The state is changing, security is changing, and so are identities, subjectivities, the nature of war, and the nature of politics itself. Globalization, we are led to believe, is changing everything. Change seems to be the leitmotif of the new millennium, although this undoubtedly also will be susceptible to change.

There are two potential problems with the contemporary fascination with change. First, change seems to be something new: before there was continuity; now there is change. But change is constitutive of the social world; hence there cannot have been a (social) time that contained no change. Second, the focus on change is apt to ignore what has not changed. For just as change is constitutive of the social world, so is continuity.

That something is undergoing change can only be understood relative to that which does not change. If everything were changing, then change could not be experienced as change. We identify change as a disruption of the nonchanging. But the disruption is never total since what can be said to be changing—processes, events, things—requires that something related to the entity undergoing change does not change. Even in extreme instances of change—-metamorphosis, for example—there is still a residue of the old such that we can identify a change from “this” into “that.” In this sense, continuity is that which makes change possible.

The books examined here all recognize the “mutually constituted” nature of continuity and change. The books differ in their point of focus: What is it that has changed, and where are the sources of continuity and change—in agents or in structures? Much recent theoretical work in international relations (IR) tends to answer the first question by saying, “Everything.” It is to the credit of the books examined that they locate change firmly within continuity. In answering the second question, many have reacted against the structurally grounded neo-realist emphasis on continuity. They have highlighted change through an increased concern with agency. Hence we can draw up a grossly oversimplified equation where structure equals continuity and agency equals change. Torbjørn Knutsen and Martin Van Creveld demonstrate the banality of this equation. Bill McSweeney unfortunately does not.

Knutsen’s book, The Rise and Fall of World Orders, is largely the result of his Ph.D. thesis, with additional chapters intended to bring the material up to date. We may consider this book a contribution to hegemonic stability theory, with an added dash of constructivism—a heady mixture that is gently stirred but not shaken. It is a welcome contribution to this body of literature. The dash of constructivism, for example, allows Knutsen to make some telling points vis-à-vis similar books, such as Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Knutsen argues that the exclusion of an explicit normative element to hegemonic power compromises Kennedy’s analysis (p. 10). This normative power allows the hegemon to maintain a high degree of social cohesion through a “consensus as to the values, norms and rules of social behaviour” (p. 142). So fundamental is this normative dimension that any approach that neglects its analysis is not really dealing in hegemony at all (p. 11). For Knutsen, “there is an essential difference between great power based on force and great power rooted in consent. Only the latter qualifies as ‘hegemony”’ (p. 11).

By neglecting this normative dimension, Kennedy inevitably characterizes the United States and the Soviet Union as two great powers locked in competition. Knutsen argues that this image was so misleading that Kennedy could even predict the demise of the United States, when in fact it was the Soviet Union that was collapsing under the weight of deteriorating economic and political performance associated with an erosion of trust in civil society (p. 10). From Knutsen’s perspective, the two countries were never equal actors since the “USA was always strong in terms of normative power, whereas the USSR was weak” (p. 10). Because of its lead in normative power, the United States has functioned effectively as a hegemon since 1945.

Once gently stirred with this normative dimension, Knutsen’s analysis is conventional in its account of the rise and fall of hegemons. “Rise and fall,” he argues, should not be employed as synonyms for change (p. 3), but as denoting a cyclical pattern, a “periodic repetition of macropolitical themes and constellations through time” (p. 3). Although hegemons change, they always do so within a horizon of continuity. Through a detailed analysis of four historical world orders, Knutsen develops his three-phase model of the rise and fall of world order: hegemony, challenge, and disruptive competition. These are some of the most impressive chapters of the book, and despite the conventional nature of his overall analysis, interesting insights emerge through the embedding of world orders in the concept of normative power.

Yet there are problems in his concept of normative power that detract from the overall thesis. Most important is the issue of what drives change. Knutsen is keen to maintain that normative power is the key to understanding the rise and decline of world orders (p. 13). It is difficult to escape the feeling that normative power is dependent upon material capabilities. As he puts it, once “its [the hegemon’s] military arsenal lags, and once its material wealth declines, it will also lose moral power” (p. 13).

