Commercial Property Law

[Name of the Institute]Commercial Property Law

Introduction

Systemic theory is premised on a single powerful insight. The leading powers in the international system create a strategic environment in which they, as well as others, must operate. As the architects of international society, they have written the rules and established the norms around which expectations have converged. Periods of relative stability, the decades following the Napoleonic wars or times of systemic convulsion, the world wars of the twentieth century are chapters in this political drama, whose effects have reached far beyond the confines of the great power arena. Today, systemic theorizing in International Relations is embattled, some would say moribund. Many realists have moved away from the systemic level and focused greater attention on unit-level variables. Liberals have by and large rejected systemic thinking, instead gravitating toward unit-level or bottom-up modes of theorizing. This overall rejection of Waltzian systemic theorizing is understandable. It is both limited in what it claims to explain and unsuccessful in explaining those things it does claim to explain. However, despite the greatest efforts to move beyond systemic thinking, people are continually drawn back because it is necessary to a complete understanding of international politics. Bottom-up accounts paint an incomplete picture.

The distinction is not completely dissimilar to that between micro and macro economics. The focus of systemic theory is on the whole, and not the individual parts that comprise it. It is tempting, but ultimately wrong, to think that the whole can be understood simply by aggregating actor preferences at a lower level. This is essentially what liberal approaches to IR attempt to do. The fundamental premise of systemic theory is that the whole has properties that are different from the sum total of the parts. If this is true, reducing the system to its component parts cannot give us insight into the nature of the system as a whole. At its most basic level, systemic theory in IR involves multiple big players interacting in a strategic situation. General explanations about actor behaviour are derived from an understanding of the nature of the strategic situation. There are many ways to conceive of this strategic situation. For Neo realists this conceptualization involves a specific understanding of anarchy and the distribution of capability among the Great Powers. However, as people will find, there are other ways to conceive of the overall strategic environment created by leading power interaction. Though liberals have not produced a systemic theory many leading scholars do understand its value. The researcher has argued in agreement with Waltz that theories of world politics that fail to incorporate a sophisticated understanding of the operation of the system, that is how systemic attributes affect behaviour are bad theories. Systemic theory is valuable for three broad reasons: it is a way for people to conceptualize the international strategic environment and how this conditions state behaviour; because the focus is on the whole, systemic theory gives people the big picture, and therefore it yields a contextual understanding of actor ...