2 page paper
Introduction Why We Disagree about International Relations
In April, 2015, ISIS militants pose with their banner in a suburb of Damascus, Syria, that they had just partially captured. What has caused the rise of ISIS, and what can be done to counter it?
Photo by Balkis Press/Sipa USA (Sipa via AP Images)
In spring 2014, an Islamic army known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swarmed across northern Syria and Iraq conquering territory larger than Belgium, including Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul. Also known as the Islamic State (IS), Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and Daesh, its Arab label, ISIS declared itself a Caliphate, resurrecting the ancient empire of Islam, and proceeded to threaten Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. Thousands of jihadists (religious revolutionaries) joined ISIS, some from the United States; and scattered extremist groups from North Africa to Southeast Asia pledged allegiance to ISIS and adopted its black flag. The Caliphate, under its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, imposed a brutal Sunni Muslim law in the conquered territories, and hooded warriors beheaded Western journalists, local Christians and Shiite (non-Sunni) Muslims, captured in terrifying videos that went viral on the Internet. Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Adviser to President Obama, identified the threat to the United States: “They are seeking to establish themselves as the vanguard terrorist organization that is at war with the U.S. and the West on behalf of Islam.”1
What causes a conflict of this sort? And what can be done about it? As students of international relations, we start with the facts, but we have to be careful. There are so many facts, and we can’t know them all or know for certain which ones may be the most important ones that cause other things to happen. Let’s look at what appear to be the salient facts in the case of ISIS and then make a first stab at how we sort out the facts and causes of international events to understand them better.
Syria and Iraq are centrally located in the geographically strategic region of the Middle East. They are Muslim countries that border the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. Both Eastern and Western empires have occupied this region. Christian crusaders invaded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the region was part of the Ottoman Empire for several centuries. The first Muslim Caliphate dated from the thirteenth century. After World War I and the collapse of the Caliphate, Syria became a colonial territory under French administration, while Iraq became a British colony. Both became independent nations after World War II. After World War II, oil became a major resource in the Middle East. Western companies monopolized oil production and remain today major economic players in the region even though the oil-producing states now control their own oil and influence global oil markets through the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Syria and Iraq are ethnically and religiously diverse, and power is contested among various tribal and religious groups. Muslims are divided between Sunni and Shiite sects and between moderate and radical (jihadist) groups. In Syria, the majority population (74 percent) is Sunni, but the government has been controlled since 1970 by a minority Shiite sect known as the Alawites under its recent leader Bashar al-Assad. Iraq is comprised of 20 percent Sunni Muslims, 60 percent Shiite Muslims, and 20 percent Kurds, a non-Arab, Turkish-origin minority. For decades a minority Sunni government ruled Iraq, most notably under Saddam Hussein. Since the invasion of Iraq by U.S. and Western forces in 2003, Shiite majorities govern Iraq.
Neither Iraq nor Syria is a democracy, although Iraq sports an American-designed constitution and holds regular albeit disputed elections. Few countries in the Middle East are free countries, with the exception of Israel and perhaps Jordan. In 2011, a rash of protests erupted across the region in what became known as the Arab Spring. Street crowds demanded reform of authoritarian governments. But, except in Tunisia, the Arab Spring quickly turned into an Arab Winter. Tyrants reemerged. Egypt held elections that overthrew the longstanding authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, but then the elected Muslim Brotherhood that replaced it proceeded to end democratic reforms. The military intervened, and Egypt is once again a military dictatorship. Civil wars broke out and continue in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The Shiite government in Iraq alienated Sunni and Kurdish groups and relies increasingly on Iran to confront the ISIS threat. Iran crushed an internal democratic movement in 2009, and remains firmly in the hands of a theocratic regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and support radical groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas that threaten Israel.
Foreign governments are deeply involved in the current ISIS conflict. The former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, a neighbor of Iran, and resistance war by militant Islamic groups in the 1980s spawned Al Qaeda, a radical Sunni group led by Osama bin Laden, scion of a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia. UN forces led by the United States intervened in 1991 to expel Iraq from Kuwait. In 1996, Bin Laden, motivated in part by U.S. forces left behind in Saudi Arabia, declared jihad (religious war) against the United States. Fleeing to Afghanistan, Bin Laden planned and perpetrated the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. A branch of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) sprang up already in 1999, but its fortunes rose after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. AQI’s tactics were so brutal, however, that U.S. forces were able to enlist disaffected Sunni tribes to drive AQI out of Iraq in the so-called surge or Awakening of 2007–2008. But then AQI regrouped in war torn Syria and morphed into the Islamic State. The invasion and conquest of northern Syria and Iraq followed.
The United States, under President Obama, pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, and refused to supply arms to moderate groups in the Syrian civil war. In the vacuum, radical groups like ISIS became the leading opposition in Syria, and Iran replaced the United States as Iraq’s principal military adviser. When ISIS beheadings stirred fears in the United States, President Obama ordered air strikes against ISIS and reintroduced a few thousand American noncombat forces to advise and train Iraqi forces. Regular Iraqi forces, mostly Sunni, failed to halt ISIS forces surging toward Baghdad, and the Iraq government ordered Iranian-trained and -led Shiite militia to lead the fight against ISIS advances.
Non-Western governments are also involved. Russia has a naval base in Syria and supplies arms to the Syrian government; Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, all led by Sunni governments, arm the moderate rebels in Syria. On religious grounds, private individuals in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries finance the ISIS extremists. France, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan participate in air strikes against ISIS in both Syria and Iraq. Along with China, Russia negotiates with the United States and other great powers (the so-called P-5 plus 1) to halt Iran’s nuclear program, but Russia also supplies arms to Iran, including, in 2015, air defense systems that could thwart Israeli air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The negotiations culminated in summer 2015 in a nuclear agreement with Iran, lifting sanctions if Iran complies for 10–15 years with provisions to halt and reduce (not dismantle) its nuclear activities related to developing a nuclear bomb.
Israel remains the focal point of conflict in the Middle East. Established by a UN resolution in 1948, Israel has fought six wars and continuous skirmishes to defend itself in its ancient homeland. As a result of previous wars, Israel occupies Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Syrian territory in the Golan Heights and faces jihadist forces around its borders in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza Strip (Hamas), and Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra). Iran supports these terrorist groups that harass and deploy rockets against Israeli settlements on a regular basis. The United States brokers an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, but in recent years to no avail because violence escalates around Israel, from fighting in Syria and Iraq to terrorist threats in Lebanon and Gaza Strip to civil wars in Yemen and growing suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia. A peace treaty with Egypt signed in 1979 is all that stands in the way of another wider regional war.
Now you have some of the facts—but only some since there are many, many more. Is your head spinning? And, even if you memorize all these facts, what do you know? What do the facts mean? What is the primary cause of the ISIS conflict, and where is that cause coming from? You need to know the answers to these questions. Otherwise, you have no idea what to do to ameliorate or end the conflict.
We begin to make some sense of this conflict and all the others we study in international relations by asking three questions: (1) where are the forces coming from that drive the conflict? We call this the level of analysis issue; (2) what underlies or constitutes these forces; are they material forces such as efforts to grab more territory or resources, ideological forces such as religious and political beliefs, or interactive forces such as failures to communicate, lack of economic and other contacts, or weak institutions? We call this the issue of theory or perspective; and (3) which perspective or level of analysis is driving the other perspectives and levels of analysis, because in any real-world situation all levels of analysis and perspectives are present? We call this aspect the causal arrows issue, namely, which level of analysis and perspective dominates the others.
Let’s see how we might apply these questions to the ISIS conflict. First, where are the forces (facts) coming from? Some forces are coming from outside the region and the countries or individuals involved. We call this level of analysis systemic or external. Here we can place the historical interventions by the Crusades, western colonialism, and the major international oil companies. We can also place the more recent interventions by outside actors such as the United States, United Nations, or Russia to defend Israel, reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, create military bases or allies, or mediate the Arab-Israel dispute.
Second, some forces are coming from inside the countries in the region. We call this level of analysis domestic or internal. Here we can place the Sunni-Shiite conflict, a religious war that has been going on for centuries among Muslims (think of a rough analogy with the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics in Europe), the struggles inside countries between authoritarian and democratic forms of government, the cultural differences among Arab countries and between Arab countries such as Iraq, Persian countries such as Iran, and a Jewish nation such as Israel.
Third, some forces are coming from specific individuals or groups of decision makers within these countries. Now we are looking for facts that are not characteristic of the country as a whole, like their common language or culture, but are specific to individual leaders and their immediate supporters. Here we place such facts as Saddam Hussein and his tribal supporters centered around the town of Tikrit in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite supporters in Syria, Osama bin Laden and his jihadist comrades in Al Qaeda, Baghdadi, and ISIS, and so on. We assemble these forces at the three different levels of analysis—systemic, domestic, and individual—in Figure Intro-1.
Figure Intro-1 What Level of Analysis Do the Causes of the Conflict with ISIS Come From?
Next we ask what are the facts or forces that seem to be driving the outcomes in this conflict. We divide these forces into three groups. First, is it the competition for raw power, military and economic resources that causes things to happen? Here, we think of actors at all three levels of analysis—systemic actors like the wealthier ex-colonial powers seeking to dominate the region and its oil, domestic actors like the oil-rich countries dominating poorer countries, or individuals such as Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad exercising power to benefit their tribe or religious sect. But at all these levels what seems to matter most is who has power and how much power they are gaining or losing.
Second, is it ideology—religious, cultural, and political beliefs—that matters most in deciding outcomes? Here we think of the religious conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, the cultural conflicts between Jews and Arabs, and Arabs and Persians (Iran), and the political conflicts between authoritarian governments and democratic ideas. Again these ideological forces may come from all levels of analysis—from the outside system involving the intervention of western nations to establish democracies in the region, from countries within the region who disagree over religion such as Sunni Saudi Arabia versus Shiite Iran, or from individuals who are primarily motivated by religious beliefs such as Osama bin Laden. In all cases, the motivation generated by beliefs dictates who grabs power and determines outcomes. Power grabs are no longer the leading factor in what happens but are themselves the consequence of ideological beliefs.
Third, is it interactions and problems in communications and negotiations that matter most in deciding outcomes? Here we think of the lack of trade and economic interaction among the Middle East countries. These countries do most of their trade with outside countries not with each other, and their outside trade is based mostly on resources such as oil that generate less diverse activities than manufacturing trade, which generates all kinds of exchanges in components and services. Moreover, the countries historically have stronger diplomatic, educational, and cultural ties with outside powers than with each other. Students, business and professional leaders, and tourists do not visit across countries. All this means that the countries have difficulties communicating with one another and developing habits of interdependence and reciprocity in which they learn to compromise with one another and achieve mutual gains. Again, reciprocal activities or lack thereof may exist at any level of analysis—with outside powers, among the countries in the region, or between individuals. What matters from all levels of analysis is how repetitive and habit-forming these interactions are. We group the three kinds of substantive forces causing outcomes—power, ideologies or ideas, and interactive relations—in Figure Intro-2.
Figure Intro-2 What Perspective (Cause) Is Driving the Outcomes of the Conflict with ISIS?
OK, now we are ready to connect these different perspectives coming from different levels of analysis to formulate hypotheses or explanations about what is going on in the ISIS conflict. Explanations have to do with what substantive forces (power, interactions, or ideas) coming from what level of analysis (external, domestic, and individual) are most important in determining outcomes, and therefore, if altered, could change those outcomes in the future. Which way do the causal arrows run among the levels of analysis and among the perspectives?
Is the ISIS conflict primarily a consequence of the imperial intervention of former colonial powers that created arbitrary countries in the Middle East? If so, we have an explanation of the conflict based on power from outside the region and would seek solutions that would eventually reduce this outside interference. Reducing outside intervention might do little good, however, if the conflict is due primarily to internal factors. Maybe the conflict is the consequence of religious and ethnic rivalries that lead groups to wage holy wars against one another. Now we have an explanation based on ideological factors from a domestic or regional (between system and domestic) level of analysis. Sunnis and Shiites or Jews and Muslims will have to reconcile with one another before the conflict can end. OK, that’s plausible. But what if there are leaders who keep stirring up the religious conflicts to advance their own material interests? Now we have an explanation based on material factors from an individual level of analysis. Until the leadership or governments in the region become more moderate, religious differences will persist. But maybe leaders are not moderate because the region is insufficiently modernized and developed. Now we have an explanation based on interactive forces, such as trade, from a domestic or regional level of analysis. If individual countries could be encouraged to create jobs instead of wars, the people in the region would gain mutual benefits and come together. But maybe countries are not moderate and modernized because they are not democratic. The desire to reform autocratic governments and become more democratic inspired the Arab Spring and produced protests and elections throughout the Middle East. This is an ideological explanation from a domestic level of analysis.
Maybe all these factors play a role. And they do. When we say that power struggles cause something to happen, we do not rule out the presence of trade (interactions) or ideology (religion). We simply hypothesize that power factors influence interactive and ideological forces more than the latter influence power factors. For example, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons (power) makes trade and diplomacy (interactive) more difficult and increases mutual suspicions and enmity (ideology). The causal arrows run from power to interactive factors to ideas. The same holds for levels of analysis. For example, the Supreme Leader of Iran (individual level) cracks down on reformists inside Iran (domestic) to unite the country and challenge Israel for hegemony in the Middle East (systemic). Now the individual level is more important in deciding outcomes than the other levels. We assemble or highlight these different explanations of events from different perspectives and levels of analysis throughout our discussions in this book by featuring causal arrows in the margins of the text.
Good students test each hypothesis and try to judge which one is best supported by the facts. We do this as much as possible, but we never have enough time to analyze all the facts and explanations. At some point we have to make judgments. And this is why we disagree, not so much about the facts, which all serious people know, but about which facts are most important. These different judgments account in turn for disagreements among us about historical and contemporary events.
And disagreements about what causes something to happen lead us to recommend different policy solutions for the future. It’s only when we conclude that specific facts caused something to happen that we know how to prevent the problem from arising again in the future. In the case of ISIS, for example, some participants believe that outside intervention created the problem, especially the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The invasion empowered Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into ISIS. They recommend that the United States get out and stay out of the Middle East. Others focus on earlier events that drew the United States into the conflict such as terrorist attacks against Western targets in the 1990s (for example, World Trade Center bombing in 1993). They emphasize the religious roots of animosity toward the West. And they conclude that if we leave Iraq or the Middle East, the terrorists will not stop attacking us but will simply attack us closer to our homeland.
