Realism And Neorealism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Broadly defined, realism is one of the major and most longstanding theoretical traditions in the study of international and foreign affairs. Realists view the world as a naturally conflictual arena in which rational and selfish states compete for the pursuit of their mutually incompatible interests. Power, especially in its military form, is for realists the main ingredient of international politics. On the one hand each state needs power to advance its interests and protect itself in an anarchical and hostile environment—an environment in which war is the rule rather than the exception. On the other hand, power is the key to international order and cooperation: the former can only be structured along the lines of a balance of power or a hegemonic system (or a mixture of the two), while the latter materializes out of fear or imposition rather than trust or altruism.

With their focus on power, conflict, and violence, realists assign a very limited role to those who do not control the means of physical force, like sub-, trans-, or supranational actors. For one thing, the sovereign state is seen as a unitary actor, whose vital interests are unaltered by the groups in power, its leadership, or its domestic institutions. As for international nongovernmental and governmental organizations, they lack the means to impose their preferences and decisions when they are inconsistent with the interests of the states involved. Similarly, the realist worldview relegates factors such as ethics, law, culture, and ideology to a secondary position, from which they can influence politics only to the extent that they do not contrast with the states’ attainment of power and security.

The above common tenets of realism coexist with a number of theoretical and methodological differences originating several branches and subdivisions within this broad tradition. The most important of these divisions is between classical realism and neorealism.

Classical Realism

Classical realism emerged in the 1930s and developed primarily in the following two decades. It is one of the oldest paradigms in the study of world affairs. In its initial phases, realism represented a reaction to the utopian liberalism that had dominated the discipline of international relations since its birth, right after World War I (1914–1918). Early realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Edward Carr, and Hans Morgenthau attacked utopianism on two fronts. First, they criticized the utopianist prescriptive approach to international politics, proposing description and explanation instead. The world, realists argued, should be portrayed as it is rather than as it ought to be.

Second, supported by the crisis of some of the main political products of liberalism, like the open international economic system and the League of Nations, classical realists rejected the interpretation of the world as a harmonious environment in which law, commerce, and social learning would guarantee peace and prosperity. In its place, they propounded a pessimistic analysis of sociopolitical behavior that built on the work of past thinkers, such as Hobbes and Thucydides, to describe the international system as a state of nature writ large—the so-called domestic analogy—in which states, like Hobbesian natural men, are engaged in an endless struggle for power and domination. Far from being an aberration, war is, in this view, just the most obvious expression of the inherent friction in the system. Similarly, peace and security are not the products of integration and institutions but the result of a careful balancing of power (through rearmament or alliances) and policies of national independence.

On neither the methodological nor the theoretical front, however, did classical realism reach radical positions. For one thing, while condemning the naïve normativism of the utopianists, realists never advocated the opposite extreme of a detached scientism. Rather, theirs was a pragmatic approach, which acknowledged the existence of some eternal laws of politics but admitted that human behavior can sometimes deviate from these laws and that policy needs to be corrected when this happens. Their writings, therefore, can be seen as both explanations of the political reality and guides for good statecraft. This dualism is particularly clear in the work of policy-oriented realists such as George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, and Henry Kissinger. In the second place, the interpretation of international politics in terms of power did not imply a total rejection of alternative principles like law, ethics, and ideology. In the classical realist scheme, these factors can and often do operate at the margins of power politics, sometimes mitigating it, sometimes exacerbating it—although never replacing it.

Neorealism

Unlike classical realism, neorealism (or structural realism) owes most of its development and success to the work of a single scholar: Kenneth Waltz. In Man, the State, and War (1959) and Theory of International Politics (1979), Waltz laid the philosophical and theoretical foundations of what would become one of the dominant international relations paradigms in the last decade of the cold war, and remains a popular research program in the early twenty-first century.

Waltz’s neorealism departs from classical realism both ontologically and epistemologically. In the first place, while Waltz shares the classical realist understanding of international politics as a sphere of egotism and conflict, he rejects the anthropological pessimism on which this understanding rests. Borrowing from Rousseau and his “stag hunt” episode, Waltz offers an alternative reading of the state of nature in which man is neither good nor bad (or, put differently, can be both) but just rational and in which conflict results from the mutual mistrust that the lack of a central coercive authority generates among rational beings. While sovereignty solves the problem domestically, it reproduces it at the international level. In an anarchic system, Waltz argues, states are concerned primarily with their survival and physical security. However, each step toward the maximization of one state’s security (most notably rearmament) produces more insecurity for other states. This permanent clash of interests makes, first, interstate cooperation in the military or in other fields highly unlikely unless this constitutes the lesser evil in security terms (defensive alliances are a case in point). Second, it easily entraps states in a “security dilemma”—whereby the improvement of one state’s security ends up creating more tension in the system—that can sometimes spiral out of control to the point of attacking, not to be attacked first.

Although re-elaborated as a means rather than an end in itself, power remains central in the neorealist framework: in its systemic configuration, polarity, power is one of the two crucial structural variables (the other being anarchy) for the explanation of international politics. On the other side of the equation, the balance of power is for Waltz one of the main recurrent outcomes of the international system.

Epistemologically, neorealists usually reject the ambiguities of classical realism in favor of a stricter form of positivism characterized by a complete detachment between the analyst and the object of study (which can neither influence nor be influenced by the analyst), by a quasi-mechanical view of sociopolitical behavior in which the maximization of security is taken as an exogenously given objective and ideational factors have hardly any space and, finally, by a predilection for deductive and universally applicable theories. Nowhere are all these features more manifest than in the more recent rational choice applications of the neorealist paradigm.

Bibliography:

Carr, Edward H. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. London: Macmillan, 1939.
Donnelly, Jack. Realism and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Frankel Benjamin, ed. Roots of Realism. London: Cass, 1996.
Herz, John H. Political Realism and Political Idealism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Kennan, George F. American Diplomacy (1900–1950). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Keohane, Robert O., ed. Neorealism and Its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Lippmann,Walter. U.S.War Aims. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944.
Morgenthau, Hans. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. 5th ed. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
Smith, Michael J. Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Wolfers, Arnold. Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962.

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