Examine major principles of State centric world views. (2013, 20 Marks)
A state-centric world view holds that world politics is what sovereign states do to one another, and that every other actor is derivative. Its image is the billiard-ball model popularised by Arnold Wolfers in Discord and Collaboration (1962): impermeable, self-contained units that collide mainly over security, their movements explained by mass and impact rather than internal make-up. The view was born with the Westphalian settlement of 1648 and systematised by realism.
Core principles
- Sovereignty and territoriality. The state is supreme within its borders and independent outside them. Non-intervention follows.
- The state as principal, unitary and rational actor. Firms, NGOs and international organisations act only with state consent, within rules states write.
- Anarchy. No authority stands above states. There is no check on their ambitions, so each must rely on self-help.
- Power and survival. Survival is the first national interest and power the means to it, so politics among nations is a struggle for power.
- Hierarchy of issues. Security is high politics; trade and welfare are low politics.
- Balance of power is the main source of order, achieved through armaments and alliances.
- No harmony of interests. E. H. Carr exposed the supposed harmony as the ideology of satisfied powers. Hoping that law, democratisation or commerce will tame the struggle for power is naive, even dangerous.
- Where particular wars come from. General competition is permanent. Particular wars are traced to aggressive statesmen or to domestic systems that let narrow groups push expansionist policies.
Morgenthau’s six principles
The fullest statement is Hans J. Morgenthau‘s Politics Among Nations (1948), whose six principles date from the 1954 edition:
- Politics obeys objective laws rooted in human nature.
- Its signpost is interest defined as power.
- Interest is a permanent category, but its content changes with time and place.
- Universal moral principles cannot be applied to state action in the abstract; prudence is the supreme political virtue.
- No nation’s moral aspirations are the moral law of the universe.
- The political sphere is autonomous: the question is always how a policy affects national power.
Kenneth N. Waltz later grounded the same state-centrism in the structure of anarchy rather than human nature.
Examining the principles
Challenges
- Technology. John H. Herz argued in 1957 that nuclear weapons and air power had pierced the territorial state’s hard shell, so borders no longer protect.
- Pluralists. John W. Burton‘s cobweb model (World Society, 1972) replaced colliding balls with webs of transactions. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye‘s complex interdependence denied any fixed hierarchy of issues.
- Globalisation. Susan Strange wrote of the retreat of the state before markets. Terrorist networks, corporations and climate change cross borders freely.
- Constructivists and critical theorists. Alexander Wendt argued that sovereignty and self-help are social practices, not givens. Human security makes the individual the referent.
- Post-colonial scholars. Mohammed Ayoob noted that many states are threatened from within, not from outside.
Resilience
- The tariff wars of 2025–26 are state power exercised over markets: a 50 per cent US tariff on Indian goods from 27 August 2025, cut to 18 per cent under an interim understanding in February 2026, with export controls on chips and critical minerals.
- When Iran restricted the Strait of Hormuz in March 2026, New Delhi protected supply by turning to its more than 40 crude suppliers.
- India’s strategic autonomy and stress on non-interference rest on state-centric premises, even within plurilateral groupings.
Conclusion
The state-centric view is too narrow as a full description of world politics, yet it remains the best guide to who decides in a crisis. The world is less a billiard table than a cobweb held together by states, still the primary, though no longer the only, actors.