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Evolution and Neo-Realism
John K. Setear*
Neo-realists rely importantly on the assumption that a nation-state must either conduct a rational, self-interested foreign policy or face extinction. This assumed selection pressure accounts, in the neo-realist view, for the primacy of national-security interests in foreign policy and for the irrelevance of domestic politics to international relations. Nations must focus on survival in the international system—or perish. Those nations that remain will then be those, and only those, that can conduct a self-interested, security-oriented foreign policy.
The neo-realist’s assumption is wrong on several grounds. First , the neo-realists’ logical argument that low extinction rates are evidence of high selection pressures is patently fallacious. High extinction rates would be much more suggestive of high selection pressures. Second , the balance of the empirical evidence suggests that extinction rates of, and selection pressures on, nation-states are low. International relations is not an environment “red in tooth and claw” but rather a lush setting highly amenable to the birth and propagation of nation-states. For at least the past century, many more nation-states have been created than have perished—the precise opposite of the situation that one would expect if the Malthusian pressures implicit in the neo-realist view actually operated. Additionally, many nation-states have successfully traversed the
- (^) Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law. I am indebted for helpful comments to ****. A discussion with my colleague Anup Malani dramatically improved my ability to set forth the analogies discussed in section IV of the piece, though of course he bears no responsibility for any shortcomings of the section. Other errors are the product of insufficient intellectual selection pressure.
supposed knife-edge of international politics for hundreds of years. Third , in the past two centuries, the vast majority of failed nation-states perished during one of three waves of mass extinctions, with the vast majority of new nation-states arising shortly thereafter. Such a dynamic, which evolutionary biologists characterize as a “punctuated equilibrium,” implies that the extinction of nation-states is a matter of chance, not of poor foreign policy.
After a brief introduction to evolutionary theory in biology and to neo-realist arguments about international relations, the first three sections of the paper take up each of the difficulties with the neo-realist position described above: fallacious inference from low extinction rates, ignorance of evidence plainly contrary to the neo-realists’ assumptions, and the existence of a punctuated equilibrium. A fourth section leaves behind criticism and, taking for granted that the neo-realist position is at least potentially salvageable, generates and evaluates several possible analogies between biological evolution and international relations.
Introduction I: A Lightning Tour of Evolutionary Theory in Biology
Biological evolution means different things to different people, but there are a number of core concepts upon which biologists are quite likely to agree. Biological evolution involves the natural selection of variable, heritable traits in living organisms. A species consists of organisms of “interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” (Mayr 1963) Each organism has a complement of genes, which control the synthesis of proteins crucial to the organism’s metabolism, and thus to its expressed characteristics. Individuals within a species display variation in their expressed traits, based in part on variation in the genetic complements of different individuals. (The environment also contributes to observed variation, as when changes in food supply change the adult size of an organism.) The origin of those genetic variations involves random mutations in the chromosomes that contain genes.
Introduction II: Classical Realism, Neo-Realism, and Selection
To the classical realist, international politics is an endless succession of armed conflicts because of an ineluctable human tendency towards aggression or because of the predictable ambitions of rulers who, after all, must desire or exercise power to become the leader of a nation. Balance-of-power politics follows naturally from the interaction of the strong, who are eager to seize any opportunities for conquest or coercion that may arise, and the weak, who are more or less forced to band together to avoid utter subjugation. The world of the classical realist is the world of Hobbes, writ large and from the national perspective perhaps not so short, but nasty and brutish to be sure.
Neo-realists place a rational-choice gloss upon the primal explanations of the classical realists. Nation-states are assumed to be rational, unitary actors. They operate in an anarchical environment, where “anarchy” is not exactly chaos but rather an “organizing principle” characterized by a system where the units of interaction are roughly co-equal and where no overarching authority exerts a remotely reliable coercive power over the units of interaction. In a world of anarchy, self-help is the predominant tool of the nation-state. In a world in which nation-states are capable of doing harm to one another with military force, and in which intentions are difficult to discern, then a nation must undertake self-help with ceaseless vigilance—not only because the threat from even the most apparently benign of neighbors remains and because extinction is always nigh, but also because security is a relative matter. One nation’s attainment of security through a relative advantage leads to insecurity in others; the insecure nations will, perhaps by banding together, strive to relieve their insecurity by improving their position relative to the originally secure nation; the originally secure nation will then see its security erode and react by attempting to improve its position … and so it goes. The world of the neo-realist is the commercial marketplace of the neo-classical economist, though one in which nations play the part of firms and national security substitutes for market share.
