TY - JOUR
AU - Steele, Brent J.
AB - “The past is never dead. It's not even the past”–Requiem for a Nun, by William Faulkner, 1951, act I, scene iii. A couple of years ago I wrote about what I termed “reflexive realism,” which I defined as “the attempt to restore classical realist principles of agency, prudence and the recognition of limitations as part of an attempt to provide a practical-ethical view of international politics” (Steele 2007: 273). At the time, however, I was not sure whether this recent trend in IR scholarship was more intellectual history or theory on its own accord. After reading these three impressive books, I would argue that whatever we term them, the recent vibrant re-engagements with realist theory are both, and exist in the space between intellectual history and theory. When one reads these accounts, we are re-reading the historical contexts in which various realist thinkers produced their work, but we recognize how their conditions speak to an unsettled present context, and thus also realize the leverage their wise lessons have upon our contemporary circumstances. All three of these books can be considered contributions to the development of realist thought in International Relations theory. All return to some of the seminal authors of the realist tradition of political thought, but with an eye toward resurrecting some critical elements found in the works of authors who were once considered to be the foundation for otherwise conventional concepts in realist IR theory (survival, fear, anarchy, etc.). And all three helpfully provide an ontology of the present by going into our past: the rereading of seminal texts to “decode” a past which speaks to our present in ways in which the traditional readings of those texts cannot (see also Lebow 2003). The books together provide IR scholars a dilemma, however. How are we to go about organizing the field of IR theory, or even the (pick one) “perspective,”“paradigm,”“research programme” or “style” of realist political thought, if we are faced with three ever-shifting domains? One domain—call it the “world out there”—is of course in constant movement, subject to systemic (Cold War to post-Cold War), constitutive and normative (international versus world society), and technological (late modernity to postmodernity) transitions. A second domain—call it “the field of IR”—is subject to theoretical advances and contractions (that is: the great “Debates”). These first two domains interact to produce the dynamism of a third – call it “the core” for lack of a better term. Most scholars reading this review know what “the core” is—they mastered, or need to master it in order to pass that most important of graduate school hurdles—the qualifying examination. It is this third domain that budding IR scholars are supposed to internalize and verify before they decide upon a topic and field of research. Yet these works demonstrate that even the core can no longer be taken for granted—political realism as one of IR theory's pillars of thought has become a vibrant subdomain where classical realists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and Morgenthau, among others, have been revisited and reinterpreted (see Lang 2002; Lebow 2003; Williams 2005, 2007). It is in this third domain—the revisiting of ancient and classical realist writers and their writings—where the three books find themselves. By diving back into these works and coming out with such a variety of conclusions and themes, these books demonstrate that the subdomain of realist IR theory defies concrete definition. Perhaps that is the major purchase of the Evrigenis account of “negative association” in that it imposes a translucent thread running through the works of Thucydides and Aristotle (chapter 1) to Sallust and other Roman thinkers (chapter 2), which is then picked up by Machiavelli (chapter 3) and then Bodin (chapter 4), and then reconstructed by Hobbes (chapter 5), whose work influenced the themes in Rousseau (chapter 6), Schmitt and Morgenthau, and fascinatingly enough the debates between the last two (chapter 7). Negative association refers to the formation of a group in the face of a common external threat, a “process by which individuals form their political identities” (2). This may sound like a familiar tune. In fact, of the three books reviewed in the current essay, Fear of Enemies is the most conventional account, albeit through the construction of well-specified concepts through a wide variety of realist thinkers to understand the maxim of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The “realism” here avoids reference to an external world and is instead based on the common fear, a common psychological drive, that humans have had of an external enemy, a commonality which has served to organize humans as political and social beings through time and space. Thus we have a realism which “captures the essence of a political community” (178). Evrigenis' account naturalizes fear in a somewhat unproblematic way, but the deeply psychological manner in which this author, using this array of thinkers as his arsenal, addresses and advances the process of negative association is quite sophisticated. While the ancient and classical thinkers' works are on full display in the first four chapters of the book, the real “star” here is Hobbes, who not only remedies some of the confusion found in Machiavelli and Bodin over the psychological component of fear, but also serves as the founding influence of a variety of thinkers, from Hegel to Kant to Rousseau, and more recently Schmitt and Morgenthau. Fear of Enemies thus reminded this reviewer of the Hobbes found in Michael Williams (2005)The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations. While Evrigenis' account serves to reinforce a rather conventional understanding of human relations—that we associate with others in the face of a mutually threatening Other—the manner in which it engages this convention is careful and judicious. Far from imposing a disciplinary continuity of negative association amongst the great thinkers, Evrigenis instead contextualizes the historical conditions each wrote within. Indeed, Fear of Enemies is in certain portions (such as Chapter 7) just as much intellectual history and biography as it is a work of international political theory. This of course makes the major thesis more compelling—despite the variety of experiences for each theorist or philosopher, they all discovered a common referent, and then served to captain this ship of negative association and steer it towards a particular direction depending upon the time and place of their writing. Thus, the referent of negative association found in Fear of Enemies may serve as both a heuristic device and a pedagogical frame, the latter of which to train graduate students attempting to sort out the realist tradition's origins and impact upon IR theory today. The choice to engage Carl Schmitt in the Odysseos and Petito volume, The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt, is of course not unusual in terms of the recent revitalization in international political