Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations, APSA 2004
2
The promise of American hegemony after the Cold War, the pressing problems of
ethnic conflict and failed states, the war on terror, and the internationally divisive war in
Iraq have focused new attention on hierarchy in international relations.
1
Recent events
have resurrected a vocabulary of spheres-of-influence, protectorates, and even empires
long forgotten in diplomatic discourse and now poorly understood by both policy makers
and academic analysts.
The international system has long been assumed to be a realm of anarchy. As a
consequence, we lack the analytic tools necessary to understand international hierarchy
and its consequences for politics and policy. This is especially true for the informal and
indirect forms of hierarchy now found in world affairs. To understand international
hierarchy both past and present requires that we rebuild the very core of international
relations theory.
This paper develops four major themes in four sections, with each building on the
previous. First, international relationists have been thinking about anarchy and the nature
of the international system wrong for over a century. From Max Weber, via Juristic
theories of the state that held sway around the turn of the 19
th
century, the discipline
imported a formal-legal conception of authority that precludes, by definition, the
possibility of hierarchy between political units. An alternative, relational conception of
authority allows us to see hierarchical relationships between political units now hidden by
the formal-legal approach.
Second, international relationists have been thinking about sovereignty wrong for
even longer. As first articulated in the late 16
th
century, the principle of sovereignty
1
I am indebted to Susan Hyde for invaluable research assistance and Miles Kahler for numerous
conversations inside and outside of the classroom on topics developed in this paper. Neither is implicated in
any errors.
Convention