The Realist Case for Global Reform

William E. Scheuerman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745650302, 9780745650296
• eBook ISBN: 9780745637792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Does a hard-headed Realist approach to international politics necessarily involve skepticism towards progressive foreign policy initiatives and global reform? Should proponents of Realism always be seen as morally complacent and politically combative? In this major reconsideration of the main figures of international political theory, Bill Scheuerman challenges conventional wisdom to reveal a neglected tradition of Progressive Realism with much to contribute to contemporary debates about international policy-making and world government.

Far from seeing international reform as well-meaning but potentially irresponsible , Progressive Realists like E. H. Carr, John Herz, Hans J. Morgenthau, and Reinhold Niebuhr developed forward-looking ideas which offer an indispensable corrective to many presently influential views about global politics. Progressive Realism, Scheuerman argues, offers a compelling and provocative vision of radical global change which -- when properly interpreted, can help buttress current efforts to address the most pressing international issues.

After recovering key subterranean strands in mid-twentieth century Realism, Scheuerman underscores their relevance to contemporary international theory. Criticizing more recent Realists for abandoning their tradition's best insights, he also demonstrates that reform-minded international theories --including versions of Cosmopolitanism, Constructivism, the English School, Liberalism, and Republicanism - could all benefit from taking Progressive Realism seriously.

A major contribution both to the history of international relations and contemporary debates in international theory, The Realist Case for Global Reform concludes by considering how Progressive Realism informs the foreign policies of US President Barack Obama.

1

WHY (ALMOST) EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED ABOUT REALISM IS WRONG

Realism comes in many different shapes and sizes. We should avoid being too hard on Ernie. Not only did he concisely summarize the dominant scholarly view of Realism, but influential variants of Realist theory do neatly fit his definition. Even the relatively small world of so-called classical Realism had more than its own fair share of internal disagreements. For example, much of what Ernie had to say accurately captures the ideas of George Kennan, an important figure in the Realist pantheon, especially as formulated in the influential American Diplomacy, 1900–50 (1951). Ernie’s remarks also offer a useful preliminary guide to Realists like Henry Kissinger and Kenneth Waltz, whose impact has been massive.

Nonetheless, core tenets of Progressive Realism conflict with Ernie’s examination answer. To be sure, Progressive Realists worried about the limitations of international law and international morality, argued about the ways in which political action might clash with morality, and theorized about the national interest, balance of power, and security dilemma. Yet they interpreted such familiar Realist theoretical tropes in a reformist and politically progressive fashion. Progressive Realists did not express unmitigated hostility to international law or international morality, advocate moral skepticism or amoral Realpolitik, offer a fundamentally Machiavellian or Hobbesian international theory, or depend on an unduly pessimistic view of human nature. Nor did they promulgate a cramped view of the national interest, embrace a backwards-looking and institutionally conservative model of the balance of power, or see the security dilemma as an insurmountable barrier to international change. The former lawyers, religious believers, and socialists who made up the ranks of Progressive Realism did not simply sacrifice their youthful humanitarian and reform-oriented views. Progressive Realism offers a more subtle account of international politics than typically acknowledged. It also provides impressive resources for those of us dissatisfied with the international status quo.

International Morality and Law

What should we make of the widespread criticism that Realists have badly downplayed the constructive roles played by international morality and law in the existing global order?

Morgenthau probably offered the most concise statement of the Progressive Realist position. Like most of his peers, he worried that the Hobbesian metaphor of an international “state of nature” was misleading: it closed our eyes to the myriad ways in which ethics, mores, and law regulated state action even absent world government (1948b: 169, 397). International affairs were not characterized by a norm-less anarchy, but instead by a complex intermeshing international “society of nations” resting on a rich variety of shared moral, legal, and social norms and practices (1954: 479). He argued emphatically against not only what he took to be exaggerated expectations about international morality and international law, but also in opposition to dismissive assessments of their accomplishments: “during the four hundred years of its existence international law has in most cases been scrupulously observed” (1954: 251). Even during moments of extreme crisis or emergency, nation states typically have abided by an international moral code: “the fact of the matter is that nations recognize a moral obligation to refrain from the infliction of death and suffering … despite the possibility of justifying such conduct in the light of a higher purpose, such as the national interest” (1948c, 82).

