ABSTRACT
The proliferation of actors and levels of action as dimensions of international societization was already considered within the debate on transnationalism towards the end of the 1960s. “Transnational politics” was the basic analytical category with which the discipline of International Relations responded to the diminishing signi¿ cance of both real-world borders between societal, domestic and international politics and analytical-categorical boundaries, a decline that went hand-in-hand with processes of socioeconomic and political integration (see Risse 2002). “Transnational politics” highlights societal processes emanating from other states that have an impact on a given society and thus indirectly inÀ uence state policies. In his book, World Society (1972), John Burton describes a number of different functionally de¿ nable webs of relationship that link actors, on the various levels of action, with a multitude of other actors, including non-state actors, in a “spider’s web model”. From this perspective, as most cross-border interactions take place between non-state actors, the territorial principle is no longer appropriate to differentiate and categorize these relations. Instead it is functional systems of relations that are constitutive, and only a world society model can capture these in a comprehensive way. With his spider’s web model, Burton takes account of interactional processes occurring below and beyond the level of the state, integrating them into a productive political scienti¿ c analysis. Burton’s approach thus overcomes the realist school’s state-centred approach. In the 1970s, the model of complex interdependence (see the chapter by Manuela Spindler in this volume) was another attempt to produce a persuasive account of the increased complexity of international processes and structures. This model aims to analyze both the generally asymmetric structures of dependency among political actors and systems and the mutual interpenetration of political, social and economic processes. Because these structures of dependency differ from case to case, the model of interdependence allows no generalizable statements. It does, however, provide an analytical framework for the increasingly complex character of international relations by rede¿ ning the role of the nation state and eliminating the division between international and domestic politics. The idea hinted at here, that International Relations should abandon its exclusive focus on states, could not hold sway for long against established theories of neorealism and neo-institutionalism (see the chapters by Niklas Schörnig and Bernhard Zangl in this volume).