Likewise, in his discussion of the secular trends in modern world politics, changing material circumstances seem to largely drive changes in norms and rules (pp. 264–269). But need this always be the case? If this normative dimension is as fundamental as Knutsen claims, might it not be possible to conceive of a world order capable of enduring through the exercise of normative power alone, in spite of a decline in the material capabilities of the hegemon? Moreover, could a deeply embedded normative structure be capable of breaking the hegemonic cycle?

Knutsen considers just such a possibility in his final chapter. Here, he suggests that secular trends—the destructive power of nuclear weapons, the increase in interdependence among national economies, and the development of unprecedented scales of cosmopolitan interaction—may facilitate a break in the cycle of rise and decline of world orders (p. 269). Such a break would bring the promise of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, sustained through the ability of the benign hegemon (the United States) to exercise normative power. Yet Knutsen misses a chance to show how the exercise of normative power might bring about fundamental change—not only in the hegemonic cycle, but also in the nature of hegemons themselves—a chance that is alluded to in the title of Van Creveld’s book, The Rise and Decline of the State.

Knutsen concludes the book by pitting Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis against Samuel Huntington’s notion of a clash of civilizations. Although Knutsen sides with Fukuyama, the logic of his argument vis-à-vis normative power might actually lend tentative support to Huntington. The secular trends identified by Knutsen, allied to the logic of normative power, suggest the possibility of a group of states becoming so firmly embedded within a common normative structure that they function as one state. Knutsen agrees, arguing that “It is on the level of ideas, norms and values, then, that the West has won” (p. 275). The dominant contemporary hegemon is not an individual state but the West. This indicates that any effective challenge will emerge not from other individual states, but the “Other” of the West. Normative power has played its role in changing the nature of the hegemon, but perhaps the cycle remains. This is the continuity of change.

Van Creveld’s book deals specifically with the issue of the changing nature of the state. In his exemplary analysis, Van Creveld charts the development of the state as a specific form of government from prehistory to the present day. Although his analysis is meticulous, it adds little to current understandings and comparable accounts of state development, and his account of decline generally concurs with the current literature.

Van Creveld identifies war as the motor of state development. Consequently, the nature of the state will change as the nature of war changes (p. 336). In addition, Van Creveld suggests that the right of sovereign states to engage in war has undergone a process of delegitimation (p. 353). Nonetheless, he is keen to stress how change and continuity go hand in hand and argues that although the nature of interstate war has changed substantially, wars of a different kind will continue (p. 354).

Along with the changing nature of war, Van Creveld argues that the states’ retreat from the provision of welfare has also played a fundamental role in their restructuring. Two sources are highlighted to account for the “retreat of welfare”—one external and one internal. The external source is the oil crisis of 1973, precipitated by the Arab–Israeli conflict of the same year (p. 362). This crisis, Van Creveld argues, caused recession in many Western economies and a concomitant lack of confidence in the global economy such that welfare provision was inevitably cut back (p. 362). The internal factor was the success of the welfare state. Success meant an ever-increasing demand on welfare provision, a demand that states simply could not meet.

Alongside these two dimensions, Van Creveld believes the internationalization of technology, internal threats, and the withdrawal of faith have contributed to the demise of the state. Missing from his account is an analysis of the relationship among all of these elements and the changing nature of war. If war made states, then is there some relationship between the changing nature of war and the other elements Van Creveld identifies? He never teases out the links among these elements, which, given the prominence accorded to the role of war in state development, must surely be important.

Despite the authority of his argumentative strategy and the empirical support Van Creveld enlists, I think he overstates the case for change over continuity. Yes, the state may be undergoing substantial restructuring, but is it in terminal decline? To my mind the state has been a particularly tenacious form of political organization, and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances will ensure its survival for some time to come. There will be continuity in change. Van Creveld does not suggest a world without government because government, he rightly argues, is not the same as the state (p. 415). Although the state may change, forms of government will continue.

