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’.