Kaplan Systems Theory

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ly equal size and strength. Their relationsare governedby certain &dquo;essentialrules,&dquo;such as &dquo;stopfighting rather than eliminatean essential national actor&dquo;or &dquo;actto con-strain actors who subscribe to supranationalorganizing principles&dquo;(p. 23). It is not ex-plained how these essential rules come tobe accepted or how an actor becomes &dquo;es-sential&dquo;(Poland in the eighteenth centuryclearly did not make the club), but theneglect of these second-order or dynamicconsiderations may be justified at this stage.

The second model is the &dquo;loosebipolar

system,&dquo;which correspondsroughly to whatwe have today, in which two of the nationalactors have risen to a much greater size andpower than the others, which tend thereforeto group around the two major actors inloose blocs. The third model is the &dquo;tightbipolar system,&dquo;in which the neutrals dis-appear and the system reduces virtually totwo power blocs. The fourth model is thatof the &dquo;universalinternational system,&dquo;inwhich the &dquo;Universal Actor&dquo;(e.g., theUnited Nations) is sufficiently powerful toprevent war among the national actors butin which the national actors retain their in-

dividuality and still jockey for power andposition within the framework of the Uni-versal Actor. The fifth model is that of the&dquo;hierarchicalinternational system,&dquo;in whichthe Universal Actor virtually absorbs all theothers, and only one nation is left in theworld. The first five systems stand some-what in a progression, in that a tendencymight be postulated to pass from one tofive through the others in succession. Thesixth system stands somewhat apart: it iscalled the &dquo;unitveto system,&dquo;in whichweapons exist of such character that anyactor, no matter how small and weak, candestroy any other before being destroyeditself. The formulation of this system

was

clearly inspired by the horrible prospect ofH-bombs in the possession of even the

smallest nations. It might be mentioned inpassing that, even though such a system hasnever existed in international relations, thewidespread possession of the Colt revolver(the &dquo;equalizer&dquo;)in the brief, balmy daysof the Wild West apparently produced asystem somethinglike this in interpersonalrelations. An economist is irresistibly reminded by

this classification of possible states of theinternational system of the &dquo;statesof themarket,&dquo;ranging from perfect competition(a balance-of-powersystem with many ac-

tors) through monopolistic competition(balance of power with few actors) to oli-gopoly (loose bipolar) to duopoly (tightbipolar) to cartelization (universal inter-national) to monopoly (hierarchical inter-national). There seems to be no economicanalogue, thank heaven, for the unit vetosystem, except perhaps completelyperfectoligopoly where any firm can take away themarket of any other completely by the

slightest shading of its price! Kaplanscate-gories are not so clear as those of the econ-omists ; nevertheless, they mark an impor-tant step toward a general theory of inter-national systems. This is more than givingfancy names to familiar things. By formal-izing the models it may be possibleto movefrom the study of the actual, to which thehistorian is confined, out toward the studyof the possible. This is always the greatesttask of theory: to study what is not yet, butwhat might be; it is the study of the not yetin the physical sciences which gave us theairplane and the bomb, and we must like-wise study the not yet in poiltical science ifthese instruments of the scientific imagina-tion are to be harnessed for mans good.

Having categorized the possiblesystems,the next step (chap. iii) is to categorize the

potential actors. Kaplan does this accordingto a fourfold classification. An actor may bedirective or non-directive, and each of these


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in turn may be either system-dominant orsubsystem-dominant.The directive-non-di-rective polarity seems to be identical withthe familiar authoritarian-democratic di-

chotomy. A nation is system-dominant ifits culture is uniform and power is widelydistributed or wielded under strong con-sensus. It is subsystem-dominantif its poli-cies are determined by a small group withinthe nation without much regard for publicopinion outside the group. Thus Spain is atype of directive, system-dominant nation;Russia of a directive, subsystem-dominant;Britain of the

non-directive, subsystem-dominant. These categorizations are, ofcourse, only approximate, as one seldom, ifever, gets a pure exampleof a type. Kaplanthen proceeds to develop the probablecharacter of his six systems under the fourdifferent types of actors and under five dif-ferent &dquo;patternsof choice.&dquo;These five are(i) the &dquo;organizationalfocus of decisions,&dquo;which seems to mean the choice of instru-

