Realism, Idealism and International Politics

A Reinterpretation

Martin Griffiths

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134913749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book defends realism in the study of international politics and demonstrates the heuristic and evaluative utility of Robert Berki's interpretation of political realism and political idealism. It argues that realism is not a meaningless term nor redundant and necessarily rhetorical in politics.

1
Introduction

I incline to think that the illusions of a truly human heart, whose zeal takes all things as possible, are to be preferred to that sour and repellent reason whose indifference to the public good is always the chief obstacle to every endeavour to promote it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The meaning of a word is its use in a language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Introduction

This book defends realism in the study of international politics. In the academic discipline of International Relations, whose nomenclature indicates a scope of inquiry not confined to politics among formally equal (but substantively unequal) sovereign states, the term realism has been severed from its association with ordinary usage and is now attributed to a particular school of thought, according to which international politics is an essentially asocial realm of conflict and perpetual struggles for security and power among states in an allegedly 'anarchical' environment. When writers in the field use the term Realism with a large R, as James points out, 'it is the school which is being referred to, not the quality of its work'.¹ To avoid any misunderstanding from the outset, this book does not defend what James calls large-R-Realism as a school of thought. Instead, and contrary to conventional wisdom, this book argues that small-r-realism, or just realism, is not a meaningless term in general common parlance, nor is it redundant as a particular attribute of thought about international politics.

The argument that follows is based explicitly on the interpretation of the meaning of the terms political realism and political idealism contained in Robert Berki's On Political Realism.² (All page references in this and the next chapter refer to this book.) I simply apply his interpretation of these vague and contentious terms to the study of international politics. Consistent with, and constrained by the logic of ordinary usage, Berki argues that realism is an attribute of thought which presupposes reality or experience as a dialectical interplay between necessity (the abstraction of constraints) and freedom (the abstraction of opportunities to transcend those constraints). The substantive content, identity and dynamic of these abstractions in international politics need not detain us at this point. In contrast, he argues that idealism proceeds from the ontological denial of this presupposition, and thus the reification of either necessity or freedom. These abstractions are then imposed upon political practice leading to an evaluative or commendatory stance of nostalgia, complacency, or revolution (which Berki calls the idealism of imagination), depending on which abstraction is privileged. Thus there are different forms of idealism. Consequently, Rousseau's dichotomy is revealed as false, based on a mistaken assumption that realism and idealism occupy two poles or extremes which permit no further synthesis. The false dichotomy between realism and idealism is endlessly repeated in the field of international relations, particularly by those writers who profess to be realists themselves. It is starkly illustrated by Hans Morgenthau, who unhelpfully saw the entire history of modern political thought from the Enlightenment onwards as a simple Manichean contest between realists and idealists.³

This book, then, attempts to begin rescuing realism from the selfstyled ‘Realists of International Relations’. Its method is blatantly deconstructivist, but its goal is to rehabilitate terms whose main function up to now has been polemical. ‘What deconstructivist thinkers “deconstruct” is the structuring of paired concepts as inevitably opposed and as opposed in a zero-sum relation…[they aim] to remove the hierarchy and to undo the pairing’.⁴ Labels matter in predisposing us to think in certain ways about international politics, and what passes for Realism in the academic study of International Relations is not realistic.

Based on Berki s conceptual analysis of the meaning and relationship between political realism and political idealism, the following chapters develop the argument by engaging in a critical analysis of three 'grand theorists of international politics—Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and Hedley Bull. Although the first two writers are arguably the most famous exemplars of Realism as a school of thought, my reason for choosing them does not rest on such an assumption. I share Gilpin's argument that one cannot attack an entire alleged school or tradition of thought by merely picking on particular writers that are assumed by the critic to represent the weaknesses of an entire tradition.⁵ Indeed, one of the difficulties of treating Realism as a clear-cut school of thought is that its representatives differ vastly in the way they use the assumptions which are said to define the school in the first place! This is because the discipline of International Relations is socially constructed. Its identity (which may well be contested between schools) is not fixed and immune either from the subject-matter it seeks to explain or from changes in thought about the social sciences in general. For these reasons there is not even a derivative consensus on how to define Realism beyond a few broad assumptions about the importance of states as actors, the institutionally anarchic environment within which states coexist, and hence the importance of power as the master variable to explain broad patterns of states' interaction. At this level of generality. Realism is simply a set of assumptions about the world rather than a particular theory, let alone anything so pretentious as a scientific paradigm. Of course, there have been many attempts to define Realism more rigorously and narrowly so that it may be compared to and evaluated against competing schools of thought. The problem with this is that both the identification of competing schools as well as the criteria to evaluate them are themselves socially constructed. On the one hand, an historical examination of Realism (loosely defined) facilitates a detailed examination of different writers, and sensitizes one to the variety of arguments within a tradition of speculation about international politics. The drawback of this approach is the lack of criteria to determine who to include in (and thereby exclude from) such a survey. On the other hand, a 'competing schools of thought' approach may be helpful for drawing rough boundaries, but the criteria for identification and evaluation are themselves contentious issues. How one understands and evaluates Realism in International Relations depends a great deal on whether one views it as a philosophical disposition, a scientific paradigm, a mere framework of analysis, a testable explanatory theory of international politics, or an ideology of great power conservatism.⁶

