Has Realism Become Cost-Beneªt Analysis? Contemporary Realism Is at a Crossroads

Has Realism Become Richard Rosecrance Cost-Beneªt Analysis? A ReviewEssay Lloyd Gruber, Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Has Realism Become Cost-Beneªt Analysis? Contemporary realism is at a crossroads. If realist claims are deªned speciªcally—predicating particular responses by nations to deªned patterns of international power—they cannot be fully sustained. Nations do not respond predictably when confronted by superior power; nor do they always act as if a zero-sum game existed between countries. The amount of cooperation in the international system is not a constant. If, on the other hand—as has been happening recently—realist claims are deªned more generally—and preferences, beliefs, and institutions are admitted to have a causal role—the distinctive contribution of realism is lost in a welter of other variables. Deªned generally, realism is in danger of be- ing reduced to cost-beneªt criteria in which empirical outcomes are unclear. In Ruling the World, Lloyd Gruber furthers these generalist conceptions by interpreting modern international and supranational institutions in a new way in which national self-interest, rather than power compulsions, deter- 1 mines the outcome. His synthesis seeks to explain why institutions should be growing in power and membership and yet—from his point of view—large numbers of participants should be dissatisªed, preferring a now-unobtainable status quo ante. The points I seek to make are as follows: (1) Realism is moving away from relatively speciªc, clear, and testable claims about the nature of the international system to a more generalist formulation in which outcomes are increas- ingly indistinct or opaque; (2) the original formulation—”speciªc realism,” as I shall call it—laid great stress on the balance of power and balancing operations Richard Rosecrance is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Project Director of UCLA’s Carnegie Study of Globalization and National Self-Determination. The author would like to thank the members of the International Colloquium at the University of California, Los Angeles, for helpful comments. 1. Lloyd Gruber, Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 1. Further references to this work appear parentheti- cally in the text. International Security, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 132–154 © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 132 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228801753191169 by guest on 25 September 2021 Has Realism Become Cost-Beneªt Analysis? 133 to sustain the system; (3) in the newgeneralist realism—of whichGruber’s work on institutions is the latest and most developed example—consolidation, agglomeration, and bandwagoning rather than power oppositions are characteristic; (4) realist explanations, however, are still there—based not on bullying and the threat of force but on manipulations of state interest; and (5) Gruber is right about the decline of power oppositions and the rise of institutions but wrong about its causes and likely results. Speciªc Realism The early realist thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli, understood that conºict, deception, bullying, coercion, and war were the crux of international politics. The ªfteenth-century military leader Cesare Borgia— an adept practitioner of realist principles—might dupe or kill an opponent. Small duchies might well be annexed or wiped out by larger states in quest of national grandeur. Great powers would survive because while men in the state 2 of nature lived in fear of violent death, states did not necessarily do so. They could outlast the demise of a ruler or the loss of a province. Twentieth-century realists such as Bertrand Russell, E.H. Carr, and Hans Morgenthau also be- 3 lieved that nations had to balance against the power of an aggressor. If they did not, one state might eventually achieve hegemony and abolish the state system altogether. All of these “speciªc realists” believed that international relations were a kind of state of nature in which the rule of the stronger prevailed. In that formulation “clubs are trumps,” and those who did not ac- knowledge this dictum fell by the wayside. According to speciªc realists, there was no law or division of labor among nations, so independence and territorial 4 integrity depended on self-help. But the essential ingredient in speciªc realism was the existence of a balance of power or a tendency in that direction. Kenneth Waltz contends that a balance of power is the natural outcome of in- 2. See Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 116–117. 3. Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1938); E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939); and Hans. J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (NewYork: Alfred Knopf, 1948). In addition, Morgenthau believed that the struggle to balance power would ultimately lead to an attempt to obtain the max- imum available under the circumstances. 4. See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 111–118. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228801753191169 by guest on 25 September 2021 International Security 26:2 134 terstate rivalry. States might not actively seek a balance. Rather, “balances of power tend to form whether some or all states consciously aim to establish and 5 maintain a balance.” Thus the balance of power emerges from the pattern of 6 opposition among states. In Glenn Snyder’s more recent formulation, nations have to balance one another’s power, because “with each successful conquest, the aggressor presents a greater threat to the security of the remaining states because of its increasing capability and increasing conªdence that it will be un- opposed. Hence the defenders’ collective good in blocking further encroach- ments increases dramatically with each round. ...Atsome point, the cost of resistance will be assessed as lower than the cost of allowing the aggression to 7 succeed.” Some speciªc realists, however, believe that nations cannot rely on the com- 8 petitive nature of the international system to foster balance by itself. De- fenders not only have to resist if attacked, but have to take action to create a 9 balance. States need to favor the weaker side in any competition. As Morton Kaplan phrased it in rule 4 of the balance-of-power system, states have to “act to oppose any coalition or single actor which tends to assume a position of pre- 10 dominance with respect to the rest of the system.” Michael Nicholson went even further, stating that balance-of-power principles “require the actors to de- 11 viate from normal self-interest to having goals for the system as such.” These speciªc realists thus posit particular behavior on the part of states. If states de- 12 viate from establishing a balance, they and the system will suffer. In fact, it is the presence of a balance and balancing behavior to sustain it that resides at 13 the heart of speciªc realism. 5. Ibid., p. 119. 6. Waltz went so far as to claim that “if there is any distinctively political theory of international politics, balance-of-power theory is it.” Ibid., p. 117. 7. Glenn H. Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 51. 8. See Doyle, Ways of War and Peace, pp. 170–172. 9. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 126, writes: “Because power is a means and not an end, states prefer to join the weaker of two coalitions.” 10. Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (NewYork: John Wiley, 1957), p. 23. The other rules appear on p. 23 as well. 11. Michael Nicholson, Formal Theories of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 26. Waltz and some others would dissent from this formulation, arguing only that failure to balance would render the system unstable and jeopardize the security of individual states. 12. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 126–127. 13. With two main participants, even zero-sum games foster balancing (as shown below). If A’s and B’s positions sum to 0 or a constant, each must prevent any increase in the other’s position (otherwise its own will be diminished). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228801753191169 by guest on 25 September 2021 Has Realism Become Cost-Beneªt Analysis? 135 Generalist Realism Recently, however, a new variety of realist thought, which I term “generalist 14 realism,” has emerged that challenges the older speciªc realist formulation. In this view, nations may join institutions to forward their national positions, and the balance of power is no longer characteristic of international relations. Institutions, however, are subject to “collective goods” problems—that is, once created, those goods are available to all. This may cause some countries to “free ride” rather than cooperate in the institutional setting. Nonetheless, nations join institutions for reasons of self-interest, and these institutions can become important determinants in world politics. Balancing may or may not be in the interest of a country, and in institutional and other contexts band- 15 wagoning may become the preferred strategy. Alternatively, a distinct type of 16 bandwagoning may be necessary to create a knife-edge balance of power. The development of this newbreed of realist theories poses important ques- tions both for the antecedent tradition and for the opposition between liberalism and realism. Unlike speciªc realism, generalist realism makes fewassumptions about the responses of states in international relations.

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