You have just been introduced to the complexities of learning about international relations. International relations do not start with facts about what is happening in some part of the world such as Syria and Iraq. The facts are simply too numerous and interconnected; we could never take them all into account. As the historian Charles Tilly tells us, we seldom do more than skim the surface when we gather facts: “I must deal with historical facts like a rock skipping water.... I do not know all the history one would need to write this book fully.”2 And the facts do not interpret themselves. Think about the newspapers you read or the television news programs you watch. Do front pages give you all the news that is fit to print, or TV newscasters all the news for that day? No, they don’t and they can’t. Someone decides what goes on the front page of a newspaper or is covered in a twenty-minute TV broadcast, and those decisions involve selecting and emphasizing certain facts over others.
So from the beginning we start with some sense or theory about what facts are significant and what facts may be causing other facts to happen. Without a perspective, we have nothing but a description of what is happening, and any description is always partial because it cannot possibly include everything that is going on. We describe only what we consider significant, and what we consider significant is already determined by some prior theory or hypothesis rumbling around in our heads even if we are not conscious of it. As one wise political scientist, Professor Robert Jervis at Columbia University, said, “Without a theory, we’re just lost. We just have all these random phenomena we can’t make any sense of.”3
Perspectives or theories tell us about the content of causes—for example, a power struggle rather than religious conflict or misunderstandings in negotiations. But to understand fully what is causing a problem, we need to know where the cause is coming from. If Russia, the United States, Iran, and the Persian Gulf Sunni states could be persuaded to stop arms shipments to belligerents in Syria and Iraq, would that do more than anything else to end the conflict? If so, we say the primary level of analysis is external or systemic (outside the country), not domestic (inside the country). Or would the conflict continue because the power struggle between Shiites and Sunnis lies primarily inside Syria and Iraq—that is, at the domestic level—and if arms shipments from abroad stopped, the belligerents would just find new ways to acquire arms?
In talking about perspectives and levels of analysis, as we noted, we emphasize primary causes and levels of analysis. That is because all causes and levels of analysis are present in any international situation. We need to determine which perspective and level of analysis dominate. Do external factors influence internal ones more than internal factors influence external ones? Do material factors such as military force or wealth influence what actors do more than the beliefs they hold? In short, do the powerful behave one way and the weak another regardless of their beliefs? Or do ideas shape the acquisition and use of force and wealth such that powerful actors do not all behave the same and weak actors may become aggressive? Do repetitive interactions among actors weaken the influence of material and ideological differences, or do material and ideological differences limit how much countries can interact with one another through trade or diplomatic negotiations?
In the ISIS case, for example, a perspective that identifies the struggle for material power as the primary cause of the conflict does not mean that a negotiated settlement, an approach emphasized by an interactive perspective, is not possible. Nor does it mean that ethnic or religious ideas, emphasized by an ideological perspective, do not matter. It simply means that from a material perspective the competition for power to survive comes first and will determine in large measure how much and what kind of negotiations take place and how the actors identify themselves and others. So, in the ISIS case, if material causes are primary, the competition for arms will create more and more distrust between the belligerents and limit the degree to which they can cooperate. And this competition will reinforce the image of the belligerent groups as enemies rather than as partners or friends. In other words, power factors are stronger (primary) influences on the negotiations and identities of the actors than the latter are on power factors.
Similarly, causes will always come from all levels of analysis. But the individual level is primary if the individual or small group involved has a stronger influence on the factors coming from the domestic and international (systemic) levels of analysis than those factors have on the individual or small group. In the ISIS case, if the individual level is primary, the leaders of ISIS are contributing—not just responding—to domestic religious differences and inviting intervention by foreign powers rather than being the victim of such intervention. In this book, the causal arrow feature points out the perspective and level of analysis that is primary—that is, which cause or perspective dominates and from which direction that cause primarily comes.
Our objective in this book is to develop these tools of analysis—perspectives, levels of analysis, and causal arrows—that you need to understand international situations like the one in Syria and Iraq. Along the way, you will learn many facts about world history and contemporary events. But facts alone are not sufficient, because we can never know all the facts. Thus, this textbook differs from those that begin with a key problem such as how to achieve “collective goods” such as wealth and security or with a single theoretical framework of “interests, interactions, and institutions” that reflects rational choice theory. Both those approaches start with assumptions that are characteristic of a liberal perspective, as we shall see, and inevitably de-emphasize problems such as the security dilemma, which is more important from a realist perspective, or the role of ideas and actors’ identities, such as religious beliefs, which is more important from an identity perspective. We will look at history differently, too, through the lens of perspectives and levels of analysis. That means that we approach, say, World War II as the different perspectives from the various levels of analysis explain it rather than simply present facts for you to memorize, as though history did not already involve theoretical choices about what events are most significant and cause other events. In this way we cover more, not fewer, facts, because each perspective and level of analysis emphasizes different facts. By including them all, we cover more facts than we would if we emphasized only one perspective. So you will encounter and memorize many facts, and it is important that we know the major events of European, Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American history and contemporary life if we are going to be serious students of international affairs. But that is not the ultimate payoff of this exercise. The payoff is the strengthening of your intellectual tool kit and your ability to think critically about and understand world affairs. We will be working mostly on your central processor rather than on your memory storage—although we hope to fill up the latter as well.
The rest of this introduction outlines the most important tools or ingredients for understanding international relations, which we will be using throughout this book—perspectives and levels of analysis, history, contemporary foreign policy disputes, methods, conclusions based on causal arrows, judgment, and ethical values.
The Roles of Perspectives, Levels of Analysis, and Causal Arrows
We see and understand international relations through different perspectives and levels of analysis. Perspectives help us decide what the primary cause of an event is. We consider three principal perspectives in this book. The first claims (hypothesizes) that a struggle for power is the primary cause of what happens in international affairs; this we call the realist perspective. The second, the liberal perspective, argues that interactions, interdependence, and institutions exert the primary influence on world events. The third, the identity perspective, asserts that ideas are more important than power or institutions in shaping international outcomes. These three principal perspectives capture the main causes of international events—power, institutions, and ideas—that make up the subtitle of this text. From time to time, we’ll take note of a fourth perspective, the critical theory perspective. We’ll do so because this perspective questions the basic Western, rationalist assumption used by the principal perspectives, that we can break up reality, separate specific causes and effects from historical circumstances, and use this knowledge of the past to engineer the future. Critical theory, such as Marxism, emphasizes deep-seated causes of human events that unfold within historical processes and obscure vast inequalities that marginalize weak and minority peoples. It seeks to expose these deep roots of injustice in past political life and encourage more radical, maybe even revolutionary, solutions to bring about social justice and change.
Levels of analysis tell us the direction from which different causes come. We consider three principal levels of analysis. The individual level, sometimes called the decision-making level, emphasizes the leaders and decision-making institutions within a country. The domestic level focuses on the internal characteristics of countries as a whole, such as their cultural, political, and economic systems. And the systemic level highlights the way countries are positioned (e.g., their relative power) and interact (e.g., unilaterally or multilaterally) with respect to one another. At times we consider other levels intermediate between the domestic and systemic levels. For example, the foreign policy level of analysis links domestic politics and international relations when, for example, leaders try to use foreign wars to get reelected or domestic events to invite foreign intervention. The transnational level of analysis involves the interactions of nongovernmental groups across national boundaries, such as multinational corporations and labor unions, that operate to a significant extent independent of relations among governments (see Figure Intro-3).
Each of the three mainstream perspectives—realist, liberal, and identity—operates at all the levels of analysis. For example, while the realist perspective emphasizes power at all levels, it singles out human nature (lust for power) at the individual level, aggressive or revisionist states at the domestic level, leaders seeking to survive in office at the foreign policy level, and the balance of power and anarchy at the systemic level. The liberal perspective emphasizes institutions at all levels but singles out a leader’s bureaucratic role at the individual level, the country’s institutions at the domestic level, and negotiations and international organizations at the systemic level. And the identity perspective emphasizes ideas at all levels but zeroes in on shared or conflicting ideas at the systemic level, a country’s political culture at the domestic level, and leaders’ ideologies or strategies at the decision-making (individual) level. The critical theory perspective emphasizes all the primary causes and levels of analysis at once and adopts a holistic interpretation of reality, one that cannot be broken down into separate causes and effects or tested by rationalist means against alternative hypotheses.
Figure Intro-3 Perspectives and Levels of Analysis: A Synopsis
Both perspectives and levels of analysis are what we call ideal types. They help boil down a complex reality, allowing us to see certain features of international relations more readily than others. Think of it this way. A theory interprets international relations the way a portrait interprets a face. Some portraits emphasize noses over eyes and mouths; others emphasize the eyes or mouths. Group together all the portraits that emphasize noses, and you have a perspective. Group together all the portraits that emphasize eyes, and you have another perspective. That’s how the perspectives used in this book group together the various theories of international relations. All theories of international relations include power, institutions, and ideas, just as all portraits of faces include noses, eyes, and mouths. But some theories emphasize one of these factors, just as some portraits emphasize noses.
Standing in front of the damaged Askariya shrine in Baghdad, an Iraqi policeman views the world from this Muslim country. How others see the world and how we see others are matters of perspective.
AP Photo/Hameed Rasheed
Similarly, to understand the level of analysis concept, think of a baseball analogy. Imagine trying to hit a pitch. Perspectives tell us what kind of pitch is coming: fastball, curveball, or changeup. Levels of analysis tell us the direction from which the pitch is coming, whether it is thrown overhand, sidearm, or underhand. Unless we know both the kind and the direction of the pitch, we’ll probably miss the ball—or, in international affairs, we’ll fail to understand the events we are interested in.
level of analysis: the direction, or “level,” from which the primary cause of events is coming.
perspective: a statement or hypothesis that explains the primary cause of what is happening—for example, a struggle for power causes conflict and sometimes wars.
causal arrow: an indicator of which perspective or level of analysis influences the other perspectives and levels of analysis more than the reverse.
ideal types: perspectives or simplified characterizations of theories that emphasize the most important aspects of reality, not all of its intricacies and variations.
The Role of History
History is the laboratory of international relations. We use historical examples to gather the facts and test the perspectives that enable us to explain and anticipate how the world works. Students often ask why we have to study history. That was then, they say; this is now. Everything changes and is new under the sun, right? Well, if that’s the case, how do we recognize when something is new under the sun? Don’t we have to know what is old to determine what is new? Take globalization, for example. Is it new? Many commentators say it is. But globalization existed before World War I at levels that were not surpassed again until after the mid-1970s. That makes globalization today different but not unprecedented. We need to recognize patterns from the past to identify the trends of the future.
History is also fun. Perhaps you like to read novels. They contain all the elements of human tragedy, triumph, mystery, adventure, and romance. Well, so does history. After all, it is the real story of human triumph and tragedy. History is also personal. Think of where you come from. Where was your family when the Berlin Wall came down or your grandparents during the Vietnam War? Do you know from what part of the world your family comes? If you live in the United States, unless you are Native American, your family came from someplace else. All these personal stories are part of the historical narrative. As we go through the book, I’ll share some snippets of my family’s history. I do this not to focus on my life but to help you discover how your life, too, is linked with history.
This book therefore covers more history than most international relations textbooks. It shows that although we have most of the facts about these events, we still disagree about them. For example, what caused World War I? Scholars do not agree. History therefore gives us a chance to explore the role of perspectives and levels of analysis in sorting out disagreements when the facts are pretty much the same. This exercise primes us to understand contemporary disagreements. Often we attribute these disagreements to facts. One side has more facts than the other. And, when we are dealing with contemporary issues, we should always opt to gather more facts. The perspectives help us in this regard, because they prompt us to look for and consider facts from multiple perspectives rather than just one. But why, if facts are the most critical ingredients, do we disagree about historical events when most of the facts are already known? Something else is going on, and that something else is the influence of perspectives and levels of analysis. The history covered here is cursory, so be sure to take history courses to explore the details. We are looking only for patterns that illuminate contemporary events. For example, Germany was a rising power before World War I; China is a rising power today. Are there similarities? We will see that there are, not identical but analogous. That’s why we need to know at least the rough outlines of history to understand international relations today.
Why did Al Qaeda attack the United States on September 11, 2001? Was it the weak balancing the strong, a reaction to U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, or a rejection of Western values? Realism views the attacks as the weak turning the weapons of the strong against them.
AP Photo/Carmen Taylor
Contemporary Foreign Policy Disputes: The 9/11 Attacks
Perspectives and levels of analysis do not just affect scholarship; they also affect everyday disputes about foreign policy. All serious students of international affairs respect the facts. But they emphasize different facts and draw conclusions that point the causal arrows in different directions among the major facts. Let’s take a first look at how our four different perspectives help sort out the reactions of various analysts to a relatively recent policy event, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, against the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The analysts are working from the same facts, but they interpret them differently because they emphasize different perspectives and levels of analysis.
Realist: Weak versus Strong
Three days after 9/11, Ronald Steel, a professor at the University of Southern California, characterized the attacks in the New York Times as “a war in which the weak turned the guns of the strong against them... showing... that in the end there may be no such thing as a universal civilization of which we all too easily assume we are the rightful leaders.”4 Steel interprets the attacks by Al Qaeda as weak actors rebelling against strong actors, with the weak actors rejecting the notion that the strong ones can dictate what is right and therefore universally valid in international affairs. Steel is applying the realist perspective emphasizing the struggle for relative power, which in turn limits the universality of what is right. It sees the world largely in terms of strong actors seeking to dominate weak ones and weak actors resisting strong ones to preserve their interests and independence. Notice that when he emphasizes relative power he does not ignore ideas. He simply argues that relative power limits the role of ideas, that there “may be no such thing as a universal civilization” that might prevent such conflicts. The struggle for power precludes the existence of a universal civilization in which the strong may claim they are the rightful leaders. Steel is making the realist point that the struggle for power has a greater impact on ideas than ideas have on power. The causal arrows run from the realist perspective to the identity perspective, with power factors determining for the most part what we can expect from the role of ideas or values.
The struggle for power goes on at all levels of analysis. In the case of the 9/11 attacks, the Al Qaeda terrorists represent nonstate actors coming from the individual level of analysis. However, if we emphasize the Taliban government in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda trained, we might be thinking of weak or failed states that have been taken over internally by terrorists and conclude that the cause is coming from the domestic level of analysis. Or, if we think more broadly still and argue that Al Qaeda is a product of the weak Muslim countries dominated in the Middle East and elsewhere by the strong Western powers, we might decide the cause is coming from the distribution of power in the international system as a whole, or the systemic level of analysis. At each level, the cause is the same—namely, the struggle for power between the weak and the strong. But depending on which level of analysis we emphasize, we respond differently to the attacks. At the individual level, we focus our attention on specific terrorists. At the domestic level, we react to the problems of a country as a whole, whether it is a weak or failed state. And at the systemic level, we address problems in broader international relationships between Muslim and Western countries (see Figure Intro-4).
