Note: this is a class based objective of IRFS 121
Realism is not a new way of thinking about international politics but as an academic theory it now has a purpose to provide a science of international politics that could study the real laws of behavior internationally. Before the central idea was that final conflict warfare violence and power play was pretty much inevitable. This thought of realism is from the ancient Greeks, invoking the Greek Historian. Looking at the conflict as it really is rather than just telling the tale of some victor Thucydides concluded that objectively speaking all that counts in politics or in war is power. One example is his work called the Melian Dialogue where Athenians attacked the Melians and since the Melians were outnumbered they can’t properly fight against the Athenians and so the Athenians told them to surrender and be their slave but on the basis of ethics the Melians refused. But because the Athenians had the power to enslave them, they say “the strong will do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Power precedes or even transcends ethics.
Machiavelli, another articulator of realism emphasizes that being a leader is staying in power which we could view in one of his works which is “The Prince”. For him power is central to Politics.
Thomas Hobbes made Machiavelli’s argument the basis about the distinction of Civilization contrasted the state of nature. He considered that instead of nature no one can stop a person from taking anything or killing someone except power. The idea of anarchy is in which there is no authority that create stability is something that we can recognize in the realm of the international, therefore we are in the state of nature characterized by violence, competition and power politics. Right then he discovered the Leviathan an absolute ruler that can control this happenings.
And all those influences came together through classical realism, the main form of realism. They have the perspective of the diplomat looking over the shoulder of the diplomatic decision making.
Kenneth Waltz in his book “Theory of International Politics” presented the theory of Structural Realism, a slightly different approach in classical realism. Structural realism actually from the structure above and tried to see how international structure governs the behavior of states. Because it was an anarchical time they look for relative games for survival.
Neorealism which developed out of Structural realism looks less for survival and more on relative power. Issues like offensive and defensive realism took place in which offensive realism would argue that states would always garner much power regardless of the circumstances while defensive realist would argue that state would garner as much power as the need to be safe.
Finally the recent development is the Neo-Classical Realism. It combines in fact from new realism and classical realism. It maintains the idea of competition and anarchy better put more emphasis on leadership and perceptions and all about what the best policy for some specific puzzle. Relations as an academic discipline is a fairly new thing and started out in the early 20th century. This was also the period in which new international dynamics took place. Roughly the 19th century had been a century of relative stability and peacefulness. There were conflicts because you can never escape conflicts before but comparing it to previous eras it had been relatively quiet. This paved the way then for what is now known as liberalist thinking with the Robert Cobden as the forerunner of this thinking. These ideals came as a breakdown of feudalism and the growth of a capitalist society. This took place when Cobden opposed the Corn Laws in Britain which imposed taxes on imported grain and increasing the price of grain. He then formed the Anti-Corn League and also promoted his ideals on free trade, laissez-faire government with minimal intervention and taxation and a balanced budget.
However in the late 19th century, nationalism and its idea of the nation-state that each people should have a total state became very dominant and prominent in European Politics giving rise to all kinds of new conflicts in the European context. And was just that the era of British Dominated free trade and relative stability started to end and make way for a new period of conflict in politics and this is the context in which international leader became interested in the study of international relations as a way of figuring out what was going on and what could be done about it.
And in this period of time the first great debate took place. The debate was all about realism and idealism. This was the attack on what we call Wilsonian politics, since Woodrow Wilson the American president at that time was a very idealist person. His idea of spreading democracy over the world and setting up institutions such as the league of nations that would function as a precursor of United Nations to say with the idea of creating a lasting global peace and spread of democracy. Now this is exactly the kind of sensibility that realism opposed to. Realism as we all know believes that world politics ultimately is always and necessarily a field of conflict among actors pursuing power. How Idealist thought blinded the idealistic scholars and politicians for the pursuit of their ideals with violence.
Realist attacked the idealist in the context of accepting or taking the world as it is. And the Realist successfully won this argument.
However, with the two international relations thoughts dominating, Marxism arose in the mid-nineteenth century. In terms of practical political struggle, Marxism has opposition to three main opposing tendencies in the workers’ movement : Anarchism, Utopian or Doctrinaire socialism, and overtly bourgeois tendencies . In terms of its theoretical roots, to use Lenin’s famous words, the three sources of Marxism are: British political economy, French Socialism and German idealist philosophy.
