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Introduction
No feature of Kenneth Waltz's neorealist theory has attracted more criticism over the years than its analytical separation of domestic and international politics. Embodied in the contrast between 'unit-level' and 'system-level' phenomena, this separation has been widely challenged by interdependence theorists, historical sociologists, Marxists, post-structuralists, constructivists and even some realists (Ruggie, 1983; Ashley, 1984; Milner, 1991; Snyder, 1991; Buzan et al , 1993; Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003). These writers have variously charged it with empirical implausibility, with producing a reified conception of international relations, and with an inability to conceptualize historical change. So loud has been the clamour that one might almost forget that Waltz had based the separation itself on a prior failure of all these other approaches. Unable to isolate and theorize specifically international causes, he argued, they had tended inevitably towards 'reductionist' explanation of one kind or another.
Three decades later, the force of Waltz's original critique stands out more strongly than ever. Despite the many achievements of historical sociological approaches - whether Marxist, Weberian, Constructivist, Foucaultian or other - they have indeed largely concentrated on explaining the changing historical forms and dynamics of geopolitical behaviour, rather than explicitly theorizing the existence and causal significance of the international dimension itself. The peculiar outcome of this emphasis, quite contrary to its intention, has been
a danger that [it] serves to strengthen the dichotomization of 'the international' and 'the domestic'. Although [...] international and domestic forces interact or combine to produce a certain outcome, analytically they are still distinct. (Hall, 1999, p. 108, emphasis added)
Nevertheless, there is a straightforward reason for this outcome: in the end, the question of number (that is, what follows from the multiplicity of societies) cannot be resolved back in its entirety to a question of form (that is, what follows from the specific internal character of the societies involved). As a result, it seems that sociological approaches always encounter international factors - such as military pressure or external cultural influences - whose existence is not given in the original premises of the social theory being deployed. At this point, the factors may be consigned to the status of untheorizable empirical contingency (as Theda Skocpol accused Barrington Moore of doing with the international context of the Chinese Revolution).