Figure Intro-4 The Causes of the 9/11 Attacks: From the Realist Perspective
realist perspective: a perspective that sees the world largely in terms of a struggle for relative power in which strong actors seek to dominate and weak actors seek to resist.
Liberal: Failed Negotiations
Writing two days after Steel in the Washington Post, Caryle Murphy, a journalist, saw the attacks quite differently. September 11, 2001, was not a result of the weak striking back against the strong but of unresolved diplomatic disputes, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that created unfairness and grievances between the feuding parties. She argued that “if we want to avoid creating more terrorists, we must end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way both sides see as fair.”5 Murphy is using the liberal perspective. It emphasizes relationships and interdependence among actors in international affairs, how groups interact, communicate, negotiate, and trade with one another. She is saying that the cause of the 9/11 attacks stems from the absence of a negotiated agreement that includes all parties—terrorists and nonterrorists, Palestinians and Israelis—one that is considered fair and legitimate. An outcome decided by a power struggle (realist) or by the imposition of one side’s ideas on the other (identity) would not be considered fair or legitimate and would probably just create more terrorists. On the other hand, a fair and inclusive agreement might actually reduce the threat of terrorism. Note how diplomacy and cooperation trump power. The liberal perspective holds out the prospect that solutions to international conflicts are not determined primarily by a balance of power but derive instead from common rules and institutions that include all actors regardless of their relative power or ideas.
Palestinian (Yasser Arafat, left) and Israeli (Shimon Peres, right) leaders meet in late September 2001 to discuss an end to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Liberalism emphasizes international cooperation and interdependence and views unresolved misunderstandings between the two states as a critical factor precipitating 9/11.
AP Photo/Pool/Ahmed Jadallah
Murphy is emphasizing the systemic level of analysis because international negotiations are a more important cause of and, therefore, solution to the problem of terrorism than the internal characteristics of countries (domestic level) or the specific behavior of individual leaders (individual level). From the liberal perspective, actors at any level—systemic, domestic, or individual—behave not so much on the basis of their relative power, whether they are weak or strong, but on the basis of the way the other party behaves, how the parties interact and negotiate, the patterns of reciprocal behavior they create, and the roles and rules they establish in institutions that regularize their relationships (see Figure Intro-5).
liberal perspective: a perspective that emphasizes repetitive relationships and negotiations, establishing patterns or institutions for resolving international conflicts.
Identity: Democratic Reform of Governments
Writing a year after the 9/11 attacks, as prospects of war against Iraq loomed, Jim Hoagland, a columnist for the Washington Post, suggested still a third way to think about the attacks. He was skeptical of finding a solution to terrorism through a better balance of power between the weak and strong or through negotiations of the Arab-Israeli dispute. He felt that the problem was one of nondemocratic governments in the Middle East: “The removal of Saddam Hussein [then Iraq’s leader] and Yasser Arafat [then leader of the Palestinian Authority] are necessary but not sufficient conditions for stabilizing the Middle East.... The administration cannot rely... on a now discredited peace process.... Only a level and clarity of American commitment to democratic change... will calm an ever more deadly conflict.”6 Note how Hoagland de-emphasizes the negotiation process, which a liberal perspective would emphasize, by describing it as a “discredited peace process” and says that the mere removal of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat from power, which the realist perspective would emphasize, is not enough. Instead, what is needed, he maintains, is a change in the nature of Arab governments. They need to reform and, with U.S. help, become more democratic, in short, change their basic political ideas and identities.
Figure Intro-5 The Causes of the 9/11 Attacks: From the Liberal Perspective
Hoagland is employing the identity perspective. This perspective emphasizes the importance of ideas that define the identities of actors and motivate (cause) their use of power and negotiations in international affairs. He is suggesting that democratic reforms at the domestic level of analysis are more important than removing individual leaders—the individual level—and may subsequently change the way Middle East states behave toward one another at the systemic level. If actor identities remain divergent, some democratic and others nondemocratic, negotiations are more difficult to achieve and power balancing is more likely to occur. If, on the other hand, actors converge toward democratic identities, cooperation is more likely. Hoagland argues that until Arab identities become more democratic and their identities converge with that of Israel, negotiations (the liberal solution) will remain discredited and shifts in power such as removing Hussein and Arafat (the realist solution) will not change much (see Figure Intro-6).
Figure Intro-6 The Causes of the 9/11 Attacks: From the Identity Perspective
identity perspective: a perspective that emphasizes the causal importance of the ideas and identities of actors, which motivate their use of power and negotiations.
Critical Theory: Pervasive Violence
From a critical theory perspective, the cause of 9/11 is the pervasive and deep-seated violence in the present international system, reflected in the behavior of the United States. As the preeminent power, the United States contributes to if notcreates terrorism through its military presence and imperialism throughout the world and the suppression of alternative cultures and political ideas. It invites radicalism and apocalyptic outcomes. As one radical critic puts it, “The probability of ‘apocalypse soon’... is surely too high... because of Washington’s primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending its historically unique military dominance.”7 American power, ideas, and institutions permeate the system at all levels of analysis, systematically excluding minority groups and driving the system toward violent upheaval and change(see Figure Intro-7).
Figure Intro-7 The Causes of the 9/11 Attacks: From the Critical Theory Perspective
critical theory perspective: a perspective that focuses on deeply embedded forces from all perspectives and levels of analysis.
The Role of Methods
The perspectives and levels of analysis thus help illuminate contemporary foreign policy disputes as well as historical disagreements. They do not substitute for facts; they compel us to collect the facts from different perspectives and levels of analysis. We then make judgments on the basis of the facts (evidence) about which perspective or level of analysis seems to be most persuasive. Because we can never consider all the facts, our judgments remain open to further facts.
Fires burn in and around Saddam Hussein’s Council of Ministers during the first wave of attacks in the “shock and awe” phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 21, 2003, in Baghdad, Iraq. From the critical theory perspective, America’s imperialistic behavior and use of force are the causes of international conflict, not responses to it.
Mirrorpix/Getty Images
In this sense, all knowledge starts with theories. Even the natural sciences use theories to select and interpret facts. Before Galileo, scientists thought about motion only in linear terms, in straight lines from one point to another. Galileo was the first to think about motion in periodic terms, that is, as the back-and-forth motion of a pendulum or the movement of the Earth around the sun. As a result, he discovered and emphasized new facts such as inertia, a precursor to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the force of gravity. The difference between the natural and social sciences is not that social sciences like political science depend on theories and natural sciences do not. They both use scientific methodology, or what we call rationalist methods. The difference lies in the kinds of facts they deal with. The natural sciences deal with facts that do not have minds of their own. Atoms are not self-conscious actors. The social sciences deal with human beings, who do have minds of their own and often change them, and that is what makes social science facts somewhat more elusive. Moreover, in the social sciences we study ourselves. We like and dislike the things we study, such as the political parties we belong to. Natural scientists do not like or dislike atoms. All this means that we need to be more conscious of our perspectives when we deal with social science subjects. We are dealing with people whose perspectives may differ from our own and may change in response to the information we provide. If we ask them questions, they may not understand or answer our questions in the way we expect. And they could always change their minds the minute after they answer a question.
Scholarly theories seek to describe, explain, and predict events. Methods provide rules for testing theories against facts. They allow us to conclude whether our theories or perspectives are consistent with the world out there. But methods are not miracles. They cannot tell us the way the world out there actually is. They can tell us only that the way we are thinking about that world is not falsified by what is out there. The scientific method in the natural sciences faces these same limitations. Newtonian physics, which helps us reach the moon, assumes the universe is made up of fixed bodies, time, and space. Quantum physics, which helps us explode the atom, tells us it is made up of probabilities and relative time and space. Which world is the real world? We don’t know. Physicists search today for a unified theory that subsumes both Newtonian and quantum mechanics. But even if they find it, a rival theory may always be possible.
Rationalist versus Constructivist
In the social sciences, we speak of two general types of methods: rationalist and constructivist.8 Realist and liberal perspectives of international affairs generally employ rationalist methods. Identity perspectives use both rationalist and constructivist methods.
Both methods start by naming or labeling facts. Before we can test whether sunlight causes plant growth or power balancing causes war, we need definitions of sun, sunlight, plants, and growth or power and war. Rationalist methods assume that such labeling can be done in a reasonably objective way; constructivist methods pay more attention to the discourse or subjective language game that produces labels. For example, when U.S. policy makers named the first atomic weapon, they called it Little Boy. Did that reflect a subjective discourse that discriminated against women and fostered male predilections for war?
More important, the two methods differ over whether facts or events cause or constitute one another. Rationalist methods see causation as sequential. One fact or event exists independent of another and precedes or comes before it. The preceding event is cause; the subsequent event is consequence. For example, the sun exists before a plant and drives plant life. Sunlight initiates photosynthesis, producing carbohydrates, the fuel of plant growth. Plants grow and reproduce as a result of the sun’s light. Rationalist methods apply this kind of sequential causation to international affairs. For example, various types of power balances, whether two great powers or multiple great powers exist, precede and cause different types of interactions between states, ranging from cooperation to war. Realist perspectives argue that polarity, the number of great powers in the system, causes or determines the prospects of war.
Unlike rationalist methods, constructivist methods see events as bound together in context, not as separate and sequential occurrences. They fit together not because one causes another but because they mutually cause one another. Social relationships often have this constitutive characteristic. Take, for example, the relationship between a master and a slave. One status does not precede and cause the other. The master, unlike the sun, does not exist before the slave; instead, the master is defined by acquiring a slave, and the slave is defined by succumbing to a master. The two entities appear together chronologically, and one has no meaning without the other. They mutually cause or constitute one another and, in that sense, explain one another. Two things fit together in a given context or situation because they are appropriate to that context. Constructivist methods rely on a logic of appropriateness, whereas rationalist methods rely on a logic of consequence by which one event precedes and causes the other or a logic of argumentation by which one point of view prevails over another.
methods: the formal rules of reason (rationalist) or appropriateness (constructivist) for testing perspectives against facts.
rationalist methods: methods that disaggregate and explain events sequentially as one event preceding and causing a second event.
constructivist methods: methods that see events as a whole as mutually causing or constituting one another rather than causing one another sequentially.
causation: explaining events in terms of one another rather than just describing them.
Sovereignty: Caused or Constituted
For one quick example, let’s explore the question of what facts caused the rise of the legal concept of sovereignty among states in international relations. Social scientists using rationalist methodologies hypothesize that sovereignty was caused by an independent and preceding event, namely, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Monarchs who existed in Europe prior to Westphalia gathered together to assert their independence from the universal Catholic Church, represented by the pope in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. In the treaty, they established (caused) the practice of sovereignty, legal recognition of their rights to decide all matters domestically and their responsibilities to respect similar rights of other monarchs. Social scientists using constructivist methodologies hypothesize that sovereignty emerged from a network of developments taking place over the course of an earlier historical period and, most important, “a change... in the basic structure of property rights,” which came about through a newly interdependent international society.9 Before the seventeenth century, monarchs held property in common as local members of a single universal community known as the Holy Roman Empire. By the end of the seventeenth century, they possessed territory separately and exclusively. How did this change in the understanding of property rights come about? Not by one prior thing causing another subsequent one, but by a combination of factors—population pressures, diminishing returns to land, a widening of trade, and institutional innovations—that accelerated the growth of international social relationships. Notice how constructivist methods explain things in terms of broad context and appropriateness (at some point, sovereignty and states seemed appropriate to the situation) and how, in this example, ideas—a new conception of property rights—altered institutions and power rather than the reverse (identity over liberal and realist perspectives).
Correlation, Causation, and Process Tracing
Rationalist methods separate events from context and examine many cases to find patterns of correlation among them. Some rationalist methods become formalistic and mathematical. Because statistical studies show that wars seldom, if ever, occur among democracies, rationalist methodologies conclude that democracies do not go to war with one another. Correlation is not the same as causation, however. Correlation tells us only that democracy and the absence of war appear together across many cases. It does not tell us whether democracy causes no war (an identity explanation) or no war causes democracy (a realist explanation if no war is a result of successful balancing and peace; a liberal explanation if no war is a consequence of cooperation and international institutions). Nor does it tell us that the two variables appearing together, such as democracy and no war, may not be caused by a host of other factors or variables that we have not considered. Called exogenous variables, these omitted variables lie outside the theoretical framework. They contrast with endogenous variables, which are included in the framework.
What is more, all these factors may be interrelated with one another. To move from correlation to causation requires a method known as process tracing, which examines events historically and in context to trace how different variables interact with one another. Does one variable appear in time before the other and thus can be said to cause it? Constructivist methods assume that we cannot separate variables in sequence or time. We have to substantiate all the facts through a thick description or narrative of the repetitive practices and interactions through which they emerge. Constructivist methods offer plausible rather than predictive explanations. They call attention to how situations might be interpreted rather than replicated and sensitize us to future possibilities rather than make precise predictions. Thus, constructivist studies might conclude that the peace among democracies is hard to separate from the deeply embedded structure of American and British culture in the contemporary world and may be a consequence of unique rather than replicable factors that can be applied to future situations.
correlation: a situation in which one fact or event occurs in the same context as another fact or event but is not necessarily linked to or caused by it.
exogenous variables: autonomous factors that come from outside a theoretical model or system and that cannot be explained by the system.
endogenous variables: causal variables that are included in a theoretical model or framework.
process tracing: a method of connecting events in sequence to identify cause and effect.
Counterfactual Reasoning
Both rationalist and constructivist methods use what we call counterfactual reasoning. The counterfactual of the claim “Event A caused Event B” is to ask, “If Event A had not happened, would Event B have happened?” History appears to have a single outcome because we look back on events that have already occurred. It appears to be factual. But we know that along the way many choices were made. With each choice, history took one path and abandoned others. Maybe a war of some sort was going to happen in the early twentieth century. But it did not have to begin in July 1914, and it did not have to cost twenty million lives. How do we determine what choices or paths were not taken and use that knowledge to judge the present circumstances? We ask counterfactual questions. What if Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary had not been assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914, the triggering event for the start of World War I? What if Germany had not had a military plan to fight a war at the same time against both Russia and France? What if the United States had given United Nations weapons inspectors more time in 2003 to do their work in Iraq? We make educated guesses about alternative paths that history might have taken, and that helps us look for missing facts and test alternative explanations.
counterfactual reasoning: a method of testing claims for causality by asking what might have happened if one event had not occurred.
