Theories of International Relations

David A. Baldwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351879736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International relations theory is a diverse and constantly evolving area of scholarly research reflecting the fluctuations in world politics. This volume brings together a number of the most important research papers published on this subject during the last sixty years. Divided into five thematic sections, this work provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of developments and debates in this area of study. Topics covered include the history and development of alternative approaches to international relations theory; the importance of domestic politics in shaping a state's foreign policy; the absence of a global 'government' and the meaning and implications of this 'state of international anarchy'; power and its role as a variable in international relations theory and the challenges of state security, war and peace. The introduction anchors the collection, putting the articles within the context of the evolution of this field to date.

Part I
Approaches

[1]
NO ONE LOVES A POLITICAL REALIST

ROBERT G. GILPIN

SINCE THE demise of Marxism, political realism has come under increasing attack from many political liberals. It is almost as if, having defeated their opponents on the left, liberals have now turned their assault rightward to the third most important contender for intellectual hegemony in the arena of international affairs. Liberal thinkers have attacked political realists especially for the latter’s refusal to believe that, with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, the liberal millennium of democracy, unfettered markets, and peace is upon us. Whereas political realists (who have never had much hope for the human species to begin with) are, on the whole, a rather tolerant and forgiving lot, liberals (and of course Marxists) tend to be more intolerant of those ideas that appear to stand in the way of human perfectibility; it would seem that liberals and Marxists cannot easily accept the doctrine of intellectual peaceful coexistence. As my colleague Michael Doyle has wisely observed, while liberal societies may not war with one another, liberals are quite aggressive toward their nonliberal opponents.¹ The same liberal intolerance appears to hold in the marketplace of competing ideas.

The primary reason for this paradoxical phenomenon, that is, the contrast between liberal profession and liberal behavior, lies I am persuaded in the character of liberal thought itself. Liberals, in decided contrast to both Marxists and realists, believe in the overwhelming power of ideas; ideas in and of themselves are believed to move the world. (How else can one explain the fact that most professors are liberals!) Right thinking leads to right action and, of course, wrong thinking to wrong action. Therefore, the task of the liberal is to convert the benighted and to make the world over in the liberal’s image. In the liberal’s lexicon, therefore, benevolent “truths” must be promulgated; malevolent “untruths” such as those held by realists, must be expunged lest they cause mischief. Realists and Marxists, on the other hand, believe that the world is driven primarily by interest; ideas are politically important only in so far as they serve the material and self-centered interests of powerful actors, or at least do not counter important interests, It was, in fact, to demonstrate the folly of this liberal belief in the power of rationality that Hans Morgenthau, the foremost American realist thinker, wrote Scientific Man versus Power Politics after the Second World War. Morgen-thau’s purpose was to show how the liberal faith in the power of reason failed them in dealing with Nazi Germany.² Or, as E. H. Carr put it, liberal morality and realist power must accompany one another if the former is to have any effect in this world.³

One of the most unfair and preposterous liberal criticisms of realists is that realists did not predict the end of the cold war and the demise of the Soviet Union.⁴ Of course, realists did not predict the end of the cold war; nor did any one else. My own opinion is that the social sciences can not and never will be able to predict major historical discontinuities, or perhaps even minor ones for that matter; like evolutionary biology, ours is at best an explanatory and not a predictive science. Critics are quite unfair to criticize realists and international relations theorists in general because they failed to predict the destruction of the Soviet empire and eventually of the Soviet Union itself; such a standard is an impossibly high one. Insofar as I myself made any predictions regarding these matters, I made three points in my writings which I would like to reiterate here for the record:

1. The cold war, I wrote on at least two occasions long before its welcomed demise, was unlikely to end in a major or hegemonic war because the American-Soviet contest lacked certain essential characteristics that have historically been associated with such wars. I made no predictions, however, about how the struggle might turn out.⁵

2. The real danger of a major conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, I believed, lay in a Soviet threat to displace the United States as the dominant power in the world. To my knowledge, such a crucial shift in the hierarchical ordering of power in an international system, or what I called the governance of the system, has never occurred peacefully. In the 1970s I began to worry about this possibility when the American economy began to falter and the American polity following Watergate was under great stress at the same time that the Soviet Union, according to intelligence reports (which later turned out to be incorrect), appeared to be taking the lead militarily and economically. I also stated, however, that the long-term prospects for the Soviet Union were not bright, and that one should not overstate the Soviet threat lest a fearful and defeatist American leadership do something rash.

3. Despite the collapse of the Soviet challenge, I must confess that I am still an unreconstructed “declinisi,” to use Samuel Huntington’s term of opprobrium, and continue to worry about the economic, political, and social condition of the United States. Since the early 1970s the United States has experienced a relatively low rate of productivity growth, a huge federal budget deficit and accumulating immense foreign debt, and, most ominously, an alarming decline in the American standard of living, especially for a substantial fraction of the society. Despite an apparent resurgence in productivity growth and international competitiveness in the 1990s, long-term negative developments suggest that the American economy continues to be in serious trouble. The implications of these developments are worrisome. In particular, the lessening of the American commitment to trade liberalization, which has been one of the foundations of postwar peace and prosperity, poses a danger to a prosperous and peaceful world. If this protectionist trend continues, it could have very dangerous consequences for the post–cold war era.

