Realist Theories

To Accompany :
International Relations 10/e
Goldstein and Pevehouse
© 2014 Joshua S. Goldstein and Jon C. Pevehouse
2013–2014 Update

Presented by:
Dr. Antanas Venckus
Vilnius 2020
 Realism’s foundation is the principle of
dominance.
 School of thought that explains international
relations in terms of power. The exercise of
power by states toward each other is sometimes
called realpolitik, or just power politics.
 Realism developed in reaction to a liberal tradition
that realists called idealism.
 Idealism emphasizes international law, morality, and
international organizations, rather than power alone, as
key influences on international events.
 Belief that human nature is basically good.
 Particularly active between WWI and WWII
 League of Nations
 Structure proved helpless to stop German, Italian, and Japanese
aggression.
 Since WWII, realists have blamed idealists for
looking too much at how the world ought to be
rather than how it really is.
 Realists tend to treat political power as separate from, and
predominant over:
 morality,
 ideology,
 and other social and economic aspects of life.
 States pursue their own interests in an international
system of sovereign states without a central authority.
 Power is a central concept in international
relations.
 It is the central concept for realists.
 Difficult to measure.
 Often defined as the ability to get another actor to
do what it would not otherwise have done (or vice
versa).
 If actors get their way a lot, they must be powerful.
 Power is not influence itself, but the ability or
potential to influence others.
 Based on specific (tangible and intangible)
characteristics or possessions of states
 Sizes, levels of income, and armed forces
 Capability: Easier to measure than influence and less
circular in logic
 The single indicator of a state’s power may be its total GDP
(gross domestic product)
 Combines overall size, technological level, and wealth
 At best, a rough indicator
 A state’s tangible capabilities (including military forces) represent
material power.
 Power also depends on nonmaterial elements.
 National will, diplomatic skill, popular support for government
(legitimacy), and so forth
 Power can only explain so much. Real-world IR depends on
many other elements, including accidents or luck.
 Relational concept: Relative power is the ratio of the
power that two states can bring to bear against each other.
 The logic of power suggests:
 The more powerful state will generally prevail.
 Estimates of the power of two antagonists
should help explain the outcome.
 U.S. and Iraq
 Implications of the outcome -- GDP does not always
predict who will win the war
 State power is a mix of many ingredients.
 Natural resources, industrial capacity, moral legitimacy, military
preparedness, and popular support of government
 Long-term elements of power
 Total GDP, population, territory, geography, and natural resources
 Less tangible long-term elements of power include political culture,
patriotism, education of the population, and strength of the
scientific and technological base.
 Credibility of its commitments (reputation for keeping word)
 Ability of one state’s culture and values to consistently shape the
thinking of other states (power of ideas)
 Capabilities that allow actors to exercise influence in the
short term:
 Military forces
 Military-industrial complex
 Quality of the state’s bureaucracy
 Less tangible: Support and legitimacy that an actor commands in
the short term from constituents and allies
 Loyalty of a nation’s army and politicians to its leader
 Trade-offs among possible capabilities always exist.
 To the extent that one element of power can be converted into
another, it is fungible. Money is the most fungible.
 Realists tend to see military force as the most important
element of national power in the short term.
 Morality
 States have long clothed their actions, however
aggressive, in rhetoric about their peaceful and
defensive intentions.
 Geopolitics
 States increase their power to the extent that they can
use geography to enhance their military capabilities.
 Location, location, location
 Two-front problem: Germany and Russia
 Insular: Britain and United States
 In general, power declines as a function of distance
from a home state.
 States interact within a set of long-
established “rules of the game” governing
what is considered a state and how states
treat each other.
 Together these rules shape the international
system.
 Realists believe the international system exists in a
state of anarchy.
 Term implies the lack of a central government that can
enforce rules.
 World government as a solution?
 Others suggest international organizations and
agreements.
 Despite anarchy, the international system is far
from chaotic.
 Great majority of state interactions closely adhere to
norms of behavior
 Sovereignty: A government has the right, in
principle, to do whatever it wants in its own
territory.
 Lack of a “world police” to punish states if they
break an agreement makes enforcement of
international agreements difficult.
 North Korea and its nuclear facilities
 In practice, most states have a harder and harder
time warding off interference in their affairs.
 Respect for the territorial integrity of all states,
within recognized borders, is an important
principle of IR.
 Impact of information revolution/information
economies and the territorial state system
 States and norms of diplomacy
 Security dilemma
 A situation in which states’ actions taken to ensure their
own security threaten the security of other states.
 Arms race
 Negative consequence of anarchy in the international system
 Refers to the general concept of one or more
states’ power being used to balance that of another
state or group of states.
 Balance of power can refer to:
 Any ratio of power capabilities between states or
alliances, or
 It can mean only a relatively equal ratio.
 Alternatively, it can refer to the process by which
counterbalancing coalitions have repeatedly formed in
history to prevent one state from conquering an entire
region.
