The Causal Logic of Realism: Parsimonious yet Incomplete

The Causal Logic of Realism: Parsimonious yet Incomplete

Examining the different variants of Realist International Relations (IR) theory, this essay assesses the causal logic underlying the paradigm’s micro-foundations. Providing overviews of Classical Realism, Structural Realism, Neorealism, Offensive Realism, Defensive Realism, Neo-Classical as well as Hegemonic Stability, it notes that all share a focus on power as the central arbiter of outcomes in international relations. On the one hand, the essay notes that these sub-paradigms diverge significantly in terms of their locations of variables such as the causes of war, the levels of analyses upon which they operate and their pessimism contra optimism regarding the future of world politics. On the other hand the essay argues that, in terms of micro-foundations, Realism is a potent and parsimonious approach to the study of international politics. Thus, because it focuses on power, a variable so crucial to understanding how hierarchy under anarchy operates, the paradigm has a sound causal logic. This said, the essay concludes by noting that, because it fails to take into account the mediating effects of ideational-level variables and the power of supra-national entities, alongside a failure to make consistent predictions regarding the balance-of-power Realism falls somewhat short of the type of comprehensive analysis required to truly understand all of the dimensions of a given empirical event in the international system.

Beginning with Classical Realism, the root of the paradigm, Morgenthau (1967) believed that the international system was prone to war because human nature is fundamentally bad. As such, in anarchic global environment, it is inevitable that conflict will occur as all states will consistently seek to outdo and outperform their rivals. In such a world, Morgenthau (1967) identified the United States as having the principal interests, derived from the thoughts of the Founding Fathers and the country’s geopolitical position. First, he proposed that America had to recognize that it was distinct from Europe. Second, America had to base its foreign policy on its natural geographic isolation. Third, America had to base its balance of power on realpolitik, and thus on the balance of power. Thus, applying Classical Realism to America, Morgenthau (1967) clearly believed that rational behavior, up to and including war, in the face of anarchy and malevolent human nature, was the key to success in international politics.

Turning to Structural Realism, the principal contemporary power-based structural theory of International Relations that is also sometimes referred to as Neorealism, ot focuses on power at the level of international structure rather than at that of the individual. Thus, it differentiates itself from Classical Realism most saliently on the basis of its level-of-analysis. At its base, the theory examines how states’ relative power levels interact in the international system so as to engender peaceful versus conflictual outcomes. Succinctly put, Walt (1987) proposes that peace is likely to prevail when a balance of power exists, and that was is likely to occur when an imbalance of power is present in the system. Thus, the international level-of-analysis, as manifested in Structural Realism, proposes that the stability of the system is largely a function of its polarity, in terms of the number of great powers that it contains, as well as of the overall distribution of power, inasmuch as counterbalancing coalitions of relatively equal power are proposed to be more germane to peace than power imbalances are (Waltz, 1979). Thus, within Structural Realist theory, the power distribution in the system, as manifested at the structural level of analysis, represents a potent tool in analyzing the likelihood of war’s occurrence.

Turning to Offensive and Defensive Realism, these represent modern addenda to the original structural variant produced by Waltz (1979) and other contemporaneous thinkers. Indeed, they are variants of structural realism, operating at the structural level, which differ most dramatically in terms of their evaluations of the likelihood of war in the system. At base, defensive realism argues the notion that, in a context of global anarchy and insecurity, states will do all that they can so as to improve their security. In so doing, however, Glaser (1995) argues that states provoke iterations of the security dilemma,: wherein attempts to buttress their own security cause other states to experience insecurity. In such a context, defensive realism thus portrays war as less inevitable than their structural realist counterparts. While still seeing it as likely, Glaser (1995) argues that states, via costly signals and other mechanisms, are capable of signaling their intentions to other states, and of thus lowering the likelihood of armed conflict. This said, and considering that Glaser (1995) attributes the onset of WWI to defensive realism-type security dilemmas, the theory still sees war as a central attribute of international political reality.

Moving to Offensive Realism, primarily a creation of Mearsheimer (2001), this variant of realism argues that states, especially great powers, are constantly seeking to maximize their power through any means available. In this context, he thus argues that they will prefer to engage in buck-passing, rather than balancing, as this will allow them to gain the most power possible on the basis of the lowest possible level of expenditures. With this, one of Mearsheimer (2001)’s main theoretical insights is a theoretical distinction between status quo and power-maximizing states. While the former are satisfied with their position, and work principally to maintain it, power-maximizing states are often revisionist, and thus will have irredentist intentions. In a context where Mearsheimer (2001) privileges buck-passing over balancing, the theory thus argues that, when irredentist and revisionist great powers emerge, war is likely to be an inevitable corollary of day-to-day life in the international system. In this respect, Mearsheimer (2001)’s main proposition is thus that wars, especially ones that realign the system, are likely and unavoidable realities of the international system.

Moving forward, a more recent version of Realism, known as Neoclassical Realism, combines Structural Realism’s focus on the international distribution of power with an all-encompassing focus on the domestic characteristics of states in explaining international outcomes such as war. Put simply, many Neoclassical Realists propose that using the mere distribution of power in the international system is not sufficient for predicting political outcomes inasmuch as such data does not provide us with information regarding how states plan on using this power. With this in mind, Schweller & Wohlforth (2000) focus heavily on the domestic modulators of power in their realist research, inasmuch as they differentiate between status quo and revisionist great powers. Maintaining Structural Realism’s belief that the international balance of power is the most significant determinant of war versus peace, Schweller & Wohlfort (2000) complement this assertion by nothing that some powerful states prefer to expand, while others prefer to simply sit on their laurels so as to preserve what they already have. With this, Schweller & Wohlforth (2000) demonstrate the value that can be gained from combining multiple levels of analysis in one piece of research. While studying the systemic level in isolation may have its benefits, examining it in conjunction with the domestic level allows the analyst to provide a much clearer causal picture that is much more germane to succinctly and successfully predicting both when and why wars occur.