ments of policy; (ii) the allocation of re-wards, both inside and outside the nationalactor; (iii) alignment preferences (whomdo you like or dislike); (iv) willingness (ornot) to play the current game, or to try tochange the system; and (v) adaptivity, thatis, flexibilityor rigidity. It is clear that wehave here a fine set of pigeonholes ( 6 X 5X 4, or 120 in toto), and, while Dr. Kaplandoes not attempt to fill them all, the readermay be pardoned if occasionally he wonderswhich box he happens to be living in. Stillpigeonholes are not entirely for the birds;they are an essential feature of a developingscience, and an economist especiallyshouldbe careful about throwing stones at emptyboxes. Just to add to the boxes, there is adiscussion somewhere along the line of &dquo;blocactors&dquo;like NATO, which are not quite na-

tional and not quite universal and presenta curious piece of political natural history.

From the systems of Part I we now pass

to the processes of Part II. The distinctionin this work between a system and a processis somewhat confusing. One usually thinksof a process as something that happens to,or in, a system-that is, if one wants to makethis distinction at all. Kaplan, however,seems to mean by process-at least this isthe subject of Part II-the internal systemof the national actor. My objection is onlya terminological one: it is entirely proper,after one has discussed the interaction ofnational actors in an intemation system togo on to specify in more detail why theyact as

theydo. Since a national actor con-

sists of a lot of people in roles tied togetherwith tight or loose communications, it isclear that the action of the national actor

depends on the interaction of the peoplewho compose it, and the action of peopledepends on their values and images and onthe regulatory or homeostatic processes bywhich they try to mold the world closer totheir hearts desire. Kaplans Part II is cer-

tainly the most difficult to read-it will, Ifear, be almost completelyunintelligible tothose who have not done a good deal ofprevious reading and thinking on these mat-ters. It is poorly organized; there are manyforward references and too many backwardreferences to things which the reader findshard to keep in mind. Nevertheless, it isstruggling with important topics. There istoo much

tendencyin

writingon interna-

tional relations to personify nations as sim-ple, homogeneous, consistent units of be-havior. For some purposes of discourse this

may be legitimate, but one should neverlose sight of the immense complexityof so-cial organization. Kaplan in effect lifts thelid off the smooth capsule of the nation andreveals the pullulating mass of interactingroles, people, and communications that lie

within. Furthermore, he sees the nation asa cross-section of role relationships whichunite the whole world in its mesh. To revert


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again to an economic analogy, just as whatwe call &dquo;international trade&dquo;is that segmentof the total volume of personal economictransactions that happens to cross nationalboundaries, so &dquo;internationalrelations&dquo;con-sists of that segment of the total volume ofsocial transactions of all kinds which hap-pens to cross national boundaries. In themoment of stating this view, of course, onehas to modify it substantially; the existenceof national boundaries itself profoundlymodifies both the flows of trade and thevolume of all social transactions. But at leastone must

get awayfrom the absurd Cloud-

Cuckoo-Land of popular discourse, wherelarge divine entities called &dquo;America,&dquo;&dquo;France,&dquo;or &dquo;Russia&dquo;act out shadow playsof love and hatred, greed and power.

In chapter v Kaplan proposes nine &dquo;Hy-potheses&dquo;regarding what he calls the &dquo;in-tegrative and disintegrativeprocess.&dquo;Theseare not hypotheses in the narrow sense ofempirically testable propositions but ratherare propositions of intrinsic plausibility re-lated to role-formation, the range of thefield of choice, the insulation of roles from

possibly relevant information, the sourcesof rigidity and legitimacy, the tolerance ofdeviations, the conflict of loyalties, and thesources of aggressiveness. The hypothesesare not arranged in any very clearly per-ceptible order or system, and many ofthem seem to

overlap.In

spiteof the con-

fusion and obscurity of this chapter, how-ever, one has the impression that the au-thor is at least confused and obscure about

something and that, if some order andclarity could be brought into the presenta-tion, some important insights would emerge.The confusion of style unfortunately carriesover into chapter vi, where an attempt ismade to apply these insights-not whollywithout success-to actual international sit-uations. Here not only are the back-refer-ences to the hypotheses of the previouschapter hard to follow, but several new

hypotheses are sneaked into the argumentwithout even telling the reader. An instanceof this is the very interesting hypothesis onpage 136 regarding the extreme difficultiesof the perceptual process in internationalrelations, resulting from the inadequacy ofthe typology: information is crammed intotoo few boxes because of the inadequacy ofexisting methods of abstraction and classi-fication.

