What is...Realism?

Welcome to Voices, the EISA podcast, the space for cutting-edge research in the discipline of international relations, and the audible companion to EISA, the European International Studies Association. This podcast sets the stage for deeper insights into award-winning papers, books and thesis as much as it provides a room for the critical engagement with key concepts in political and sociological thought. Voices, the EISA podcast, feeds your reading lists, makes cutting-edge IR research audible. My name is Judith Koch. I'm a PhD student at the production manager of this podcast. Please welcome today's host, Vinay Tarkor, lecturer in international relations at the Institute of History at Leiden University and board member of the EISA. Welcome everyone to this edition of the EISA podcast, and this month we continue our series what is. Considering there is an ongoing war in Europe, and one theory that we associate more than any other we are trying to understand why wars happen is realism. So today's podcast is about going back to some of those fundamental ideas, assumptions and misconceptions of realism. In pursuing this, we also talk specifically about geopolitical theory, which our guest here today refers to as the militarist gaze of realism. So a very warm welcome to our guest today, Professor Stefano Guzini, who spends his time between universities and think tanks in Brazil and Europe, he's affiliated with Pocreo in Brazil, Opsala University, Sweden, and the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. But I think what really stands out about him, and that's not what you'll find in the online Stefano Guzini, is that how easy it is for any early career scholar to contact him and how committed he is to help young scholars. You will go literally anywhere fast to sit on a PhD workshop, and that's what my experience has been with him. So this is Stefano. You may receive a lot of PhD drafts for comments after this podcast, so I hope you will regret being here. But it is so wonderful to have you with us, and thank you very much for taking out the time. Stefano, I thought the question that we could start with, considering one, of course, we are in the middle of all, but also realism is everyone's favorite vlogging house at times. It is often blamed for being a positivist, state-centric, militaristic, imperialist, immoral, western theory, a warm-ungering theory, and so on. Some than justifiably, but a lot of them, one could argue, are misconceptions. So I wonder if you could sort of take us through what are, according to you, some of the common misconceptions about realism, and I'm asking you as a sort of, sort of, somebody who is a critical of realism. So if you had to defend realism, what do you think are some of the common misconceptions? Well, thanks very much, Renate, and thanks, Isaiah, to have me with you today. Well I started my career as a realist, so I'm a fallen realist. I no longer am, but that's where I come from. And there are indeed many things which I would still feel one can defend in one way or the other. Yet not the way that it has been set up, not as an explanatory theory. But if you want me to start, I think the biggest misconception that we have about realism is that it is a coherent school of thought. In fact, realists are not seldom at loggerheads with each other. When Jack Donnelly published his textbook on realism and international relations, he ends the first overview of competing definitions with the finding that there is no more than a family resembleance or a certain style, as he calls it, such that we may not be able to define realism, but we know it when we see it, well, or not. More tellingly, the back cover says, Donnelly argues that common realist propositions are rejected by many leading realists as well. This raises, of course, the issue why realism is still around, which we may return later, but that would be the first thing to take into account. It is a very large family, which is self-contradictory in many, many places. And therefore, whatever you said about all these different qualifications that we give about realism being positive is the eccentric materialists and so on, I will find you one which is exactly doing this, and I will find you others who are not necessarily doing this. I mean, I can go a little bit through the list. Classical realism is said not to be positiveist whereas neorealism is, but even that is slightly more complicated. There is a famous exchange between Martin White and his "Why is there no international theory?" Hans Morgenthau, who answered about it, in which White says that, Well, there is no international theory. Because there is no Taylor's and international affairs, there is just a place of repetition. And then Morgenthau, the anti-positiveist Morgenthau, says, Well, it is exactly for this repetition that we can theorize it. So because we have a regularity, an empirical regularity, that we can have a theory of international relations, which is, well, a classical, positiveist statement about scientific laws that you can start having from there, which he of course then denies at some point in his writings again. I mean, Morgenthau himself, you can read him both as having positiveist components whenever he needs them and when he doesn't, well, then he will no longer use them. And Kenneth Wald, who is one of those neorealists who is supposedly then very positiveist, has been a Kant scholar and has been very critical of some parts of positivism as well. Realism is state-centric. Yes, that is to some extent true, but not necessarily more than, say, Alexander Vendt in the social theory of international politics. And also not when you have IPE scholars, which are realists, like Susan Stranger, Robert Gilpin, who have been heavily insisting in the retreat of the state, the Susan Stranger calls it. Yes, realism is materialist, but it is not materialist in a sense that there would be no ideas present. And Sean Maloy has been often making this argument that, look, if you read a little bit more carefully, these ideas are present time and again. And indeed, Remoiraur, who is one of the classical realists, has been educated through German sociology and very much the barian understanding and understanding type of sociological theory, which is also one of the reasons he says there cannot be a rationalist theory of international relations as the