nm1160: good afternoon ladies and gentlemen perhaps we could make a start thank 
you very much er a couple of quick announcements before we start er would the 
group of students who are due to meet namex that's not the one that's already 
had the first class but the other group he's asked me if you could meet him at 
three o'clock on Friday this week in room two-five-seven so if you could meet 
him in room two-five-seven at three o'clock this Friday afternoon the second is 
to announce that the last four lectures which are on your er sheet as to be 
announced will be given by er namex er and er she's asked me also to point out 
that she intends to er reinstate the human rights lecture and we're going to 
delete the one on er domestic sources of foreign policy today i'm going to turn 
my attention to probably one of the longest lasting theories of international 
relations er and that is the theory of realism in international relations for 
many years the key textbook on 
international politics was a book by a man called Hans J Morgenthau an American 
academic who wrote various editions of his major work Politics Among Nations in 
this book Morgenthau outlines the theory of realism as it applies to 
international politics and he begins with a very famous er sentence in his book 
international politics he says like all politics is the struggle for power he 
then proceeds to define international relations in terms of power and how 
states acquire retain and er sustain themselves as power er in power for the 
realist power is the currency of international politics it's the way in which 
you get on it's the way in which you achieve your objectives power is therefore 
crucial if you are to be successful there is no other criteria you don't act in 
a way which is right morally or in any other way you simply do what is 
necessary morality plays no part power is everything and the world according to 
the realist analysis is divided into two broad groups of states those who are 
satisfied with the status quo and therefore will seek to sustain it and those 
who are dissatisfied with the status quo who have one of two choices they can 
either change the status quo or they have to accept it so you have dissatisfied 
powers or revolutionary powers at one end and satisifed status quo powers at 
the other the world is seen as a hierarchy with the most satisfied and powerful 
states at the top and the least satisfied and least powerful states at the 
bottom realists therefore define international politics as the struggle for 
power the struggle for supremacy they are in many respects rather like Hobbes' 
analysis of man and the state of nature they see human nature and the nature of 
states as being much the same states are like Hobbes' man motivated by greed 
and fear according to Morgenthau no state will willingly lose power or give up 
power or indeed threaten itself or its position by 
taking actions which it er cannot achieve so for the realist the analysis is 
very simple but it becomes a circular argument power is defined in terms of the 
national interest all states pursue the national interest but in a sense that 
creates a real problem because it follows that everything that states do is 
always in the national interest and what the national interest is in is is 
always what states do in other words you can't get below that er level of 
analysis because no state will act out of the interests of its national 
concerns now Morgenthau may have some relevance because of course he was 
arguing against the ideas of the nineteen-twenties and the nineteeen-thirties 
which had seen a view that international politics should be more cooperative as 
initially it had seen the idea of internationalism as being crucial and 
essential if progress was to be made the future of the world as seen after the 
end of the First World War as lain with international cooperation in 
establishing new forms of international morality in establishing some forms of 
cooperative behaviour between states a collective agreement as to what was 
right and what was wrong Morgenthau argues strongly against this his view was 
such a er the the liberal idealist view of the world that in fact you could 
create a a a cooperative world was simply not related to the realities of 
politics but what in fact happened then was that you simply threatened your own 
existence by being nice to people you ended up in more trouble than being nasty 
to them states who didn't seek to defend their power position simply would not 
be able to survive so that was the problem the problem as far as Morgenthau was 
concerned was if you acted morally you put at risk the interests of your state 
and therefore states should simply ignore morality he wrote a famous article 
called The Twilight of International Morality in which he argued very strongly 
that the purpose of morality 
purpose of ideology as well was simply to provide a gloss for what you would do 
anyway in other words nobody goes out and says i'm going to war against this 
country because it's smaller and i can beat the hell out of it you go to war 
because of international principles but the reality is that you choose war 
because you think you can win it and then you find some reason for doing for 
for taking er the military action you don't in other words er make moral 
judgements about the use of force so Morgenthau presents a very s-, extreme 
view of realism that the only thing that matters is power that the only way in 
which states will will respond to each other is in their perception of other 
states' power and that essentially international politics is an anarchic system 
in which only the powerful will succeed the problem however with Morgenthau's 
analysis and with the realist analysis lies in the number of directions the 
first is that they're not united in what they 
believe should be the role of states even Morgenthau who in his book claims 
that his analysis of international politics simply reflects what actually 
happens complains er halfway through the book that America isn't actually 
conforming to the rules which he's actually laid down and has asserted that all 
states always follow so in other words he's actually saying here's the theory 