The pre-eminent philosopher of Marx’s youth was G W F Hegel.For Hegel however, this history was the work not of living human beings, but rather of a Spirit which acted “behind the backs” of the actors in history, unbeknown to them. In this sense, Marx said that Hegel took “the standpoint of political economy”. That is, that Hegel, just like Adam Smith, saw people as slaves of an “invisible hand”, of laws which governed the outcome of social action independently of the intention of individuals, and what is more, that the fundamental relations of person to person by means of which this spirit acted in history, was the property relation.
Meanwhile, the French socialists had already taken this a step further by showing that science and religions not only have their origins in human history, but were themselves weapons and instruments of social struggle. Consequently, people should be seen simply both products and creators of the world they lived in, and the struggle over ideas was an integral part of the political and social struggle.
These ideas were further developed by Karl Marx and his successor Friedrich Engels, who had ideas such as historical materialism, class struggle, and the proletariat revolution.
The first major working class political struggle of Marx and Engels’ lifetime were the out-break in 1848, right across Europe, of independent movements of the working class, pressing their own demands within the upheavals which saw the downfall of the old order in Europe. Marx and Engels published a daily newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung throughout this period, agitating, advocating and organizing for the workers’ movement.
The second major working class struggle of their time was the Paris Commune — the first time in history when the working class seized state power. From a critical examination of the Commune, Marxism develops its ideas about democracy, the state and revolution. Even the Communist Manifesto of 1848 was amended to include the gains of the Commune, principally that the working class could not simply take over the state machine, but had to utterly smash it and build its own organs of class rule, based on proletarian democracy.
During the latter part of their lives, the works of Marx and Engels were translated into many languages, and through the work of the Second International, Marxism became known and understood in all corners of the world and deeply entered the heart of the organized working class, now united across the world in a single organization.
post- structuralism emerged by 1960s in France. It is to critique structuralism. Structuralism concerns with social and cultural construction of the various structures which give meaning to our everyday lives.
post- structuralism emerged by 1960s in France. It is to critique structuralism. Structuralism concerns with social and cultural construction of the various structures which give meaning to our everyday lives.
Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes are one of the writers in the early post-structuralism movement. Jacques developed a strategy called deconstruction in the mid 1960s. It is a critique of the early Western Roland Barthes wrote “the Death of the Author”. He uses a metaphor to explain what he meant by the “death of the author” and that it is also “the birth of the reader”. It is the source of the creation of meanings of the text.
The two writers did not intend to create a group in criticizing traditional phenomenology – experience is the foundation of knowledge, and structuralism. They argued that founding knowledge is either based on pure experiences or systematic structure is impossible.
The term Third World arose during the Cold War on August 14, 1952 by French demographer, anthropologist and historian, Alfred Sauvy in an article printed out in the French magazine L’Observateur to outline those countries that stayed non-aligned with either NATO, or the Communist Bloc. He used this term to refer to the Third Estate, the commoners of France who, before and during the French Revolution, did not agree with the clergy and nobles, who framed the First Estate and Second Estate. In the magazine, Sauvy wrote, "This third world ignored, exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something.” This term provided a way of widely distinguishing the nations of the Earth into three groups grounded on social, political, cultural and economic partitions.
IR in the Third World is best described through the mainstream theory called the dependency theory. Dependency theory is the idea that the resources from the “periphery” countries flows to the “core” countries which makes the Third World poorer. Dependency theory was born as a result of an earlier theory of development, the modernization theory that describes Third World as a primitive version of developed countries and that it needs to undergo a path of development through a variety of means such as technology transfers, investments, and a closer integration to the world market in which the Dependency theory argues that the Third World is not a primitive version of developed countries rather it has its own unique features and structures of its own.
Dependency theory thinkers like Raul Prebisch, Walter Rodney, Theotonio dos Santos, and Andre Gunder Frank, describes the Third World in connection with the world economic partition as “periphery” countries in the world system that is overpowered by the “core” countries.
