chess to argue that the international system, much like the game of chess, is governed by
rules and norms that constitute its identity. Thus John Ruggie argues that “if we are
asked to ‘explain’ the game of chess, the appropriate response consists of its constitutive
rules,” and that “precisely the same holds for ‘explaining’ modern international politics in
contrast to Medieval or classical Greek systems…”
Realists and materialists on the
other hand have argued that the international system is unlike chess: it is governed only
by regulative rules that are constantly challenged and changed by member states. Thus
Stephen Krasner has argued that any constitutive rules that we might attribute to the
international system are in fact continuously defied without leaving a dramatic impact on
the nature of the system, and thus cannot be constitutive: “The designated moves for
each chess piece are the constitutive rules of chess. Moving a Bishop in a straight line is
a violation of one of these rules; It is not chess if a Bishop is not moved along a diagonal.
In contrast, alternatives to sovereign statehood have been accommodated in the
international system over the past several hundred years.”
Realists, adopting a strict and static definition of constitutive rules, would argue
that if one is playing chess with dice, with more than two players per board or with
Bishops that can leap over other pieces, then one is not playing chess but something
substantially different. But chess was, until the 14
th
century, played with dice.
originally played by four players.
The Bishop, until 500 years ago, did leap over other
pieces. He did not even exist as a piece on the board for a majority of the history of the
game. The rules of chess which we consider constitutive of the game today were not
4
John Gerard Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, (London: Routledge, 1998), p.24.
5
Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.229
6
Golombek, p.19.
7
Anne Sunnucks (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Chess, (Robert Hale, London, 1976), p.39.
3
Convention