Realism (DONNELLY 2005)

Jack Donnelly, Realism, in 

Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak, Jack Donnelly, Matthew Paterson, Christian Reus-Smit and Jacqui True, Theories of International Relations, third edition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005

 

Defining realism

30 (...) Thucydides is sometimes seen as a realist, but that is a minority reading today.

31 (...) ‘Radical’ realists exclude almost everything except power and selfinterest from (international) politics. The Athenian envoys to Melos in Thucydides’ History (1982: Book V, Chapter 85–113) express such a view, but it is held by few if any international theorists.

 

Waltz and structural realism

Polarity

39 (...) Unfortunately, empirical tests are constrained by the fact that in 2,500 years of Western history there have been as few as four bipolar systems (Athens–Sparta in the fifth century BCE, Carthage–Rome in the third century BCE, the Hapsburg–Bourbon rivalry in the sixteenth century and the United States–Soviet Union in the twentieth century) (Copeland 1996).

Abstracting from or assuming motives

41 (...) Anarchy alone does not produce Hobbes’ war of all against all. It arises from equal individuals driven by competition, diffidence and glory interacting in anarchy. Homeric heroes seeking glory through great deeds, Hobbesian egoists driven by a fear of violent death, Nietzschean individuals driven by a will to power and homo economicus may behave very differently in the same anarchic structure.

 

Process, institutions and change

Norms, institutions, identities

46 (...) Power alone will not even tell us which of their rights states actually enjoy. It simply is untrue that, as the Athenians at Melos put it, ‘the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must’ (Thucydides 1982: Book V, Chapter 89). The strong are often constrained by the rights of even weak states.

 

Morality and foreign policy

48 (...) Although in principle simply a special case of the broader issue of norms and institutions, the place of morality in foreign policy has been a central concern of the classical realist tradition, not only in canonical texts such as Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue and Machiavelli’s The Prince but also in the work of major twentieth-century realists such as Carr, Morgenthau and Niebuhr.

49 (...) For example, humanitarian interventions in Kosovo, East Timor and Darfur, however tardy and limited, simply cannot be understood without the independent normative force of the anti-genocide norm and humanitarian principles.

 

 

How to think about realism (and its critics)

53 (...) But world-views – natural law, Islam, Kantianism, Christianity, Aristoteleanism, humanism – are not usually what we have in mind by ‘theories of international relations’.