but in fact unfortunately er states don't [laugh] abide by my theory which of 
course is nevertheless an accurate description of how states always behave so 
in reality states don't always act as the realists would wish nevertheless the 
realists did have a genuine point in the sense that they were arguing against 
those who believed that policy should be motivated by idealistic and morali-, 
er moralistic views to take one example in the post-nineteen-forty-five period 
there were those in the United States who sincerely believed that because 
democracy and ec-, and the market economy was so 
morally superior it was the duty of the United States to roll back the 
frontiers of communism to liberate Eastern Europe by military means if 
necessary whilst the realists might agree that that would be a laudable 
objective they equally firmly argued that that was not a real possibility that 
you could not roll back frontiers of communism because such to try to do so 
would simply put at risk all that the United States stood for 
and particularly in the age of nuclear weapons and once the Soviet Union could 
respond in nuclear kind it was the there was little point in doing so there was 
no point in being right but very very dead so for the realists the argument is 
very much a practical one as well as a theoretical one now that doesn't mean to 
say that realists and idealists don't always agree indeed in Korea during the 
Korean War or perhaps more recently during the Gulf War you could get both 
realists and idealists agreeing on the outcome even though they actually 
came to it from two entirely different viewpoints on the one side the realists 
would argue the key issue in the Gulf is oil and therefore it's in the United 
States' interests to secure oi-, oil supplies prevent Saddam Hussein from 
controlling a large er section of the world's oil supplies so the United States 
should take military action and on the other side there would be the idealists 
who said this was poor little country invaded by a rather larger country it was 
the duty of the international community to defend the right of Kuwait to 
sovereign independence and existence so both agree on military action but from 
entirely different perspective one saying it's our moral duty the other saying 
it's the interests of the state which is important there however remain 
significant problems with the analysis which er Morgenthau and others bring 
forward first of all in defining what is the national interest whose interests 
are to be defined as the national interest here we 
have the same sort of problem as you get in political philosophy in relation to 
Rousseau in relation to the will of all and the general will Morgenthau's 
answer to that is that in the sense the national interest is so self-evident 
that in fact you don't need to define it but that's a bit of a cop out really 
because you do need to actually know what the national interest is if you're 
going to pursue it and simply to assert that to retain your power is in the 
national interest seems to me to be an inadequate explanation it's also very 
much related to time constraints how much time has to expire before you know 
whether something is in the national interest let's take the case of Germany 
Germany between nineteen-thirty-six and nineteen-forty-two or thereabouts could 
be said to have gained as a result of the Nazi government they had expanded 
Germany they had occupied most of Europe they were being highly su-, successful 
in military terms between nineteen-forty-three 
and nineteen-forty-five Germany lost everything so perhaps the Second World War 
wasn't quite so in America er sorry in in Germany's er national interest but 
view that from the year two-thousand you could certainly argue that not only 
was it in the national interests of Germany to fight the Second World War it 
was in the national interests of Germany to lose the Second World War because 
Germany has become by far and away the strongest state in Europe so in a sense 
it depends on how you define success and what kind of time scale you're looking 
at as to whether or not a particular policy or a particular approach is in the 
national interest the third problem is the problem of power what constitutes 
power now we all have a fairly broad view of what we mean by power but really 
the realists are only concerned in their analysis with military power military 
power is the tangible power that you can see that states actually have but 
power is much more significant than that power 
may be the currency of international relations but some of it is not easily 
measurable the bits that are we can look at and compare so for example we can 
look at the size of a country's military capabilities tells us very little how 
about the quality of those capabilities and there are some states who genuinely 
believe that quantity will always overcome quality but nevertheless it is an 
important factor which needs to be considered how good are the weapons how 
accurate are they how effective what about the size of the population that 
again gives you some clue as to how large an army a country might be able to er 
deploy in times of emergency what is the strength of the economy is it a modern 
economy is it is it er is there a well educated population we can measure most 
of these factors in terms of almost every state and every year for example the 
International Institute for Strategic Studies produces a list of the military 
capability of almost every state so anybody 
who wants to look up how strong a particular country is you can look up and 
find out but that doesn't really tell you very much there are also immeasurable 
elements of power power is relative and it is psychological power is relative 
in the sense that whilst we may have a general hierarchy of states you can 
still have regional great powers who may not necessarily meet the reach the top 
ten internationally but who are still great powers in their locality and who 
can influence and effectively manipulate states around them secondly people may 
perceive one state as being more powerful than it actually is or less powerful 
Britain is a very good example of a state that after nineteen-forty-five 
proclaimed itself to be a great power and possibly for about a decade after the 
