Contemporary IR Theory and the Washington Policy Debate

Contemporary IR Theory and the Washington Policy Debate
With pardonable exaggeration, Daniel Deudney has described the eighteenth century as the “big bang” of international theory. A great part of the resulting fireworks can be understood as a clash between Realism and Liberalism, but two features of that dialogue are especially notable: one is that we find thinkers who have both “realist” and “liberal” beliefs and find no inconsistency between them; a second is that each of these respective schools, as we imagine them, are often to be found riven by internal division. Who is a liberal? What is a realist? The truth is, it’s hard to say. Nevertheless, in the interstices of this great argument between realism and liberalism we see the outlines of the constitutional tradition, which takes the pursuit of the national interest to be a primary duty of political leaders but also seeks the regulation of power by law and ethics.
One can get to all the main problems in international relations by studying the classical thinkers, but there is always something new to say in assessing the relative importance of these ideas for our own time. Because so many minds have been at work for so many years on these problems, it is basically impossible to say anything genuinely original about any of the important questions we have taken up thus far. In that respect, social theorists are like the people of Abraham Lincoln’s generation, who stood in worship and awe of the founders of the United States. How, Lincoln asked, could we surpass them when the “field of glory” had already been harvested? Lincoln went on to say that men would arise who were not content with this splendid inheritance, who disdained to fill the offices of the government. “What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path . . . It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious.”1
For most of its propositions, alas, social theory cannot escape its dependence on previous thinkers, or can do so only by ignoring them or leaving them unacknowledged. This state of affairs may not satisfy the theorists who covet the distinction of profound originality, but for the rest of us it presents a not unpleasing picture. So what if our best ideas are derivative? As there is no degradation in such indebtedness,2 we are free to search for truth without the onerous burden of trying to say something utterly new and original. It is not as if the acknowledgement of our incapacity gives us nothing else to think about. In seeking to understand the ever-shifting present, in other words, we are still impelled to forge new ways of reassembling the traditions and to assess their relevance to new social facts. The present chapter assesses contemporary authors who have done this and who offer distinctive syntheses of realism and liberalism. Then we turn to the curious role that these “isms” have played in the Washington policy debate.
Most IR textbooks describe a field divided into Realist, Liberal, and Constructivist approaches, but the labels can be confusing. Though Constructivism defines itself in opposition to academic theories of Realism and Liberalism, many of its insights can be found in early modern thinkers identified today as “realists” or “liberals.” Constructivists emphasize the importance of norms of behavior and socially-constructed identities in understanding state action. The question of whether a foreign state was a friend, a rival, or an enemy, as Alexander Wendt observed, depended on concepts of interest and threat that were not objective categories but sociocultural creations or “constructions.” What happened under circumstances of “anarchy” depended to a large degree on what states made of this condition. It was not foreordained by the structure of the international system.3
The importance of both norms and identifies had been recognized by classical writers in both the realist and liberal traditions, but by the 1970s both had been stripped out of Realism and Liberalism by “neorealists” and “neoliberals.” For the neorealists, states were reduced to units careening about the structure of the international system; for neoliberals, states were maximizers of interests and utility, like petty bourgeois shopkeepers who counted every penny. Both theories looked to “parsimony” or simplicity as a great virtue in theorizing politics, as if in the field of international politics it was possible to get to the political equivalent of Newton’s laws of physics and sum everything up in a simple equation. The constructivists poured lots of rain on this parade, pointing out that simplicity is not a virtue in analyzing a complex situation; their work, in effect, reintroduced a set of factors that had been put out to pasture by neorealists and neoliberals. This was all to the good.
The question of whether norms are important is different from whether they are true; constructivists largely accept that “science” cannot answer the second question, though it can answer the first. For reasons earlier advanced, I think we should try to answer both questions, with due humility over the likelihood of achieving objective answers. It must also be borne in mind that, in any particular situation, norms could be true without being important or could be irrational and immoral and yet rule the day. The murderer almost by definition acts without care that murder is wrong, though state and society do and must pronounce that it is.
The society of states is notorious for being, in Tocqueville’s words, “always a little bit barbarous,” so it is easy to become cynical about the significance of norms and ideals among nations. Sometimes, it must be acknowledged, they are weak. That does not make them less true. Yes, they are often misused; that does not show that they should not be used properly. It tells us instead to make a more exacting inquiry into how they should be applied in a given situation. Glaring injustice demands rectification. Confronted with a web of lies, we seek the truth. The experience of aggression leads to the vow: this must stop.