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Morgenthau understandably worried that modern total war was destroying both international law and international morality. “Nationalistic universalism,” driving individual political units arrogantly to identify “the standards and goals of a particular nation with the principles that govern the universe,” was working disastrously to weaken those features of international morality and law which traditionally had mitigated the dangers of international politics (1958: 176). Even a seemingly uncontroversial shared moral or legal norm consequently might mean something “different to an American, a Russian, and an Indian” since it was “perceived by, assimilated to, and filtered through minds conditioned by different experiences” (1954: 240). This resulted from disparities in everyday social existence, but also from parochial national frameworks by means of which most moral and political events were still digested: nation states continued to fill the “hearts and minds of men everywhere” with narrow “standards of political morality” (1954: 244).

Progressive Realists thus hammered away at the simple but telling point that apparent agreement on abstract moral and legal matters often masked explosive disagreements. People everywhere should and increasingly do condemn war and violent aggression, for example. Yet even apparent consensus on the relevant moral and legal prohibitions veiled explosive tensions.

They rejected a crude instrumentalist account of morality and law, which interprets them as easily manipulated playthings of the Great Powers, a passive “superstructure” determined willy-nilly by the “base” of global power relations. Such one-sided views of law and morality – including orthodox Marxism – only captured some facets of a more complex social reality (Carr, 1964 [1939]: 176–7). Even Great Powers were sometimes forced to obey norms which they otherwise would have preferred to violate: powerful “[g]overnments must at least outwardly conform to the standards which they have invoked for their own benefit” (Schwarzenberger, 1951: 227).

Nonetheless, international law and morals suffered from considerable weaknesses. In the context of a deeply divided international society, the decentralization of legislation, adjudication, and enforcement too often rendered international law subject to “vicissitudes of the distribution of power between the violator of the law and the victim of the violation” (Morgenthau, 1954: 270). This undermined law’s requisite generality: powerful states were treated differently from their weak rivals. To be sure, parallel dilemmas could be readily identified at the domestic level, where law could also prove subject to inconsistent application and enforcement. Yet such trends were badly aggrandized in the international system since it lacked “the unity and coherence of communities of more limited size.”¹ Unable to fulfill basic integrative functions accomplished more-or-less automatically by successful nationally based polities, international society remained embryonic and underdeveloped. The requisite “world community,” Carr confessed, was increasingly a concrete lived social reality (1964 [1939]: 162). Yet it remained plagued by fragilities – most notably, stunning power inequalities – that had been minimized at least to some degree at the national level. Not surprisingly, its moral and legal instruments were unable to operate as effectively as those on the national scene, where privileged political and social interests often obeyed burdensome moral and legal norms.

Not surprisingly given Progressive Realism’s socialist background, this view echoed key features of conventional leftist legal thinking.² Even when the law appeared to treat all parties equally, de facto power inequalities meant that it favored those possessing superior power resources. To be sure, the socialist and especially Marxist tradition typically prescribed an ambivalent conception of law: while emphasizing the virtues of the rule of law and civil liberties within capitalism, many Marxists thought that a postcapitalist social order could simply expend with basic rights and fundamental legal protections. Fortunately, most Progressive Realists acknowledged law’s admirable normative aspirations along with its tendency to mirror power inequalities. They generally recognized law’s institutional and normative complexity, even if they were forced to admit that a model of it as chiefly serving the interests of the powerful and privileged provided a more fruitful analytic starting point for making sense of global than domestic legal realities: in contrast to the domestic setting, where meaningful possibilities for peaceful social change could be readily identified, international law constituted a relatively static system offering few opportunities for weak states to challenge the status quo. Absent a developed system of global legislation, its static contours stymied peaceful reform (Morgenthau, 1929; Schwarzenberger, 1951). The nearest analogy to interstate conflict between “have” and “have not” powers, and thus “by far the most instructive,” was found between and among representatives of labor and capital (Carr, 1964 [1939]: 212; also, Schwarzenberger, 1951: 202). That social conflict, Carr observed, was an exceptionally explosive one and thus posed major challenges even to relatively well integrated national communities. While the explosiveness of tensions between labor and capital made them something of an exception in domestic politics, it vividly illustrated the normal state of affairs in international affairs, where inequalities between “have” and “have not” states regularly threatened existing legal and moral devices.

