Wendt: The State as Person in International Theory

Wendt, A., 2004. The state as person in international theory. Review of International Studies, 30(02), 289-316.

“To say that states are ‘actors’ or ‘persons’ is to attribute to them properties we associate first with human beings—rationality, identities, interests, beliefs, and so on. Such attributions pervade social science and International Relations (IR) scholarship in particular…all this discussion assumes that the idea of state personhood is meaningful and at some fundamental level makes sense. In a field in which almost everything is contested, this seems to be one thing on which almost all of us agree” (289).

“My objectives are threefold…the first is simply to distinguish several questions one might ask about it and to identify some scholarship that bears on them…My second purpose is to expand on my earlier realist argument that ‘states are people too’…Finally, I explore how far a realist view of state persons might be pushed, even if this means leaving physicalims behind” (291).

One way of exploring this question is by looking at what constitutes a person. A person can be seen as being constituted both from the inside and the outside. There were times when people were internally people but not recognized externally (slavery, etc.). There were also times where animals were internally not persons but were externally recognized as such (Wendt cites an article about animal trials in the middle ages, really an interesting read in footnote 16).

States as well have the internal recognition and the external recognition issues to deal with. Internally, states have legitimate right to the use of force. Externally, they are recognized as being sovereign. This, however, is not the case as Wendt highlights Taiwan as being internally but not externally a state and Somalia as being externally but not internally a state.

Wendt then goes on to claim that we need to highlight different kinds of “state”. These are psychological persons, legal persons and moral persons. “In modern societies infants are legal persons but not psychological or moral ones; women are psychological persons, but historically often not legal or moral ones; corporations can be morel persons even if they are not psychological ones; and so on” (294).

“In sum, how we address whether states are people too will depend on two choices—whether to focus on their legal, moral, or psychological personhood, and on their inside or outside constitution. For the first…here I shall deal with states only as psychological persons, since this is how they are treated in most IR scholarship…For the second, I shall explore only the inside constitution of state persons, since this is the hard case of the realist view” (295).

Wendt then points out the rationalist perspective on persons: there are four properties. First, identity is static. Second, persons have opinions about their surroundings. Thirdly, they are motivated by “transitive” desires. Finally, they act rationally, defined as utility maximization. The rationalists get it right when they talk about intentionality, but they miss out on the requirements of a person being both an organism and having consciousness.

Reductionism, supervenience and emergence are discussed.

Then there is a discussion that “deepens” the understanding of state as organism or superorganism.