Realpolitik

9 Key excerpts on "Realpolitik"

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  Impediments to the Prevention and Intervention of Genocide

  • Samuel Totten(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Realpolitik has become for those leaders of the international community and individual states who wish to do next to nothing (or, hypocritically, the barest minimum in order to make it seem as though their cosmetic approaches look as if they care and that they have attempted to ameliorate a deadly situation) when it comes to the prevention and intervention of genocide. What this may well mean in the “real world” is that the prevention and intervention of genocide will, at least for the foreseeable future, remain more of a hope than a reality.

  Realpolitik and Its Impact

  Believed to have been coined in the early nineteenth century by the Austrian statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich following the theoretical work of German political theorist Ludwig von Rochau, and then put to its most effective use by Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the German term Realpolitik effectively translates to “the politics of reality.” In a short essay entitled “Realpolitik: Foreign Policy Based on Practical Rather than Ethical or Ideological Considerations,” Robert Rauchhaus (n.d.), of the University of California, Santa Barbara, notes that

  Over the last century, two academic schools of thought have incorporated key elements of Realpolitik thinking. In the realist tradition, E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau expanded on the concept of balance of power, citing human nature as the source of the quest for power. In contrast, Kenneth N. Waltz and other neorealists locate the source of state behavior not in human nature, but instead in the structure of the international system. Neorealists find that the lack of world government (anarchic international order) produces a self-help system that requires states to maximize their security by balancing internally (armaments) or externally (alliances). In keeping with the tradition of Realpolitik, most realists and neorealists call for a cautious foreign policy. . . . (n.p.)

  The term Realpolitik is generally employed by political scientists for the purpose of identifying the reasons behind certain state behaviors relative to other states within the international community. The term effectively refers to an attitude whereby states do not have friends, but interests; accordingly, states work to secure those interests in a manner that is the least threatening and costly to themselves, and from which they can derive the greatest possible advantage. Thus, Realpolitik

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  Princeton Studies in International History and Politics

  History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics

  • Marc Trachtenberg(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  To understand power—that is, to understand how a system based on power works—is to understand why the most fundamental interests of other major states normally need to be respected, and why it is normally not to one’s own interest to allow conflicts to get out of hand. There are times, of course, when more aggressive policies might need to be pursued for the sake of a state’s own security—U.S. policy toward Germany in late 1941 is a good case in point—and there are times when states can pursue expansionist policies without running great risks. But moderation is normally a source of stability, above all in a world where the major states all think in power political terms. In a Realpolitik world, the great powers relate to each other on a businesslike basis; power realities are accepted for what they are; compromises can normally be worked out relatively easily because statesmen all speak the same language, the language of power and interest. And “interest” in that kind of world tends to get defined in geostrategic terms: for obvious military reasons, neighboring countries are more important than far-off areas; a region that is important to one great state may well be of secondary importance to another; great nations may therefore find it relatively easy, in such a world, to accept each others’ spheres of influence and coexist with each other on that basis.

  The power political approach, therefore, by defining what needs to be emphasized, by its very nature defines what needs to be played down, and thus tends to rule out other kinds of policy: power, from the Realpolitik point of view, is too precious to squander on moralistic or imperialistic or ideological enterprises. The power political approach thus provides a kind of yardstick for judgments about how power might be intelligently used—and, above all, for judgments about when its use is to be avoided. In this sense also, it is by and large a source of restraint.22

  Arguments of this sort are by no means new. The eighteenth-century “balance of power” theorists, for example, identified rationality with moderation and restraint. To reach for hegemony, in their view, was both pointless and dangerous: pointless, because other states would probably be able to frustrate an attempt to dominate the whole system, and dangerous, because to attempt to achieve such a position of power was to run great risks. As Fénelon, the most impressive of those theorists, warned, “[S]tates have often perished by these ambitious follies.”23 Traditional realists also often emphasized the importance of keeping goals limited, preventing conflicts from becoming crusades, and making sure the lines of communication remained open with one’s adversaries. The very fact (as Henry Kissinger pointed out in a famous passage) that “absolute security for one power means absolute insecurity for all others” and thus “is never obtainable” as part of a settlement whose legitimacy is generally accepted implied that absolute security could not be taken as a serious goal: if the aim was stability, statesmen had to set their sights somewhat lower.24 Policy from that point of view had to be limited and balanced; the goal was a kind of equilibrium. This was the sort of thinking that inspired the peacemakers at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars. The aim there was balance and equilibrium; the leading statesmen at Vienna, especially the British and Austrian foreign ministers Castlereagh and Metternich, were very much concerned with creating a stable structure of power.25