end of the Second World War was regarded by almost everybody as a great power 
so in order to be to have your power acknowledged is a very important factor in 
terms of public assessment of your power 
capabilities states simply can't assert that they are powerful other people 
have to recognize it as such states may not be powerful if they are divided 
amongst themselves however much your military capability may be it may be 
ineffectual if in fact you are have a weak government a divided country a 
country which is simply unable to get its act together to use one example the 
example of Laos or Cambodia during the nineteen-fifties and sixties had a 
neutralist government to the north er of the sort of er in northern Laos and 
northern Cambodia you had communists er dominance to the south you had western 
capitalist dominance and so you had compromised on a government that was a 
neutral government neither capitalist nor communist but virtually incapable of 
doing anything or France in nineteen-forty which collapsed as a result of inter-
, in part at least as a result of internal divisions within France and the 
effectiveness of German propaganda we cannot measure people's 
determination to fight and a classic example of this er would be Israel in the 
modern day we can take Israel today Israel is a very small country with a ve-, 
relatively small population and certainly if you simply add up the population 
significantly weaker than its Arab neighbours and yet Israel has fought a 
number of wars in the past and survived and been successful why because it is 
more determined to do so it is more determined because for Israel one loss is 
one loss too many it simply would not survive and therefore however small you 
are you may be very determined to be successful and to survive i'm not arguing 
that this will always be s-, [laugh] er er mean that you can be successful but 
the motivation is a very powerful element in getting people to fight and to 
sustain their position so when we look at power we can't always add up the 
numbers and be certain that one state is more powerful than another in the last 
analysis power exists at three 
different levels it exists at the level of influence how people influence other 
states well you can do that physically by sending a gunboat harassing people 
threatening people but occasionally and quite often influence can far exceed 
your physical capacity er to force an action that is to say organizations like 
the Vatican have enormous influence around the world but have very little power 
a country like Britain has got enormous influence but comparatively declining 
power you can also have mobilized power let's say how much power you actually 
have available to you at any given moment mobilized power is the amount of 
power which you can normally deploy in peacetime conditions and then you've got 
total power which is what you can achieve when you mobilize fully and 
completely onto a war footing and how quickly you can do that how effectively 
you can do that is a further factor in determining how powerful you may be many 
states have often been frightened of a 
surprise attack and however powerful you may be you can sometimes be the victim 
of such attacks furthermore it's become increasingly clear in the modern world 
that the kind of military capability that states have may not always be 
relevant to the particular operations which they wish to undertake nobody would 
suggest that because the United States failed in Vietnam Vietnam was more in 
powerful than the United States all one can say is that the f-, power that was 
available to the United States was inappropriate for use in Vietnam and 
therefore no state in a sense has absolute power in the international community 
a second and perhaps more interesting point is that economic power is equally 
significant and something which in a sense the realists have paid very little 
attention to economic power may be differently distributed from military power 
indeed if you go back in history when you look back to the nineteenth century 
and the eighteenth century most of the 
knowledge great powers of that era were in fact also the economic giants but in 
the twentieth century we find that that has not always been the case if we look 
at the period after nineteen-forty-five for example nobody would really argue 
that the Soviet Union was ever an economic great power but militarily it was 
second in the world to the United States in terms of its military capability so 
there has become a growing mismatch between economic power and military power 
and some states have used economic power very sucessfully to achieve their 
objectives in the international community so that economic power has become a 
new reality which in a sense the realists have failed to take into account neo-
realists people like Kenneth Waltz and others in more recent times have however 
taken that into account in their analysis of international politics is it true 
howe-, also that in fact states do not behave according to some basic feelings 
of morality i think here again 
the realist analysis is simply inaccurate of course it's true that states will 
not act simply out of er a feeling that what they should ought to do should be 
moral and states will of course choose to do a series of immoral actions but as 
Arnold Wolfers one of the early realists argued in a famous er article called 
Statesmanship and Moral Choice states do make choices and they do make them on 
the basis of some moral values given the fact that you may have objective which 
can be achieved by more than one means then you can choose the least immoral of 
a range of immoral actions that's not saying you're going to act morally but 
there is a degree of moral choice between sort of bombing somebody and maybe 
using less intrusive means now the analysis which the realists have offered 
adds one further element and rather interestingly it becomes a moral imparity 
the realist analysis is that order is more important than justice in the 
international community to the realist 
what is important is that peace is preserved not because it is morally good but 
because it benefits those that are at the top of the international system when 