For these reasons, my selection of Morgenthau and Waltz is only tangentially based on their status as paradigmatic Realists in International Relations. Rather, these two writers are selected on the basis of Berki's distinction between the idealism of nostalgia (to which I will add a variant called the idealism of complacency) and the idealism of imagination, realism being understood as the synthetic transcendence of each. Morgenthau and Waltz are idealists, or so I will claim. As a counterpoint to these writers, Morgenthau representing nostalgic idealism and Waltz representing a form of complacent idealism, I have selected Hedley Bull's work as a closer approximation to the interpretation of realism defended in this book. My goal is simply to demonstrate through a dialectical argument (in the Socratic sense) of exegesis and critique, the heuristic and evaluative utility of Berki's interpretation of political realism and political idealism. These terms are not meaningless, yet at the same time their meaning is not immediately obvious, even though they are part of common parlance and everyday discourse.

Meaning and Language

Robert Berki is not directly concerned either with international politics or international political theory, which is perhaps one reason why his argument has been ignored by students of international relations. He provides a conceptual analysis of the terms realism and idealism whose departure point is ordinary usage. His goal is to arrive, by reflecting on what is normally meant when we employ these terms, at a better understanding of what, in Feinberg's words, 'we had better mean if we are to communicate effectively, avoid paradox, and achieve general coherence'.⁷ By appropriating Berki's interpretation and applying his categories to international political theory, the (common) sense in which the terms realism and idealism will be used in this study is consistent with how they were intended to be interpreted by those responsible for the terms' introduction and popularization (obfuscation is closer to the mark) in the discipline of International Relations. As Smith puts it, 'as opposed to Utopians, idealists, optimists, and reformists of every stripe, realists say that they accept and understand the world as it is; this understanding provides the foundation [or rather, rhetorical claim] for all their ideas'.⁸ E.H.Carr identifies realism with 'the impact of thinking upon wishing which, in the development of a science, follows the breakdown of its first visionary projects, and marks the end of its specifically Utopian period'.⁹ Hans Morgenthau, who has been described as the 'Pope' of Realism in International Relations,¹⁰ presents his theory of international politics by proclaiming it to be concerned 'with human nature as it actually is, and with the historic processes as they actually take place...which tries to understand international politics as it actually is and as it ought to be in view of its intrinsic nature'.¹¹ John Herz reiterates this common-sense understanding when he argues that realism and idealism apply to 'those who behave according to "real," that is, existing givens, and those who engage in wishful thinking'.¹² One could fill pages with vague and unreflective phrases similar to these. The important point is that their authors identify the terms with ordinary usage, but take for granted the self-evident meaning of the terms, instead of asking themselves what they are obliged to think when they use them. All too often, realism is treated merely as a synonym for accuracy. This is a category mistake, as I will demonstrate below.

Berki also begins with ordinary usage, defining realism tautologically as:

the mode of conduct of a person who is said to be a 'realist', and a realist is one whose actions are 'realistic' ... [which] means being adequate in one's understanding of and relationship (active and passive) to reality. Adequacy connotes 'goodness' in a circumscribed sense, as sufficiency, competence, ability to get on, utilize possibilities.

(Berki, 1981, p. 3)

His goal is to transform this tautology, or analytic term (i.e. one that is true by definition, such as 'a triangle has three sides') into a synthetic term with substantive content. Only by doing this can realism begin to fulfil its approbatory or commendatory function as an attribute of thought without its application becoming arbitrary and polemical.