economists have. War mongering. Well, George Kennen didn't want NATO after the war and didn't want NATO enlargement in the 90s. Morgantel was against the Vietnam War, Walt and Mershama were against the Iraq War, which is probably the biggest mistake the US did after the end of the Cold War, because basically the Iraq War is a non-justified illegitimate intervention for regime change in the country far away from you, so it's actually even more difficult to justify than some of the interventions we have seen more recently. But Henry Kissinger has been in favor of all of them, so you have no clear position in that one item. The most interesting is perhaps the ethical position of realism. As you said, we are often realism is considered to be immoral, and sometimes this is not really fair because the realism does the, well, argues that morality is a sphere that should not apply to politics, so it would not be immoral but somewhat immoral because it's something which is from a different sphere which should not be there. But that actually is not tenable, as Nardin and Donnelly and others have shown, it's not tenable because realists do have an ethical commitment, but the ethical commitment is one of moderation. So if the world is one of power politics and the world is really bad, then well, state's persons, usually state's men, are considered to be the ones who have to guide us through this in a kind of moderating manner. So it's a very tragic vision, as Netlabel also calls it, a very tragic vision of politics in which somewhat romantic heroic politician has to make, and Smith has to try to find an ethics of responsibility as the user from Weber in which we will have to sacrifice some first principles in order to save as much as possible first principles, and that's the tragic component. If anything, realism is actually part of a liberal understanding of world politics, and I need perhaps to make that point, Mike Williams has done that as well, and I think it's perfectly correct. Liberalism can be understood as an art of separation. This is how waltzer calls it. In Michael Waltzer's famous worlds, liberalism is a world of waltz, and each one creates a new liberty and as he later writes a new equality. He lists a series of such walls erected out of a previous social political hole. The separation of state and church, which allows religious freedom. Separation of universities from government, which allows academic freedom. The separation between civil society and political community, which allows economic freedom and so on. And the most fundamental wall for a liberal state may be, though, the one that separates the private from the public sphere. In which interests and opinions meet on equal terms and allow you to have your freedom at home, so to speak, for having a public sphere in which tolerance and pluralism can play out in the public. And if you think about the religious freedom of Augsburg, and the starting of all this myth of the vegetarian treaties and so on, it is about this division between in which countries you can have your whatever religion and the outside, well, and the outside, these religions should no longer be imperial. They should no longer be messianic or being given to some, as a kind of expansionist policy. So you divide the countries having their own policies as long as they behave on the international matter. And so you redo the private public distinction in the inside, outside distinction of international affairs. And by this, you defend the pluralism of the international affair. Think about Hadley-Bull, who said that it is actually better to have this kind of anarchical society, because if you had a world government, then we would have no place where to apply for a asylum anymore, which is actually comes out of the treaty of Augsburg. So there's this idea that actually realism is as Gilpin says it. It's the only universal theory, which every society can understand, because every society would be respected in their guaranteed pluralism of the international system. And that's a profoundly liberal idea, which the realists try also to defend. So there's not one realism but a family of positions that contradict each other, while seemingly at least referring to a common core. Thanks, Stefano. I just want to sort of probe you further on this. So would you still say that, would you say that realism is more of what Vigil Sani and sort of family resemblance, kind of, you know, etlicting bunch of theories coming together, or would you still say there are certain core assumptions which separate realism for other forms of theorizations? There are some core assumptions, but before I get there, I think these core assumptions, they are located at the political theory level and the tradition of political realism. And that might inform many different types of explanatory theories, and that informs in turn many different types of foreign policy strategies. But before getting there, I think it is important to say that one way of thinking about realism is less by what it means, or its characteristics and assumptions, by what it does. So realism is, for me, the most prominent attempt to translate particular practical knowledge as it has evolved in particular in European International Society, and the whole thing is extremely Eurocentric, into laws of a science. So we move practical machines into scientific laws, and we move them from the historical context of Europe into a social science context increasingly characterized by the US. So I, that was my old definition, but I understand realism as the repeated and repeatedly failed, attempt to turn the Maxine's characteristic for 19th century diplomacy in Europe into a scientific theory practiced mainly in the US. And I believe that it has always produced a dilemma out of which realism has never been able to get out, because whatever important insights that's gathered, these attempts have so far failed because realist scholars face a basic dilemma. Either they update the practical knowledge of a diplomatic culture rather than science, but then they risk losing scientific credibility. When you find that very often, people tell you are no, but I mean realism is not this very positive as science. It has all these very classical ideas and so on. Or they cast these maxims into a scientific mode, which then, though, distorts this rather practical wider realist tradition. Therefore, so the subtitle of my early book, the story of realism as a causal explanatory theory is the continuing story of a death foretold. It will be always retried, but the dilemma can never be resolved. Now that realism is or can be understood as this attempt to translate practical maxims into scientific laws is not coincidental, because that is something which is typical for the discipline of international relations at large. When in Europe, at least the social sciences evolve in the 19th century, they evolve in parallel to the differentiation, the functional differentiation of our societies. So the beginning of an independent economics sphere, and therefore the beginnings of economics, the beginning of an independent civic society and the idea of studying also the private components of our societies and therefore sociology. And by having the state no longer being this comprehensive total, but having given up all these different parts, suddenly the state becomes this limited thing called the government, and therefore we get political science or government as it is sometimes called. Now I are predates historically this, because the differentiation of different states happens in the European context earlier, and so by the time of the 19th century there is already knowledge accumulated that exists prior, so to speak, to the discipline as it evolves. So it is not for the distant view of science that social and political practice is improved. It's the other way around. It's through recourse to the lessons of practice that science has constituted. If the evolution of societies has made science necessary for knowledge control and for the legitimacy of rule, then our late coming discipline of I.R. was to become the necessary to convince the new and enlarged world diplomatic society about, and thus preserve, the already existing practical knowledge of its diplomatic and military lead. So science did not turn against tradition, rather tradition fitted itself into its science. The discipline was not there to produce knowledge, the already existing knowledge produced its discipline. And realism was the main conduit for doing so. It is a language of practice. So learning, if one learns and teaches realism, it is not only about the theory of international relations, it's also a socialization in the common sense and the historical language of, as it has evolved, in international society. And therefore, that there are so many realist theories and that they are connected to the fact that realism provides this common language in which people disagree. So realism is not necessarily only the one position. It is also the kind of underlying common sense in which we express ourselves when we talk international affairs, and I see here that much more in terms of practice. So I will come to the question of the real assumptions a little bit later in your questions, but I think this is important as a starting point for understanding where I think one should also think about the role of realism as a specific role, which is not just one theory of international relations, but in many regards has infused the way that we talk about it or the other way around, the way we talk about it has been gathered together in what we have called realism. Thanks Defauna, I mean, in terms of, you know, how you sort of brilliantly sort of explained to us is trying to turn this practice or accumulated knowledge into a political scientific theory. And what I learned from your work, and that's quite a helpful distinction for us as scholars I think, is when you say that in doing that realism is understood to be doing three different things. It's understood to stand for three different things. One is this as sort of a political theory or ontology of politics. Second is sort of as an explanatory theory of power politics. And third is a foreign policy strategy of sort of prudential power politics. Could you sort of explain elaborate on them a bit for us? Yeah, I will do so. And then I will come also to some of the assumptions which I think are shared by realism. So we have three levels indeed, and these are three levels which all theories in IR somewhat will have to link up. And it is a kind of political philosophy, ontology, the meta-theoretical assumptions, the explanatory theories which come with it. And then since we are quite practically oriented science, also the foreign policy strategies that come with it. Now in order to make this distinction, let me start by a rather weird confusion that the sets IR and which of course we have experienced recently with the war in Ukraine again. Whenever there is a war, there is some pundit which will tell you that this shows the internal wisdom of realism. But war is in itself. an argument for realism, indeed, for any explanatory theory. I mean, any theory in IR, hopefully, will have something to say about war, otherwise they will not be around for very long. Just as much as realism will have to say something about cooperation, liberals will explain war via misperceptions, constructive is my explain it by ontological insecurity, which has been used, for instance, for the Russian case now, quite a bit, well, in the run-up, already for decades. While realists, on the other hand, can see cooperation as part of a line's behaviour of power politics is Joe Grecoven, he tried to analyse the European Union. A realism was connected only to the practice of war, it would be something like what Fitzcattock with one script, a shit happens, theory of international relations, he has said that in a panel with John Merchheimer. So, this reference to realism is therefore not to a theory, but to a foreign policy strategy. Whenever things turn sour, whenever we use military means, or whenever there's a territorial conflict, so to speak, then it is something about realism, but not realism as an explanatory theory. It's realism as a foreign policy strategy. And that is important, because that makes already the first distinction which I try to get home to, that is that we need to make this distinction between realism as an explanatory theory and what one might call realist foreign policy strategy, which is less multilateral, and what many people actually use the term for. This confusion between a practice and a theory is very rare in the social sciences, and as I said, it's a typical sign of where I are comes from. But that means that the moment that you have this kind of practice, you need to find ways to defend it, and one way to defend it is to base it on some ontological or historical assumptions. And here I think that there are two common assumptions, and I take that from Numbar to Bobio, an Italian political philosopher, that are typical for the realist tradition. Mind you for him, the realist tradition is a wider tradition, and I think it's important to have that in mind. The first one is the idea, the underlying idea, that the social world is by default conflictual. So it's not harmonious, it's not shinyan shing and the confusion relationalist theory that you would come out of a Chinese tradition. It is conflictual. Now for Bobio that includes that obviously also materialist approaches which are not just realism but Marxism. But the difference with Marxism, and that's the second point, it's not only that it's conflictual, but that the history has no tailors. It has no end. It has no progress. It is the eternal return. It's a cyclical vision of history, which is bound to return in different disguises. Of course, it's not the exact same return, but there is no finer redemption possible. We are stuck. It's a tragic world. But if you think about these two things, it produces also attention within the realist tradition, even in the ontological level between what Bobio in another piece called the distinction between the anti-ideal and the anti-apparent realism. Realism as anti-idealism is status quo-oriented. You have it beautifully summarized in Albert Hishman's rhetoric of reaction, where he talks about three main arguments of the reactionary political discourse which he calls "proversity, futility, and jobability." According to the futility thesis, any attempt that changes condemned to be without any real effect. The "proversity" thesis would argue that far from changing for the better such policies only had new problems, so the already existing ones. And the central jobability thesis says that "purposeful attempts at social change will only undermine the already achieved." The best is the enemy of the good. And here you get this very idea that all these social engineers, they are not only wrong, but they will make things even worse, by trying to believe that we can change a world that is always already given to us and that we cannot best adapt to but never really change in itself. This is the more conservative version of realism. But then there are some realists who think, "Hey, maybe some people make this very conservative argument because it's in their interest to make this very conservative argument." And you have that in car, but you have that also in Susan Strange. And that is what Bob your calls the anti-apparent realism. So that's an attitude more akin to the political theories of suspicion. It looks at what is hidden behind the smoke screen of current ideologies, also conservative ones, putting the allegedly self-evident into the limelight of criticism. With the other form of realism it shares a reluctance to treat beautiful ideas as what they claim to be, but it is much more sensible to the ideological use. Whereas the anti-ideal defends the status quo, the anti-apparent questions it. It wants to unmask existing power relations, somewhat hidden power relations. So if you read Carr, he has very often been seen as this anti-ideal, conservative, realist by people who have not read anything beyond the 20 years crisis because I mean for somebody who wrote so many volumes about the Bolshevik Revolution and criticizing other historians, it would not have been too difficult to see that he is actually more of the anti-apparent, realist type. And that means also it is easy to understand why Marxists like Opost Marxists like Cox or Render Germain find themselves in a realist lineage if they think that Carr is this lineage. So what I want to come out of this is that the two assumptions which we have, I.e. that the world is inherently conflictual and that there is no redemption to be had, can give rise to already on the political theory level a quite large tradition which then underdetermines the kind of explanatory theories that you can have afterwards with it. So it is it doesn't come as a surprise that if you have only these kind of generic assumptions that there can be a multiplicity of people coming up with different explanatory ideas informed by utilitarianism some others who would deny it and so on because it doesn't give that much more. And this is because it starts from practical knowledge moves via the anthology's two explanatory theories and it doesn't start so to speak in a consistent setup but needs to rationalize, expose that what we already know and practice. If it is, if you make this link between the political ontology, the explanatory theory and the foreign policy strategy in a realist key most of the time the concept of power is the central connecting link. It is the the drive for domination, the necessity for self-defense, whatever you call it on the level of the ontology. It is power politics or the maximization of power or of security involved but then we have not a good way to distinguish the two in the realist tradition and then you have also the the moderation of power politics on the foreign policy strategy level. The trouble with that is for me is that it comes with the realist fallacy which you see also in Foucaultian analysis very often. Namely that although power is always about politics, not all politics is about power but it gives you this one way of conf-, conf-, conf-, this fallacy of confusing the two in which power and politics have to be thought always together as if there was no other way like and there are a rantian tradition of thinking politics in a different manner. Thank you for listening to the ESA podcast. Our conversation with Professor Stefano Guzini turned out to be significantly longer than what could go into one episode. In part two of this conversation, Professor Guzini answers our questions on geopolitical theory. The militarist gaze of realism is how he defines it. You can listen to this and more in the next episode of Voices titled 'What is geopolitical theory?' Thank you for listening. Please find all information on today's interview guests and hosts in the show notes. Voices the ESA podcast is available on all established podcast platforms. If you liked it, subscribe now. 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