The possibility of involuntary exit—state death—plays a crucial role in the neo- realist tale, just as the shadow of bankruptcy looms over every business in the competitive market of the neo-classical economist. Neo-realists are at pains to point out that, in contrast to issues of international trade or other examples of “low” politics, the “high” politics of security issues have as their stakes the very survival of a nation-state. Few states, they argue, collapse as a result of excessively high tariffs, while many states have disappeared after choosing the wrong neighbor to anger or choosing what proves to be a weak partner in an alliance.
This ever-present possibility of being hanged in the morning, or at least the near future, concentrates the national mind wonderfully. Selection pressure in the international system is high. Domestic politics are at most a distraction. If a state’s foreign policy privileges domestic political preferences over geopolitical necessities, then the nation-state will fall to foreign invasion. If a nation-state’s foreign policy focuses on trade or environment to the detriment of security issues, then the nation-state will pay dearly for its inattention. Only a security threat is likely, so the argument goes, to erase the nation-state itself, and so security issues must take primacy over issues that do not threaten the sine qua non. Even security issues require not just rationality but rational egoism, lest a nation mortgage its future to the goodwill of some other nation that chooses not to keep its own promises. Nations cannot depend on the kindness of foreigners. Over time, then, only those nation-states that pay sufficient attention, and sufficiently selfish attention, to security issues in making their foreign policy will survive. The selection pressure created by other nations will select out inattentive and altruistic states from the system.
Indeed, the winnowing process may cull more than just the domestically distracted, the internationally inattentive, or the insufficiently egoistic from the international system. Some nation-states may try to conduct a wise and attentive foreign policy, but fail. Good intentions are no proof against cold steel. Attentive but inept nations will also be selected out of the international system.
One cannot gainsay the logic of this argument, taken on its own: in an environment characterized by long periods of strong selection pressure from a constant and ongoing source, the current inhabitants of that environment are likely to be well suited to their environs and thus unlikely to go extinct.
There are, however, two problems with this argument as the neo-realists make it. Perhaps the most glaring difficulty is what this argument does not note: in an environment characterized by long periods of no selection pressure from any source, the current inhabitants of that environment are also unlikely to go extinct. With no selection pressure, entities of all stripes will survive. The absence of pervasive state deaths is, therefore, consistent with both the neo-realist position and its precise opposite. The presence of pervasive state death would be inconsistent with the neo-realist argument that states are well suited for their environment as a result of a long period of high selection pressure, but the absence of pervasive state death is consistent with either the presence of highly fit organisms or the absence of selection pressures.
(This paper generally ignores a double counterfactual that nonetheless may occur to readers familiar with the inductive nature of much theorizing in international relations: if international relations displayed a high rate of state extinction, wouldn’t the neo- realists delightedly point to the operation of strong selection pressures in the international environment? Such a position would, to be logically consistent, require denouncing any argument that low extinction rates show high selection pressures, since this neo-neo- realist argument holds that high extinction rates show high selection pressures. If the current neo-realist argument and the neo-neo-realist argument existed side by side in the relevant portion of IR theory, then proponents of this inclusive theory would be asserting that any rate of state deaths supported its position, which seems a flaw in any theory that aspires to generate empirically testable propositions. This paper, however, simply takes at face value the current neo-realist assertion that (only) low extinction rates in the current international environment are consistent with the once and current presence of strong selection pressures.)
The neo-realist argument that low rates of state deaths affirm the adaptive fitness of modern states is therefore logically underdetermined: in fact, low extinction rates are consistent not only with high adaptive fitness among contemporary states (owing to high selection pressure in the past) but also with low selection pressures. This is not the only logical difficulty with the neo-realist argument, however. If the neo-realists wish to argue that low contemporaneous extinction rates are consistent with the prior existence of strong selection pressures, they must also argue that exactly the same selection pressures that existed in the past exist in the present. If selection pressures are both strong and consistent through time, then entities present after the passage of significant amounts of time will be highly fit for their environments and thus unlikely to suffer extinction. Strong selection pressures in the past will have weeded out the unfit, while those strong selection pressures in the present will not harm those organisms still alive. If selection pressure is strong but from variegated sources, however, then the previously fit inhabitants of the environment will be poorly adapted to the new environment and will perish in large numbers.