Is One Perspective or Method Best?
Is one perspective or method better than another? Perhaps, but there is no general consensus among specialists and, like all other analysts and even professors, you will eventually have to make a judgment for yourself.10 This book will familiarize you with the arguments of each perspective and method and thus help you decide which one works better for a given set of facts and circumstances.
The realist perspective may have certain advantages in situations of greater threat. When someone draws a gun on you, you tend not to ask what that person believes (an identity approach) or whether you can refer the dispute to a court or institution (a liberal solution). You duck or fight back to even up the balance of power if you can. But how do you determine situations of greater threat? Often a threat is not obvious. It depends on what you are looking for. So the realist perspective, it is sometimes argued, may exaggerate threat.
The liberal perspective may be better at finding ways to cooperate. Long before someone draws a gun on you, you try to find out what is aggravating that person and negotiate a compromise or alleviate the circumstances, such as poverty or lack of education, that may be driving him or her to violence. But what if the individual intends all along to harm you, not because of anything you do or he or she doesn’t have but just because this person doesn’t like you (an identity cause)? You may be compromising with someone who will take advantage of you later (a realist possibility). How do you protect yourself? So the liberal perspective, it is sometimes argued, may risk exposure to unanticipated dangers.
The identity perspective may be best at distinguishing between potential allies and enemies. It looks for similarities or differences in collective and individual self-images and asks how these self-images get constructed. If identities can be brought closer together, you might be more willing to risk cooperation (for example, if it’s your brother who pulls the gun on you). If identities diverge, you might prefer to protect yourself. But how do you manage relations with an enemy country to avoid war and maybe mutual destruction? Don’t you have to risk cooperation, even or especially with enemies? And what about friends? Don’t they sometimes change and become enemies? Maybe the identity perspective is too categorical—some would say ideological—and leads to more fear or more complacency than power disparities or opportunities for compromise might otherwise prescribe.
This book presents and discusses the different perspectives (and methods) evenhandedly. Through this approach, each perspective, in effect, critiques the others. What the realist perspective relatively de-emphasizes—for example, the roles of institutions and ideas—the liberal and identity perspectives emphasize. What the liberal perspective de-emphasizes—for example, the roles of power and ideas—the realist and identity perspectives emphasize. And so on. Thus, when we discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis or terrorist attacks from the four different perspectives, we see the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective. We can keep an open mind toward each perspective rather than being told at the outset that this or that perspective is best.
Many studies of international affairs deliberately exclude alternative explanations. Professor Sean Wilentz, for example, places the burden of judgment on the reader: “I reject... the now fashionable claim that objectivity involves reporting all views or interpretations equally. Objectivity instead involves judging validity for oneself, fairly, and then inviting others to consider and argue the evidence, logic, and fairness on which that judgment is based.”11 This textbook will help you develop that capacity to judge validity for yourself, first, by making you aware that you have a preferred point of view and, second, by keeping you open to alternative points of view. This is healthy. Too much contemporary debate about international affairs is personalized and vitriolic. People label one another wicked or stupid instead of listening carefully to one another. Once we are used to thinking in terms of alternative perspectives, we may become more patient and generous in our debates with fellow citizens. We may concede that they are just as well meaning and smart as we are but may be judging the world from different perspectives or levels of analysis.
The Role of Judgment
There will always be differences and controversies in international affairs. As noted above, scholars still disagree about the causes of World War I. Contemporary controversies are no different. Take the war in Iraq in 2003. Did Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)? At the time the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, the major intelligence services around the world in the United States, France, Russia, China, Great Britain, and Australia thought he did, particularly biological and chemical weapons.12 UN inspectors thought so as well. After the invasion, however, no weapons were found. Was that simply a case of bad intelligence? To some extent, no doubt it was. On the other hand, decision makers never act on the basis of perfect information. They have to rely on conjecture and judgment. As the Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland writes: “Most of the time you are not going to have perfect knowledge for making decisions. If you look at the way Saddam Hussein acted, any reasonable person would have concluded that he was hiding those weapons, just from what he said and did. The key point is always going to be the judgment you then make from what is almost always imperfect intelligence.”13
After we have assembled all the facts and done all the testing of perspectives we have time for, judgment comes into play. This is especially true in policy making, where time is always a pressing factor. We make decisions on the basis of some broader judgment about what we think makes sense. What is judgment? Is it instinct? Is it experience? Is it character? It is probably all these. Whatever it is, it is different from facts and tested knowledge, yet it does not substitute for them. The best judgment, we say, is informed judgment—judgment enriched by facts and accumulated knowledge.
Thus, judgment is indispensable for good statesmanship as well as good scholarship. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice, once described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a man with “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.”14 Many said the same thing about President Ronald Reagan. Neither man had a brilliant mind, yet, arguably, these two men were the greatest American presidents of the twentieth century. They had first-class personalities and instincts; they were excellent judges of people and events. As The Economist observed on Reagan’s death in June 2004, Reagan knew “that mere reason, essential though it is, is only half of the business of reaching momentous decisions. You also need solid-based instincts, feelings, whatever the word is for the other part of the mind. ‘I have a gut feeling,’ Reagan said over and over again, when he was working out what to say or do.”15 A gut feeling without facts is ignorance, but incomplete knowledge without a gut feeling is often useless, especially under time constraints.
judgment: the broader assessment of what makes sense after one accumulates as many facts and tests as many perspectives as possible.
The Role of Ethics and Morality
Judgment is part of character, and character in turn is guided by ethics and morality. Because judgment plays a role in decision making, personal honesty is very important in intellectual and human affairs more generally—which is why we emphasize it in academic and other activities. What are our obligations to one another as human beings and to the world we inhabit? Ethics and morality deal with standards of right conduct and behavior—what we ought to do, not what we need, can, or prefer to do. Thus ethics and morality go beyond mere facts and perspectives. They involve what we believe, not what we want, have, or know. Belief often delves into intangible, maybe religious, worlds that we cannot access or test through logical or scientific means. But that does not mean that ethics and morality are incompatible with the material world. Indeed, ethical and moral beliefs are essential guides for directing contemporary scientific and technological debates. The question of what we do with nuclear technology or with the technology used to clone human beings involves moral and ethical dilemmas. In international affairs, we can distinguish three broad views about ethics and morality: relativism, universalism, and pragmatism.16
Relativist Values
Relativism holds that all truth is relative. There are no universal moral principles that apply to all people under all circumstances. Each culture or religion is entitled to its own view of truth. Because relativists do not believe in an ultimate truth, they are willing to tolerate multiple truths. Their attitude is “live and let live”—respect all views of ethics, morality, and religion. This became the moral view, at least within Christendom, in the seventeenth century. Protestants and Catholics who had been fighting one another for more than a hundred years decided to tolerate one another and agreed in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to respect the right of each sovereign to choose the religion for his or her own country. Sovereignty meant that each sovereign, and subsequently each state, agreed not to interfere in the domestic life—meaning, at that time, religion—of other sovereigns. This principle of nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other states remains enshrined today in the Charter of the United Nations. It now accommodates a world of diverse religions, going beyond Christianity. But such moral relativism, taken to an extreme, could also accommodate genocide—the purposeful slaughter of human beings because of their race, religion, or ethnicity—because there are no moral absolutes or prohibitions to condemn it. Shouldn’t it be possible to proscribe morally the slaughter of Jews in Germany, Muslims in Bosnia, and Tutsis in Rwanda under all circumstances at all times?
ethics and morality: standards of good conduct for human behavior.
relativism: a position that holds that truth and morality are relative to each individual or culture and that one should “live and let live.”
Universal Values
Universalism rejects relativism and argues that some absolute moral principles apply to all people in all countries at all times. After World War II and the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe, many decided that genocide should never happen again, that the world community has a moral obligation to prevent or stop it. Thus, the United Nations has evolved a standard of humanitarian intervention that directly contradicts the organization’s charter. Kofi Annan, then secretary-general of the United Nations, framed the contradiction this way: even though the UN Charter rules out intervention in the domestic affairs of states, “is it permissible to let gross and systematic violations of human rights, with grave humanitarian consequences, continue unchecked?”17 The international community may be moving beyond Westphalia’s relativist morality and insisting that there are universal standards of basic human rights that all states, whatever their cultural or moral beliefs, must follow. But where do we draw the line? Saddam Hussein grossly violated the human rights of the citizens of Iraq, yet neither the United Nations nor the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) authorized the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Was the United States nevertheless right to intervene based on universal standards of human rights? If so, how do we know whose standards are the universal ones?
universalism: a position that holds that truth and morality are universal and cannot be adjusted to specific circumstances.
Pragmatic Values
Pragmatism offers a third point of view. Pragmatists answer the question of whether to intervene based on certain practical requirements, such as preserving stability or not setting a precedent. That is, they ask, will an intervention create disproportionate consequences that actually reduce world solidarity, and will an intervention set a standard that encourages repeated future interventions? U.S. intervention in Iraq, pragmatists might argue, increased rather than reduced the scale of violence. Moreover, the U.S. action sanctioned the doctrine of preemption, attacking another state after you see it preparing to attack you, or, worse, the doctrine of prevention, attacking another state before you see any preparations because you fear it may attack you at some point in the future. Whether Iraq was an imminent threat was much disputed at the time. But some pragmatists might conclude that the threat was not imminent and that America’s intervention encouraged further repeated interventions in the future. Pragmatists look to the immediate circumstances surrounding the action and ask whether intervention minimizes instability in that situation while at the same time securing whatever just outcome is possible. Pragmatism does not abandon a notion of universal morality but opposes the application of a single morality at all times in all places. It is willing to compromise, even though compromise, repeated too often, risks slipping into relativism.
pragmatism: the idea that morality is proportionate to what is possible and causes the least harm.
Moral Choice
A simple story illustrates the differences among these moral views.18 An officer and a small group of soldiers involved in war enter a village that enemy forces recently occupied. Overnight, one soldier is killed by a single shot. The next morning, the officer assembles the village residents and asks who shot the soldier. The villagers remain silent. The officer then announces that he will randomly select and kill three villagers in retaliation for this atrocity. You are a member of the officer’s group. What should you do?
If you are a relativist, you will not object. Each side has its own standards of morality. If the other side can justify killing you, certainly you can justify killing them. Killing three people instead of one sets an example in a situation where force is the only arbiter of order because there is no common morality.
If you are a universalist, you will object. No one can kill innocent villagers under any circumstances at any time. To do so may be committing a war crime. So you say to the officer, “This is wrong; you can’t do it.” At this point, the officer turns to you and says, “OK, you shoot one, and I’ll let the other two go.” As a universalist, you still have to say no because it is wrong to kill innocent people, whether the number is one or three. You may go on to report the incident as a war crime if you are not arrested for disobeying an order.
If you are a pragmatist, however, you might accept the officer’s offer and shoot one villager, thereby saving the lives of two others. For the pragmatist, killing three villagers would be disproportionate because only one person on your side was killed and the disproportionate retaliation might encourage further arbitrary killing. Killing one innocent villager is still immoral, but the pragmatist minimizes the violence and sets a standard—tit for tat, not triple tit for tat—that potentially limits a chain of future retaliations.
Summary
Figure Intro-8 shows how the various elements covered in this introduction about how we study and understand international affairs fit together. We start with perspectives because we could not start at all if we tried to consider all at once the many facts that make up world affairs. We theorize about what causes events and select or consider as many facts as we can from the different levels of analysis. Then we test our perspective against other perspectives using rationalist or constructivist methods or some combination of the two. Finally, we draw conclusions based on how the causal arrows run and which perspective and level of analysis seems to be primary, relying on judgment, ethics, and morality to fill in the gaps that analysis inevitably leaves.
Figure Intro-8 How One Thinks about International Relations
Want a better grade?
Get the tools you need to sharpen your study skills. Access practice quizzes, eFlashcards, video, and multimedia at edge.sagepub.com/nau5e
Key Concepts
causal arrow, 4
causation, 20
constructivist methods, 20
correlation, 21
counterfactual reasoning, 22
critical theory perspective, 18
endogenous variables, 21
ethics and morality, 24
exogenous variables, 21
ideal types, 12
identity perspective, 17
judgment, 24
level of analysis, 4
liberal perspective, 16
methods, 19
perspective, 4
pragmatism, 26
process tracing, 21
rationalist methods, 20
realist perspective, 14
relativism, 25
universalism, 25
Study Questions
Why is one event considered front-page news but not another?
Do you think terrorism is caused by American military dominance or American diplomacy? Which answer reflects the realist perspective? Which reflects the liberal perspective?
How would you test the perspective that American military dominance is the cause of terrorism—by measuring relative power over different periods or by examining the social purposes of American foreign policy embedded in specific historical circumstances? Which method is rationalist, and which is constructivist?
Do you believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq was wrong because it violated Iraq’s independence or right because it ended genocide in Iraq? Which argument is relativist, and which is universalist?
Why is history relevant to what is
(Nau 1-28)
Nau, Henry R. Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas, 5th Edition. CQ Press, 20160105. VitalBook file.
The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.
1 How to Think about International Relations Perspectives and Levels of Analysis
We study the world together from many different analytical perspectives and social settings.
Oli Scarff/Getty Images
What are the differences among the following statements?
The rise of German power caused World War I.
Kaiser Wilhelm II’s clumsy diplomacy caused World War I.
Germany’s militarist ideology, which glorified aggressive war, caused World War I.
Capitalist class conflicts caused World War I.
The statements offer different explanations of the causes of World War I, which we explore more fully in Chapter 3. The purpose of examining them here is to help you see that these explanations come from different perspectives and levels of analysis. As already noted, we cannot describe everything in international affairs. Perspectives on international relations help us make selections. They point us in certain directions to find facts, and they order these facts differently to explain events. One fact becomes the cause or independent variable; a second fact becomes the effect or dependent variable. Or, in the case of constructivist methods, two facts mutually cause or constitute one another.
Some political scientists like to say we start with a puzzle, but in truth perspective comes first, because we do not have a puzzle until we cannot explain something, and that requires an already existing perspective. The occurrence of war, for example, is not a puzzle unless we expect peace. So we formulate hypotheses from the different perspectives, and then we look at the facts from all levels of analysis to test our hypotheses. Often we go back and forth between the hypotheses and the evidence many times, refining our analysis. Then we make judgments about which perspective and level of analysis are most important in a specific case. We draw the causal arrows showing how one perspective and one level of analysis dominate the others. As Professor Thomas Risse says, we see “how far one can push one logic of action [perspective] to account for observable practices [levels of analysis] and which logic [causal arrows] dominates a given situation.”1
The realist perspective focuses on separate actors and military conflict and the role that state-based actors play in it and argues that the relative distribution of power among actors in international affairs is the most important cause of war. When one actor becomes too powerful, the other actors feel threatened. They form alliances to counterbalance the first actor, and that can lead to tension and war. Did this happen before World War I? The realist perspective says it did. The rise of German power (see Statement 1) upset the relative distribution of power among states in Europe and set in motion a security competition that eventually caused World War I. The liberal perspective focuses on global society and international institutions and argues that the reciprocal process and quality of interactions and negotiations among actors have more to do with peace and war than does the relative power of separate actors. If actors lack sufficient social and economic connections to enable them to build trust, or institutions do not provide clear rules and sufficient information for communicating effectively, war may result. This perspective looks at the facts before World War I and finds that the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was not a trustworthy actor and caused the war by provoking unnecessary rivalries, especially with Great Britain (see Statement 2). The identity perspective focuses on ideas and norms and argues that the way actors think about themselves and others—their identities—influences their international behavior more than do specific institutions or power disparities. This perspective holds that countries with aggressive self-images are more inclined to go to war and finds that prior to World War I Germany had just such a domestic ideology of military aggressiveness, which caused conflict with its neighbors (see Statement 3). The critical theory perspective focuses on deep-seated forces driving history and, in the case of Marxist-Leninism, sees World War I as rooted in the capitalist forces of economic production, which generate social conflicts between capitalist and proletariat classes (see Statement 4).
Explanations also differ regarding the levels of analysis from which events originate. Perspectives tell us what the substance of the cause is—power, institutions, or ideas; levels of analysis tell us where the cause is coming from—individual leader, domestic factors or systemic structure. Statement 1 sees the cause of war as coming from the systemic level, the relationship of states to one another in the international system as a whole. The rapid rise of German power relative to that of all other states in Europe caused instability and war. Germany’s position in the system was the source of instability. The domestic characteristics of Germany and its leaders did not matter as much; any country rising in power relative to other countries would have caused the same instability. This is why some realists today worry about the rise of China. This type of explanation we call a systemic structural level of analysis.
Statement 2 sees the cause of war as coming from a specific leader: Kaiser Wilhelm II’s bad diplomacy caused the war. If someone else had been in charge of Germany under the same historical circumstances, war might not have occurred. This is a more specific level of analysis. We call it the individual or, alternatively, decision-making level of analysis because the primary causes come from the leaders themselves. Sometimes, however, leaders decide to exploit international events to stay in power at the decision-making level—for example, a leader may choose to go to war to rally the country around the existing government. In that case, the decision-making level connects foreign and domestic causes and becomes the foreign policy level of analysis. Now, Kaiser Wilhelm’s incompetence at the individual level of analysis is less the cause than his desire at the foreign policy level to use war to shore up domestic support for his monarchy.
Statement 3 argues that Germany’s militarist ideology, which caused war, came from the nature of Germany’s domestic system, not the relative rise of German power or Kaiser Wilhelm II’s inept diplomacy. In such a domestic system, any leader would have behaved in the same way, regardless of individual and decision-making factors or international systemic conditions. This type of explanation comes from the domestic level of analysis. Finally, Statement 4 sees the cause of war coming not from any specific level of analysis but from deep-seated historical forces that tie together leaders, classes, states, and international developments.
Our task in this chapter is to explain these differences. They are a function of the different perspectives, levels of analysis, and the ways the causal arrows run between perspectives and levels of analysis. At the end of the chapter, after we have developed these tools for understanding international affairs, we revisit the statements about the causes of World War I.
We start by using the story of the prisoner’s dilemma and various modifications of this story to highlight the different ways the three core perspectives—realist, liberal, and identity—view the same facts. The perspectives look at the same story but make different assumptions about it—what the situation is, how the prisoners interact, and who the prisoners are. As we will see, the realist perspective places primary emphasis on the external situation in which the prisoners find themselves and over which they have no control. This environment in turn dictates how they relate to one another (liberal perspective) and their respective images (identity perspective). The liberal perspective places more emphasis on how the prisoners relate to one another and expects that their repeated interactions in turn eventually override the influences of external (realist) and internal (identity) factors. The identity perspective draws primary attention to who the prisoners are rather than the situation they face or the interactions they undertake. Their identities determine how they evaluate the situation (realist) and behave toward one another (liberal).2
Prisoner’s Dilemma
The basic prisoner’s dilemma story is simple. Two individuals are caught with illegal drugs in their possession. Police authorities suspect that one or both of them may be drug dealers but do not have enough evidence to prove it. So the warden in the prison where the individuals are being held creates a situation to try to get them to squeal on one another. The warden tells each prisoner separately that if he squeals on the other prisoner he can go free; the accused prisoner will then be put away as a drug dealer for twenty-five years. If the other prisoner also squeals, each prisoner gets ten years in prison. On the other hand, if both prisoners remain silent, each will get only one year in prison because there is no further evidence to convict them. The prisoners do not know one another and are not allowed to communicate. Table 1-1 illustrates the choices and outcomes.
Now, let’s look at how each perspective analyzes this situation. In this case, as in many real-world cases, the perspectives consider more or less the same facts, but they focus on different facts and order them differently the direction of the causal arrows.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma from the Realist Perspective
The individual prisoner’s dilemma as seen from the realist perspective is the following. If actor A remains silent, in effect cooperating with his fellow prisoner, he gets either one year in prison if the other prisoner also remains silent (see upper left box in Table 1-1) or twenty-five years if the other prisoner squeals (lower left box). On the other hand, if actor A squeals, he may either go free if the other prisoner remains silent (see upper right box) or get a sentence of ten years in prison if the other prisoner also squeals (lower right box). Assuming the prisoner’s top priority is to go free, it would be logical for him to squeal. But if both squeal, they get ten years each in jail, a worse outcome than if both remained silent (one year in jail for each) but not as bad as the outcome for one prisoner who remains silent while the other squeals (twenty-five years). The point of the story is that each prisoner cannot achieve either his preferred outcome of going free or his second-best goal of only one year in prison because circumstances outside the control of the prisoner—the various consequences or payoffs of the different choices set up by the warden—make squealing the less risky alternative. Each settles for a second-worse outcome (ten years) to avoid the worst one (twenty-five years).
Notice how the outcomes are ordered for each actor: DC > CC > DD > CD. If this order changes, the game changes. See subsequent tables.
The realist perspective argues that this sort of dilemma defines the logic of many situations in international affairs. Countries desire peace (analogous to cooperating) and do not want to arm or threaten other countries (analogous to squealing). They prefer less risky or more peaceful strategies such as mutual disarmament (analogous to cooperating and staying only one year in prison). But one country cannot disarm (cooperate) without risking the possibility that the other country may arm (defect) and perhaps seize territory or take away the first country’s sovereignty, eliminating its independence and, if it is a democratic state, its freedom as well (analogous to the maximum penalty of twenty-five years). In the case of territory, the situation is what political scientists call zero-sum. What one country gains, the other loses. Notice that the country that arms is not aggressive. It is just looking for the best outcome, and if it arms and the other country does not, it is safer than it would be otherwise. The situation is set up such that each party cannot have peace (going free or spending one year in prison) without risking loss of territory or sovereignty (twenty-five years in prison). If both countries arm, on the other hand, they can protect their territory and sovereignty but now risk the possibility of mutual harm and war. Because the possibility of war is less risky (equivalent to ten years in prison) than the actual loss of territory, let alone sovereignty (or democracy), they squeal or defect.
Thus, from the realist perspective much of international relations is about mutual armaments and conflict. As Figure 1-1 shows, the causal arrows run from competition to survive (go free) in an environment that is decentralized and largely outside the control of the actors, to increasing distrust and inability to cooperate, to self-images of one another as enemies.
Figure 1-1 Causal Arrows: The Realist View
prisoner’s dilemma: a game in which two prisoners rationally choose not to cooperate in order to avoid even worse outcomes.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma from the Liberal Perspective
The liberal perspective argues that situations described by the prisoner’s dilemma do exist in international affairs but that these situations are not the only or even most prevalent ones and can be overcome. Three factors that realism de-emphasizes help surmount these situations and change the prisoner’s dilemma to a more cooperative game: repeated reciprocal interactions or communications, common goals, and technological change. In the original game, the prisoners are not allowed to communicate and build trust; they play the game only once. What if they were allowed to play the game over and over again, the equivalent of meeting regularly in the prison yard to exchange moves and perhaps make small talk? It’s not so much the content of what they say that produces trust (after all, familiarity may breed contempt, not cooperation, as a realist perspective would argue) but, rather, the mere fact that they play the game over and over again. In game theory, this is called creating the shadow of the future, that is, the expectation that the prisoners will have to deal with one another again and again—tomorrow, the day after, and every day in the future. As long as the prisoners can avoid the expectation that they will not meet again—what game theory calls the last move, equivalent to playing the game only once—they might gain enough trust in one another over time to discount significantly the possibility that the other prisoner will defect if the first prisoner remains silent. Now, as Table 1-2 shows, they end up in the upper left box—the second-best outcome of a one-year sentence—rather than the lower right one. The liberal perspective expects that if countries develop habits of regular interaction and communication through diplomacy, membership in common institutions, trade, tourism, and other exchanges, they can overcome the security dilemma that drives mutual armament and conflict.
In this game, the prisoners face the same payoffs and goals as in the original game, but we assume A and B can communicate repeatedly. They meet for one hour in the prison yard each day. This interaction becomes patterned and institutionalized and establishes a “shadow of the future.”
What is more, according to the liberal perspective, many goals in international relations are common and mutually beneficial, not self-interested and conflicting, such as the zero-sum view of territory emphasized by the realist perspective. Countries seek to grow rich together or protect the environment together. These goals are non-zero-sum. Both sides gain, albeit perhaps not equally.
So what if we change our assumptions about the goals of the prisoners in the original version of the prisoner’s dilemma? Let’s say the prisoners are less interested in going free than they are in frustrating the warden by reducing the total number of years the warden is able to hold the prisoners in jail. Now the prisoners have a common goal, not a self-interested one. Nothing else in the situation changes, but notice how the outcome of the game changes. As Table 1-3 shows, the logical choice that now meets the goal of both prisoners is to remain silent (upper left box). That gives the warden only two prisoner years (one year for each prisoner), while squealing by one or both prisoners gives the warden twenty-five or twenty (ten years each) prisoner years, respectively. The prisoners still can’t influence the warden. He is outside their control. But now both prisoners can get their second-best outcome simultaneously by cooperating.3
An example of this situation from the real world may be two countries trading to increase wealth for both (non-zero-sum) rather than fighting over territory that only one can gain (zero-sum). Look at how the countries of the European Union have overcome historical disputes over territory by building a common trade and economic union (liberal), which reduces the significance of relative military power (realist) and engenders a common European identity (identity).
In this game, the prisoners face the same payoffs as in the original game, but the goals have changed. Notice that the new goal of frustrating the warden rather than going free is non-zero-sum because both prisoners can now get their best outcome simultaneously.
Further, what if the warden changes the payoffs, or consequences, of the original game? For example, if both prisoners squeal, that should give the warden enough evidence to convict them both as drug dealers and now, let’s say, put them to death. Table 1-4 shows the new game. All we have done is increase the most severe cost of defecting from twenty-five years to death. That might be the equivalent in international affairs of a technological change, such as developing nuclear weapons, that raises the penalty of arms races and war. Nuclear weapons increase the dangers of mutual armament by states just as the death penalty increases the cost of mutual defection by the prisoners. Now the actors no longer have a dominant strategy to defect, as in the original game. Each knows that defecting carries the risk of death, the worst outcome; both would prefer to cooperate. But each still wants most to go free (remain independent), and each can achieve that outcome only by defecting. So the actors are torn between the two strategies depicted by the upper right and lower left boxes: defecting if the other actor cooperates (and going free) or cooperating if the other actor defects (and getting twenty-five years). Much depends on what each actor thinks the other will do. While the prospects of both cooperating and ending up in the upper left-hand box are not assured, they have improved somewhat over the original game. The scale tips toward cooperation. The cost of twenty-five years in prison if the other prisoner does not cooperate is still less than that of death.4
The warden increases the cost of defection and hence changes the order of preferences for each of the prisoners: DC > CC > CD > DD (different from the original order: DC > CC > DD > CD).
Technological change may work the other way, of course. It may reduce the costs or increase the benefits of cooperating rather than increase the costs of defecting. Let’s go back to the original game and reduce the cost of remaining silent if the other prisoner squeals, from twenty-five to five years. Now, as Table 1-5 illustrates, the prisoners risk less if they cooperate (five years) than if they squeal (ten years). Their preferred strategies again are the upper right and lower left boxes. But now, because they risk only five years in prison if they guess wrong about what the other party will do, the prospects of cooperating are better than in the original game. A real-world example of reducing the costs or increasing the benefits of cooperation might be technological advances that make the prospects of ballistic missile defense more feasible. If all countries possessed such defenses, they may be more willing to cooperate in a nuclear crisis. If the other country defects and attacks, the first country can defend itself and not lose as much (the equivalent of getting five years) as it might if it also attacked (the equivalent of getting ten years).
The warden reduces the costs of cooperation and hence the order of preferences for each actor: DC > CC > CD > DD (different from the original order: DC > CC > DD > CD).
In all these ways—repeated communication and diplomacy, focusing on common rather than conflicting goals, and exploiting technological changes that alter payoffs in favor of cooperation—the liberal perspective argues that realist logic can be overcome. As Figure 1-2 shows, the causal arrows run from repeated interactions and a focus on common objectives and technology, to less incentive to arm and compete using relative military and economic power, to increasing trust and converging identities among the actors.