As Kratochwil points out in the following passage, in which I have substituted the word 'realism' for 'good':

the commendatory function...stays the same despite a great variety of meanings conveyed by the second function, the descriptive meaning. It is the descriptive meaning, however, that supplies the reasons by virtue of which we call something [realistic]; and to that extent, the commendatory function of [realism] is...restricted by the appropriateness of the reasons supplied in the descriptive meaning.¹³

Giving and justifying 'appropriate reasons is thus prior to, and necessary for the term 'realism' to be used in a commendatory manner. In the absence of any presentation and defence of their descriptive meanings (i.e. what we are obliged to think by the logic of ordinary usage), the terms realism and idealism can only function, as Quincy Wright wearily noted in 1952, as 'propaganda terms':

according to which everyone sought to commend whatever policy he favoured by calling it 'realistic'. The terms do not... throw light on the policies, institutions, personalities, or theories which they are used to qualify but only on the attitudes toward them of the speaker and, it is hoped, of the listener. From this usage we learn that in the past two decades political propagandists have regarded 'realism' as a plus term and 'idealism' as a minus term.¹⁴

Clearly, before these vague and highly charged terms can be applied, as attributes of thought, to theories of international politics, their descriptive meaning must be explicated independently of such thought.

As Moorhead Wright has pointed out, ‘we cannot formulate and express real meaning without the use of words, so that language in large part structures our thinking about the nature of things’.¹⁵ The dependence of meaning upon language requires us to take the latter (at least initially) as our departure point, rather than simply assume we know what realism and idealism mean in ordinary usage. Although political science, as Oppenheim notes, ‘cannot effectively use the language of everyday life as it stands’, he argues that the only way to adapt ordinary discourse for analytic purposes, is to ‘make explicit the rules governing the use of its concepts, sharpen the criteria of their application, reduce their vagueness… and hence sometimes modify their meaning’.¹⁶ There is no other way to proceed if realism in the theory and practice of international politics is, as Berki puts it, ‘the realism of everyday life expressed in a certain area of practical experience’ (p. 2). This is the methodological approach—the logic of analysis, if you will—that Berki employs, which is consistent with the semantic rules or guidelines so effectively used by David Baldwin in his analysis of the concept of interdependence in international relations. As he notes: 'I am aware that some would deny the worth of such an undertaking and dismiss it as "mere semantics'' or "pure logomachy". The advancement of knowledge, however, depends on the ability of scholars to communicate with one another; and clear concepts seem to help'.¹⁷ This book echoes Baldwin's sentiments.

At first sight, to claim that realism and idealism generate their own criteria of descriptive meaning sounds distinctly odd, a counterintuitive inversion of common sense rather than its corollary. Suppose a man throws himself off a tall building and dies on the street below. Without any knowledge of why he did it, one could not appraise his behaviour in terms of its realism or idealism. If he thought that by flapping his arms in the air he would fly like a bird, we would call him an idealist. On the other hand, suppose he was being chased by a gang of thugs intent on torturing him to death, he understood this, and reasoned that his chances of surviving were higher if he jumped than if he simply begged for mercy. In this context we would call him a realist. If so, then before the terms can be used, surely we must know something about the context. Moreover, one might add that the context is always subject to change. What is idealistic today may be realistic tomorrow with the invention of, say, anti-gravity belts. Change the context of what is possible, and the terms realism and idealism must change also. The application of the terms is always contextual, but contexts are important primarily in delimiting the scope or application of what Kratochwil calls the descriptive meaning of concepts. In the context of no context, the distinction between realism and idealism rests on abstract criteria whose application (i.e. scope and content) must be justified in situational terms. None the less, these criteria presuppose two key conditions about the situations to which they apply. First is the existence of choice under constraint. Agents are not free to opt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS: REALISM VERSUS IDEALISMS
• 3 HANS MORGENTHAU: THEORY AS TRUTH
• 4 HANS MORGENTHAU: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
• 5 KENNETH WALTZ: THEORY AS SCIENCE
• 6 KENNETH WALTZ: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
• 7 HEDLEY BULL: THEORY AS TRADITION
• 8 HEDLEY BULL: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
• 9 CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX