Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

partly by his own experiences in the 1930s, saw the mainspring of realism
as lying not in scarcity, a product of the human condition, but in sin, a prod-
uct of human nature. The aggressive, power-seeking nature of states stems
from the imperfect human material of which they are constructed. It could
well be argued that this shift was a mistake. Unless explicitly defended on
theological grounds, themselves dubious to many theorists, it leads towards
psycho-sociological explanations for social behaviour, which are rarely
satisfactory (although the renewed interest in socio-biology in the last
few years may yet provide some support for Morgenthau). Even amongst
theologians there would be a reluctance to defend the version of original sin
which seems to underlie much of Morgenthau’s work – a strange foundation,
since Morgenthau’s Judaic heritage did not commit him to this stance.
Morgenthau’s second difference from Carr was equally suspect on
intellectual grounds, but, nonetheless, was the key to the success of Politics
Among Nations. Morgenthau systematized realism. His book is full of lists –
the six principles of political realism, the three foreign policy strategies open
to states and so on. This made it a very successful textbook, but at the cost
of a significant coarsening of the realist position. By contrast, Carr’s The
Twenty Years Crisis is a complex, nuanced book, open to a variety of
different readings. The same is true of some of Morgenthau’s other works,
but most of the complexity in Politics Among Nations is provided by acci-
dent, as a result of some rather loose formulations, rather than by design.
However, a simple guide to realism was what was required in 1948. Twenty
years later, Hedley Bull commented that the United States had become the
dominant power in the world without needing to develop a deep knowledge
of the kind of statecraft practised in Europe; now they had this need, and
Development of IR Theory
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American realism provided them with a ‘crib to the European diplomatic
tradition’ (Bull in Porter 1969: 39). This is patronizing, but broadly true.
Morgenthau’s account of realism can be boiled down to one basic propo-
sition about international relations, which is that international relations is
about states pursuing interests defined in terms of power. This simple for-
mula opens up in all sorts of ways and the different component terms will
be discussed at length below. A few comments to situate these later discus-
sions may be helpful here. First, according to Morgenthau, the state is
the key actor in international relations. Other bodies such as international
organizations (governmental and non-governmental), economic enterprises,
pressure groups, even individuals, may, in certain circumstances, exercise
influence and act independently of states, but the state is the key actor
because the state is the institution through which all these other bodies
operate, the institution which regulates these other bodies and decides the
terms under which they can act. As we will see in later chapters, it is a moot
point whether this position will hold in the twenty-first century, but, for the
moment, it should simply be noted that the claim is not that the state is the
only actor but that it is the most significant actor; it is important not to
‘win’ arguments against realism by burning straw people.
Stress on interests conveys two notions: first that states have interests,
second that state interests dominate state behaviour. The idea that states
(nations) have interests could be problematic – can an institution rather
than a person have interests in any meaningful sense? The realist position
is that states are like ‘persons’, capable of possessing interests, and thus that
the ‘national interest’ is not simply a shorthand term for the interests of
whatever group controls the administrative structure of the state. States
behave in accordance with these interests and not in response to abstract
principles (such as collective security) or a desire to act altruistically. States
never sacrifice themselves; they are essentially egoists. This seems straight-
forward, but could actually easily become tautological. Suppose states
define a system of collective security as in their interest and act to support
such a system even when their own material interests are not directly threat-
ened by an aggressor – would this be egoistic behaviour? Clearly pinning
down the idea of the national interest and using it in the analysis of foreign
policy poses real problems, as we will see in Chapter 4 below.
National interests may be complex and difficult to identify in concrete
terms, but the realist proposition is that a degree of simplicity can be intro-
duced by assuming that whatever else states seek, they seek power in order
to achieve other goals. The need for power stems from the anarchical nature
of the international system. There is no authoritative system of decision-
making in international relations; states are obliged to look after themselves
in what has become known as a ‘self-help’ system. Power is a complex
notion; we can think of power as ‘capability’ – the physical force necessary
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to achieve a particular goal – but capability is always cashed out in a
behavioural relationship. The actual possession of assets has political
meaning only in relation to the assets possessed by others – although skill in
deploying one’s assets counts for something. One of the problems here is that
while measuring assets is not too difficult, measuring power in a relationship
can be very tricky indeed.
We will return to each of these points in the chapters that follow. For the
moment, one further general point is worth making, namely that it is not
always clear what kind of theory realism is. Morgenthau obviously thinks
of it as descriptive and explanatory – describing how the world is, explaining
how it works; but there are also clear prescriptive elements here – he is
telling statesmen how they should behave, what they should do. Moreover,
there is a critical edge to his doctrines. One of the points about the notion
of the ‘national interest’ is that it can be employed to criticize the behav-
iour of a particular government. These different kinds of theory sit uneasily
together. When Morgenthau attended ‘teach-ins’ at American universities in
the early 1960s in order to protest that the Vietnam War was against the
national interests of the United States, he was highly irritated by the tactics
of State Department spokespersons who would quote back at him citations
from his writings of the 1940s. Of course, he was right to think that they
were missing the point – that the reasons why the national interest might
call for engagement in European security in the 1940s had little bearing on
the reasons why the national interest might call for disengagement in
Vietnam in the 1960s. However, the young men and women from the State
Department also had a point – Politics Among Nations is, at times, a very
confusing text, purporting, inaccurately, to be simply an account of how
things are, while actually, and inevitably, containing a very strong lead on
how they should be.