you're at the top you don't want to risk anything you become more conservative 
with a small C you want to have a conservative view you don't risk anything you 
don't put your head above the parapet you want order in order that your trade 
will continue that your economic prosperity will continue that your interests 
will be safeguarded and you don't risk anything of course if anybody threatens 
you you will fight them and presuming you're as powerful as you think you are 
you will defeat them but the reality is you want order order is by far and away 
the most important value as far as the realist is concerned other people would 
argue that justice is more important that you cannot have a real just world a 
peaceful world unless there is proper justice people will always be 
dissatisfied if they cannot see that their legitimate complaints will be dealt 
with and if at all possible remedied 
the reality is that for those who are dissatisfied with the status quo which is 
essentially what the realists support have to change that status quo by 
military means the only way in which a status quo can be changed is by 
replacing those at the top with a new international order and the general 
belief is that that can only be achieved by military means now in reality of 
course that may not be true some states can achieve objectives using economic 
means and provide tremendous impact on the international economy such as 
raising the price of oil but in but in the realists' analysis you are faced 
with a very stark choice there is order in which states at the top dispense 
what they regard as justice er or there is anarchy others on the other hand 
would would argue that in it is an anarchy because there is no justice why is 
it that two-thirds of the world consume less than a third of the world's 
resources is this not an unfair and unreasonable distribution both of 
the resources of the world and of power that more equal division of power will 
lead to more peaceful relations particularly given the fact that more people 
will be satisfied than dissatisfied now one way in which states can increase 
their power is through alliances they can achieve what they cannot achieve 
alone by joining with others and alliances can be created in the short term for 
short term gains they can be economic alliances they can be diplomatic 
alliances they can be military alliances alliances enable you to change the 
power relationship and to achieve far more collectively than individually but 
the difference between that kind of collectivism which realists would approve 
of and the collectivism of the idealists is that under alliances you choose 
your partners and you choose the purposes for which you form an alliance the 
realists would argue that it is only makes sense if you have common objectives 
to join together to achieve them as happened 
during the Second World War it doesn't require ideological considerations if 
you have a common enemy you'll join together to fight against that common enemy 
and that's as really as we'd have predicted all that as quickly as you came 
together you disintegrated because you always fall out over who's going to get 
the biggest spoils at the end of that conflict but alliances are ways of 
increasing power in the short term very few alliances last longer than the 
existence of the threat that created them so that realists have a view of the 
world which is very simple the world is divided to some extent into good guys 
and bad guys the good guys are the people you agree with the bad guys are the 
people who are trying to upset you they have a simplistic view of how states 
interreact they see it in terms of power the only thing that matters is whether 
i am more powerful than another state or that state is more powerful than i am 
and it's a very simplistic 
analysis of power because it simply seeks to identify military power of the 
main means by which states interreact it excludes morality there's no moral 
considerations at all except in so far as you might choose not so bad a means 
of achieving your objective and the example which Wolfers uses is the example 
of the Cuban missile crisis where he says look let's consider what the options 
of the United States were they could have written a nice letter to Mr Gorbachev 
sorry to Mr gru-, Khrushchev and say er please take your missiles away doesn't 
seem very likely that would be happen they could ignore it they can simply say 
it's none of our business they could bomb the missile sites they could invade 
or they could set up some kind of quarantine to stop the military capability 
getting through Wolfers' argument is that Kennedy chose the least worst of 
those options that were available to him he dismissed the idea of writing to 
Khrushchev or ignoring it completely 
and that was to set up a quarantine because that was the least worst option 
because it threatened nobody except those who wished to either run the 
quarantine or attempt to er er force their way through it it threatened no 
Cubans it threatened no Russians but it demonstrated America's commitment to do 
something positive about getting rid of the missiles it achieved its objectives 
so there is an element of morality but it's not very strong where i think there 
there is a weakness however is that most states seek to defend their actions in 
moral terms very few states seek to actually announce that they're doing 
something just because they can do it they always find some reason ideological 
or moral to justify the actions which they have taken and you have to ask 
yourself why why do states do this if in fact everybody knows that states are 
simply out for themselves if everybody knows that the only thing that really 
matters is power why do you feel the 
necessity to defend yourself against world opinion and i suppose the answer to 
that is that in fact states like to be liked they don't like to be seen as 
bullies they don't like to be seen as people who ignore the rights of others 
and so states do feel a certain degree of obligation to justify their actions 
furthermore i think realism excludes the possibility and it's a growing one 
that states can simply isolate themselves from the ouside world the growth of 
television the growth of mass communications have meant it's virtually 