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  Diplomacy

  • Henry Kissinger(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SIX Realpolitik Turns on Itself R ealpolitik —foreign policy based on calculations of power and the national interest—brought about the unification of Germany. And the unification of Germany caused Realpolitik to turn on itself, accomplishing the opposite of what it was meant to achieve. For the practice of Realpolitik avoids armaments races and war only if the major players of an international system are free to adjust their relations in accordance with changing circumstances or are restrained by a system of shared values, or both. After its unification, Germany became the strongest country on the Continent, and was growing stronger with every decade, thereby revolutionizing European diplomacy. Ever since the emergence of the modern state system in Richelieu’s time, the powers at the edge of Europe—Great Britain, France, and Russia—had been exerting pressure on the center. Now, for the first time, the center of Europe was becoming sufficiently powerful to press on the periphery. How would Europe deal with this new giant in its midst? Geography had created an insoluble dilemma. According to all the traditions of Realpolitik, European coalitions were likely to arise to contain Germany’s growing, potentially dominant, power. Since Germany was located in the center of the Continent, it stood in constant danger of what Bismarck called “le cauchemar des coalitions” —the nightmare of hostile, encircling coalitions. But if Germany tried to protect itself against a coalition of all its neighbors—East and West—simultaneously, it was certain to threaten them individually, speeding up the formation of coalitions. Self-fulfilling prophecies became a part of the international system

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  Encyclopedia of Political Theory

  • Mark Bevir(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Although theorizing about international relations in the first four decades of the twentieth century had contained many elements, including some that could be described as realist, those who, in the 1930s and 1940s, adopted the name and set out the tenets of realism argued that a gulf had opened between what they saw as a naive concentration on international law and organization in the universities (largely Anglo-American) in which they worked, and an increasingly dangerous world in which the distribution of power was tilting against those same countries. These realists intended to look behind the formal institutions of international life to reveal the power realities that would either drive these rules and organizations or destroy them. The formulators of mid-twentieth-century realism wished to awaken their societies to the peril in which they found themselves because of their neglect of the factor of power, but they also hoped to tear away what they believed to be the hypocrisy that prevented these societies from seeing the power urges that lay beneath their own actions—to argue, for example, that a seemingly disinterested advocacy of international law and peace could mask the preservation of the international status quo by satisfied powers. In both its polemical and its scholarly sides, then, this realism disputed the tendency to see Realpolitik as a relic of the past that was being replaced by institutionalized and cooperative international action for the common good. On the other hand, the American realists also rejected the insistence of Realpolitik that a successful foreign policy was necessarily amoral. The argument of these realists was instead that only by accepting the existence of the contest for power could any international actor confront and mitigate the self-seeking aims behind its own actions, and only by pursuing policies that protected national interests while also advancing broader international interests could progress toward greater global justice be made. One mark of this camp of realists was its moral anguish at the realities that constrained, though they did not eliminate, ethical action in international relations. It was precisely because they differed from the exponents of Realpolitik in seeing the possibility and obligation of some realization of justice that they painfully delineated the gap between what was ideal and what could practically be accomplished given the characteristics of human nature as they understood them.

  This form of “traditional” or “classical” realism became influential and indeed dominant in the study of international relations, though it was never unchallenged by adherents of various forms of “idealism” in the three decades following World War II. In the 1970s, however, it was confronted by an alternative form of realism. Criticizing traditional realism for its failure to meet the standards of social science, and taking economics as a better model, Kenneth Waltz and others sought to supplant human-nature realism with international-anarchy realism. Their argument was that human nature, being almost impossible to study directly with precision, could be accepted as a constant, while attention focused on the “structure” of international relations: its anarchical lack of a global sovereign, which made the distribution of power among its independent units the determining factor in relations among them. These “structural” realists, or neorealists, contended that hypotheses could be advanced, tested, and confirmed or disconfirmed if one adopted the parsimonious abstraction of international reality that they offered in the place of the philosophical-historical approach of the traditional realists. The debate between traditional and structural realists therefore proceeded on two fronts, one being the fundamental starting point of any interpretation of international politics and the other being the degree to which the study of international relations could be modeled on the natural sciences and those social sciences that had been transformed by the behavioral revolution.