Figure 1-2 Causal Arrows: The Liberal View
The Prisoner’s Dilemma from the Identity Perspective
The identity perspective takes still another tack on the situation described by the original prisoner’s dilemma game. It challenges the implicit assumption that the prisoners have independent identities and receive payoffs that are exclusive of one another. If the identities and payoffs were more common and interdependent, the two prisoners would seek to maximize joint scores. What if, for example, the two prisoners knew that they were both members of the Mafia? Members of the Mafia, an underground criminal organization, take a blood oath that they will never squeal on other members of the organization or reveal anything about its criminal activities. This oath becomes part of their identity. The prisoners now remain silent because of who they are. They may also remain silent, of course, because they fear that someone else in the Mafia will kill them if they squeal. But, in that case, the scenario mimics a realist situation because their behavior is determined by external circumstances they cannot control. In the case as seen from the identity perspective, they do not squeal because their obedience to the Mafia code has been internalized and is now part of their identity. If each prisoner knows that the other prisoner is also a member of the Mafia, he is unlikely to squeal on the other. No feature of the game has changed except that the prisoners now know they have similar or shared identities. Yet, as Table 1-6 shows, the outcome of the game changes substantially. It is now logical for the two prisoners to remain silent and get off with only one year each in prison.
In this game, the prisoners are back to the original payoffs and goals and share no communications except knowledge of the other’s identity. Assume that A and B are not self-interested actors but members of a common organization—such as the Mafia—and know that about one another.
Figure 1-3 Causal Arrows: The Identity View
In the same way, the identity perspective argues that two countries may behave differently depending on their identities. They may see one another as enemies, rivals, or friends, depending on the way their identities are individually and socially constructed. Or their identities may converge or diverge with one another depending on how similar or different these identities are. Thus, democracies behave more peacefully toward one another than they do toward autocracies, and countries that identify with common international norms and ideas behave differently than those that see themselves struggling over the balance of power. As Figure 1-3 shows, the causal arrows in the identity perspective run from converging or conflicting self-images (identity), to more or less cooperation (liberal), to the need or lack of need for military and economic power (realist).
Let’s leave the game metaphor and develop these three perspectives in the real world. The sections that follow introduce numerous concepts, many of which will be new to you. Don’t despair. We will revisit these concepts again and again and use them throughout the rest of the book to help you see how they work in our understanding of historical and contemporary international affairs.
The Realist Perspective
Refer back to Figure 1-1. It depicts the directions of the causal arrows in the realist perspective. They run from competition to survive in a decentralized environment to limits on trust and hence cooperation among participants to perception of self and others as friends or enemies. In this section, we break down the component parts of this realist logic.
The realist perspective focuses on conflict and war, not because people adopting this perspective favor war or believe war is necessary, but because they hope by studying war they might avoid it in the future. War, according to the realist perspective, is a consequence of anarchy, the decentralized distribution of power in the international system. In anarchic situations, actors have to rely on self-help to defend themselves; unilateralism or minilateralism is necessary because there is no reliable central, multilateral power they can appeal to. So, throughout history, wherever anarchy existed, individuals, tribes, clans, villages, towns, and provinces had to provide for their own security. Today the state is the principal actor authorized to use military and other forms of power to protect security. The state enjoys sovereignty, meaning no other actor can exert legitimate power over it or intervene in its domestic affairs. In pursuing power and sovereignty, however, states inevitably threaten one another. Is one state arming to defend itself or to attack another state? States cannot be sure about other states’ intentions. They face a security dilemma similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. If one state arms and another doesn’t, the second one may lose its security. To cope with that dilemma, both states defect and pursue a balance of power. They form alliances against any country that becomes so strong it might threaten the survival of the others. The number of great power states or alliances involved in the balance of power constitutes the polarity of the system. Two great powers or alliances form a bipolar system, three form a tripolar system, and four or more form a multipolar system. Different system polarities produce different propensities toward war.
Let’s look a little closer at the key concepts, italicized above, of a realist perspective on world affairs. These concepts appear again in boldface below where they are more succinctly defined.
Anarchy and Self-Help
From a realist perspective, the distribution of power is always decentralized. This fact of international life is referred to as anarchy. The word means no leader or center, as opposed to monarchy (or empire), which means one leader or center, and polyarchy, which means several overlapping leaders or centers, such as the shared authority of the individual states and the European Union in contemporary Europe. In the world today, anarchy means there is no leader or center of authority that monopolizes coercive power and has the legitimacy to use it. The United States may be the only world superpower, but, as the Iraq War suggests, the rest of the world does not recognize its legitimacy to use that power as a world government, not in the same sense that citizens of a particular country recognize the legitimacy of the domestic government to monopolize and use coercive power. No world government exists with the authority of a domestic government, and no world police force exists with the authority of a national police or military force. In short, there is no world 911. If you get in trouble abroad, there is no one to call for help, no one except your own clan, tribe, or state. If a student from the United States is arrested in Singapore, for example, the student calls the U.S. embassy in Singapore, not the United Nations in New York. Similarly, if a country is attacked, it provides its own defense or calls on allies. It is not likely to depend on international organizations.
Anarchy places a premium on self-help, which means that whatever the size or nature of the actor in any historical period—whether it is a tribe, city-state, or nation-state—it has to provide for its own protection or it risks succumbing to another actor. The size or nature of the actor may change over time. Some states unite into a larger state like Germany in the nineteenth century, while others break up into multiple states like the Soviet Union. But the condition of anarchy and the need for self-help do not change. Unless the world eventually unites under a single government that all the peoples of the world recognize as the sole legitimate center of military power, decentralized actors will be responsible for their own security. Realist approaches, therefore, often favor unilateralism or minilateralism—action by one or several states—rather than action by all states (multilateralism).
anarchy: the decentralized distribution of power in the international system; no leader or center to monopolize power.
self-help: the principle of self-defense under anarchy in which states have no one to rely on to defend their security except themselves.
unilateralism or minilateralism: action by one or several states but not by all states.
State Actors and Sovereignty
Because the realist perspective is especially interested in conflict and war, realist scholars find it more important to study states than nonstate actors. States command the greatest military and police forces to make war. Corporations, labor unions, and human rights groups do not. Even terrorist groups command far less military power than states. Where groups other than states use military-style force—for example, terrorists or private security forces defending corporate properties overseas—these groups are not recognized by domestic authorities or international institutions as having the right or legitimacy to do so. Only states have that right. They possess what is called sovereignty. Sovereignty means that there is no higher authority above them abroad or beneath them at home. It implies self-determination at home and nonintervention abroad—that is, agreeing not to intervene in the domestic affairs or jurisdictions of other states.
How do actors acquire sovereignty? When territorial states emerged in Europe during the period from 1000 to 1500 c.e.,5 they had to demonstrate that they could establish and defend their borders. Once a state monopolized force within its borders and mobilized that force to defend its borders, it was recognized by other states. As power changes, therefore, the principal actors in international politics change. Nonstate actors can become state actors, and state actors can dissolve or evolve. For example, the Muslim population in Kosovo, formerly a minority nonstate actor in the country of Serbia, became an independent state, recognized by the United Nations and more than one hundred other states. Conversely, the Soviet Union disappeared and the former republics of the Soviet Union, such as Estonia, became independent. The European Union has already replaced independent European states in certain specific areas of international negotiations, such as trade and monetary policy, and if it develops an integrated security policy it will become a fully sovereign, new state actor. But even then, from a realist perspective, the European Union remains a separate and independent actor and therefore, as long as other independent actors exist, subject to the same imperatives of anarchy and self-help.
states: the actors in the contemporary international system that have the largest capabilities and right to use military force.
sovereignty: an attribute of states such that they are not subordinate to a higher power either inside or outside their borders and they agree not to intervene in the domestic jurisdictions of other states.
power: the material capabilities of a country, such as size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capability, and military strength.
Power
States monopolize power, but what is power? For the most part, power from the realist perspective is concerned with material capabilities, not influence or outcomes. Normally, we define power and influence as getting others to do what they would not otherwise do. Power does that by coercion, influence by persuasion. But how do we know what others might intend or otherwise do in the absence of our attempt to influence them? Their intentions may be manifold and hard to discern. And outcomes that might have occurred if we had not sought to influence them are part of that counterfactual history we can only speculate about. As the realist perspective sees it, it is too difficult to measure power and influence in terms of intentions or outcomes. It is better to measure power in terms of material inputs or capabilities. Military and economic capabilities are paramount. It is then assumed that these capabilities translate roughly into commensurate influence and outcomes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin visits a Russian military base in the Armenian city of Gyumri in December 2013.
Alexei Nikolsky/AFP/Getty Images
How does the realist perspective measure capabilities? Kenneth Waltz, the father of what is known in international political theory as neorealism or structural realism—a realist perspective based primarily on the systemic structural level of analysis—identifies the following measures: “size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capability, military strength, political stability and competence.”6 Population, economics, and military might are obvious elements of state power. Territory and resource endowment are, too. They involve geography and contribute to what realist perspectives call more broadly geopolitics. Some countries have more land than others, some have more natural resources, and some have more easily defended geographic borders. For example, Switzerland is protected on all sides by mountains, while Poland sits in the middle of the great plains of northern Europe and, as a result, has been more frequently invaded, conquered, and even partitioned. Island nations have certain power advantages by virtue of being less vulnerable to invasion. England was never defeated by Napoleon or Hitler, while states on the European continent succumbed to both invaders.
Notice, however, that Waltz also mentions capabilities such as political stability and competence, which are not, strictly speaking, material capabilities. These political capabilities involve institutional and cultural or ideological factors that are more important in liberal and identity perspectives, what some analysts call soft power. The neorealist perspective does not emphasize such political capabilities. It focuses more on material power than on the domestic political institutions and ideologies that mobilize that power. Realists may care about prestige and reputation, which are elements of soft power, but they value such factors mostly because these factors derive from or are caused by the credibility to use force.7 The direction of the causal arrows runs from the use of force to reputation, not the reverse. Another version of the realist perspective, known as classical realism, pays more attention to domestic values and institutions. Power is used to protect American democracy or Russian culture. But at the international level, realists pursue relative power, not common values such as the spread of democracy or human rights. As Professor Hans Morgenthau, the father of classical realism, tells us, “The main signpost... through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interests defined in terms of power.”8
The realist perspective emphasizes military and economic power over institutions or ideas. It differentiates states primarily on the basis of relative power. Great powers, middle powers, and small powers acquire different interests or goals depending on the size of their capabilities, not the characteristics of their institutions or the political ideas (identities) they espouse. Great powers have the broadest interests. They make up a good part of the international system and therefore have an interest in the system as a whole. When states fade from great power to middle power status, as Austria did after the seventeenth century, their interests shrink. By the time of World War I, Austria was interested only in its immediate surroundings in the Balkans. Small powers often remain on the sidelines in realist analysis or succumb to the power of larger states, as happened to Poland through repeated invasion and conquest.
geopolitics: a focus on a country’s location and geography as the basis of its national interests.
Security Dilemma
When states pursue power to defend themselves, they create a security dilemma from which the possibility, although not the inevitability, of war can never be completely excluded. The security dilemma results from the fact that, as each group or state amasses power to protect itself, it inevitably threatens other groups or states. Other states wonder how the first state will use the power it is amassing: Will it use its power just to defend its present territory, or will it use that power to expand its territory? (A case in point, as this is being written, is Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.) How can the other states be sure what the first state intends? If it is only seeking to defend itself, other states have nothing to worry about. But if it has more ambitious aims, then the other states too must arm. Exactly how much power is consistent with defense, and at what point does the accumulation of power signal aggressive or offensive intent?
States may signal their intentions by diplomatic means. Defensive realists emphasize this possibility. For example, a state acquires defensive military capabilities, not offensive ones. But military technologies may have both defensive and offensive uses (think of machine guns). It may be hard to read such signals. When do states become revisionist or greedy—that is, seek more power than they need to defend themselves? And who decides what amount of power is defensive or offensive? Because no state can be sure, other states arm too, and in this process of mutual armament, states face all the uncertainties of what exactly constitutes enough power to be safe. Ronald Reagan once said that the United States was seeking a “margin of safety” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union probably assumed that the United States sought “superiority.” Scholars who emphasize the realist perspective have never agreed on whether states seek just “security”—that is, enough power to balance and defend themselves—or whether they seek “maximum power,” on the assumption that more power always makes the state more secure. Theories of defensive realism say states seek security and manage most conflicts by diplomacy without using force directly; theories of offensive realism say states seek maximum or dominant power and often use diplomacy to disguise the aggressive use of force.9 Notice how the realist perspective does not exclude diplomacy, but the causal arrows run from power (realist) to diplomacy (liberal), not the other way around.
security dilemma: the situation that states face when they arm to defend themselves and in the process threaten other states.
Balance of Power
The best states can do then, according to the realist perspective, is to pursue and balance power. The balance of power is both a strategy by which states seek to ensure that no other state dominates the system and an outcome that provides a rough equilibrium among states. In balancing power, it does not matter what the rising state’s intentions are. Does the United States today seek to dominate the world? Many would say no. But the European states, Russia, or China may have reasons for concern. From the realist perspective, they cannot worry about America’s intentions; they have to worry about America’s power.
Figure 1-4 The Realist Worldview
As a strategy, the balance of power focuses on the formation of alliances and requires that states align against the greatest power regardless of who that power is. The greatest power is the state that can threaten another state’s survival. So it does not matter if that greater power is a former ally or a fellow democracy, the smaller state must align with others against that power. After all, a growing power may change its institutional affiliations or values. Hence, states do not align against the greatest threat, which may be a function of a state’s institutions and values, but against the greatest power, whatever its institutions and values. Realism does not rule out other strategies, such as bandwagoning, that is, aligning with rather than against the greatest power to share the spoils of conquest; or buckpassing, that is, avoiding alliances and letting other states do the fighting. It just warns that these strategies are dangerous, as Stalin learned after he bandwagoned with Hitler in 1939 and Hitler turned around and attacked him in 1941.
As an outcome, the balance of power may involve equilibrium or hegemony. Defensive realists argue that states seek equilibrium or power balancing, that is, relatively equal power that offsets the power of other states and thus lessens the risk of attack and war. They see danger when one state moves away from equilibrium toward hegemony, dominating other states. Offensive realists argue that states seek empire or hegemony because it is desirable (more power is always better than less) and increases stability (other powers have no chance of defeating the dominant power). The danger comes, as Robert Kagan writes, “when the upward trajectory of a rising power comes close to intersecting the downward trajectory of a declining power.”10 This is the moment of power transition when war is most likely to occur. As we shall see, that may have been the case when Germany passed Great Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century (Chapter 2), and, according to some realists, it may be the case in the twenty-first century if China surpasses the United States as the world’s dominant power (Chapter 5).
In subsequent chapters, we refer to the power balancing and power transition schools to capture this difference among realist perspectives on which configuration of power—equilibrium or hegemony—is most conducive to stability.
balance of power: the strategy by which states counterbalance to ensure that no single state dominates the system, or an outcome that establishes a rough equilibrium among states.
power balancing: a school of realism that sees hegemony as destabilizing and war as most likely when a dominant power emerges to threaten the equilibrium of power among other states.
hegemony: a situation in which one country is more powerful than all the others.
power transition: a school of realism that sees hegemony as stabilizing and war as most likely when a rising power challenges a previously dominant one and the balance of power approaches equilibrium.
polarity: the number of states—one (unipolar), two (bipolar), three (tripolar), or more (multipolar)—holding significant power in the international system.
alliances: formal defense arrangements wherein states align against a greater power to prevent dominance.
Polarity and Alliances
How do states balance power? It depends on how many states there are. We call the number of states holding power in a system the polarity of the system. If there are many states or centers of power, the system is multipolar. In a multipolar system, states balance by forming alliances with other states to counter the state that is becoming the greatest power. These alliances have to be temporary and flexible. Why? Because the balance of power is always uncertain and shifts, sometimes quickly. States must therefore be ready to shift alliances. Remember that the purpose of alliances is to balance power, not to make permanent friends or permanent enemies. Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister during World War II, once said that “if Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”11 Alliances in a multipolar realist system are expedient, not emotional attachments.
What if there are only two great powers? After World War II, the United States aligned with western Europe and Japan, while the Soviet Union aligned with eastern Europe and, until the 1960s, China to create a bipolar system. Now the two superpowers could not align with other states because there were none, except small and inconsequential ones that could not contribute much to the balance of power. The superpowers had to balance internally. They competed by mobilizing internal resources to establish a balance between them. Once China broke away from the Soviet Union, the system became tripolar. Now the United States maneuvered to bring China into the Western coalition because whichever superpower captured China would have an advantage. The contest before World War II may have also been tripolar. Hitler, Stalin, and the United States/Great Britain competed to control Europe. Because in a contest of three powers a coalition of two powers wins, some scholars believe that tripolarity is uniquely unstable.12
Polarity determines the propensity of different international systems for war. Here again, realist scholars don’t agree on what distributions of power or numbers of powerful states—polarities—contribute to greater stability. Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer argue that bipolar worlds are the most stable because two bigger powers, such as the United States and the Soviet Union, have only each other to worry about and will not make many mistakes.13 But Dale Copeland, a professor at the University of Virginia, contends that multipolar systems are more stable because a declining power, which is the one most likely to initiate war, has more partners to ally with and is therefore more inclined to deter than fight the rising power.14 So far, the statistical evidence from large-scale studies of war has yielded no definitive answer to this disagreement.15
War
No state seeks war, but the possibility of war is always inherent in the situation of anarchy. Although the costs of war are always high, the costs of losing sovereignty or freedom may be even higher. Diplomacy and other relationships help clarify intentions but never enough to preclude the possibility of military conflict. Ultimately, states have to base their calculations on capabilities, not intentions. That is why the realist perspective notes that even democracies, which presumably are most transparent and accessible to one another and best able to know one another’s intentions, still cannot fully trust one another. Many European countries opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq, and some European leaders call for a united Europe to become a counterweight or military counterbalance to the United States, despite the fact that Europe and the United States share the same democratic institutions and values. As the realist scholar Charles Kupchan concludes, “Even if all the world’s countries were democratic,... democratic powers may engage in geopolitical rivalry [and]... economic interdependence among Europe’s great powers did little to avert the hegemonic war that broke out in 1914.”16 Notice again from Figure 1-1 how the causal arrows run in a realist perspective; power competition (realist) limits the influence of interdependence (liberal) even among countries that share democratic values (identity).
Wars result from the dynamics of power balances or polarity and especially from shifts in power balances. Technological change, especially military innovations, and economic growth produce such shifts.17 Because realist perspectives focus more on relative than absolute gains, they worry more about the zero-sum effects of technological change than they do about the non-zero-sum effects. Military innovations may alter the balance between offensive and defensive technologies, which might give one side a crucial military advantage. Free trade, while it benefits both partners, may benefit adversaries more. Rising powers such as the United States in the nineteenth century, Japan after World War II, and China today have generally favored protectionist policies toward trade. Technological change and modernization offer mutual benefits, but realist perspectives worry about how these benefits will be distributed, especially if they fall into the hands of opposing powers.
Defensive realist perspectives concentrate on defense, the use of actual force after an attack, and deterrence, the use of threatened force to deter an attack before it occurs. More offensive realist versions envision the use of force to initiate attacks: compellence and preemptive and preventive war. Compellence is the use of force to get another state to do something rather than to refrain from doing something. The threat of force to get Iraq earlier or Iran today to give up its nuclear program is a case of compellence. The strategy to get Iran to refrain from using nuclear weapons once it has acquired them is a case of deterrence.
Preemptive war is an attack by one country against another that is preparing to attack first. One country sees the armies of another country gathering on its border and preempts the expected attack by attacking first. Israel initiated a preemptive war in 1967 when Egypt assembled forces in the Sinai Peninsula and Israel attacked before Egypt might have. Preventive war is an attack by a country against another that is not preparing to attack it but is growing in power and is likely to attack it at some point in the future. War is considered to be inevitable. And so a declining power, in particular, may decide that war is preferable sooner rather than later because later it will have declined even further and be less powerful. It attacks at the point when its power peaks or has not yet declined that much. As we note in Chapter 2, some realists believe that was why Germany attacked Russia in 1914.
It is often difficult to distinguish between preemptive and preventive wars. In the Iraq War in 2003, if you believed—based on imperfect intelligence—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and might use them or pass them on to terrorists, the war was preemptive, even though Iraq’s WMDs may not have been as visible and hence as verifiable as armies massing on the border. If you believed Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs but would surely get them in the future, the war was preventive, because the United States decided to attack before Iraq actually had the weapons. If the United States had waited until Iraq had the weapons, Iraq might have deterred a U.S. attack by threatening to retaliate with its weapons. For realists, this same dilemma faces U.S. policy makers today in Iran. Do you stop Iran’s nuclear program before (preventive) or after (preemptive) it becomes apparent? Or do you let it emerge and then contain it by deterrence, the threat of mutual nuclear retaliation?
One thing is certain: the balance of power does not prevent war. Over the past five centuries, there have been 119 major wars in Europe alone, where most of the great powers have been located. (A major war is defined as one in which at least one great power was involved.) Many of these wars were horrendously destructive. How do we defend a way of thinking about international relations that accepts such destructive wars? Well, remember, realist scholars are trying to see the world as it has been and, in their view, remains. They don’t favor or want war any more than anyone else. But if any leader anywhere in the world intends war, the quickest way to have war is to assume that it cannot occur. Antiwar advocates made such assumptions both before and after World War I, and the world paid a heavy price for it.
Wars within states, or intrastate wars, are more common today than wars between states, or interstate wars. So far, intrastate wars, such as the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, have not ignited global interstate wars. But there is no guarantee they won’t do so in the future, and intrastate wars have caused devastation and suffering in specific areas on a scale comparable to the damage done by interstate wars across wider areas. Thus, the realist perspective advocates constant vigilance regarding power and power balancing as the only path to peace. As Morgenthau explains, the transformation of the world system into something else “can be achieved only through the workman-like manipulation of the perennial forces that have shaped the past as they will the future.”18
The liberal perspective emphasizes diplomacy and getting together repeatedly to solve problems. During one of several groundbreaking trips to China, Henry A. Kissinger, then national security adviser to President Richard Nixon, toasts with Premier Chou Enlai of China at a state dinner in Beijing in February 1972.
AP Photo
defense: the use of force to defend a country after an attack.
deterrence: the use of threatened retaliation through force to deter an attack before it occurs.
compellence: the use of force to get another state to do something rather than to refrain from doing something.
The Liberal Perspective
Refer back to Figure 1-2. It depicts the directions of the causal arrows in the liberal perspective. They run from repeated interactions and a focus on common goals and technology to more trust and less incentive to arm among participants to greater mutual understanding and convergence of identities. In this section, we break down the component parts of this liberal logic.
The liberal perspective is interested in the problem of cooperation, but not because it is naïve and does not recognize the prevalence of violence and conflict. Rather, it is more impressed by the extent to which villages, towns, provinces, and communities have been able, over time, to overcome violence and conflict by centralizing and legitimating power in institutions, always at higher levels of aggregation. The state is just the most recent level at which groups of people have been able to overcome the balance of power and centralize authority. Why could this kind of consolidation not happen eventually at the regional (EU) and international (UN) levels?
The liberal perspective, therefore, focuses on the causes of cooperation and finds them in the ways in which states interact with and relate to one another through repetitive processes and practices. It assumes that individuals and groups behave more on the basis of how other groups behave toward them than on the basis of how much relative power they possess (realist) or what their initial cultural or ideological beliefs are (identity). Just as anarchy is a central concept in the realist perspective, reciprocity, or how states respond to one another, is a central concept in the liberal perspective.19
States increase their chances to cooperate if they interact frequently. Thus, in contrast to the realist perspective, the liberal perspective pays more attention to interdependence than to independence or self-help. Interdependence links groups and countries together through trade, transportation, tourism, and other types of exchanges and makes countries mutually or equally dependent and hence interdependent on one another. As this happens, they get used to one another and develop habits of cooperation that facilitate the formation of international regimes and institutions. Institutions (liberal) help resolve disputes despite diverse ideologies (identities) and without the use of force (realist). Notice again, as Figure 1-2 shows, how the causal arrows run from institutions to ideas and power, not the reverse.
Modernization and technological change increase interdependence and the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Liberal perspectives, therefore, are generally optimistic about change. The agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions steadily expanded the scope and intensity of human contacts and created new nonstate actors at the levels of both domestic civil society and global governance. Private multinational corporations (MNCs) and cross-national nonprofit organizations, such as the International Red Cross, proliferated, contributing to the thickening of transnational relations, or cross-national relations among nongovernmental actors outside the immediate control of national governments. Partly to control these developments, national governments established intergovernmental organizations (IGOs); the International Telecommunication Union, for example, was founded in 1865 to regulate the ballooning telephone and telegraph traffic. Compared to the realist perspective, the liberal perspective places more emphasis on NGOs and IGOs than it does on states and the balance of power.
In a world of accelerating interdependence and proliferating actors, liberal perspectives place heavy emphasis on cooperation and bargaining. Cooperation facilitates the achievement of better outcomes for one or more actors without harming other actors. It is a non-zero-sum game. For example, a national or global economy may be operating at a level of less than full employment. If public policy can generate more employment without harming the people who are already employed, the national or global society as a whole is better off. Economists talk about this possibility in terms of moving the society toward a Pareto optimum or frontier, in honor of the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who developed this idea. Cooperation also facilitates the provision of collective goods, or common goals that actors can achieve only together or not at all. Collective goods include environmental protection such as clean air, which all or none can enjoy, but also increasingly, in a nuclear and globalized world, security and wealth, which have to be achieved for everyone or no one will benefit for long.
When outcomes cannot be improved for some without harming others, bargaining becomes essential. Bargaining arises when actors have to choose among options that make some better off but others worse off. Bargaining is a zero-sum game—that is, what one actor gains the other loses—and can lead to conflict and war. Notice liberal perspectives do not exclude coercion and the use of force. They simply see the use of force as determined more by interactive factors in the bargaining process (liberal) than by geopolitical (realist) or ideological (identity) realities outside the bargaining process. For example, rational choice theory, which emphasizes bargaining, pays relatively less attention to the causal forces of anarchy or domestic culture, which lie outside the bargaining context, and more attention to the causal forces of signaling, information, and other factors that lie inside the bargaining context.
Institutions facilitate cooperation and bargaining. International regimes, such as the Group of 20 (G-20), which deals with global economic issues, coordinate the expectations and behavior of countries without necessarily incorporating them into a single institution, while international institutions, such as the United Nations, formalize interdependence, promote specialization by enabling certain groups or countries to carry out specified roles (e.g., the veto rights of great powers in the UN Security Council), and implement common rules and regulations (such as those spelled out in the UN Charter). Regimes and institutions enhance efficiency both by lowering transaction costs, the extra expenses incurred to carry out long-distance exchanges, and by increasing information, which reduces uncertainty and bargaining asymmetries in diplomacy.
Once created, institutions tend to evolve through feedback and reinforcement, a process called path dependence, whereby actions taken initially for intended reasons lead down a path of subsequent interactions to unintended consequences and new challenges that were not predicted or foreseen at the outset. One of the best examples of path dependence, as we will see, is the spillover process in the European Union.
Finally, the liberal perspective expects that, over a long enough time, diplomacy among multiple powers and multilateralism among multiple ideologies will foster a habit of compromise and pluralism that will eventually consolidate the legitimacy or right to use force at the international rather than the state level. The liberal perspective, as deployed in the Western tradition, envisions that such global legitimacy will ultimately reflect liberal values, a world of the so-called democratic peace. But other perspectives that also emphasize interactions over power and ideas envision nondemocratic outcomes. Marxism, for example, emphasizes the dialectical interactions between capitalist and proletariat classes and sees these interactions ending not in democracy, as liberal perspectives expect, or in equilibrium, as realist perspectives expect, but in the eventual triumph of the proletariat over the capitalist classes and, thus, of communism over democracy. (Marxism also sees these interactions as coming from deep-seated historical circumstances that cannot be changed. For this reason, we treat Marxism later in this chapter as a critical theory perspective.)
What distinguishes the liberal perspective from other perspectives, therefore, is not the end state of democracy but how one arrives at that end state. Process, not power or ideology, determines outcomes. Some liberal versions, such as classical liberalism, start with a domestic commitment to democracy but then at the international level emphasize economic, social, and institutional interactions, not the spread of democracy.20 Other versions, such as neoliberalism, focus more exclusively on international interactions. In all liberal perspectives, the causal arrows run from interactions to outcomes, not from ideology or relative power to outcomes. Identity perspectives reverse these causal arrows. They see prior ideological commitments to democracy creating better relations at the international level, which in turn facilitates cooperation in international institutions and the reduction of military and economic competition, the so-called democratic peace. Some realist perspectives too, such as classical realism, emphasize democracy at the domestic level but then rely primarily on balancing power at the international level to produce stability and peace.
Thus, all mainstream perspectives support democracy. We should not bias our choice of perspectives by identifying democracy with only one of them, namely the liberal perspective. As Robert Keohane, a liberal scholar, suggests, we should separate our preference for democracy from our analytical perspective:
Liberalism associates itself with a belief in the value of individual freedom. Although I subscribe to such a belief, this commitment of mine is not particularly relevant to my analysis of international relations. One could believe in the value of individual liberty and remain either a realist or neorealist in one’s analysis of world politics.21
Let’s look more closely at the key (italicized) concepts that provide the logic of the liberal perspective. (Again, the concepts appear in boldface below where they are most succinctly defined.)
Reciprocity and Interdependence
From the liberal perspective, reciprocity and interdependence among states matter more than self-help (independence) and anarchy. Reciprocity means that states behave toward one another largely on the basis of mutual rather than individual calculations of costs and benefits. Outcomes depend not only on the choices of one state but on how those choices interact with the choices of other states. The focus on reciprocal behavior places greater emphasis on how countries communicate, negotiate, trade, and do business with one another than on how much power they have or what they believe. It also places great emphasis on compromise—swapping or logrolling objectives (e.g., trading territory for peace in the Arab–Israeli dispute) or splitting the difference between objectives (drawing territorial borders halfway between what disputants claim).
Interdependence refers to the frequency and intensity with which states interact. How often states interact with and interdepend (i.e., mutually depend) on one another increases the opportunities for reciprocity and, hence, cooperation. Cooperation is not automatic. It requires repetition and time to emerge. But, in the end, it is not a product of relative power or shared ideas; it is a product of the cumulative practice through which power and ideas are reshaped. How countries relate to one another changes the ways they perceive one another and use their relative power toward one another. Interactions are doing the heavy lifting, acting as primary causes changing ideas and power relationships.
From a liberal perspective, therefore, international relations is more about relational (interactive) power than it is about positional (relative) power. Hierarchy becomes more important than anarchy. Professor David Lake makes the case for relational authority:
Because [in realism] there is no law superior to that of states themselves, there can be no authority over states in general or by one state over others. Through the lens of relational authority, however, we see that relations between states are not purely anarchic but better described as a rich variety of hierarchies in which dominant states legitimately rule over greater or lesser domains of policy in subordinate states. The assumption of international anarchy is not only ill suited to describing and explaining international politics but also can be positively misleading.22
reciprocity: the behavior of states toward one another based largely on mutual exchanges that entail interdependent benefits or disadvantages.
interdependence: the mutual dependence of states and nonstate actors in the international system through conferences, trade, tourism, and the like.
technological change: the application of science and engineering to increase wealth and alter human society.
modernization: the transformation of human society from self-contained autarchic centers of agrarian society to highly specialized and interdependent units of modern society.
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): nonstate actors such as student, tourist, and professional associations that are not subject to direct government control.
civil society: the nongovernmental sector.
transnational relations: relations among nongovernmental, as opposed to governmental, authorities.
human security: security concern that focuses on violence within states and at the village and local levels, particularly violence against women and minorities.
Technological Change and Modernization: Nongovernmental Organizations
The imperative from the liberal perspective, then, is not to balance power but to increase interdependence. Two forces, in particular, accelerate interdependence. The first is technological change, the application of science and engineering to increase the scope and capacity for interaction; think of the consequences of the automobile and Internet revolutions alone. The second force is modernization, the transformation of human society from self-contained autarchic centers of agrarian society to highly specialized and interdependent units of modern society that cannot survive without coordinated exchanges at the national and now international levels.
As the liberal perspective sees it, technological change and modernization bring more and more actors into the arena of international affairs. This pluralization of global politics broadens and deepens the context of international relations. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are nonstate actors such as student, tourist, and professional associations that are not subject to direct government control. They include economic actors such as MNCs, international labor unions, private regulatory bodies, and global financial markets. They also involve international humanitarian, foreign assistance, and environmental activities. In all these areas, nonstate actors expand the nongovernmental sector or civil society of international relations and engage in what are called transnational relations— that is, relations outside the direct influence of national governments and international institutions set up by governments.
The liberal perspective emphasizes nonstate actors. Through the broadening and deepening of international relations, nonstate actors change the nature of security. International relations are no longer just about the security of states; they are also about the security of people within states. Human security takes precedence over national security and focuses on weak actors, not just the strongest or most capable ones emphasized by the realist perspective. Human security is concerned with violence within states as well as among them. Such intrastate violence includes family violence, especially against women and children; genocide; diseases; pollution; natural disasters; and large displacements of populations. Since the end of the Cold War, liberal perspectives point out, human security issues have become more prevalent than great power or traditional national security issues.
Figure 1-5 The Liberal Worldview
Diplomacy
Diplomacy is the business of communications, negotiations, and compromise and thus weighs big in the liberal perspective. From this perspective, talking is always better than not talking, especially with adversaries. Whatever the differences among countries, whatever their relative power or beliefs, they can profit from discussions. Discussions encourage cooperation and bargaining, which produce trade-offs and compromises. Compromise consists of splitting the difference between interests in an issue area, while trade-offs involve the swapping of interests in one issue area for interests in a second. To reach arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, for example, the United States backed off its interest in promoting human rights in the Soviet Union. An identity perspective, which emphasizes values over institutions and power, might oppose this type of compromise, whereas a liberal perspective, which emphasizes cooperation over power and ideas, might approve it.
diplomacy: discussions and negotiations among states as emphasized by the liberal perspective.
Cooperation and Bargaining
Cooperation facilitates the provision of better outcomes for some while not harming others. The idea is to focus on absolute gains, not relative gains. As in the prisoner’s dilemma story, if countries focus on common rather than conflicting goals (the prisoners frustrating the warden rather than going free), they can achieve non-zero-sum outcomes in which all gain. One country does not have to win and the other lose. The overall pie grows, and everyone’s slice grows in absolute terms.
Of course, one country may gain more than another. Bargaining is necessary to sort out issues of relative gains. Liberal perspectives generally assume that such bargaining can be done peacefully. From a liberal perspective, war is always the most costly option. Hence, given the chance, countries will look for lower-cost ways to resolve their differences. If they fail, the primary causes are to be found in the bargaining process (liberal), not in the inevitable constraints of power balances (realist) or types of regimes (identity). For example, countries fail to make credible commitments to signal their interests and intentions, they misread the shifting balance of power, they bluff, or they have inadequate information about the other country’s intentions. They are not compelled (caused) to do these things by factors outside the bargaining context; rather, they make less-than-optimal choices within the bargaining context. Bargaining approaches raise questions of cognitive bias as well as miscalculation. Leaders may make less-than-optimal choices because they harbor prior beliefs that distort information or because they are paranoid and psychologically unstable. Saddam Hussein, for example, failed to signal credibly that he had no WMDs either because he worried about exposing his weakness to Iran as well as to domestic opponents or because he thought the United States was a paper tiger and would not intervene.23 Such impediments to rational bargaining may be handled best by psychological theories (see the later discussion).
cooperation: working to achieve a better outcome for some that does not hurt others.
bargaining: negotiating to distribute gains that are zero-sum (that is, what one side gains, the other loses).
Collective Goods
Cooperation also facilitates the provision of collective goods. Collective goods have two properties: they are indivisible (they exist for everyone or for no one) and they cannot be appropriated (they do not diminish as one party consumes them). The classic example of a collective good is clean air. It exists either for everyone or for no one. And breathing by one person does not diminish the air available for another person. The prevention of global warming is another example. It will be accomplished for all countries or for none. And if the benefits of preventing global warming are enjoyed by one country, that does not subtract from the benefits available to other countries.
The liberal perspective sees peace and security in large part as collective goods, especially in today’s nuclear and globalized world. If peace and security exist for one member of a society, they exist for all members, because the use of nuclear weapons would destroy peace for everyone; and the benefits to one member do not diminish the amount of peace and security available to other members. Collective security does just what it says—it collects military power together in a single global institution, such as the United Nations, that provides peace and security for all countries at the international level, just as national governments do for all citizens at the domestic level. This global institution sets up rules that states must follow to resolve disagreements and then creates a preponderance of power, a pooling of the military power of all nations, not a balance of power among separate nations, to punish aggressors who violate the rules. Because the global institution monopolizes military power, it can reduce military weaponry to a minimum. Arms control and disarmament play a big role in the liberal perspective, just as the opposite dynamics of mutual armament and competitive arms races play a key role in the realist perspective. Collective security becomes an alternative way to the balance of power for organizing military relations.
Wealth is another collective good. It is not quite as pure a collective good as clean air because it may be appropriated and consumed unequally by one party compared to another, and, unlike air, does not exist in infinite supply. But the liberal concept of comparative advantage and trade, which we examine in detail in Chapter 8, makes it possible to increase wealth overall and therefore, at least theoretically, increase it for each individual or country, although some individuals and countries may gain more than others. Trade is a classic non-zero-sum relationship in which two parties can produce more goods from the same resources if they specialize and exchange products than if they produce all goods separately. The liberal perspective emphasizes such absolute rather than relative gains because these relationships shift the focus away from conflicting goals and demonstrate that, even under conditions of anarchy, cooperation is not only possible but profitable.
collective goods: benefits, such as clean air, that are indivisible (they exist for all or for none) and cannot be appropriated (their consumption by one party does not diminish their consumption by another).
collective security: the establishment of common institutions and rules among states to settle disputes peacefully and to enforce agreements by a preponderance, not a balance, of power.
International Institutions
The liberal perspective sees the pursuit of diplomacy, cooperation, bargaining, and collective goods as culminating in international institutions. International institutions include intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) as well as NGOs. IGOs are set up by national governments (hence the label intergovernmental) to increase efficiency and control. They help states lower transaction costs, the extra costs involved in managing interactions over longer and longer distances. Unlike contacts among village neighbors, international contacts take place between strangers separated by wide distances. IGOs develop and spread information to help overcome these obstacles. Greater information reduces asymmetries in the bargaining process generated by secrecy, uncertainty, and miscommunications and misperceptions.
Governments create international institutions to serve their common interests, defined as areas where their national interests overlap. But once these institutions exist, they take on a life of their own and constitute a system of global governance, or network of IGOs, that may override national interests and make up a kind of nascent world government. They constitute the hierarchies or authority relations that Professor Lake speaks about. In some cases, these institutions make decisions and undertake activities that compromise national interests or supersede them by defining and implementing broader supranational interests, as in the European Union. To the extent that such institutions are not completely under the control of national governments, they become quasi-independent actors in the international system.
A network of institutions may come together to form an international regime. An international regime creates a set of rules, norms, and procedures around which the expectations of actors converge in a particular issue area, such as finance or trade policy.24 It provides a mechanism of coordination without constituting a single overarching institution. For example, the annual economic summits held by the major industrialized countries (Group of 7, or G-8 when it includes Russia) and now also by industrialized and emerging market countries (G-20) coordinate global economic expectations but do not represent a specific centralized organization like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Trade Organization (WTO).
International institutions evolve through feedback and path dependence, a process in which later outcomes are shaped by previous outcomes, unintended consequences, and learning.25 A prominent example of path dependence, institutional learning, and growth is provided by the European Union. When European integration was launched, the founders insisted on creating one organization that would focus not on national but on community-wide interests; that was the European Commission. As we learn in Chapter 6, it is the only institution in the EU that has the right to initiate legislation independently. The idea was that individual states would be forced to react to community needs and, in this reciprocal process, would get used to taking into account community as well as national needs. In time, they might begin to think differently about their own needs and identify more with the European Union.
Thus, like the European Union, international institutions alter the relationships through which people interact and pursue common interests. Through repeated interactions, participants acquire different habits and change their perceptions as they exchange better information and their trust in one another increases. They get caught in the labyrinth of cooperation and can’t get out or remember the original purposes (entrance) for which they started the process. As Professor John Ikenberry writes, “Conflicts would be captured and domesticated in an iron cage of multilateral rules, standards, safeguards, and dispute resolution procedures.”26 Over the longer run, countries may even change their material interests and identities.
Notice how, in this case, process influences thinking and eventually loyalty. States identify with supranational rather than national goals. Eventually they identify more with Europe than with France or Germany. But identities are not the cause of this development; they are the result. Habitual and routine contacts do the heavy lifting in the liberal perspective and cause material power and self-images to adapt. The liberal perspective does not ignore power or identity; it just concludes that these variables are shaped more by institutions than institutions are shaped by them. The direction of the causal arrows that originate in institutions distinguishes the liberal perspective from realist and identity perspectives.
The liberal perspective generally expects better or more peaceful outcomes from repetitive interactions. It presumes that compromising mostly benefits pluralist or democratic values. But compromising with nondemocratic countries may also produce less efficient and nondemocratic outcomes. International institutions can be just as corrupt and oppressive as domestic ones.27 After all, they are directly accountable only to governments, and many of these governments are nondemocratic and not accountable to their own people. Moreover, as realist perspectives might emphasize, interactions may lead not only to peace but also to the last move or defection, when countries fear that the game is over and they face a last move to go to war or lose their sovereignty or freedom. As we discuss in Chapter 2, World War I is thought by some scholars to have been resulted from the deleterious effects of reciprocal interactions.
international institutions: formal international organizations and informal regimes that establish common rules to regularize international contacts and communications.
intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): formal international organizations established by governments.
global governance: the system of various international institutions and great powers groups that in a loose sense govern the global system.
international regime: a network of international institutions or groups not under the authority of a single organization.
path dependence: a process emphasized by liberal perspectives in which decisions in a particular direction affect later decisions, accumulating advantages or disadvantages along a certain path.
International Law
International regimes and institutions create international law, the customary rules and codified treaties under which international organizations operate. International law covers political, economic, and social rights. Historically it developed to protect the interests of states and the rights of sovereignty and self-defense. Increasingly, however, it addresses the rights of citizens and individual human beings to protection from mistreatment and the responsibility of international institutions to intervene in sovereign affairs to prevent genocide, starvation, and the like. Human rights involve the most basic protections against physical abuse and suffering.
International law and human rights are more controversial than national law. Democratic countries emphasize how the law is made by free institutions and champion political and human rights. Nondemocratic countries emphasize how the law is enforced and, in the case of socialist countries, champion economic and social rights. But the liberal perspective argues that the more treaties and international law there are, the better, because states are acquiring the habit of obeying central norms and guidelines and will eventually move toward greater consensus on the making and enforcement of law.
From the liberal perspective, the essence of international law is multilateralism, to include all actors, often nonstate participants as well, and to encourage compromise regardless of the ideologies or beliefs participants hold. All countries and points of view are respected. Tolerance and coexistence are the most important virtues. As Michael Steiner, a UN representative in Kosovo, has argued, “The United Nations wields unique moral authority because its members represent a wide spectrum of values and political systems. Most of the world trusts the United Nations more than it trusts any single member or alliance,... not because of the inherent virtue of any individual member but because the
(Nau 29-60)
Nau, Henry R. Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas, 5th Edition. CQ Press, 20160105. VitalBook file.
The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.