impossible for states to ignore what is going on around them and public opinion 
has become more important in some respects within states forcing states to do 
things which they might not otherwise do so the strict application of power in 
terms of maintaining the hierarchy of ignoring the interests of others is 
simply being slowly withered away i'm not suggesting that there's a tremendous 
amount of international compassion and so forth 
but there is certainly a view that today's states cannot get away as often as 
they did with simply doing things because it's in their interests to do so 
furthermore there has been a second line of criticism of rea-, of realism not 
this time from the idealists who simply throw up their hands in despair at the 
idea that states should simply behave in such a a cavalier way but from those 
who wish to see a more clearer analysis of international relations based on a 
more scientific method of er study into the debate if that is the right way of 
putting it came a group of scientists mainly who sought to criticize 
Morgenthau's view that what he had put forward was a scientific theory of 
international relations by pointing out first of all that Morgenthau did not 
set out any preconc-, er did not set out any propositions that he sought to 
test but merely asserting that the behaviour of states was as he described it 
and therefore was able to fit everything into his theory but he 
also failed to discard his own ideological views and that what was needed was a 
more scientific and rigorous approach to the study of international politics 
that yes states behaved in certain ways but they could be seen as behaving in 
certain ways because of certain variables which operated across all states and 
in the same way across all states so the scientific analysis of international 
politics would analyse the ways in which states behave not by asserting 
beforehand what they would do but by looking at what they did and then trying 
to understand why it was they behave in the way in which they did Morton Kaplan 
in his book System and Process in International Politics introduced this new 
idea of systems analysis that there was such a thing as an international system 
and the international system simply had to be analysed in terms of the way in 
which it was structured and how the subsystems within that system interreacted 
traditionalists like Morgenthau and others 
simply found this beyond comprehension they argued strongly that you couldn't 
have a scientific study in that sense you couldn't have a study of politics 
which discounted the human element within it they argued that their analysis of 
international politics the realist analysis of international politics reflected 
a broad philosophical tradition about the nature of human beings human beings 
behaved selfishly that the nature of individuals was such that they behaved in 
the way in which to Morgenthau and others states behaved why because states 
were made up of human beings the people who made decisions for states 
translated their individual er methods of working to the state level it was 
individuals who made decisions on behalf of states states themselves couldn't 
make any decisions at all so that the debate which went on was between those 
who thought you could understand the international system by looking at issues 
in a scientific way and those who asserted that it was simply impossible to do 
so 
at a later stage in this debate which to some extent became rather sterile with 
each side shouting at the other and not really communicating there developed a 
new version of realism or neo-realism as it became the leading er figure in 
this er analysis was a man called Kenneth Waltz er now Kenneth Waltz's analysis 
of international relations was very much to attempt the broad principles of 
realism but to argue that in a sense it needed to be modernized and brought in 
up to date and to accept a wider range of factors than people like Morgenthau 
and the early realists had suggested the Waltz book or series of books he made 
his name for example by an analysis of war entitled Man the State and War in 
which he tried to analyse the different levels of which war might be seen to 
have been the cause he then went on to look at the balance of power as a theory 
because as you'll see next time in which i'm sure you'll be pleased to know 
will be my last appearance er in this 
lecture thea-, er series er we er er he identified the balance of power as 
being one of the most crucial elements er for the realists and indeed for the 
maintenance of order within international relations but he also saw it in terms 
of the nuclear balance of power but what you had to do was you had to see the 
balance of power within the nuclear context and rather interestingly he and 
others have argued very strongly that deterrence is best achieved through the 
acquisition of nuclear weapons but Waltz went further he actually argued that 
as many states as possible should have nuclear weapons because that way every 
state would deter every other and that war would simply be abolished through 
deterrence he wrote a famous article called Nuclear Weapons More Would Be 
Better and that what he's trying to argue it seems to me is that you can create 
some kind of stability and order within 
the international community the search for order while as it is primarily 
concer-, the concern of the realist who assert that it is far more important 
than justice remains a key factor in international relations in the next few 
lectures that we shall be er having er and giving it is answering the questions 
of how we avoid war that will be central er to the discussions now half the 
reason for that is that even if you believe in international justice there is a 
general feeling that wars are destructive and should be avoided if at all 
possible the fact that war does exist and continues to exist is a key factor in 
understanding international politics how you avoid it and the answers to what 
the best means of achieving the avoidance of war is a matter which varies for 
individual approach to individual approach but next week i shall be looking at 
in detail at the balance of power as a concept for managing international 
relations