In spite of the difficulty of these chapters,the patient reader should emerge with someimportant ideas. One is the notion of the

&dquo;metatask&dquo;-thetask of redefining tasks,or

the role of role-creation. Where an organi-zation is under great pressure, all its ener-gies will be devoted to its tasks, and noneto metatasks; it will be enormously busydoingwhat it sets out to do, without havingtime to inquire whether what it is settingout to do is the right or the sensible thingto do. The survival of an organization de-pends, therefore, not only on its efficiencyin performingthe tasks which it sets itselfbut also on its ability to reassess, in the lightof some larger values, the tasks themselves.The nation which is hell-bent on winninga war might even find it worth while tohave at least some people who ask whetherthe war is worth winning. Another impor-tant notion is that of insulation. This is theknife that carves out segments of the in-tolerable network of

potentialcommunica-

tions, partly in order that the informationinput and output will not exceed the capac-ity of the persons who occupy the roles. Itis insulation that carves a nation (or a gang!)out of the meshed tissue of social relation-

ships ; there are gains here in limiting therelationshipsto what people can &dquo;take&dquo;capacity of the person for understanding,love, sympathy,etc., being very limited-butthere are severe losses in cutting off infor-mation which may be necessary for survival.

Another interesting set of concepts centersaround the notion of legitimacy, or habit, or


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acceptance. Still another important conceptis that of the multiple role-the person oc-cupying several different roles. It is clearthat we are dealing here with the raw ma-

terial of very important social theory, high-ly relevant to the study of international re-lations. I must confess, however, that it im-presses me as being not much more thanraw material, and much work needs to bedone in shaping it up.

Part III is headed &dquo;OnValues&dquo;and hastwo chapters: one a general discussion ofthe realm of values, for some strange reasonrelegated to an appendix; the other headed&dquo;TheNational Interest and Other Interests.&dquo;The link with the precedingpart is not per-haps made as clear as it should be, but itis nevertheless there: the underlying theoryof behavior is the theory of homeostasis,which interprets behavior as action directedtoward closing a perceived gap between a&dquo;real&dquo;and an &dquo;ideal&dquo;value of some variable.

Any theory of behavior must therefore in-clude a discussion of the

ideal, divergencesfrom which are perceived as cues for action. Any adequate social theory must therefore

include a study of the dynamics of valueformation. I am not sure that Kaplan getsvery far with this, but at least he sees theproblem. His failure to go very far withthe analysis, however, makes the chapteron the national interest, in spite of somevery interesting insights, seem a littlesketchy. The basic concept is that interestis what important people think it is, eventhough what they think is by no meansarbitary. The chapter is an excellent veiledattack on what mightbe called the &dquo;naivetough&dquo;school of international relations the-orists who assume that the national interestis some non-subjective, easily definable,and generally agreed-uponobjective.

The fourthmajor

section of the book isheaded &dquo;OnStrategy&dquo;and consists of anattempt to apply the theory of games tointernational systems. This section is dis-

appointing. The exposition of the theory ofgames is too elementary for the initiatedand too difficult for the neophyte. The ap-plications are not uninteresting and are per-haps less obvious to those unfamiliar withgame theory. The notion of a game matrixas a device for setting out the problem ofdecision-makingunder uncertainty is a veryuseful one; whether the actual propositionsof the Von Neumann game theory areequally useful is open to doubt. The maindifficulty is that game theory has for themost part been confined to the discussionof zero-sum games, in which one partygains what another loses. These are actuallyvery rare in social life, and positive- (ornegative-) sum games raise a set of prob-lems involving threats, promises, commit-ments, lies, bluffs, and so on, which are

highlyrelevant to international and, indeed,to all social relations. Thus one has a feelingthat these chapters are a little premature-that recent developments in game theory