In the final analysis, Van Creveld’s stateless world is a version of neomedievalism: a world populated with multiple overlapping sites of authority; a world that will contain winners and losers; a world devoid of large-scale interstate war, but one in which violence will be sporadic and local (p. 419); a world that will be neither “better [n]or much worse than the one which is even now fading into the shadows” (p. 421)—a world, that is, where what has changed serves only to highlight what continues.

Bill McSweeney’s Security, Identity and Interests explicitly locates the necessity of his analysis in the changing nature of the world since 1989 (pp. 1–2). McSweeney’s concern is with security, particularly the inability of what he calls the “conventional framework” (p. 1) of academic discourse on security to provide adequate accounts and explanations of particular events and processes since 1989. The author highlights three particularly problematic areas for the “conventional framework” of security. The first is the continuation of European integration after 1989. The second is the shift in British security policy in Northern Ireland. The third is NATO enlargement. Given the inability of the “conventional framework” to explain the puzzles, McSweeney suggests an alternative framework based on Anthony Giddens’s “structuration theory,” but also incorporating elements of neofunctionalism while rejecting its commitment to positivism.

There is much to admire in this book. It is a contribution to the emerging body of literature known as “critical security studies.” McSweeney’s carefully crafted analysis displays a sophisticated grasp of difficult theoretical issues. By linking these issues to contemporary empirical puzzles, he is able to underscore the policy implications of his approach. He makes some cogent points about the current state of the discipline and approaches to theory, particularly his insistence that what binds the so-called postpositivist approaches to IR is much more substantial than the differences suggested through the deployment of disparate labels (p. 116).

What unites these various attempts to rethink security, McSweeney argues, is the turn to an analysis more grounded in sociological categories. He has in mind the turn toward identity, but he uses the term “sociological” because he considers the problem of identity to be inextricably linked to that most perennial of all sociological problems: the agent–structure problem.

The structure of the book follows that of his argument. Section one outlines the “conventional framework” and details its weaknesses, as perceived by McSweeney (an important caveat). Section two provides an exegesis of contemporary attempts to introduce identity into the security equation and an account of McSweeney’s proposed alternative. McSweeney focuses on Alexander Wendt’s vision of constructivism and David Campbell’s version of poststructuralism, both of which he finds wanting. Section three attempts to validate the alternative framework through an analysis of his three chosen puzzles.

It is clear that McSweeney is advocating a change from how we conventionally theorize about security to a new, more sociologically grounded account. But it is not clear whether this new approach is required because the “conventional framework” has always been inadequate or because the nature of security itself is changing.

Overall, the book is a valuable contribution and at times a corrective to some of the overblown claims made by those theorists keen to make identity the sine qua non of global politics. McSweeney is eager to point out that the relationship between identities and interests is not simply a one-way street. Interests can also shape identities (p. 167). McSweeney is to be applauded for how he relocates the possibility of changes in identity firmly within a material context. His approach avoids, as he puts it, the inherent “cultural determinism” of Wendt and Campbell (p. 132).

His proposed framework treats the relationship between identities and interests as recursive; they are inseparably linked and reflexively feed back on one another (p. 168). From neofunctionalism he looks at the idea of “spillover” to elaborate on this relationship. Yet, because of the “discredited baggage” of neofunctionalism (by which McSweeney means a deterministic positivism), he utilizes a different term to capture the sense of enmeshment that “spillover” embodies, but one devoid of deterministic residues. Seduction, rather than “spillover,” becomes the name of the game because it conveys both the sense in which actors consciously manipulate others’ identities and interests (p. 169) and how actors are “tempted, led, or entangled in a web of relations from which it becomes too costly to extricate themselves” (p. 170).

Although the theoretical framework is seemingly sound, problems emerge when the framework is applied to his chosen postwar puzzles. In the case of Northern Ireland, for example, “A people divided for centuries by religion, political allegiance, cultural adherence and myth has reflected on its divisions and re-examined its ideological roots to find space to compromise in favour of the other” (p. 180). If voluntaristic alarm bells are beginning to ring, then so they should. In his analysis of Britain and the European Union, McSweeney tells us how “Britain chose to distance itself from the community” and how Germany chose to “identify its interests in terms of a western democracy” (p. 184).

