Behavioural Systems

In Chapter 8 two different methods were suggested of conceiving manageable abstractions from ‘the international system’, which was defined as ‘the totality of all [state-] boundary-crossing interactions of whatever kind among whatever units’. ¹ The first of these methods was to select particular units, such as states, and to identify various ways in which systems conceived in terms of states, and the interactions among them, may be analysed. The second was to identify particular types of interaction and to define a variety of systems, each consisting of all interactions, among whatever units, of a particular type. Using rather different language, the international system may be conceived of as a social system, the units in the system being international status roles. ‘International status roles may be conceived as the outputs of the foreign-policy process of international actors. … The input of an international actor consists in the demands facing its policy-makers and the power put at their disposal; its output is in the policy-makers’ international decisions or policies or, from another point of view, their international role-playing.’ ² The second type of conceptualization involves breaking down the status roles into a variety of different types of systems of action, the units in the system being the status roles in respect of a particular type of action only, together with additional originators and receptors of this type of action.