In this article I shall be concerned with one particular line of liberal criticism of realism, that contemporary economic and technological developments are transforming the nature of international affairs and thereby invalidating the premises of realist thought. Whatever validity realism may have had in the past, this argument goes, it is decreasingly relevant for a world characterized by increasing economic interdependence. Consequendy, critics allege, changes in national priorities, powerful transnational forces, and new non-state actors are undermining the nation-state and traditional national interests as the organizing principles of international affairs. This line of argument, I believe, greatly overstates what is actually occurring in the world economy and the implications for the nation-state. Prior to considering these matters and their significance for the relevance of realism, however, I must address the question of what I myself mean by political realism.

THE NATURE OF POLITICAL REALISM

AS I HAVE argued elsewhere, realism, like liberalism and Marxism, is essentially a philosophical position; it is not a scientific theory that is subject to the test of falsifiability and, therefore, can not be proved or disproved. Testable theories, however, can be and have been derived from realist assumptions; among these theories are the balance-of-power theory and the so-called theory of hegemonic stability. I am primarily concerned in this article with the underlying assumptions of realism that are said to have been invalidated by contemporary economic and technological developments. Among these challenged realist assumptions is the belief that human beings are self-centered and attentive primarily to their own interests. Society, according to realism, is basically conflictive and the struggle for power among rival groups is a fundamental condition of human existence. Peace is more the result of a power equilibrium than a cessation of conflicting ambitions. A wide range of differing positions, however, exists within this realist tradition.⁶ Morgenthau, for example believed that human beings were driven by a lust for power; other realists, including myself, while acknowledging that power can become the primary goal of a Hitler or Stalin, regard power as essentially instrumental to and necessary for the achievement of other goals such as security and even liberal ideals. Because of these differences of opinion within the realist camp, I shall set forth my own views of what I personally mean by political realism.

PRIMACY OF CONFLICT GROUPS

The fundamental idea of realism is Aristode’s observation that man is a political animal. Men find their being as members of social groups to which they give their loyalty and for which they are willing to die; human beings are not the solitary individuals assumed to exist in liberal theory. The fundamental unit of social and political affairs is the group, or what the distinguished German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf has called the “conflict group.”⁷ The precise nature of these conflict groups, however, has changed over the millennia in response to economic, technological, and other developments. In Aristode’s Greece, for example, the basic unit was the polis or city-state. In the modern world, the principal conflict group has been the territorial state whose foremost manifestation today is the nation-state; the modern state has displaced earlier types of political entities, for example, tribes and empires, because it has been more efficient in organizing military power, managing economic affairs, and providing security; for these reasons, individuals have transferred their loyalty from other political entities to the state. This exchange of loyalty for benefits is still taking place, and one can only pity the poor Kurd or Bosnian who lacks a protective state of his or her own.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NATIONAL INTEREST

States (or, more generally, conflict groups) are motivated primarily by their national (or group) interests which may be economic, ethnic, or territorial. These interests are determined by dominant elites and may be quite particularistic, for example, maintaining the elite’s hold on power or preserving its economic prerogatives. As elites change, the definition of national or group interest may also change. For this reason, I myself do not find credible Morgenthau’s assumption of an objective national interest defined in terms of power.⁸ In an anarchic international system composed of competing states, however, a governing elite must of necessity put a high premium on the security and survival of the state or the group; if a national elite, for example, fails to protect the territorial integrity of the state, the state may cease to exist, or at least could lose its independence. Thus, while the national interests of states do have a large subjective component, the conditions of survival as determined by economic factors, geographical location, and the like do constitute an objective component in the definition of national interest. From this perspective, it is significant to observe that the many different elites that governed England for over three centuries from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, defined the preservation of the independence of “the low lands,” that is, today’s Benelux nations, as a British national interest for which they fought numerous wars. Thus understood, I would agree with Morgenthau that defending the national interest is the highest priority of the state.

THE PRIMACY OF POWER AND POWER RELATIONS

In a world characterized by political anarchy and conflicting interests, power and power relations are a fundamental feature of international affairs and political life more generally. While realists do stress the significance of military force as the ultimate determinant of political affairs, they also recognize other forms of power. E. H. Carr, for example, in his classic work, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, identified three types of power in international affairs: economic, military, and psychological.⁹ I myself would certainly agree. While this definition of power can be criticized as overly broad, it does exclude moral claims and reasoned persuasion as powerful motive forces in political life, unless they are backed by power; morality functions best within and not among groups. In a world where mankind is still divided into politically distinct groups, economic relations constitute power relations and competing groups will seek to maximize their economic power.

THE STATE IN A HIGHLY INTERDEPENDENT GLOBAL ECONOMY

AS NOTED earlier, an important critique of realism is that the nation-state has become an economic anachronism. However well-suited the nation-state may have been in the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Approaches
• Part II Domestic Politics
• Part III International Anarchy and Institutions
• Part IV Power
• Part V War, Peace and Security
• Name Index