A well-known example from recent natural history may illustrate. In northern England, the Manchester moth spends a great deal of time in the presence of both birch trees and predatory birds. The bark of the birch tree is white in a state of nature. The population of the Manchester moth, as of the onset of the Industrial Revolution, was almost entirely white. Inferentially, the prevalence of this coloration was a result of strong selection pressure against highly visible, dark-colored moths—easy prey for watchful, hungry avians. A small number of darkly colored members of the species survived, however. Soot from the smokestacks of the factories of the Industrial Revolution in northern England blackened the bark of the birch trees. The moths and their predators remained. In much less than a century—the geological blink of an eye— the moth population was almost entirely dark-colored. Inferentially, the few dark-colored moths present in the population at the onset of the Industrial Revolution were more difficult for predators to find on sooty trees than were light-colored moths, and so those moths born dark were much more likely to survive to pass on their genes for dark coloration to their offspring than those moths born white were to survive to pass on the
commanding the greatest allegiance of one’s peasants has not, at least since Napoleon, remained the ticket to national success. To the degree that the fitness criteria in international relations have changed over time, the lack of state extinctions in the recent past is evidence only of a general lack of selection pressure rather than of state fitness fine-tuned over a long lapse of time.
II. Empirical Evidence of State Transitions and Neo-Realism
A more directly empirical threat to the neo-realist argument would be evidence that state extinction is relatively frequent. (Again, however, perhaps the neo-realists will then abandon their fitness argument for a gleeful declaration that selection pressures are so strong that states die frequently). Fazal has argued that extinction, as defined by a significant foreign military occupation, has in fact befallen about 25% of nation-states, as defined in the Correlates of War Project, during the period from 1816 to the present. Fazal is careful to qualify her results, noting that state extinction has been virtually absent from the international system since 1945 and that buffer states make up an especially prominent portion of vanished states. Still, only nine of the twenty-three states extant in 1816 survived continuously to 1996.
Fazal presents strong evidence that, at least from 1816 until 1945, the birth of a state was not a guarantee of its perpetuity. Her definition of state extinction is a relatively broad one, however. By this measure, France perished during both the Franco- Prussian War and World War II, and, if it were in Fazal’s sample set, would presumably have perished in 1814 or 1815 as well—yet of course we recognize “France” on the map as in continuous existence from well before 1814 until well after 1945. This is not merely an acknowledgment of a nation or a culture without attention to whether the nation or culture has a state. In contrast to, say, Laplanders, the French throughout this period had a state and not only a culture, a language, or a people. Tsarist Russia became, after a military occupation of much of its European territory, soon became the Soviet Union, and then after the Cold War became Russia again. Tsarist Russia perished under
Fazal’s definition. So too did the Soviet Union, if only as the result of a somewhat ad hoc recognition by Fazal that not every state death requires a military occupation. Yet there is a clear continuity among all these entities: Russians were at the center of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, even though both of these entities had imperial holdings outside of Russia, and Russians are now obviously at the core of the Russian Republic. One might also note that, even under Fazal’s definition, three-quarters of all states did not fall victim to military occupations or other events defined by Fazal as state death. To the extent that Fazal’s definition of state extinction overestimates the actual number of state deaths, the neo-realist argument remains unthreatened.
An examination not only of the death, but also of the birth, of states provides significant evidence consistent with a lack of selection pressure in the international system and thus inconsistent with the neo-realist argument.
Under the Correlates of War Project’s definition of a nation-state, there were 23 states in 1816. As of 1997, there were 187. This nearly ten-fold increase in the number of states is hardly evidence for a ruthless winnowing of irrational or altruistic states. Certainly, on balance, the international system shows a surplus of state births over state deaths. While much of this growth in the number of nation-states followed World War II, the increase in extant states also shows a nearly secular trend over a much longer period of time. As mentioned, there were twenty-three nation-states in 1816 under the definition of state employed by the Correlates of War Project. In 1920, there were 42 charter members of the League of Nations, with 21 more joining in the next two decades. (This membership count ignores withdrawals or expulsions from the League.) After World War II, there were only 53 charter members of the United Nations—a slight drop compared to the minimum of 63 nations extant by the end of the League—but 67 more nations joined the UN in the next 17 years, and 50 more in the 17 years after that. Current UN membership totals nearly 200 states. The membership of an international organization is not a perfect representation of the number of states in the international system—Switzerland was plainly a state but only quite recently joined the United Nations—but no one would argue that there were dozens and dozens states at the start of
III. Punctuated Equilibria and State Extinction
In theories of evolutionary biology, two main perspectives on the rate of change in the number of extant species exist. The “gradualist” perspective, of longer standing in evolutionary biology, holds that the predominant force in determining whether species thrive or perish is a force operating gradually over long periods of time. The competing theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” associated with Neil Campbell and Stephen Jay Gould holds that very intense forces of selection operate for very brief periods of time (geologically speaking), with the intervening periods characterized by very mild selection pressures and concomitantly few extinctions.