Admittedly, McSweeney does attempt to redress the balance in the following section on the “primacy of interests,” with identity now seemingly a pawn of interests. For example, the author utilizes the structural inability to maintain the arms race to explain the redefinition of national identity in the Soviet Union (p. 189). Similarly, financial enticements and considerations explain changing identities in relation to the Northern Ireland problem.

McSweeney’s account might appear to be very similar to Knutsen’s in this respect, and it seems that one no longer sells one’s soul to the devil but rather one’s identity. To equate McSweeney’s approach with Knutsen’s would be a mistake. Even in this section the logic of his Giddens-like notion of agency (the ability to do otherwise) seems inexorable, with McSweeney putting it succinctly: “We choose who we are and who we want to be” (p. 196). Despite the prima facie attractiveness of this articulation, I doubt that a Jew faced with the gas chamber could have escaped his or her fate by a simple declaration of “I choose to be German!” The problem is that in his desire to stress change over continuity McSweeney overplays the role of agency and underplays the influence of structure, which not only constrains, but also enables. To locate change only in agency, as McSweeney tends to do, overlooks how change can be a structurally driven phenomenon.

A related problem is that McSweeney believes that identity pertains mostly to agency and interests to structure. But identity can be part of the structural context; it can enable and constrain in much the same way as material interests can. We cannot simply choose to be a state leader, for example. The adoption of that particular identity requires that one jump through some substantial hoops—some of which are embedded in interests, some in identities.

The source of McSweeney’s voluntaristic analysis is in two prior errors. First, his analysis of the “conventional framework,” and in particular of Kenneth Waltz, sets up an overly deterministic framework, the only alternative to which would seem to be some form of voluntarism. McSweeney locates theoretical space for change against what he sees as the continuity emphasized by Waltz. He argues that the structure of the international system, for Waltz, is an objective reality existing independently of the acting units. Waltz’s concept does not specify from where such a structure emerges (p. 102). The structure of the system determines the behavior of the units (p. 102).

This view is undoubtedly the standard account of Waltz in much of the literature, but I think it misrepresents the situation. If we really want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of neorealism, we do ourselves a disservice by drawing these hackneyed mischaracterizations. Waltz does not think that the structure of the system exists independently from the actions of the units. He fully accepts that the world of international politics is constructed by states, although he finds this a trivial and obvious insight, hardly worthy of further enunciation. As he puts it, “States produce their situations. One of course agrees with that statement.” What he fails to do—and this is a valid critique—is explore the implications of this position. Waltz is equally misunderstood on the issue of determinism. Even in Theory of International Politics, he does not argue that the system determines either the behavior or the attributes of the units.

Another problem is in McSweeney’s treatment of Giddens. He presents Giddens’s structuration theory as unproblematic and does not engage with the wide body of literature that has either criticized Giddens or amended his theory. McSweeney’s book promises to draw on contemporary trends in social theory. Therefore, it should have featured contemporary critiques of Giddens. IR may gain from theoretical developments in other disciplines, but not if the analysis fails to grapple with the intricacies of debates surrounding these developments within the disciplines where they were originally developed. Giddens’s theory comes replete with its own problems, most notably the inherent voluntarism. Some analysis of these problems might have helped McSweeney avoid some of the voluntaristic excesses. Without it, little will change, and old ways of thinking will continue.

So what do these three books tell us ultimately about the relationship between continuity and change? First, we should be wary of grand claims that see change and nothing but change everywhere; there are always elements of continuity within change. Second, change is not simply something pertaining to agency. Agents bring about change, but not in circumstances of their own choosing; the sources of change can reside in either agential or structural conditions. Third, there is a real need for the development of theoretical accounts able to locate the continuity of change and the change in continuity. McSweeney’s book is a valiant attempt to construct such a theoretical account, but it ultimately displaces continuity at the expense of change.