HIERARCHY UNDER ANARCHY - INFORMAL EMPIRE AND THE EAST-GERMAN STATE

Contemporary international politics embody a tension between formal eq uality and de facto inequality. States recognize each other as soverei gn equals, yet the strong still push around the weak. Among the struct ures that reflect this tension are informal empires. The dominant assu mptions in mainstream international relations theory, materialism and rationalism, privilege the formal equality of states in informal empir es a priori: materialism by assuming that authority relations cannot e xist between sovereign states; rationalism by assuming that states are sovereign over their own interests. A constructivist approach allows one to explore the hypothesis that transnational authority structures construct state identities and interests. An empirical analysis of the Soviet-East German relationship supports this hypothesis, which raise s questions about the emerging study of international governance.