Do Global Crises Foreclose or Expand Room for Agency?
Theorizing crisis and change in international relations (Part 1 of 2)
The idea that crises lead to change is a very common trope in social science. Polanyi contrasts “critical periods” with “connecting stretches of time” and focuses on the former to explain change.1 In American politics, scholars of parties emphasize the importance of “critical realignments” in voting behavior.2 Historical institutionalists talk about “critical junctures” — and so on and so on.3
Fine. Let’s agree that crises and change are often linked. The question I want to ask is: should we see crises as a narrowing of possibilities, or an expansion of possibilities? Both are a kind of change, and potentially very radical change, but change of very different sorts. We often assume that crises, by wiping the slate clean and suspending the normal rules of politics, create more space for human agency, increase choice, and embolden variety and exploration. But it’s not obvious to me that there is a simple answer here.
Let’s take two examples, one that subscribes to the idea of crises expanding room for choice, and another that doesn’t.
Most social scientists know the concept of punctuated equilibrium, introduced by paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould. The idea is that biological evolution is characterized by long periods of stasis, followed by bursts of change. In this model, an exogenous shock leads to a proliferation of different life forms, the archetypal example being the Cambrian Explosion. The aftermath of the shock brings forth many new species, even if many of them subsequently fail to adapt and die out. At least for a little while, the field is opened up.
This is what we think of as the emancipatory power of crises. For Eldridge and Gould, shocks represent an opening up of possibilities. While no “progress” of any sort is to be expected (in fact they argue against such teleology), new things do become possible in the aftermath of crises. Variety increases, at least temporarily.
In general, social science has followed the same view. Having borrowed the term, we also borrowed the attitude toward the role of crises. That is, we focus on the role of human agency in moments of change and the importance of increased choice and individual action in times of crises.4
Mark Blyth, for example, argues that moments of crises generate space for individual action through a process of “inter-elite persuasion,” in which ideas held by individual actors temporarily take on a crucial importance.5 And crises, argue Goldstein and Keohane, “cause ideas to become important because all constitute exogenous shocks that undermine the existing order. At such moments radical shifts in the political agenda may occur because of the common acceptance of some new normative or causal set of beliefs.”6
However, crises can also foreclose possibilities. They can and do privilege structure over agency, and material factors over ideas. Here’s an example. When you look at global crises like the World Wars or the Great Depression or the Soviet collapse, there is a distinct foreclosure of possibilities in the aftermath of the global shock. As a state, the regimes you adopt are often the regimes of the victors, and the alliances you make often depend on where you sit in the international system. This is also why we see massive waves of regime change in the wake of hegemonic transitions - not just democratic waves but fascist and communist ones, corresponding to sudden changes in the structure of global hegemony. And since it is the structural features of the system that shape and constrain choices in those moments, how much agency is there really in times of such sudden change?
To make the distinction explicit: if we apply the term “punctuated equilibrium” to social processes like sudden hegemonic transitions, we are using the term in a fundamentally different way from Eldridge and Gould. In global politics, hegemonic shocks do not level the playing field, but reshape it to their own liking. Variety is reduced rather than expanded. In their effects on domestic institutional evolution, there’s no Cambrian Explosion of regime types after hegemonic shocks. Quite the opposite, we see the consolidation of regimes around the archetypes promulgated by the victors.
I’ve purposefully put the two positions at odds, but I think we can – and should – consider that they are commensurable. One could believe that crises narrow the options available, yet also open up more freedom to people acting within those narrower options. In the 1980s, Gorbachev is acting under severe constraints, sure, but it is precisely and paradoxically those constraints that give him the freedom of action to implement his ultimately radical reforms.
The question then becomes: under what conditions do crises open up space for change, and under what conditions do they foreclose it? I cannot provide an answer here, since my aim is more modest: simply to highlight the ambivalent role of crisis in opening space for human agency.
This post is part 1 of 2. It’s based on some comments for a roundtable at the 2021 ISA meeting. Part 2 will make the case for a distinction between evolution and adaptation, and what this means for how we treat evolutionary metaphors in social science.
Karl Polanyi (1944/2001) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston: Beacon Press, p.4
Peter Gourevitch (1986) Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises, Cornell University Press, p.222. (Note here, too, the notion of persistence of new forms, in contrast with the paleontological view of critical junctures where new forms flourish but then die out rather than persist.) In V.O. Key’s formulation, American political history can be divided into five periods separated by “critical elections” that drastically realign political allegiances. V.O. Key (1955) “A Theory of Critical Elections” Journal of Politics 17:3-18. Likewise, Burnham refers to long-term American political development as a process of punctuated equilibrium. He describes American politics as characterized by periods of "long-term inertia" during which "politics as usual" prevails, regularly interrupted by "concentrated bursts of change”. Walter Dean Burnham (1999) "Constitutional Moments and Punctuated Equilibria" Yale Law Review 108: 2237-77.
See also Paul Pierson (2004) Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis, Princeton University Press; Peter J. Katzenstein (1985) Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe, Cornell University Press; Frank R. Baumgartner, Christian Breunig, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Bryan D. Jones, Peter B. Mortensen, Michiel Nuytemans and Stefaan Walgrave (2009) “Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative Perspective” American Journal of Political Science 53(3), 603–620; Gary Goertz (2004) International Norms and Decision Making: A Punctuated Equilibrium Model, Rowman & Littlefield, p.134-9.
The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism in fact defines critical junctures as “situations of uncertainty in which decisions of important actors are causally decisive for the selection of one path of institutional development over other possible paths”.
Blyth, Mark. 2007. “Powering Puzzling, or Persuading? The Mechanisms of Building Institutional Orders.” International Studies Quarterly 51(4):761-77. Likewise, Widmaier, Blyth, and Seabrooke (2007) argue that ideas and agency matter more in times of crisis. Pushing against structural and material views of transformation, they argue that wars and disruptions create opportunities for persuasion among both the public and the elites, and in these periods interpretation and persuasion come to the fore. They argue that “wars and crises provide openings for change where a range of social agents can interpret events to push for policy innovations. (Widmaier et al. 2007:753).
Goldstein and Keohane 1993:17.