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  The Ethics of Nonviolence

  Essays by Robert L. Holmes

  • Robert L. Holmes, Predrag Cicovacki(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Many who concede that violence always needs justifying where questions of morality are pertinent contend that in international affairs, particularly in matters of warfare, morality either has no relevance at all or has at best limited relevance. Hence, they say, appeals to morality in foreign affairs are best foregone in the interests of clear thinking and effective action.

  This view has been called Political Realism, and is sometimes said to have been the dominant outlook in American foreign policy since World War II.1 Whether the latter is true is difficult to judge with confidence, of course, since the haze of secrecy surrounding high-level decision making makes such judgments almost unavoidably partly conjectural. But much of post–World War II foreign policy conforms closely to the prescriptions of the realists, and Political Realism has unquestionably been a leading—and perhaps even the dominant—theoretical approach to foreign policy thinking in America since World War I, with adherents among leading theologians, historians, diplomats, and political scientists, including Reinhold Niebuhr, George Kennan, Robert E. Osgood, Hans Morgenthau, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.2

  Despite its importance, however, and the fact that it abounds with philosophical assumptions, Political Realism has rarely been subjected to close philosophical examination.

  I wish to initiate such an examination here. I do not presume, in such limited space, to be able to do justice to all of the theories which have some claim to be called forms of Political Realism, or even to all of the particulars of those theories I shall discuss. The differences among realists on many matters of political, military, and historical judgment are too great for that. My aim, rather, will be, first, to clarify what Political Realism is and what some of the grounds are upon which it has been, or might be, held; and second, against this background, to place in general perspective two of the main currents of recent political realist thought in America. In the latter undertaking I shall concentrate upon analyses of American foreign policy between the two world wars, and deal only incidentally with the views of “neorealists” who attempt to update Realism for the nuclear age, and not at all with the forms which the doctrine has taken in European thought. Finally, I will, in the process, indicate the points at which I think that Political Realism has been in error. For despite the differences among the theories it embraces, it seems to me that Political Realism not only embodies some serious confusions but that it has provided a rationale (whether or not rational, a factual question I shall not attempt to answer) for the policies which eventuated in the Vietnam-Indochina War.

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  Metapolitics

  From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler

  • Peter Viereck(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER IX

  Realpolitik: Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke, Hitler

  War is the prime fact of Life, is Life itself…. The beast of prey is the highest form of mobile Life…. In the Faustian Kultur the proud blood of the beast of prey revolts against the tyranny of pure thought.

  — OSWALD SPENGLER 1

  From Fichte to Hitler

  Almost as hard to define as “ Kultur” and “ daemonic” is Realpolitik. The word has seeped through all layers of the German population. In foreign-policy discussions it is a favourite equally of professors and of humble beer-table strategists. The word is pronounced with a long, throaty, truculent “r.” Its pronunciation in Realpolitik connotes “ r-r-ruthless” (r-r-r⃼cksichtslos , Hitler’s favourite adjective) and “ r-r-realistic” (r-r-realistisch). Realpolitik tends to mean ruthless power-politics. It means the most callous pragmatism (it “works”). It means force (notably militarism and war) plus bluff of force as the twin principles of foreign policy. As Treitschke, the favourite nineteenth-century historian of the Nazis, put it, war is the supreme court of history. We, too, might cynically state the existence of war as an objective fact of life, a perhaps unavoidable though obviously deplorable fact. But the Nazis state it as a fact to exult in, sometimes even as the highest and all-absorbing national goal.

  Literally Realpolitik means “ realist politics.” It is about as realistic as smashing the street-corner traffic lights or substituting Stone Age clubs for due process of law. Fortunately reality is not at the beck and call of the self-styled realists. Hitler and Rosenberg are following an unrealistic and suicidal Realpolitik when they advocate that Germany rule the globe not by peaceful consent but “ by the victorious sword of the master race,” for as a more truly realistic Frenchman said, “ One can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.”

  Mein Kampf is a psean to war. It has become almost a parlour game to quote scary passages from Mein Kampf.