*** Lebow and the Ancients
Richard Ned Lebow is the most impressive writer among the constructivists, though an imposing figure like Lebow is difficult to associate with any school. With his great feats of intellectual derring-do, he made a school of his own. Though he has made important contributions to empirical theory, especially relating to the causes of war and peace, he is first and foremost a normative theorist. In addition to his previously mentioned book, which looked to Thucydides and Morgenthau as oracles of wisdom, Lebow also wrote A Cultural Theory of International Relations, a 700-page heavyweight that goes back to Greek conceptions of the psyche to help us understand foreign policy. Lebow mounts a full-scale attack on regnant theories of IR and is especially cutting in his analysis of neorealism and neoliberalism. If you are looking for a Massacre-of-Glencoe-like refutation of the claims of those schools, you can find it in Lebow’s Cultural Theory.
Lebow argues that IR theory needs to reacquaint itself with the wisdom of the classical writers of ancient Greece, whose fuller version of the human personality—and, by extension, of state and society—offers an alternative and more persuasive framework for the understanding of social action. “Fear, honor, and interest”—fundamental ways of assessing how states think that were underscored in one of those fascinating speeches in Thucydides’ History—is Lebow’s point of departure. As we saw in the Introduction, Lebow shows that honor played a critical role in the history of human war-making. Incredible as it may seem, attention to the spirit and to its associated qualities of honor, standing, status, and prestige got practically expunged from IR theory over the last generation, as the false god of parsimony came to be worshiped among the denizens of that establishment. (It never went missing in diplomatic or international history, where attention to it and related factors arises naturally from consideration of the sources.)
“Rational choice and other theories of strategic action,” as Lebow argues, often derive preferences from substantive assumptions, as neorealists do when they stipulate that relative power must be the principal goal of states in an anarchic international environment. Deduction of this kind, whether in economics or politics, almost invariably leads to a single motive like wealth or power, or at least to its prioritization. By making human, institutional or state preferences unidimensional, theorists homogenize and oversimplify human motivation while divorcing it from contexts that give it meaning.
Lebow urges us to reconsider how the Greeks thought about the psyche, which they identified in a tripartite way: there were the appetites, of course, the Bermuda Triangle of getting it on with the human desires for power, wealth, and sex, but alongside the appetite lay “the spirit”— the need that humans have for self-esteem and approbation, closely tied to considerations of dignity and honor. The appetite and the spirit were very different things, and sometimes clashed. Honor (see the Melians) might lead to the sacrifice of appetite. The pursuit of appetite might be dishonorable.
For the Greeks, it was the job of reason to manage this inglorious contest, sort of like the cartoon picture of the fellow who has a bevy of little Angels on one shoulder, and a Devil (with a little pitchfork) on the other. They are jabbering in his ears, prompting him, telling him to act in diametrically opposite ways; he, using his reason, has to figure out the best choice to make. In one ear comes the temptation: “Go for it, my man! Take the plunge! Do the dirty! Steal some mon-eee! You like power, right?” In the other is the warning: What would your wife and parents say? Your friends? Your children? Your countrymen? Your posterity? Your Gods? Have you no self-respect?” Reason, surveying the consequences, weighs the chances of getting caught, reflects on the danger that everybody would hate you if selfish appetite were your only rule, seeks a standard that will reconcile these irreconciliables. In this semi-tragic and semicomic picture,4 the human being is the mental midget who must process all this and make a reasonable choice.5
Lebow’s picture of the human personality—with appetite and spirit roiled by fear but capable of enlightenment through reason and experience—is relevant both to individuals and states and can illuminate any social situation of whatever scale, like the “fractals” of mathematical theory. Neorealists and neoliberals constructed a theory in which each actor was always just looking after itself, though neoliberals thought you could do this through cooperation and neorealists did not. Lebow blows that debate up by showing its primitive simplicity. His reconstruction of world diplomatic history, with attention to “honor” and “the spirit,” is a tour de force.6
Lebow’s reshuffling of the intellectual tradition, with a little help from the Greeks, illustrates the tricky waters through which the student must pass in understanding the central contentions of the various theoretical schools. Lebow does battle with Realism and Liberalism understood as positivist academic theories, but his themes are to be found abundantly in both the classical realist and classical liberal traditions. Yet more confusingly, Lebow calls Morgenthau a constructivist, whereas Morgenthau self-identified as a realist. Then we must recall that Morgenthau fell in love with America and became more liberal over time.
All these struggles over nomenclature are puzzling, somewhat annoying, indispensable to navigate the theoretical thickets but a pain to explicate. Probably the biggest difficulty in tracing the genealogy of contemporary theories of academic Realism and Liberalism is that the purpose of much contemporary theory has been episteme, the knowledge of universals, whereas the classical thinkers were engaged in phronesis, the integrated consideration of facts and values, empirical theories and normative commands. These are different activities, though carried on under the same name.
