Foreign Policy
Spring 1998

International Relations: One World, Many Theories

By Stephen M. Walt

The following abstract is adapted from Dr. Walt's article, originally published in the Spring 1998 issue of FOREIGN POLICY. All rights reserved.

Why should policymakers and practitioners care about the scholarly study of international affairs? Those who conduct foreign policy often dismiss academic theorists (often, one must admit, with good reason), but there is an inescapable link between the abstract world of theory and the real world of policy. We need theories to make sense of the blizzard of information that bombardsus daily, and even policymakers who are contemptuous of "theory" must rely on their own (frequently unstated) ideas about how the world works in order to decide what to do. It is hard to make good policy if one’s basic organizing principles are flawed, just as it is hard to construct good theories without knowing a lot about the real world.

The study of international affairs is best understood as a protracted competition between the realist, liberal, and radical traditions. Realism emphasizes the enduring propensity for conflict between states; liberalism identifies several ways to mitigate these conflictive tendencies; and the radical tradition describes how the entire system of state relations might be transformed. The boundaries between these traditions are somewhat fuzzy and a number of important works do not fit neatly into any of them, but debates within and among them have largely defined the discipline.

Take, for example, the current debate over NATO expansion. From a realist perspective, NATO expansion is an effort to extend Western influence¾ well beyond the traditional sphere of U.S. vital interests¾ during a period of Russian weakness and is likely to provoke a harsh response from Moscow. From a liberal perspective, however, expansion will reinforce the nascent democracies of Central Europe and extend NATO’s conflict-management mechanisms to a potentially turbulent region. A third view might stress the value of incorporating the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland within the Western security community, whose members share a common identity that has made war largely unthinkable.

Scholarship on international affairs has diversified significantly since the end of the Cold War. Yet the sense of déjà vu is equally striking. Instead of resolving the struggle between competing theoretical traditions, the end of the Cold War has merely launched a new series of debates. Ironically, even as many societies embrace similar ideals of democracy, free markets, and human rights, the scholars who study these developments are more divided than ever.

The most interesting conceptual development within the realist paradigm has been the emerging split between the defensive and offensive strands of thought. Defensive realists such as Kenneth Waltz and Stephen Van Evera assumed that states had little intrinsic interest in military conquest and argued that the costs of expansion generally outweighed the benefits. Accordingly, they maintained that great power wars occurred largely because domestic groups fostered exaggerated perceptions of threat and an excessive faith in the efficacy of military force.

This view is now being challenged along several fronts. First, as Randall Schweller notes, the neorealist assumption that states merely seek to survive 2 stacked the deck" in favor of the status quo because it precluded the threat of predatory revisionist states that are willing to risk annihilation to achieve their aims. Second, Peter Liberman, in his book Does Conquest Pay?, shows that the benefits of conquest often exceed the costs, thereby casting doubt on the claim that military expansion is no longer cost-effective. Third, offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer and Fareed Zakaria argue that anarchy encourages all states to try to maximize their relative strength simply because no state can ever be sure when a truly revisionist power might emerge.

Meanwhile, among liberal theorists, the most interesting and important development has been the lively debate on the "democratic peace." This principle rests on the belief that although democracies seem to fight wars as often as other states, they rarely, if ever, fight one another. It is hard to think of a more influential, recent academic debate, insofar as the belief that "democracies don’t fight each other" has been an important justification for the Clinton administration’s efforts to enlarge the sphere of democratic rule.

It is therefore ironic that faith in the democratic peace became the basis for U.S. policy just as additional research was beginning to identify several qualifiers to this theory. For instance, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder have pointed out that states may be more prone to war when they are in the midst of a democratic transition, which implies that efforts to export democracy might actually make things worse.

Whereas realism and liberalism tend to focus on material factors such as power or trade, constructivist approaches emphasize the impact of ideas. Instead of taking the state for granted and assuming that it simply seeks to survive, constructivists regard the interests and identities of states as a highly malleable product of specific historical processes. They pay close attention to the prevailing discourse(s) in society because discourse reflects and shapes beliefs and interests and establishes accepted norms of behavior. Consequently, constructivism is especially attentive to the sources of change, and this approach has largely replaced marxism as the preeminent radical perspective on international affairs.

Given that we live in an era where old norms are being challenged, once clear boundaries are dissolving, and issues of identity are becoming more salient, it is hardly surprising that scholars have been drawn to approaches that place these issues front and center. From a constructivist perspective, in fact, the central issue in the post- Cold War world is how different groups conceive of their identities and interests. Although power is not irrelevant, constructivism emphasizes how ideas and identities are created, how they evolve, and how they shape the way states understand and respond to their situation. Therefore, it matters whether Europeans define themselves primarily in national or continental terms and whether the United States embraces or rejects its identity as "global policeman."

While these debates reflect the diversity of contemporary scholarship on international affairs, there are also obvious signs of convergence. Most realists recognize that nationalism, militarism, ethnicity, and other domestic factors are important; liberals acknowledge that power is central to international behavior; and some constructivists admit that ideas will have greater impact when they are backed by powerful states and reinforced by enduring material forces. Thus, the boundaries of each paradigm are somewhat permeable and there is ample opportunity for intellectual arbitrage. The "compleat diplomat" of the future should remain cognizant of realism’s emphasis on the inescapable role of power, keep liberalism’s awareness of domestic forces in mind, and occasionally reflect on constructivism’s vision of change.

 

Sidebar: Waiting for Mr. X

 

Further Reading

David Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993)

Stephen Brooks, “Dueling Realisms” (International Organization, Summer 1997)

Michael Brown, Sean Lynn-Jones, & Steven Miller, eds., The Perils of Anarchy: Contemporary Realism and International Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)

Brown & Lynn-Jones, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996)

Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York, NY: Norton, 1997)

Doyle & G. John Ikenberry, eds., New Thinking in International Relations Theory(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997)

John Duffield, “NATO’s Functions after the Cold War” (Political Science Quarterly, Winter 1994–95)

Miriam Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)

Peter Evans, “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalization” (World Politics, October 1997)

Charles Glaser, “The Security Dilemma Revisited” (World Politics, October 1997)

Paul Hirst & Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1996) 

Robert Jervis, “The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past?” (International Security, Winter 1991–92)

Ethan Kapstein, Governing the Global Economy: International Finance and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)

Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996)

Eric Labs, “Offensive Realism and Why States Expand Their War Aims” (Security Studies, Summer 1997) 

Yosef Lapid & Friedrich Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder: CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996)

Michael Mastanduno, “Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War” (International Security, Spring 1997)

Jessica Mathews, “Power Shift” (Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997)

Robert McCalla, “NATO’s Persistence after the Cold War” (International Organization, Summer 1996)

John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War” (International Security, Summer 1990)

Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions” (International Security, Winter 1994–95)

Andrew Moravcsik’s “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics” (International Organization, Autumn 1997)

Barry Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict” (Survival, Spring 1993)

Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)

Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics” (International Organization, Spring 1992)

Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

“The World Economy: The Future of the State” (The Economist, September 20, 1997)