During the Cold War, unaligned countries of the Third World were seen as possible allies by the First and Second World. The United States and the Soviet Union went to a complete stretch to establish associations in these countries by offering economic and military underpinning to add strategically settled alliances.All throughout the Cold War and beyond, the countries of the Third World have been the precedent receiver of Western foreign aid and the emphasis of economic development through mainstream theories such as modernization theory and dependency theory.
The idea of the Third World was applicable through the modernization theory to maintain Western European and North American hegemony; emphasis will now shift to another theoretical approach of development which also made use of the concept of the Third World – namely dependency theory – but which approached the question of development/underdevelopment from a different perspective.
Constructivist theory emerged in the mid-1990s as a serious challenge to the dominant realist and liberal theoretical paradigms. Constructivists also focus on the idea of anarchy, but they depart from prior positions on the anarchical system. Specifically, constructivists disagree with the realist position that anarchy inherently leads to competition and war. As one of the foremost scholars on constructivism, Alexander Wendt (1992), in his seminal article Anarchy is what States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics, says, “self-help and power politics do not follow either logically or causally from anarchy and that if today we find ourselves in a self-help world, this is due to process, not structure.
The theory was not popularized until Wendt 1992 (a direct challenge to neorealism) and Katzenstein 1996 (cited under Identity) made it a staple of international relations (IR) syllabi around the world. The theory’s relatively recent arrival on the scene makes a constructivist canon somewhat harder to identify and makes the inclusion or exclusion of particular sources in this bibliography a potentially much greater source of contention than in the articles on realism and liberalism. Constructivist theory emphasizes the meanings that are assigned to material objects, rather than the mere existence of the objects themselves.
Academic community witnessed the explosion of post-colonial literatures, in the 1990s, when the critical approaches challenged the classical thinking and the dominant theories in the field of IR. This was developed already in the 1960s but came to being when the book of Edward Said (referred as the Father of post colonialism theory), “Orientalism” was materialized. It was also considered the foundational work on which post colonialism theory developed. Many people before Said may had worked with post-colonial ideas but it was Said that formulated the ideas to transition into a theory. His work focused on exploring and question the “artificial boundaries” or the stereotypical boundaries, that have been drawn between East and West, specifically as they relate it to Middle East.
International ethics is the study of the nature of duties across community boundaries. it is the study of how members of ‘bounded’ communities ought to treat ‘outsiders’ and s’trangers’ and of whether it is right to make such a distinction.
It asks how it is possible to treat others as equals in a world characterised by two conditions: the existence of international anarchy and moral pluralism. Nonetheless, the advent of globalisation prompted multiple queries regarding how human beings should be perceived.
Perhaps the most extreme proponent of a deep historical origin for globalisation was Andre Gunder Frank, but was further divided by Thomas L. Friedman into 3 periods: Globalization 1 (1492-1800), Globalization 2 (1800-2000) and Globalization 3 (2000-present).
Globalization brings different ethical positions into greater relief and provides the strongest reason for applying universal standards. Globalization increases interconnections between communities and also increases the variety of ways in which communities can harm each other.
Globalization’s rise precipitated questions that are concerned about how human beings should be considered, either in the contexts of cosmopolitanism, realism and pluralism.
Cosmopolitanism was conceived when Socrates avoided traditional political engagement, in favour of a career or examining himself in 500 BC. It has recognised humanity wherever it occurs, giving its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity.
Moreover, through realism, international ethics has considered whether to view human beings as a collection of separate communities each with their own standards and no common morality.
classical realism was foremost developed in the 1940s as an appeal to moral principles in the international sphere that has no concrete universal meaning. it could provide rational guidance for political action and serves as the reflection of the moral preconceptions of a particular nation.
Nonetheless, globalisation also provoked another perspective of human beings and that is a collection of separate communities with some minimally shared standards, and that was encapsulated by pluralism. Pluralism viewed the world as a world of diversity in which the variety of national cultures find expression in different sets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_liberalism#Beginnings
http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/ideology-politics/difference-between-liberalism-and-neo-liberalism-understanding-liberalism-you-might-be-more-or-less-liberal-than-you-think/
Baylis, Smith and Owens, The Globalisation of World Politics, OUP, 4th ed, Ch 11 Nardin and Mapel, Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge Studies in International Relations), Ch 4 Nardin and Mapel, Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge Studies in International Relations), Ch 4