(for instance, those developed by T. C.Schelling in the last issue of this Journal[2] ) make these chapters somewhat obso-lete. It may be distressing for an author tofind his work obsolescent almost before it is

published, but this augurs well for the prog-ress of sciencel

There is one major gap in the generaldiscussion which is almost immediatelyap-parent to an economist. There is no dis-cussion anywhere of the forces which de-termine the scale of the nation. This is aserious omission from the point of view ofthe completenessof the system-indeed, itshould be the cornerstone of the wholeedifice-and it is very odd to find it so com-

pletely neglected. More than any other fac-tor it is the forces which determine the

optimum scale of the nation that determinethe nature of the international

system.There

is again a close parallel with economics. If,because of internal limitations of some kind,the optimum scale of the firm is small rela-


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tive to the market, we are likely to comeclose to perfect competition. If these in-ternal limitations are relaxed, the largerfirms gobble up the smaller until marketlimitations come into play, and we havemonopolisticcompetition. At still larger sizewe get oligopoly, or even duopoly, and atstill larger sizes, monopoly. Similarly in theinternational system, if the diseconomies ofscale of the national unit set in at fairlysmall sizes, we are likely to have a balance-of-power system with several smallish na-tions. If these limits are pushed back, theaverage size of the nation will grow untilwe get loose bipolar, then perhaps tightbipolar systems (duopoly), and, finally, theone-nation world (monopoly). These dis-economies of scale are closely related tothe role and communication processes in

society; on the whole, the disadvantagesoflarge scale are mostly due to breakdowns incommunication, and any improvement incommunications therefore pushes back the

scale barrier and enables larger organiza-tions to function. The world crisis today isprecisely a crisis of scale: the revolution incommunication and organization has beenincreasing the optimum size of the state,and the reduction in the costs of transport-ing destruction has been increasing the in-tensity of competition between states anddecreasing their viability. We may nowhave reached the point where only a worldstate is viable, and we are witnessing thepainful death agonies of the first four ofKaplansinternational systems. If this theoryof scale had been explicitly included inKaplans system, it would have integratedand related all its rather scattered parts.

By this time my reader will hardly havefailed to gather that I think this an impor-tant book. He may also have surmised thatI

thinkit a rather bad book. It reads like a

first draft. It is couched for the most part in

language that is pompouslyacademic and

devoid of grace. It would, I suspect, havebeen enormously improved if the authorhad sat down and rewritten it almost in its

entirety and if the publisher (as a metatask)had insisted on his doing this. It is perhapspardonable that a young man filled withimportant ideas should want to rush intoprint. I feel that the crime is all the morepardonablein that I have committed it fre-quently myself. Nevertheless, it remains acrime, and a serious one. The book will notreceive the attention it deserves or get thereaders who really need it, because of thisinattention to style, arrangement, and com-pleteness of argument. This would not mat-ter if the content were unimportant. Thecontent of this work, however, is of thehighest importance. It represents perhapsthe first systematic, integratedattempt at atheory of international relations. It gives usa useful frame not only in which interna-tional history can be studied but also inwhich future developments may be ap-

praised. It points, like all good theory, fromthe actual toward the potential. And it mayhelp to liberate us from bondage, in Kap-lans own words, &dquo;eitherto a moralismwhich undercuts itself by denigrating themeans necessary for maintaining values orto an opportunism which continually de-grades the values of the political and socialsystem in the guise of defense of the sys-tem.&dquo;For the importance of its content,therefore, I recommend it heartily to all myreaders, in the hope that one of them-orperhaps Dr. Kaplan himself-will one daysoon use this material in writing the defini-tive work for which we all wait.

REFERENCES

1. KAPLAN,MORTON A. System and Process inInternational Politics. New York: John Wiley& Sons, 1957.

2. SCHELLING, THOMAS C. "Prospectus for aReorientation of Game Theory," this Journal,Vol. II, No. 3 (1958).

Documents

Kaplan Systems Theory