International Relations: Approaches, Issues and Analysis Lecture 2: Classical IR

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International Relations Approaches, Issues and
AnalysisLecture 2 Classical IR

• Jevgenia Viktorova
• University of St Andrews
• E-mail jv2 ät st-and.ac.uk

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Classical IR

• Wilsonianism and liberal internationalism
• Classical realism
• Central concepts and issues of realism anarchy,
  state, sovereignty, (in)security and its sources,
  power, war, international system, foreign policy
• Behavioural revolution

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Wilsonianism and liberal internationalism

• A return to the question of the causes of war
• US president Woodrow Wilson
• ideas of liberal internationalism were mainly
  British and American in origin
• application of liberal principles to the
  management of the international system

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Principles of liberal internationalism Domestic
component

• Belief that people do not want war wars occur
  because
• nations are lead astray by militarist and
  autocratic rulers
• peoples legitimate drives for self-determination
  are blocked by undemocratic, imperial systems
• The answer is democratically elected governments
  that express popular will, plus the principle of
  national self-determination
• If all states espoused these principles, there
  would be no war

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Principles of liberal internationalism
International component

• Establishing a set of new principles for the
  conduct of international affairs embodied in
• International institutional structures to
  counter
• The anarchical international system that
  undermines peace (anarchy absence of
  overarching central authority above state level)
• balance-of-power that promoted alliance
  building through secret diplomacy
• Collective security
• League of Nations

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Principles of liberal internationalism political
and philosophical

• Political liberalism
• constitutional government
• the rule of law
• Philosophical liberalism
• belief that peoples fundamental interests are
  harmonious and compatible
• if they do not appear to be such, the reason must
  be temporary distortions or ignorance
• Education is instrumental in elucidating the
  harmony of interests and peace

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Implications for IR

• Establishment of IR as academic discipline the
  foundation of
• the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International
  Politics at the University of Aberystwyth
• the Montague Burtons Chair of IR at Oxford and
  London School of Economics
• Liberal internationalism becomes the first
  orthodoxy of academic IR
• Kellogg-Briand pact (1928) abolished war as a
  legitimate means of achieving political ends

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Liberal internationalism undermined

• Reluctance of policy-makers
• despite Wilsons liberal enthusiasm, the US
  never became part of the League of Nations
• Favours status quo
• In the interests of established powers League of
  Nations tied to the Treaty of Versailles which
  Germany perceived as unjust
• John Maynard Keyness The Economic Consequences
  of The Peace exposes the selfishness of the
  liberal allies motives
• Failure of the liberal internationalist approach
  to avert WWII

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Calls for a new explanation of what motivated
human conduct

• rise to power of popularly supported militaristic
  dictatorships in Germany and Italy dealt a blow
  to the liberal belief that people desired peace
  
• Reinhold Niebuhrs Moral Man and Immoral Society
  (1932) a conflict between the benevolent and
  destructive inclinations of the human nature
• E. H. Carrs The Twenty Years Crisis (1939)
  scarcity of resources ? interests will clash
• Realism

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(Classical) Realism

• came to dominate IR for a long period (still is
  the most influential IR theory?)
• WWII corroborated its pessimistic assumptions
• Conflict in the international system is endemic
  and unavoidable, owing to
• aggressive dispositions of the human nature
• the deficiencies of human condition
• realism as the new orthodoxy for IR

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Post-WWII realism (still classical)

• Influential thinkers
• Martin Wight (in the UK)
• Reinhold Niebuhr, Nicholas Spykman, George
  Kennan, Hans Morgenthau
• Morgenthaus Politics Among Nations (1948)
• A systematised account of a realist IR
• Reader-friendly but schematised
• Claims to describe things as they really
  are(?...)
• Not simply a descriptive, explanatory theory has
  a strong prescriptive component
• Carr realism deduces what should be from what
  was and what is

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Eclecticism of realist thought

• Philosophical and ontological origins of realist
  thinking are eclectic
• Wights realist pessimism stems from a
  Christian view of the life on earth as profoundly
  sinful
• Morgenthau also refers to the original sin as
  the cause of unholy inclinations of humankind
• So are methodological prescriptions
• Despite schematising realism, Morgenthau
  opposed a scientific study of IR (in his 1946
  Scientific Man vs. Power Politics) one needs to
  understand thought in a historical perspective
  human affairs are too ridden by chance to be
  graspable in a theory or a model
• Differences between realism and liberalism
  overblown

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Morgenthaus account of international relations

• Politics Among Nations (1948) international
  relations is about states pursuing interests
  defined in terms of power
• Centrality of state for the realist IR
• States are egoists acting on national interest
• anarchical international system is a self-help
  system
• security as a function of power

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The concept of state in realist IR

• State as the central concept is extremely
  under-theorised
• it is deemed universal while in fact its origins
  are historically- and culturally-specific
• State as a black box
• Does not matter what happens inside only
  output is important
• States in the international system as billiard
  balls
• Balance-of-power imagined as a simple matter of
  physics
• Foreign policy

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The concept of power in realist IR

• Power politics the focus of realist analyses
• undermined by the uncertainty of the category of
  power
• power as an attribute
• power as a relation
• these two are not always interchangeable
• the pursuit of power lacks a clear comparative
  aspect
• power as a human universal entails both
  communication and conflict

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A realist view of power struggles

• Zero-sum games (vs. non-zero sum games of
  liberalism)
• Security dilemma misperceptions regarding
  offence/ defence
• Morality is a concept antithetic to realism
• statesmen cannot live by personal morality or
  normal-life ethics
• Carr politics is not a function of ethics but
  vice versa ethics is a function of politics
• The nature of politics dictates what kinds of
  morality statesmen can abide by (it is usually
  understood through national interest)
• Kissinger peace cannot be the primary objective
  of states in the international system

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Realism as science?

• Realism as unscientific
• Laws of realism not scientific/ deterministic if
  they were, statesmen would not need persuading to
  act on realist wisdoms it would happen
  automatically
• Scientific aspirations of realism made it
  vulnerable
• in Chris Browns words, any doctrine which
  claims to be based on how things really are is
  open to those who claim to have a better grasp of
  this reality.

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Behavioural revolution

• The serious scientific methodology was supplied
  by a plethora of ex-natural scientists (1950-60s)
• scientific methodology in emulation of natural
  sciences
• The fusion of realist IR and behaviouralist
  methods the behavioural revolution
• a second great debate (limited in its reach)
  between
• (largely American) behaviouralists and
• the so-called traditionalists of the English
  School (who viewed IR as predominantly a
  humanitarian exercise, with emphasis on history
  and sociological concepts).

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Behaviouralism

• purports to study actual behaviour of actors as
  opposed to its meanings or interpretations
• focus on stimuli and regularities
• the objective is to make predictions about future
  behaviour
• rigorous, systematic and objective scientific
  reasoning
• positivist epistemology
• behaviouralism hijacked realism?