International Relations Worldviews And Frameworks Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

One way to review international relations worldviews related to foreign policy is to probe the positions of key theorists within the influential schools of realism, idealism, behavioralism, and postmodernism.

Idealists And Realists

The twentieth century brought into focus several “great debates” in international relations (IR) theory. The oldest, and still unresolved, is the debate between realism and idealism. Idealists claim that human nature is basically good, rational, and law-abiding and seeks peace, well-being, liberty, democracy, justice, and self-determination. Nation-states ought to pursue these goals and will do so given rational and democratic leaders, transnational institutions dedicated to idealist goals, and global education and socialization that instruct citizens about habit-forming benevolence. Idealists from ancient philosophers to Woodrow Wilson, pacifists, and utopians see global harmony of interests and cooperation as realizable goals.

Realists, from ancient philosophers to modern proponents of balance of power like Hans Morgenthau (1948), reject most of these idealist assumptions. With a pessimistic view of human nature and transformative (harmony-producing) transnational institutions, realists see all politics as a struggle for power, national interest, and survival in a dog-eat-dog world. Rational citizens and leaders, schooled in the reality of hostile forces, incomplete understanding, scarce resources, and disagreement on the rules of engagement, must prepare for the worst; doubt the good intentions of states with competing interests; pursue obtainable (limited, not utopian) goals of national interest; and cooperate with like-minded states (democratic scruples need not intrude) dedicated to resisting hegemonic states that seek to dominate neighbors and upset balances of power. For realists, conflict is inevitable but manageable when leaders understand that anarchy breeds danger and that a balance-of-power strategy, rather than policies based on human goodness, provides the best avenue toward stability and survival.

This debate resurfaced in the 1970s when neorealists and neoliberals delivered upgraded reports on the prospects for peace in the twenty-first century. Neorealists argued that states remain the major actors in an anarchical world. While cooperation occurs, states still may fight for self-defense, power expansion, stability, national or ideological interests, and economic or geopolitical necessity. Neorealists, like Kenneth Waltz, want to shore up the rigor of realist theory to enable better explanation for state rivalry. The neorealist emphasizes the persistent influence of the anarchic structure of the world as a constraint on states that still respond to structural/system-induced drives for power, security, and stability.

Neoliberals, like Robert Keohane (2002), reject the pessimism of realists who failed to predict the peaceful end of the cold war. They expect to encounter cooperation, integration, and peace once states abandon dangerous power obsessions. Where neorealists expect stability to be produced by states adjusting to international anarchy and power imbalances, neoliberals assume stability and prosperity will follow in the wake of expanded awareness of the benefits of global economic and technological interdependence and the effectiveness of transnational institutions, such as the United Nations and European Union.

Behavioralists And Traditionalists

In the midst of this two-part realist/idealist debate, a second great debate emerged between traditionalists, who approached IR theory as intuitive historians, philosophers, and policy analysts, and behavioralists (or empiricists), who intended to discover, by scientific method, laws of human and state behavior.

In this epistemological (ways of knowing) debate, behavioralists assert that knowledge depends on a logical positivism: We can only know to be true that which we can observe, measure, test, operationalize, and replicate. Only through observation, quantitative experimentation, and scientific conceptualization can we build empirically valid and cumulative theory. From observing and scientifically unpacking the interacting parts of the political world, IR scholars like J. David Singer claim to discover and describe the objective laws of interstate relations; convert facts into “hard” data, without which one cannot generalize; offer generalizations (empirically derived and sponsored) and heuristic explanations about human action; and predict from discovered trends to high probability futures.

Traditionalists are not persuaded that scientific techniques and hyper-abstractions applied to state behavior will yield accurate data measurement and empirical validity. For traditionalists, behavior is not prepackaged and uniform, but unique; not subject to scientific predictability, but affected by chance and random human choices; and not quantifiable or subject to controlled experiments, but understood by philosophical reasoning. Traditionalists, therefore, maintain that IR theory remains slippery and impressionistic, difficult to measure, and dependent on historical and speculative analysis or on what Donald Puchala (1990) calls a metaphysical way-of-knowing accomplished through plausible and insightful reasoning and conceptualizing. Theory, in this view, derives from analytic impressions and intuition and then launches empirical follow-through. Thinking, imagining, and theorizing precede empirical testing, data making, and knowledge.

Postmodernists

Postmodernists (a.k.a. postempiricists, postpositivists, and structuralists) reject all these previous theoretical endeavors as façades because there are no “proven” facts, data, truths, or value-free theories, only perceptions and opinions. In their view, Modernist or Enlightenment metaphysicists, whether creating or asserting knowledge based on reasoning or revelation or on realist or idealist perspectives, are actually imposing their privileged Western opinion about truth as if this opinion were neutral theoretical explanation. Enlightenment behavioralists (empiricists) impose meaning on what they discover, presumably without preconceptions or bias.

Postmodernists do not care for behavioral, realist, Marxist, or natural law models, either in terms of their social scientific or value-free methods or their presumptions about data making or the ability to discover truth. For postmodernists, it is unfounded arrogance to presume that history moves with meaning toward goals like democracy, balances of power, capitalism, socialism, and even human progress toward the “better.” The seemingly anti-hero-theory of postmodernism questions and deconstructs all notions about truth and embraces conceptual pluralism and relativism. There is no one better idea or explanation, or rather there are many social and political constructions that portray reality according to many (equally valid or equally invalid) points of view.

Postmodernists lament that these points of view masquerade as objective truth presumably proven by rational discourse and exegesis or by the tools of science. In their view, authority figures such as political and cultural elites (usually male) of dominant power centers (usually Western) take control of people (variously poor and oppressed), language, identity, and history to coerce others to accept their power, ideas, and cultures. We are better off rejecting theoretical and ideational imperialists posing as fact-finders and neutral interpreters savant. However, postmodernists themselves reveal an imperialist impulse because they believe their philosophical proclamations are somehow true (one must, apparently, strive for absolute tolerance and yet reject all forms of dominance) and not just opinion constructions. Postmodernists rightly question, but in the grab-bag of contending IR theories, they have made little headway.

Bibliography:

Booth, Ken, and Steve Smith, eds. International Relations Theory Today. University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1996.
Dougherty, James E., and Robert L. Pfaltzgraph Jr., eds. Contending Theories of International Relations. New York: Longman, 2001.
Keohane, Robert. Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics Among Nations. New York: Knopf, 1948.
Puchala, Donald. “Woe to the Orphans of the Scientific Revolution.” In The Evolution of Theory in IR, edited by Robert Rothstein, 39–60. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

This example International Relations Worldviews And Frameworks Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.