (New York: Routledge) Kant, Immanuel (2005 [1795]) Perpetual peace (New York: Cosimo Classics) Kaplan, Morton A (1957) System and process in international politics (New York: Wiley) Kapstein, Ethan B and Michael Mastanduno (eds) (1999) Unipolar politics: realism and state strategies after the cold war (New York: Columbia University Press) Khanna, Parag (2008) The Second World: empires and inuence in the new global order (New York: Random House) Kirshner, Jonathan (2008) Globalization, power, and prospect in Jonathan Kirshner (ed) Globalization and national security (New York: Routledge), 321 340 Klapp, Orrin E (1986) Overload and boredom: essays on the quality of life in the information society (New York: Greenwood Press) Kupchan, Charles A (1998) After pax Americana: benign power, regional integration, and the sources of a stable multipolarity, International Security, 23:2, 40 79 Lampton, David M (2008) The three faces of Chinese power: might, money, and minds (Berkeley, California: University of California Press) Lasswell, Harold D (1965 [1935]) World politics and personal insecurity (New York: Free Press) Layne, Christopher (1993) The unipolar illusion: why new great powers will arise, International Security, 17:4, 5 51 Mackinder, Halford J (2004 [1904]) The geographical pivot of history, Geographical Journal, 170:4, 298 321 Manjoo, Farhad (2008) True enough: learning to live in a post-fact world (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley) Mearsheimer, John J (2001) The tragedy of great power politics (New York: Norton) Mueller, John (2004) The remnants of war (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press) Olson, Mancur (1982) The rise and decline of nations: economic growth, stagation, and social rigidities (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press) Posen, Barry R (2006) European Union security and defense policy: response to unipolarity?, Security Studies, 15:2, 149 186 Putnam, Robert D (1995) Bowling alone: Americas declining social capital, Journal of Democracy, 6:1, 65 78 Putnam, Robert D (2000) Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community (New York: Simon and Schuster) Pye, Lucian W (1963) Communications and civic training in transitional societies in Lucian W Pye (ed) Communications and political development (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 124 127

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011

Entropy and polarity 163

Rosecrance, Richard N (1987) The rise of the trading state: commerce and conquest in the modern world (New York: Basic Books) Scott, James C (1985) Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press) Scott, James C (1990) Domination and the arts of resistance (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press) Wallace, David F (1997) A supposedly fun thing Ill never do again: essays and arguments (New York: Back Bay) Waltz, Kenneth N (1979) Theory of international politics (Reading, Massachusetts: AddisonWesley) Waltz, Kenneth N (1986) Reections on Theory of International Politics: a response to my critics in Robert O Keohane (ed) Neorealism and its critics (New York: Columbia University Press), 323 346 Waltz, Kenneth N (1993) The emerging structure of international politics, International Security, 18:2, 44 79 Wohlforth, William C (1999) The stability of a unipolar world, International Security, 24:1, 5 41 Zakaria, Fareed (2008) The post-American world (New York: WW Norton)

Downloaded by [University of Stockholm] at 17:09 22 August 2011