Summarising the ‘second state debate’

What have we learned in this book so far? I will first summarise the second state debate and extract five generic ‘theories’ of the state that can be discerned within IR theory. I argued in chapter 1 that IR has in fact had two ‘state debates’ running in parallel, even though the second state debate has remained obscured. The structure of the first state debate presents us with the orthodox view of IR theory: that neorealism is state-centric while liberalism, Marxism and constructivism are essentially ‘society-centric’. But I suggested in chapter 1 that this received picture emerges because IR theorists have ignored what I have called the ‘international agential power’ of the state. The central message of this book is that the first state debate presents an inadequate framework for understanding IR theory and its various approaches to the state. The irony of the first state debate is that, arguably, it is not even about the state, given that both sides reify international structure over the state-as-agent (i.e. the economic structure for radical pluralists and the political structure for neorealists). Indeed, for neorealists the state is no less imprisoned within an international structure than it is for radical pluralists. In the end, then, both sides deny the possibility that states can shape the international realm, or even construct policy free of international structural constraints. The second state debate goes beyond the first debate, because it locates IR theory within the agent–structure problematic.