| Summary/Abstract |
This article advances a unified explanation of intersubjective rules, international agents, and historical structures. It also ties in national identity narratives and international practices. It shows that rules, suitably defined, instantiate and assemble themselves to form national-autobiographical narratives that become the identities of states, motivating their actions and practices. Agents here do not follow rules, rather self-activating rules constitute agents. Rules are distributed across states and other agents, some shared widely and others held narrowly. A rule can gain or lose credibility among the agents it constitutes. Rules depend on the operation of other agents’ rules for their credibility. An international historical structure is a collection of rules distributed among different states that operate to vindicate each other. The rules, shared and divided across agents, motivate practices that vindicate the rules. This process of structuration gives rise to enduring social networks of agents connected by interdependent practices. This process also yields the historical dynamics of the rise, fall, and succession of structures. Structures rise, unevenly, as new rules and practices join into the reproduction process and some old ones drop out. Structures break down when some rules are discredited, leading to a disruption of established practices, causing the discredit of yet more rules. Agents can be transformed radically. This model has strong empirical reference as the rules define categories, norms, and causal beliefs visible in discourse. The case of US-Russian relations is used for illustration.
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