Finally, hegemonic stability argues that a systemic hegemon is capable of engaging in the more or less durable dissemination of its interests, through power, influence, prestige and structural modification in the international system. Much of the early work in this area is empirically relevant to the hegemon’s role in elaborating a self-beneficial international trade structure. Krasner (1976) proposes, on the basis of a historical analysis of British and American hegemonies from 1820 to 1970, that a hegemon will use both positive and negative incentives so as to force a liberalized free trade system onto states the might otherwise not accept it. Conversely, when hegemony is absent such as during the period of British decline, and before American power reached its apex, the international trading system remained more closed. From this, we may conclude that the concentration of power underlying hegemony is capable of generating the influence necessary to construct and maintain the system that the hegemon prefers, and which ultimately serves to perpetuate its power-based positon at the center of the system.

With these overviews in mind, explaining the causal logic of realism, as per Gaubtatz (2001), represents an exercise that must be undertaken on the basis of the paradigm’s micro-foundations. In this regard, the components of realism that exist across all of its variants are a portrait of the state as a rational and power-seeking actor, a notion that the international balance of power is the arbiter of outcomes in the system, and an overarching pessimism that conflict is an almost inevitable element of international interaction.. Indeed, the micro-foundations of realism are so potent that Kertzer & McGraw (2012) found, in a series of experiments on ordinary citizens, that the logic of realism represented the principal guiding force in their own evaluative judgments vis-à-vis world politics. Ultimately then, the validity of the causal logic of realism is not only buttressed by its internal coherence, logical structure, and parsimony. In fact, there is significant evidence to suggest that the notions inherent to realism are inherent to the cognitive heuristics which we, as ordinary citizens, make use of in our everyday decision-making and opinion formation activities in regards to foreign policy. With this, realism is not merely a causal theory which serves to explain events and developments in the international system; it is a legitimate part of our empirical life-world.

In terms of these micro-foundations, however, the space in which realism faces the most difficulties in achieving congruence with the realities of the empirical world is within the realm of the system’s balance of power. On the one hand, structural realism argues that states will seek to balance power so as to preserve the system’s stability (Waltz, 1979). This said, and even within the context of offensive realism, a variant of the structural type, revisionist states are introduced as an adjunctive and modulating causal force to explain why balancing behavior sometimes fails to occur (Mearsheimer, 2001). Departing even more saliently from the baseline set by structural realism, hegemonic stability theory makes the argument that a predominance of power, within the system, is germane to its stabilization, and to the prevention of war (Krasner, 1976). Thus, it becomes clear that, in spite of the paradigm’s parsimonious and rightful focus on power, it fails to consistently make the same predictions regarding real world outcomes on the basis of this reference point. Rather, different variants of realism impute different realities to different forms of the balance, and thus saliently detract from one element of the paradigm’s overarching causal logic.

Moving from micro-foundations to phenomena which are simply absent from the realist point-of-view, and mirroring the critiques made by Wendt (1992), Realism does problematically, save for its Neoclassical variant, not take into account ideational variables which might serve to mitigate the pure-power based variants of the paradigm. Thus, to a very large extent, anarchy is indeed what states make of it in that Realism fails to account for the many potential interpretations of power gaps and other relationships that exist in the system. With only neo-classical realism truly taking a look at the ideologies and other ideational-level phenomena which present themselves at the domestic level of analysis, it becomes clear that most of the variants of realism simply fail to take into account the notion that ideas and other ideational variables can serve to modulate or even interpret fluctuations in both intra and inter-state power. Thus, as it pertains to the empirical world, and the dualistic ontology which has been attributed to it in modern philosophy, realist theories simply fail to acknowledge the importance of an entire component of our life-world.

Moreover, another failure of realism, in terms of achieving congruence with the empirical world in which it operates, lies in the neglect of supra-national institutions and other actors that the theory has historically engaged in. Tangibly, and because all realist theories believe that cooperation is unlikely, with the notable exception of defense realism, the paradigm sees international organizations and other supra-national phenomena as impotent, weak, and largely irrelevant. Problematically, developments in the empirical record, like the formation of the EU, demonstrate that international cooperation can truly be enduring, and thus demonstrate the weaknesses of realism’s power-based assumptions vis-à-vis the historical and empirical record. Ultimately, however, neither of these empirical lacunas detracts from the internal causal logic of realism itself. Rather, they detract from its external validity as a truly parsimonious grand theory of International Relations. Thus, considering Realism’s strengths, rooted in its focus on power, it simply becomes imperative that gaining a full comprehension of the events occurring in the international system at any time requires the triangulation of realism with alternate theories such as liberalism, constructivism, and other less significant theories of IR. Thus, realism has a sound causal logic indeed; it is simply not a panacea for understanding every single component and development occurring in the international system.

References

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Gaubatz, K.T. (2001). The Hobbesian problem and the microfoundations of international relations. Security Studies, 11(2), 164-186.

Kertzer, J.D., & McGraw, K.M. (2012). Folk realism: testing the microfoundations of realism in ordinary citizens. International Studies Quarterly, 56(2), 245-258.

Krasner, S.D. (1976). State power and the structure of international trade. World Politics, 28, 317-347.

Mearsheimer, J.J. (2001). The tragedy of great power politics. New York, NY: Norton

Morgenthau, H. (1967). Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace. New York, NY: Knopf.

Schweller, R.L., & Wolhlforth, W. (2000). Power test: updating realism in response to the end of the Cold War. Security Studies, 9(3).

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Waltz, K.N. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Wendt, Alexander. (1992). Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391-425.