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Repository. Research Institute University IR !0 > European Institute. Cadmus, European University Institute, Florence on University Access EUI Working Paper SPS No. 94/7 European Open The Realist Qwest fo r the SOCIALSCIENCES IN POLITICALIN AND WORKING PAPERS EUI Dynamicsof Power S Robot Gilpin. tefano Author(s). Available The 2020. © G in uzzini Library EUI the by produced version Digitised Repository. Research Institute University European Institute. European University Library Cadmus, 3 on 0001 University Access 0015 European Open 7283 Author(s). Available The 2020. 5 © in Library EUI the by produced version Digitised Repository. Research Institute University European Institute. Cadmus, EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE, FLORENCE on DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES University BADIA FIESOLANA, SAN DOMENICO (FI) Access European EUI Working Paper Open The Realist Quest for the Dynamics of Power S Robert Gilpin. Author(s). Available tefano The 2020. © G in uzzini SPS SPS Library No. 94/7 EUR WP WP 3£0 EUI the by produced version Digitised Repository. Research Institute University European Institute. Cadmus, on University Access No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form European Open without permission of the author. European University Institute I -I 50016 San Domenico (FI) Printed in Italy in July 1994 Author(s). Available All All rights reserved. © Stefano Guzzini Badia Fiesolana The 2020. © in Italy Library EUI the by produced version Digitised Robert Gilpin. The Realist Quest for the Repository. Dynamics of Power Research St efa n o G u zzin i’ Institute (Revised version of a paper presented at the inaugural conference of the Nordic International Studies Association, Oslo, 18-19 August 1993. To appear in: Iver B. Neumann & Ole Wæver (eds) Masters in the Making. University International Theorists Reassessed. London: Routledge, forthcoming) European Table of Contents Institute. 1. Assumptions: ontological ambiguities and methodological individualism 5 Cadmus, 1.1. Moral pessimism and the permanence of human nature (5) 1.2. The utility function of security, power and wealth (6) on 1.3. Individual or group permanence? (7) University Access 2. Realist IR as necessarily neomercantilist IPE .......... .......................... 8 2.1. The changed modern international political economy (9) European 2.2. Definition and ideologies of IPE (11) Open 3. Dynamising neomercantilism: three dialo g u es......................................... 14 Author(s). 3.1. State dynamics: the dialogue between Lenin and Clausewitz (14) Available 3.2. Socio-economic dynamics: the dialogue between Marx and Keynes (16) The 2020. © 3.3. IPE dynamics: the dialogue between Lenin and Kautsky (18) in 4. International liberal order after the decline of the Pax Americana . 21 Library 5. The limits of neomercantilist IP E ............................................................... 24 EUI 6. Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 28 the by European University Institute (Via dei Roccettini, 9; I - 50016 San Domenico produced di Fiesole (FI); Fax: (39-55) 59.98.87; E-mail: [email protected]). 1 would like to thank Anna Leander, Iver B. Neumann, Heikki Patomaki, Michael Suhr and Ole Waever for comments on the previous draft of the paper. version Digitised Repository. Research Institute University European Institute. Cadmus, on University Access European Open Author(s). Available The 2020. © in Library EUI the by produced version Digitised Repository. Robert Gilpin. The Realist Quest for the Dynamics of Power Research Stefano Guzzini Institute The crucial date in the recent International Political Economy must have been 15 August 1971, when the US administration decided to suspend University the Bretton-Woods monetary system. Not only did this unilateral deci sion change the way the international monetary system was to be run; it was perceived that the US thereby officially declared its power posi European tion as challenged. After the 1973 crisis, the erosion of US power, the recession, and the rising protectionism came to be linked. US academics Institute. started for the first time to apply analysis of the decline of powers to Cadmus, their own country. The oil shock and the accrued influence of economic on weapons moved economic issues to the level of ‘high politics’, i.e. to University questions of war and peace. One of those scholars who were caught relatively well-prepared to Access respond to these issues, was Robert Gilpin. The first reason is that he European had not specialised in the core of International Relations. His initial Open academic majors were in fact outside political science, narrowly con ceived. He took a B.A. in philosophy and a M.S. in rural sociology Author(s). before he wrote a PhD in political science. He specialised on the role Available of science and technology for domestic and foreign policies. At the time The 2020. of the 1971 watershed, his most recent book was a detailed analysis of © the social and political responses of one former great