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  Theories of International Relations

  • Siegfried Schieder, Manuela Spindler, Siegfried Schieder, Manuela Spindler(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There is therefore some confusion about what the term realism actually means within International Relations theory. This has much to do with the fact that the ideas about the nature and understanding of international relations formulated by Morgenthau and the other realists were part of a long tradition of philosophical writings and historical treatises on the coexistence of nations and polities, and these ideas have often undergone subsequent modification and development. So when discussing Morgenthau’s ideas and those theorists close to him both temporally and in their world-view, the literature generally refers to the realist school or classical realism in order to distinguish these ideas from more recent theoretical developments. In what follows, realism is used as a collective term for the theoretical approaches developed under this rubric between the 1930s and 1950s to explain international relations. I refer to ideas that go beyond this as realist thought. While the emergence of realism in the 1930s and 1940s was due to specific circumstances and crises, realist thought stands within a long intellectual tradition whose leading historical exponents are generally identified as Thucydides and Niccolò Machiavelli, along with Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber. In the first major historical work in Western history, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (460–400 BCE) identified the increase in the power of Athens (Book 1.23) as the key reason for the military conflicts between the Greek city-states. Here, for the first time, power was viewed as the key constitutive and regulative factor in politics. Thucydides understood politics, meanwhile, as the eternal conflict between ideal principles and the application of power and force to further one’s own interests (Book 5). Power also played a significant role in Machiavelli’s (1469–1527) political thought

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  War in Economic Theories over Time

  Assessing the True Economic, Social and Political Costs

  • Renata Allio(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  territory and war. These debates, most frequently taking place at a journalistic and media level rather than in an academic environment, have not attracted many economists.

  Realism, Neorealism and Anarchy in Relations Between States

  “Neorealism ”, often called “structural realism ”, follows the “realist” current that dates back to Thucydides and Machiavelli , later being influenced by the thought of Hobbes , and considers as its founding fathers the German politologist Hans Morgenthau and the French sociologist Raymond Aron .2

  Realist thought flourished in the 1950s as an opposition to idealism , which had from the pre-war period on considered favourably policies of international cooperation put forward by authoritative international institutions, but also utopian liberalism, which despite any indications to the contrary continued to be founded on the hope that free trade would lead sooner or later to world peace .

  The realists, so named because they largely based their arguments on Realpolitik , went back to focusing attention on the state as the main political agent and on its pursuit of national interest , first of all in the search for power, independently of any moral or ethical considerations. Seeing that rationality must indicate the behaviour of states , ethical norms and moral principles as well as the concepts of ideological superiority, which also change over time, should not condition the relations between states which should instead be handled with due care. This allowed for the selection of the correct behaviour to be adopted each time on the basis of the possible consequences resulting from this selection. Peace could be maintained by avoiding ideological confrontations and crusades, while seeking a compromise respecting the interests of each side instead.

  Morgenthau challenged idealism in politics by holding that conflicts were the result of the greed for power which typifies mankind. Since human nature remains unchanged over time, the consequence is that the will to dominate is the main cause of conflict both between individuals and between states and that international politics , just like any other form of politics , is always a struggle for power . These basic convictions lead Morgenthau to define six fundamental principles of realism :

  • Politics is governed by objective laws derived from an immutable human nature.

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  The Invention of International Order

  Remaking Europe after Napoleon

  • Glenda Sluga(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Realpolitik

  Le roman est fini, nous entrons dans l’histoire.

  —METTERNICH TO LIEVEN, DECEMBER 1825

  What always seemed more important and serious to me … this grand drama of the Orient of which we haven’t yet seen the first act. If we are to commence this piece of drama we need to assemble the actors! Don’t you see?

  —DOROTHEA LIEVEN TO LORD ABERDEEN, PARIS, 27 FEBRUARY 1840

  IN 1825, while on a tour of the Russian Black Sea regions, Tsar Alexander mysteriously disappears and then is pronounced dead, likely the victim of an infectious virus. He is forty-eight years old. A wave of regret washes over Dorothea Lieven, now forty and wearing the tsar’s gift of the title “princess.” When she writes to Metternich in search of sympathy, his condolences are tempered. He takes the tsar’s death as a sign that the era of “romance” is over and that they have entered the era of “history.”1 The idea that European relations moved from a brief window of romance in 1814 to a cynical view of foreign policy and politics has shadowed the history of multilateralism at the end of the Napoleonic wars ever since. Some historians argue that to the extent this new society of states’ ideal manifests a romance, its death knell occurs not with the death of Tsar Alexander, who commits to it most consistently, but a quarter of a century later, in 1853, when the outbreak of the Crimean War pits Tsar Nicholas’s Russia against a coalition of the French, British, Austrian, and Ottoman empires. That same year sees the coinage of “Realpolitik,” a term that pits realism against idealism. Alternatively, British historian Harold Temperley locates the origin of this break in the months just prior to the tsar’s death: Dorothea Lieven convinces Alexander to prioritize Russia’s foreign policy interests over those of the Quintuple Alliance, thereby launching “the end of the Neo-Holy Alliance and the congressional or international system of government,” even “the beginning of the break-up of the Turkish empire.”2

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