Back to Realism Richard Gowan
February 13, 2010 | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Key Posts, Middle East and North Africa | 23 comments
I’ve just returned from the UAE, where the Center on International Cooperation, NYU’s Abu Dhabi Institute and Brookings organized a conference on “Emerging Powers, Global Security and the Middle East”. Discussions ranged pretty far and wide but (unsurprisingly) kept coming back to whether or not the U.S. and China are trapped in a cycle of confrontations, and how this will affect the Iran issue this year. Julian Borger of the Guardian was there, and gives an excellent summary of this strand of debate:
The conference was under Chatham House rules, but broadly speaking: the Chinese were furious about the Taiwan arms sale, arguing it had come at a time when relations between the island and mainland China were at their best for years. They warned that Chinese nationalism was slowly awakening and should not be provoked. The current political turmoil in Iran actually serves to harden China’s resistance to sanctions, because it makes them appear more like interference in another country’s affairs – anathema to Beijing.
Others hit back at a rising nation they saw as seeking more global power than responsibility. The westerners urged China to play more of a broader role in the Middle East, beyond its immediate energy needs. India is angry at what it sees as China’s increased assertiveness along their common border. The Gulf Arabs accused China of allowing Iran to get away with its nuclear manoeuvring. Interestingly enough, it was clear at a public function put on as part of the conference, that “ordinary” Arabs, outside the government and think-tanks, were more sympathetic to Tehran’s case.
More broadly, I was struck by the fact that most participants – not only from the US and China, but also from India – were hung up on “old” hard security issues. There was a rough agreement that the Copenhagen climate talks were a mess, but that it should be possible to start making some real progress on climate again soon – although not through the UN framework. By contrast, almost everyone was extremely downbeat about the odds for alleviating classic inter-state competition (be it over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Sino-Indian border or the Gulf). A number of participants highlighted the need for great power cooperation to handle failing states, but this was overshadowed by talk of big power rivalry – an excellent panel on Afghanistan concluded that the odds for real Sino-US-Indian cooperation there are low.
Given conversations like these, we need to take a long hard look at how we think we advance international cooperation. Good multilateralists like the authors of this blog are very good at saying “transnational threats require transnational responses” and assume that new threats like climate change and pandemic disease can be used to persuade governments to think beyond classic inter-state rivalries. David, Alex and Bruce Jones make a compelling version of this case in their recent paper on Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization:
In his 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, Hans Morgenthau exhorted his readers to “assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power.” This assumption, he argued, allowed all foreign policy decisions to be placed on a single “intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen.” While this focus on national interest and the primacy of nation-states had explanatory power in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is outmoded in the post-Cold War context.
Now, David, Alex and Bruce know me well enough to know that I’m unlikely to agree with this. And, yep, I think it’s fallacious. They argue that today’s statesmen are constrained by so many transnational factors (capital flows, etc.) and threats (H1N1, etc.) that a state-centric approach falls apart. And so it should in theory. But in practice, today’s statesmen seem extraordinarily adept at sticking with “national interest”-based thinking – and many are having to struggle with rising nationalist and populist forces at home. Territorial disputes still get people awfully worked up. Military-industrial complexes still follow their own logic. And politicians assume, not wrongly, that there are more votes in these issues than in swine flu.
Oddly, it’s possible to believe all that and still share Alex and David’s concerns about transnational threats. Actually, they terrify me. And we need to completely retool how we respond to them (again, when it comes to the threat-by-threat specifics, I concur with my GD colleagues on what needs doing). But I’m increasingly convinced that we can only construct our responses to those threats on a traditional, balance of power foundation – which means prioritizing hard security talks, and basing deals on transnational threats on agreements on the global division of influence.
Goddamit, I feel like John Bolton this morning.
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I think it’s useful to remember Norman Angell from 1909 when he argued that war in Europe would be an irrational act (“war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which people strive”).
He was right. It wasn’t rational and didn’t achieve the aggressor’s objectives. But that didn’t stop European countries from fighting two wars, destroying the globalization of the late 19th century, and surrendering their own primacy to the United States.
So, do I think nationalism is a powerful idea? Yes, undoubtedly. Do I think governments (usually) follow their own short term interests (maintaining their grip on power)? Even more so.
But I refuse to conflate the interests of a particular government with Palmerston’s (mythical) “perpetual and eternal” interests. Nor to allow national elites to use the term ‘national interest’ as if it’s a trump card that brooks no argument.
I also don’t think we should treat countries as if they were a black box – behaving in hyper-rational, intelligible ways “regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen.”
That’s as misguided as the radical behaviourism with whose world view realism – in its crude form – derives.
Right, this should be fun – but it’s an argument worth having!
