The theory accounts for the agendas and the venues that now decide outcomes

The argument

A second case for the theory rests less on restraint than on description. Interdependence theory holds that states relate to one another through multiple channels rather than one, and that there is no fixed ranking in which security questions always outrank the rest. Proponents argue that this is simply what the system now looks like, and that a framework which insists otherwise cannot describe it. The channels are the first point. Contact between states runs through central banks, regulators, standards bodies, courts, universities, firms and migration systems, and much of it is conducted by officials who do not report to a foreign ministry and are not pursuing a foreign policy. Outcomes with large distributive and strategic consequences are settled in these venues continuously. A model that treats the state as a single actor speaking through its diplomats and its armed forces has nowhere to put any of this, and so must treat as peripheral the activity where much of the bargaining happens. The absence of a fixed hierarchy of issues is the second. Governments routinely subordinate a security preference to a monetary, trade or public health one, and the ordering shifts with circumstance rather than holding fixed. Proponents treat this as a finding rather than an embarrassment: if the ranking of issues varies, then a theory that derives behaviour from the permanent primacy of survival will mispredict in a large class of cases. Interdependence theory, by leaving the hierarchy open and the channels plural, gets the agenda roughly right before it makes any prediction at all, which proponents regard as the minimum test an explanation of the system should pass.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that getting the agenda right is not the same as explaining it. A list of the venues where business is transacted may be accurate while saying nothing about why outcomes fall as they do, and the suspicion is that the theory buys descriptive breadth by giving up predictive content. They also question whether the open hierarchy survives pressure: governments appear to reorder their priorities freely in calm conditions, but when a question becomes existential the ranking looks rather fixed, and the reordering the theory points to may be a luxury of ordinary times rather than a feature of the system.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] That bargaining is conducted by regulators and central banks does not make it independent of state power; those officials operate inside mandates set politically, and the apparent plurality of channels may be one authority working through many hands. [Rejecting P3] Reordering priorities in calm conditions is not evidence that no issue permanently outranks the others, since the test of a hierarchy is what happens when the issues conflict sharply rather than when they can all be accommodated. [Rejecting C] Describing the agenda accurately is a lower bar than explaining outcomes, and a framework can be more faithful to the surface of politics while saying less about what determines it.