The two perspectives are in the end matters of degree—both acknowledge that there have been mass extinctions during relatively short periods of time, and both acknowledge that selective fitness of one sort or another accounts for the survival of those species that persist through a mass extinction—but these matters of degree are not simply quibbles about a second-derivative function. To the gradualist, natural selection of a slow but discriminating type is the predominant mode of species selection. Species that survive do so as a result of the gradual accumulation of adaptive traits providing small comparative advantages compared to other species. To the backers of punctuated equilibrium, in contrast, the world as we see it is the result of a much more arbitrary process. Periodically, a catastrophe befalls the world. Huge numbers of species perish, possessing a wide variety of fine-tuned fitnesses that do not select carefully over long periods of adaptation for the very fittest species. Once having survived a catastrophe, a species does not exhibit much subsequent change. Selection pressures are gigantic and arbitrary at the punctuation, and minimal if still extant during the equilibria. If all of the dinosaurs perished despite the huge variations among them, then what impact did natural selection have upon all that accumulated variety of characteristics and fitnesses? If
mammals suffered a huge growth in numbers of species and differentiations among them in a relatively short time, and then changed little, then what impact does natural selection have during the millennia between catastrophes and upon their fitness to survive the next catastrophe?
The two theories appear conceptually an even match, with no obvious errors of logic or ambiguities of definition. The debate between those favoring gradualism and those endorsing punctuated equilibrium persists in evolutionary biology in significant measure because of the paucity of the kind of data necessary to resolve the issue. The fossil record, of course, is the pre-eminent source for data in debates involving geological time scales. That record has huge gaps in both space and time. Found fossils vary immensely in completeness and quality. Many important traits—coloration, locomotion, embryological characteristics—are almost impossible to determine even with the most modern methods and the most favorable fossil record.
Those who study international relations instead of evolutionary biology are fortunate to have before them a much less opaque and more complete record. At least if one confines one’s analysis to the past few centuries, then the births and deaths of states are known almost exactly and all around the globe, absent a few definitional ambiguities. The record of these past few centuries is much more consistent with a theory of punctuated equilibrium, rather than of gradualism, with respect to states in international relations. There are two, or at most three, periods of mass extinction of states during the past few centuries. In between, the number of state deaths is minimal.
The extinction of the dinosaurs closely followed the impact of a huge meteorite near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. In international relations, the meteorites were made in Berlin. The unification of non-Austrian initiated by Prussia, and the roughly contemporaneous unification of Italy, led to one period of mass state extinctions. The
these conquests as state extinctions, then the Napoleonic Wars are another mass state extinction. Even with Austria and Prussia left out of the equation, French rule by occupation or Napoleonic nepotism led to the extinction of an unusually high number of states. [Note to readers of the draft: I need to provide exact data on the Napoleonic Wars eventually.]
One might of course examine state births in addition to state deaths. Under a military-occupation definition, one almost always leads to the other, unless the conqueror annexes all of the loser’s territory. All of the nations conquered and then militarily occupied during World War II, whether by the Axis or the Allies, died and were then reborn. Additionally, however, there are instances of multiple state births flowing simultaneously from the dissolution of the parent: Austria-Hungary gave rise to several successor states, as did Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in more recent times. When one examines state births as well as deaths, the punctuated nature of changes in states’ existences becomes even more apparent, as Table Two shows. (Note that a state death without a state birth is possible under the Correlates of War Project’s definition of a state, as occurred in the unification of West Germany with East Germany or of North and South Vietnam.) [Note to readers of this draft: There is no Table Two. The basic idea, though, is that a state death frequently leads to a state birth, and that some state deaths (like the USSR) lead to a whole bunch of state births. So including state births tends simply to amplify the distinctiveness of periods displaying high rates of state death.]
What is the implication of a punctuated equilibrium in state survivals for the neo- realist arguments about selection pressure on states? In the biological case, evolution by punctuated equilibrium emphasizes the role of chance and downplays the prominence of fine-tuned natural selection operating over extended periods of time. The analogy to international relations, given the data, seems a close one. Nations conduct their foreign policy and then prosper or die, not in accordance with a reward for fitness cultivated over time, but by chance. As Fazal shows, buffer states are particularly likely to meet their demise. The difficulty of developing sufficient fitness to survive in the international system extends beyond those whose geopolitical bad luck places them between the
political equivalents of Scylla and Charybdis, however. France is a great power, but it fell to Germany in World War II, along with virtually every nation in continental Europe whose name didn’t begin with “S.” Did Switzerland and Ireland, for example, conduct their foreign policies with so much more aplomb than Belgium and Norway that the latter were deservedly prey to Germany while the former were not?