 The most powerful states in the system
exert most of the influence on international
events and therefore get the most attention
from IR scholars.
 Handful of states possess the majority of the
world’s power resources.
 Great powers are generally considered the half-
dozen or so most powerful states.
 Until the past century, the club was exclusively
European.
 Defined generally as states that can be defeated
militarily only by another great power.
 Generally have the world’s strongest military forces and
the strongest economies
 U.S., China, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, and Britain
 U.S. the world’s only superpower
 China the world’s largest population, rapid economic growth
and a large military, with a credible nuclear arsenal
 Middle powers
 Rank somewhat below the great powers
 Some are large but not highly industrialized
 Others may be small with specialized capabilities
 Examples: midsized countries such as Canada, Italy,
Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine, South Korea,
and Australia, or larger or influential countries in the
global South such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina,
Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and
Pakistan
 Most powerful states in 16th-century Europe were
Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and Spain.
 Ottoman Empire
 Hapsburgs
 Impact of industrialization
 Napoleonic Wars
 Congress of Vienna (1815)
 Concert of Europe
 UN Security Council
 WW I
 WW II and after
 An alliance is a coalition of states that
coordinate their actions to accomplish some
end
 Most are formalized in written treaties
 Concern a common threat and related issues of
international security
 Endure across a range of issues and a period of
time
 Augmenting their members’ power
 By pooling capabilities, two or more states can exert greater
leverage in their bargaining with other states.
 For smaller states, alliances can be their most important power
element.
 But alliances can change quickly and decisively.
 Most form in response to a perceived threat.
 Alliance cohesion
 The ease with which the members hold together an alliance
 Tends to be high when national interests converge and when
cooperation within the alliance becomes institutionalized and
habitual.
 Burden sharing
 Who bears the cost of the alliance
 NATO = North Atlantic Treaty Organization
 One of the most important formal alliances
 Encompasses Western Europe and North America
 Founded in 1949 to oppose and deter Soviet power in Europe
 Countered by the Warsaw Pact (1955); disbanded in 1991
 First use of force by NATO was in Bosnia in 1994 in support of the
UN mission there.
 European Union formed its own rapid deployment force,
outside NATO.
 Biggest issue for NATO is its recent and eastward
expansion, beyond the East-West Cold War dividing line.
 Russian opposition
 U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty
 U.S. maintains nearly 50,000 troops in Japan.
 Japan pays the U.S. several billion dollars annually to offset about
half the cost of maintaining these troops.
 Created in 1951 against the potential Soviet threat to Japan.
 Asymmetrical in nature
 U.S. has alliances with other states: South Korea and
Australia
 De facto allies of the U.S.: those with whom we collaborate
closely – Israel
 CIS – Commonwealth of Independent States
 In 2008, Georgia declared it would withdraw from the CIS, effective
August 2010, over its conflict with Russia
 In the global South, many states joined a
nonaligned movement during the Cold War.
 Stood apart from the U.S.-Soviet rivalry
 Led by India and Yugoslavia
 Undermined by the membership of Cuba
 Organization of African Unity
 NGO that reformed as the African Union (AU)
 Stronger organization with a continent-wide
parliament, central bank, and court.
 China loosely aligned with Pakistan in opposition to India
(which was aligned with the Soviet Union).
 Relationships with India warmed after the Cold War ended.
 Middle East: General anti-Israel alignment of the Arab
countries for decades
 Broke down in 1978 as Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel
 Israel and war with Hezbollah and Hamas
 Israel and Turkey formed a close military alliance
 Israel largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid
 Egypt
 Iran
 Bush administration: emphasis on spreading democracy
 Deterrence
 Uses a threat to punish another actor if it takes a certain
negative action.
 Compellence
 Refers to the use of force to make another actor take
some action (rather than refrain from taking an action).
 Escalation
 A reciprocal process in which two (or more) states build
up military capabilities in response to each other.
 Game theory
 Branch of mathematics concerned with predicting bargaining
outcomes.
 Game is a setting in which two or more players choose among
alternative moves, once or repeatedly.
 Each combination of moves (by all players) results in a set of
payoffs (utility) to each player.
 Game theory aims to deduce likely outcomes given the players’
preferences and the possible moves open to them.
 Game theory first used in IR in the 1950s and 1960s
 Focus on U.S./Soviet relations
 Zero-sum games versus non-zero-sum games
 Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD)
 Captures the kind of collective goods problem common
to IR
 All players make choices that in the end make them all
worse off than under a different set of moves.
 They could all do better, but as individual rational actors
they are unable to achieve this outcome.
 Bank robber story
 IR example: the arms race
 Other games:
 Chicken and the Cuban Missile Crisis
 Kennedy, some argue, “won” by seeming ready to risk
nuclear war if Soviet Premier Khrushchev did not back
down and remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
 There are alternative explanations of the outcome as
well.