Progressive Realists were only able to pull off this creative reworking of the old socialist critique of formal law by abandoning Marxism’s economistic theory of power. Although acknowledging power’s economic roots, they argued that an adequate account of international relations also needed to identify alternative sources, including relatively tangible forms of military power, but also intangibles along the lines of what Carr called “power over opinion,” or even “national character” and “quality of government” as described by Morgenthau (Carr, 1964 [1939]: 102–45; Morgenthau, 1954: 93–152; Wolfers, 1962: 103–16). In striking contrast to more recent Realists who regularly envision military force as playing a predominant role in international affairs, mid-century Progressive Realists outlined a multisided analysis in which power was properly understood as deriving from a multiplicity of sources (Schmidt, 2005).

Realist Political Ethics

What then of the accusation that Realism “finds moral considerations unfit for the necessities that characterize politics, especially international politics,” as well as the closely related charge that Realism endorses amoral power politics or Realpolitik? (Doyle, 1997: 106).

To be sure, Progressive Realists sometimes polemically and confusedly attacked “moralism,” which meant a number of different things to them (Coady, 2008). And at least some of their formulations risked rendering morality’s status in international affairs unnecessarily murky. Yet the religious believers and old-fashioned moralists who dominated Progressive Realism were typically not trying to cleanse international politics of moral concerns, even if they undoubtedly worried about the tendency in recent political (and especially) international thinking to overstate the transformative possibilities of moral persuasion in the face of deep political antagonisms and power inequalities. Although sometimes unfairly caricaturing the views of their opponents, they thought that too many defenders of international reform, for example, deep down believed that all that was needed to bring it about was to convince opponents of the fundamental rightness of their cause; far-reaching action would then automatically ensue. Moralism, in this view, suffered from a failure to make sense of why human beings fail to achieve that which they otherwise consider desirable and praiseworthy. Too often allied to a naive rationalism, it downplayed the existence of irrational forces at work in human beings as well as society and especially in international affairs.

Progressive Realists endorsed a robust brand of political ethics. So Herz and Wolfers, for example, turned to Max Weber’s ethic of responsibility, following the German social thinker in contrasting it favorably to an “ethics of conscience.” The latter demanded that political actors follow moral principles regardless of the costs or consequences, whereas the former insisted that they grapple with the great paradox of all moral and political action: moral aims can sometimes result in counterproductive and even evil results, whereas actions otherwise universally condemned (e.g. the employment of force) may sometimes prove necessary to minimize greater moral evils (Herz, 1951: 143; Wolfers, 1962: 47–65, 81–102; also, Weber, 1994 [1919]: 309–69)). Rigid fidelity to the Christian Sermon on the Mount, Wolfers followed Weber in observing, was a recipe for political disaster: the call to lay down one’s arms would merely aggrandize moral evil in a world where not everyone was ready to do so. Yet Wolfers simultaneously lambasted amoral Machiavellianism, linking it directly to cynical Nazi power politics: Machiavellian Realpolitik was the enemy’s tool (1962: 48, 60, 82).³ While consistently assailing Realpolitik and what he described as an irresponsible German intellectual tradition that minimized morality’s place in international affairs, he insisted that political actors were obliged to “make the best moral choice that circumstances permit” (Wolfers, 1962: 50).⁴ This nonperfectionist political ethics supposedly provided plenty of room for morally sensible political action.

Nonetheless, this version of Realist political ethics still risked leaving the status of the fundamental moral values to which political actors were expected to subscribe unclear. In his original formulation, Weber endorsed moral relativism: our ultimate moral choices cannot be grounded in a universally ascertainable manner. They represented ultimate or final values among which moral and political actors simply decided in ways that lacked the cognitive soundness of scientific verities. Like Weber, Herz and Wolfers not only sometimes seemed ambivalent about how to ground basic moral values, but their political ethics also risked opening the door to an oddly dualistic political ethics: strict morals might be appropriate outside politics, but in politics so-called nonperfectionist standards were apparently tolerable.

It fell to Morgenthau and Niebuhr to provide a more robust moral vision. They not only adamantly rejected Weber’s moral relativism, but also worried deeply about the implications of a dualist political ethics.

Morgenthau relied on a theory of human nature to argue that human beings inevitably sought power over their peers. At the same time, however, he forcefully claimed that moral action requires “respect for man as an end in himself,” and hence that even in the context of explosive conflicts potentially requiring some sacrifice of moral standards (e.g. the universal condemnation of killing) actors must heed the call of conscience and reduce ethical compromises to an absolute minimum (1958: 247). In this view, “the test of a morally good action is the degree to which it is capable of treating others not as means to the actor’s ends but as ends in themselves” (1946: 196). The tragic contours of human existence stemmed in part from the fact that political action necessitated the instrumentalization of other human beings and thus violations of the moral imperative to treat other persons as ends in themselves. Yet because humankind was fundamentally both a moral and power-seeking creature political actors were always obliged to minimize the resulting evils.

The key attribute of admirable political leadership was the capacity to fuse a far-sighted assessment of the oftentimes deplorable realities of political struggle and power politics with a principled commitment to moral imperatives: both Hitler and Churchill were masters at the game of power politics, but only the latter deserved our praise and admiration. For Morgenthau, as for Wolfers, it was the terrible figure of Hitler who consistently practiced amoral Realpolitik (1954: 206). Political life was always deeply agonistic; a perfectly harmonious political or social community could never be achieved. Yet those, like Hitler, who reduced the tension between power conflict and morality simply by abandoning the latter rebelled against the West’s greatest moral and religious traditions. Instead, in the spirit of Churchill’s stirring wartime leadership, we should aim for a “combination of political wisdom, moral courage, and moral judgment,” and at least try to reconcile our “political nature with moral destiny” (1946: 203). Morgenthau conceded that most likely the results would be a frustrating “modus Vivendi,” an “uneasy, precarious, and even paradoxical” state of affairs (1946: 203). Political and moral action typically left participants with a sense of unease, anxiety, and even guilt. Rather than interpret such emotions as an atavistic leftover from which modern education or advanced psychology ideally should liberate us, Morgenthau considered them a necessary and potentially fruitful force: even if we sometimes followed a nonperfectionist code, we could never rest satisfied with having done so. Our conscience would bother us; we might be encouraged to change political conditions so to minimize prospective moral trade-offs. Even if in practical terms Morgenthau’s political ethics overlapped with Herz’s and Wolfers’ more orthodox Weberian account, the differences remained consequential. Those who compromised morality would have a hard time sleeping soundly: they might get up in the morning motivated to change those features of social life which required unpalatable ethical compromises.

Morgenthau’s Scientific Man thus quite consistently attacked Machiavelli and Hobbes as well as the “reason of state” tradition to which they helped contribute, while also rejecting a dualist political ethics according to which “there is one ethics for the public sphere and another ethics for the private sphere” (1946: 179). Machiavelli and Hobbes were also accused of having irresponsibly abandoned Western political thought’s praiseworthy aspiration to tame the exercise of power by moral means (1946: 33, 169, 174, 174–6; 1945a: 145–7). Even if the ugly realities of politics prevented perfect fidelity to the far-reaching demand to treat others as ends in themselves, a non-instrumentalist moral vision remained binding: setting up a separate (and less demanding) moral code for political action potentially meant caving into its ugliest features.

As Morgenthau periodically admitted, his political ethics had been directly inspired by Niebuhr’s. The key difference was that Niebuhr built overtly on Christian foundations, while Morgenthau appealed more ecumenically to what he dubbed “Judeo-Christian morality,” and even Kant and Marx, whom he read as having “decried the use of man by man as a means to an end” (1946: 184).⁵ Both thinkers also sought to ground basic moral values in what they considered universally valid ways. Like both Wolfers and Morgenthau, Niebuhr doubted that a rigorous ethical stance could always be consistently realized in the political realm, accusing Christian pacifists who believed in the self-sufficiency of an ethic of love of succumbing to a well-meaning but ultimately counterproductive political naivety (1940, 1–33; 1935: 153–80). Politics might involve getting our hands dirty, for example, by employing force when necessary to avoid even greater evils. So in Niebuhr’s eyes 1930s pacifists disastrously ignored the need to counter fascism by violent means, and they ignored legitimate reasons why oppressed social groups sometimes chose to take up arms. Gandhi’s enthusiasts, for examp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 WHY (ALMOST) EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED ABOUT REALISM IS WRONG
• 2 REALISTS AGAINST THE NATION STATE
• 3 REALIST GLOBAL REFORMISM
• 4 WHAT COSMOPOLITANS CAN LEARN FROM PROGRESSIVE REALISM
• 5 WHAT OTHER GLOBAL REFORMERS CAN LEARN FROM PROGRESSIVE REALISM
• 6 WHO’S AFRAID OF THE WORLD STATE?
• CONCLUSION: A NIEBUHRIAN PRESIDENT?
• REFERENCES
• Index