*** Republican Security Theory
Complementary to Lebow, but pursuing a different line of analysis, is the work of Daniel Deudney, who has set forth the idea of Republican Security Theory or RST. Deudney, whose keen insights we have frequently recurred to, is the author of Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village. The title gives the clue to Deudney’s main thesis: with the growth of technology, power has been bounding forward, reaching to the potential to obliterate us all. Our task in these new circumstances is to think of how to put constitutional restraints on that scary phenomenon, super-added to all the traditional rivalries of power politics. Those bounding powers of destruction must be bound up, just like Gulliver by the Lilliputians: that is the key idea. This project, writes Deudney, entails doing what constitution-builders have done many times before, but in perilous new circumstances. As we saw in the Introduction, Deudney had shown in the early 1990s the need for political science to deal with material causes as well as social causes. The five material factors considered by earlier philosophers—climate, arable land, mineral resources, population, and topography—have in effect been revolutionized and transformed in their implications by economic growth and high technology. The “Promethean ambition” of human beings to control nature bounds ever upward and poses the clear and present danger that technology escapes human control.
Like Lebow, Deudney started with the ancients. He showed that the experience of antiquity formed the central problem of republicanism. The dilemma was summarized pithily by Montesquieu: republics, if they remained small, were in danger of getting run over by empires; if they themselves became an empire, however, they would become corrupted and couldn’t retain their republican character. This was, in effect, the problem that modernity inherited from the ancients, symbolized and framed by the contrasting experiences of the international anarchy of Greece and the universal empire of Rome. Deudney then works out a fascinating reconstruction of western thought, the first iteration of which culminates in the American Founding, whose makers Deudney persuasively regards as master international theorists. Their task was to find a viable path between Scylla of international anarchy and the Charybdis of consolidated despotism, for which purpose they needed a union. The Federalist Papers, as Deudney shows, were often more penetrating, but also more richly taken up with phronesis, than anything to be found in Kant. Taking his cue from Publius, Deudney in effect argues that the cumulative weight of reflection on the lessons of the past points toward negarchy—that is, relations of restraint and reciprocity as opposed to lawlessness and imperial domination—as the safest and most desirable political arrangement, for the domestic state and the society of states. Both realms stand in dire need of a constitution that both gives and limits power.7
Deudney’s impatience with Kant raises an important issue in the understanding of liberalism. Kant’s moral theory, insistent that we should not treat others simply as a means, set a high bar for the human being, one on which the Anglo-American tradition of liberalism looked skeptically. From the perspective of the classical liberals, Kant reintroduced the problem that they had set out to resolve. Was this human being perfectible and capable of loving virtue for its own sake, such that we should construct political orders assuming that end state? Or was the human being a passion-driven creature, ineradicably selfish, more like Top Dog than Mother Teresa? The Anglo-Americans took the skeptical view of human beings, saw human weakness as the problem to be solved rather than assumed away in flights of fancy about human perfectibility. One of Deudney’s big points about Kant is that he was often oblivious to the way of the world. In decided contrast with Publius, Kant “never mentions most of the ancient Greek or Latin authors, nor any of the ancient or early modern polities.” Kant’s close engagement with Hobbes and Rousseau “is accompanied by a nearly complete silence on Machiavelli, British constitutionalism, Montesquieu, and the American founders.”8 Today’s social scientists, by focusing on the discovery of universal empirical laws and shutting out normative evaluation, commit one sort of error. Kant’s error was the opposite one, of an abstract and deductive argument disengaged from the empirical realities. That also prevents a due exercise of phronesis.9
In one respect, however, Deudney resembles Kant in his treatment of the problem of world government. As we saw, Kant started with the mockery of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel. The international system needed to be taken out of the state of nature; this implied a coercive authority “with teeth.” On closer inspection, however, Kant found that solution hopeless. It was not only utterly impracticable but deeply undesirable: a soulless despotism. Even Kant’s “negative substitute”—the federation of the republics led by one great state—in effect proposed hegemony rather than empire as the solution, but left unexplained whether and how the hegemonic republic would use coercive power and why it wouldn’t itself be subject to the same infirmities as the world state if it claimed the right to rule. Kant, in short, promised a way out of the inadequacies of the Vattelian approach, but didn’t actually provide a way out.
Deudney performs a similar sleight of hand, holding out the prospect of a solution like that proffered in Philadelphia in 1787, but not actually crossing the chasm that separates a government from a league of states. At the end, Deudney rejects a world state of a coercive kind and must fall back on voluntary nuclear disarmament as the remedy, though there is no realistic prospect of that occurring even in a less conflictual world. The inescapable reality is that conventional arms control—ratifying deterrence but leaving populations exposed to intense violence interdependence—is the only solution available, just as international organizations and treaties are the only vehicles available at the interstate level for contending with global dangers such as climate change, pandemics, and internet security. What Deudney is calling an “authoritative world government” is not a federal state like that created in 1787, but a construction that falls well short even of the Articles of Confederation in 1777.
Deudney’s analysis was predicated on the idea that the hypertrophy in the means of destruction, producing intense violent interdependence, gave the old problem of anarchy and empire a startling and terrifying new form, necessitating authoritative governance, but rather than “scaling up” with authoritative governance to m...