More generally, it is Europe that seems to possess the equivalent of a meteorite magnet; other continents seem able, with the possible exception of colonization, to avoid the mass extinctions that visited Europe as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and World War II. In Fazal’s table of state extinctions, 30 of the 43 extinguished states are European. A European state is not readily able to move to another continent no matter how sophisticated its foreign policy.
Even in a punctuated equilibrium, of course, there is selection on some criterion— distance from Germany is a good candidate, at least in many cases—that accords with fitness in some very rough sense, but that selection does not appear to be based upon a small comparative advantage in foreign policy held by one entity over another as the result of an accumulation over long years of advantageous factors. The neo-realist case is thereby weakened.
Europe, or before the Peloponnesian War. States must either become and remain strong, or somehow preserve themselves against threats from stronger nations. Wise diplomacy, in this view, remains as crucial a determinant of state persistence now as it did in the past.
The nearly explosive net increase in states since 1816 is a more direct challenge to neo-realist assertions of strong past selection pressures, but the mere existence of the increase does not conclusively show that selection pressures are minimal. The introduction of a bacterium into a nutrient-rich agar will lead to exponential growth in the bacteria during that period when neither the size of the dish nor the level of available nutrients is constraining bacterial growth. Perhaps, the neo-realists might argue, the post- 1945 explosion in the number of states (and sharp drop-off in death rates) is unsustainable. Strong selection pressure may be just around the corner. (One might, however, caution such neo-realists that continuously arguing for the future relevance of selection pressures, regardless of past or present evidence for their existence, sounds suspiciously like the advancement of a non-negatable hypothesis.) Alternatively, a finer- grained analysis of state extinctions might, in a way that gross numerical comparisons cannot, show the operation of selection pressures dependent upon foreign-policy decisions rather than the happenstance of proximity to one or more expansionist powers.
The existence of a punctuated equilibrium in the number of states undercuts the assertion that highly fit states exist in response to long-present, high selection pressure. Still, fitness of a sort is present even in a punctuated equilibrium. The organisms that survive a catastrophe are well adapted to post-catastrophic conditions, while those that perish are not. Selection for post-catastrophic fitness accords with the general concept of natural selection even if the fitness in question is of only transient importance and possessed by only a few organisms.
The balance of this section assumes that one may salvage the aspects of neo- realism that depend upon selection-oriented arguments. Even if one makes this assumption, however, there remains the question of just how one might adapt or analogize evolutionary theory to international relations. One approach is to embrace the
elasticity of metaphor and then state, in effect, that selection of some sort happens or at least could happen, and that states currently in existence are certainly fit enough not to have died. Such a formulation may strike some as excessively vague or nearly tautological, but extremely broad metaphors play a role in many theories of international relations.
An alternative approach would be to search for extensive plausible analogies between evolutionary biology and the state system, and then examine the theoretical or empirical implications that flow from choosing a particular analogy. Neo-realists have already performed a similar analysis with respect to the analogy between the perfectly competitive marketplace and the international system, with the state analogized to the firm, national security analogized to market share, and so on. An examination of imperialism as analogous to a firm’s decision whether to integrate vertically or contract with other firms is one product of the analogy that might not have been undertaken if the state-firm analogy had not already been developed.
One potential set of analogies between evolutionary biology and the state system would be to analogize the state to an individual organism in a given species. The state in this view is the member of a population (of all states taken together). The state would possess observable traits, including its foreign policy. These observed traits would be a product of the natural (international) environment and the state’s genetic complement. Just what constitutes the state’s genetic complement, however, is a thorny issue. Very little in a nation remains nearly constant in the way that genes in an organism do. Genes control the production of proteins that in turn serve a dominant role in cellular metabolism, but no particular structures or institutions in a state plainly dominate all others. Is the output level of a nation’s economy, for example, a “gene” that contributes to the determination of foreign policy, or is GDP instead a “trait” upon which selection may act directly? More stable characteristics of a state may be more closely analogous to the organism’s genes, such as the nation’s physical location, its type of political regime (democracy, autocracy, theocracy, etc.) or its economic system (planned, mixed,