power to the chal in lenges of the after-war period.1 When he presented some of the theses in an article, he concentrated Library on industrial and technology policies undertaken in different European countries to respond to the so-called ‘technology-gap’ which existed EUI between the US and European countries.2 Provoked by T. Levitt’s criti the que that the ‘gap was not technological’, but managerial, Gilpin re by sponded that this was true, but beside the point. And here it is worth 1 France in the Age of the Scientific State (Princeton University Press, 1968). produced 2 ‘European disunion and the technology gap’, The Public Interest, no. 10 (Winter 1968), pp. 43-54. version 1 Digitised 2 Stefano Guzzini Repository. quoting at length, because the 1968 text alludes to Gilpin’s nearly entire research programme afterwards. Research The point is that the technology gap is much less an economic than a political problem. This is true in several senses. In the first place, what is at issue for Europeans is their political position vis-à-vis the great Institute powers and their capacity for long-term national independence. Where as, beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century, control over petroleum resources became essential once naval ships shifted from sail to diesel, so today an independent aerospace and electronics industry, University along with the supporting sciences, is seen to be crucial for a nation to enjoy diplomatic and military freedom of action. Second, the intensity of the European reaction to the technology gap must be understood in the context of the profound economic and political developments which European have engulfed western Europe since the end of World War II ... First, there has been the trauma for France, Great Britain, and several other Institute. European countries of decolonization; seldom in history have proud and ruling peoples been reduced to second-class status so fast. Second, for Cadmus, the first time in history the political and industrial leaders of western on Europe have experienced and must come to terms with a full-employ University ment market economy.3 Access It is a research programme about the long-term shifts in ‘power’-factors European that give way to the rise and fall of ‘powers’. In short, it is about the Open dynamics of power. Its ingredients are: (1) the basic driving forces: on the level of the actor, the quest for Author(s). power and on the system level, market mechanisms and technological Available change. In the modern age, technology/efficiency and power have The become inextricably linked. The result is a global, i.e. national and 2020. © transnational, ‘struggle for efficiency’; in (2) the domestic response to this struggle which has to accommodate an ever more complicating socio-economic consensus. Gilpin’s approach to the welfare state is torn between its positive capacity to stabilise Library democracies and its negative nationalistic impulses to export problems; EUI (3) the international accommodation of power shifts, especially of great the power decline, where competition risks to degenerate in technological by or other wars. When Gilpin recalls in 1987 his crucial turn in 1970 to what will 1* produced 1 ‘Of Course the Gap’s Not Really Technological’, The Public Interest, no. 12 (Summer 1968), pp. 125-26. version Digitised Robert Gilpin. The Realist Quest for the Dynamics of Power 3 Repository. later be called the discipline of IPE, he refers to his experiences in France where the US multinational corporations would have been kick ed out, if Général de Gaulle had convinced the German government to Research follow suit. He analysed that the German refusal was linked to a wider bargain in which the US military guarantee to Germany was ‘traded off for the Multinationals: only the Pax Americana made transnationalism Institute of this kind and speed possible. Although I did not fully appreciate it at the time, I had returned to a University realist conception of the relationship of economics and politics that had disappeared from postwar American writings, then almost completely devoted to more narrowly conceived security concerns.4 European This particular dynamising of the Realist vision produces several ap parent paradoxes for the easy categorisation to which IR/IPE scholars Institute. have been trained to. One the one hand, ever after he declared that Cadmus, Thucydides ‘would (following an appropriate course in geography, on economics, and modern technology) have little trouble in understanding University the power struggle of our age’5, he is considered as one of those most ahistorical Realists who believe in the Realist credo from a profoundly Access unchanged international system. Some of his own writings, especially European chapter 6 of his War and Change give credence to this belief. Yet, in Open the chapters preceding it, and in several other writings, Gilpin goes at length developing the changes that occurred in the international system Author(s). since the Peloponnesian War — with the coming of global capitalism, Available the rise of the nation-state and the welfare state.