It’s probably also an argument in part based on what we mean by “Realism”. David rejects the whole “rational choice” version of Realism that now predominates in Political Science departments, especially in the US. So do I. But there is a much older tradition of Realism, stretching back to Hobbes, etc., that Jonathan Haslam brilliantly analyzed in a book called “No Virtue Like Necessity”:
http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300091502
At some point in that book, Haslam makes a very simple point about liberal attacks on Realism. Good Realist analysis rests on the assumption that the search for power and security is a political fact of life. Critics too often attack Realists by arguing that this is irrational. But the Realists aren’t saying things ought to be this way, just that they are. The search for power won’t go away because economic and environmental circumstances change.
So what I’m trying to argue is that we have to assume that the struggle for power – often in very old-school forms – will remain a constant that cannot be erased by institutions, good scientific analysis of climate change, etc. I think that this was proved in Copenhagen.
Conversely – and this is where I thoroughly agree with David and Alex – is that Realists have to rethink what “security” means in the face of new threats. That was a big theme in “Power and Responsibility”, which Bruce Jones wrote with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman. But however well we do trying to convince leaders on this point, I fear that older definitions of security will linger on…
Just to make something explicit that I think both Richard and David have said in their comments: is this disagreement essentially a question of ‘is’ versus ‘ought’? That is to say, Richard says that Realism ‘is’ the best way to analyse how those in power act, and hence how they will act in future, while David (and indeed Alex) argue that the powerful ‘ought’ to act according to a new intellectual and moral framework. No-one disagrees with the other side’s point, it’s just a matter of emphasis: do we start from the is and work forwards, or start from the ought and work backwards?
As regards Copenhagen, I have found GD’s coverage extremely useful in suggesting a framework for what the negotiators ought to have done. Namely, as I understand it, they should have avoided the messy and counter-productive ‘Realism’ of bartering over individual commitments, and instead agreed to a common metric (historic per capita entitlements), which could than have been modified as necessary. In its own way, this could, in theory, have removed some of the biggest problems that the old-fashioned horse-trading approach seems incapable of overcoming.
I’m not sure where that example fits in to the precise debate here, but I look forward to seeing where this goes.
I think Dave is right – there is an ‘is’ vs ‘ought’ divergence here.
In the UK at the moment, it is fashionable to say we ‘ought’ to get back to protecting our national interest – a talismanic term that is conveniently left undefined.
I think this is nonsense – and suspect that Richard does too.
The Long Crisis argues that governments ‘ought’ instead to focus on a more effective response to global risks – after a decade when three shocks (9/11, energy/food price spike, financial crisis) have shown clearly that much of what they do internationally is either useless or counter-productive.
I am with Richard, though, in that I think countries will often – and perhaps usually – do stupid things, because of both the domestic and international incentives they face.
I am not 100% about the wording of the para that Richard quotes – power politics does have explanatory power, but the ‘billiard ball’ model of international relations (rational actors bounce off each other in a relentless pursuit of a Platonic conception of the national interest) does not.
Keen to read Haslam’s book.
David is right to assume that I’m not a hardcore “national interest” sort of guy. Even in classic international security, it is an “ambiguous symbol”, as Arnold Wolfers pointed out in the 1950s:
http://instituty.fsv.cuni.cz/~plech/Wolfers_BS.pdf
More immediately, it seems to me that all major powers have interests in (i) tackling issues like climate change and (ii) preserving the basics of the present international order, even if they may want to alter parts of it. One point that came up a lot in Abu Dhabi was that China, India, etc. can’t replace the US in providing core global security functions – and won’t want to for a while.
I certainly reject a strand of thinking that’s quite popular in the UK and the EU at the moment, which goes like this: (i) the UK/EU has lost a lot of power to shape or protect the global system; (ii) our publics aren’t interested in it anyway; (iii) so we should focus on narrowly defined “national interests” like cutting back our financial contributions to the UN to save the taxpayer money. That’s just cheap – and dangerous – declinism.
Hello Richard: I very much enjoyed both your original post and the subsequent debate. To add my tuppence worth, I think that we’re still living in a world where Europe’s ’1989 generation’ continues to hold sway. This generation came to see both domestic and international politics not as an issue of power and interest, but rather as one of managerial administration and consensus.
Unfortunately, this generation, mesmerised by 1989, and over-inflating its historical significance, has taken its eye off the ball. The result has been the growth of an increasingly multipolar world where Europeans and Americans are less and less the final arbiters of international relations. It has also led to a number of problems in domestic politics, particularly with regards to identity and internal cohesion. Quite where this will all lead is something I often worry about…
Thanks for the positive comments, James. I sort of agree on the “1989 generation” and sort of don’t. I concur that we’ve tended to assume that foreign affairs can be reduced to tricky but soluble public policy problems. Equally, one alternative we tried – the sort of Realism that involved let the Balkans burn “because we have no fundamental interests there” – sort wasn’t a huge success either.
The millon dollar question remains how you combine a realist world view with an understanding that some problems – from Srebrenica to climate change – demand an international,interventionist response. We’re not there yet.
I liked this line from Evan Bayh: “Power is constantly sought through the use of means which render its effective use, once acquired, impossible.”
He is referring to the US Senate – but perhaps it’s more broadly applicable to the neo-realist world view.
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