thought with the German jurist's work. What is unique, however, is that it is Schmitt's 1950 work The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, which serves as the organizing body dissected by a variety of theoretical scalpels, rather than the typical works of Political Theology and Concept of the Political, which served as the centerpieces for other IR confrontations of Schmitt (Huysmans 1998; Williams 2003; Doty 2007). Schmitt's assertion of a nomos is helpfully defined by the editors in their introduction, where it is a “foundational act that creates a concrete territorial order as unity of (legal) order and (spatial) orientation” (4). The notion of space especially works front and center in Schmitt's nomos, and throughout many of the contributions to the volume, serving as both an anchor to the notion of the Westphalian, European nation-state and as a regulator of relations, including war. The volume is organized into four parts. Part I (chapters 1–3) deals with Schmitt's “heterodox” international thought, Part II (chapters 4–7) analyzes “the crisis of order in the post-9/11 era” and includes four contributions on terrorism (by Alain de Benoist, Gary L. Ulmen, Linda Bishai and Andreas Behnke, and Louize Odysseos). Part III narrates what a “new nomos of the earth” might look like with reference to systemic distributions of power and empire (chapters 8 and 9, by Chantal Mouffee and Danilo Zolo), liberal global order (chapter 10, Fabio Petito), and recent developments in European international law (chapter 11, J. Peter Burgess). Part IV (chapters 12–14) includes what I consider to be the most fascinating expositions which critically “reread Carl Schmitt's international thought” (Mika Ojankangas, Sergei Prozorov, and Mitchell Dean, respectively). Three issues arise in this volume, issues not uncommon to any edited volume with an array of talented contributors. First, some authors stray from the central text of Nomos, instead focusing upon the more familiar Concept of the Political. In this, some contributions (such as Prozorov's) are more successful at stretching the application than others. Burgess' chapter, for instance, barely addresses the topic of international law via Schmitt. That chapter aside, when reading a volume on Schmitt most of the diversions are in my view welcome—they serve to round-out the analysis and keep the reader engaged in a text that exudes spontaneity. Second, there is some redundancy in the volume—three different contributions (Odysseos and Petito, Burgess, and finally Dean) all take a crack at defining the word “nomos,” again with varied success. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, what makes IPT of Carl Schmitt such a compelling read also illustrates the predicament embodying either the field of international political theory or Carl Schmitt himself (or both). Schmitt becomes, like a rock song now a decade old, “everything to everyone,” and moreover a philosopher for all purposes. Here, one can make Schmitt into an English School theorist because he used land and soil to resolve what Hedley Bull termed the “Problem of International Order” (Colombo, chapter 1). Schmitt was also an E.H. Carr realist concerned with European gross-politics, which required an authoritative subject to make “decisions in Europe's name” (Luoma-aho, chapter 2, p. 52). My favorite is that Schmitt may also be read as a presage to the late Foucault, as Ojankangas, Prozorov, and Dean discuss in chapters 12–14 in the final part of the book. I've always had a hunch that there were some similarities between Foucault and Schmitt's work, especially the emphasis on creativity and vitality found in the Self in Foucault and in the Decision in Schmitt, an intersection that is as ironic as it is compelling. The Schmitt here is also defended and chiseled into what he is not. Against the preneoconservatism of James Burnham, who saw American principles needing to be asserted in the founding of a universal order, Luoma-aho posits that Schmitt was much more cautious, seeing as a troubling development the defensive to offensive shift in the US reading of the Monroe Doctrine (p. 49). According to Bishai and Behnke (chapter 6), Schmitt is anything but a neoconservative “apologist for violence and aggression,” which constitutes those authors' arming of Schmitt into a vibrant critique of both modern liberal-idealism (such as democratic peace) and its eschatological fetishes. Yet these observations about the diversity of the contributions also bring up the functional benefits of IPT of Carl Schmitt, namely that it may serve as a text for graduate courses dealing with a variety of topics. Most obviously, it could be assigned for seminars on international political theory or realism in IR, but it could also serve as a text for core graduate seminars on theories of International Relations as its contributions bear upon several IR paradigms (English School, liberalism, classical realism, critical and poststructural thought) and core field topics (terrorism, international law, Just War). Last, but certainly not least, we arrive at, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace, Vibeke Schou Tjalve's critical rereading of Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau as both recipients, and then 20th Century proponents, of an American “republican” form of realist thought which celebrated self-interrogation, seeking dissent's perpetual place in American democracy. Tjalve begins in the first chapter with a genealogy of two American impulses—one focusing on certainty and triumphalism of unique and “exceptional” American principles, and “the other in that of hope despite suspicion,” or more directly the tension between “faith in destiny or fear of contingency,” (23) and then investigates Niebuhr and Morgenthau's place against or within these impulses. While I see all three of these books as contributions to their respective fields of thinking on international relations and political thought, I am most partial to Tjalve's thesis, mainly because I am an American and I am also someone who finds Niebuhr and Morgenthau as models of an ethos which modern academic-intellectuals, including myself, should seek to practice. More directly, I think she appropriately approaches Niebuhr and Morgenthau as skeptics who saw dissent as vital to the health of an American democracy that was prone to overconfidence and aggressive assertion. They are also accurately positioned against the modern scholastic manifestations of such overconfidence, neoconservatism and then the “dual languages of Just War and Democratic Peace.” Niebuhr and Morgenthau are read by Tjalve, again I think accurately, as theorists constructing an ethos which challenges the notion of certainty itself. In the first two chapters, Tjalve discusses the developments within Puritan thought—the uniquely American historical traditions within which her two theorists of focus are situated. In chapter two, Niebuhr and Morgenthau are situated as “preachers,” individuals who “considered themselves social critics … [of democracy's] broader spiritual and philosophical underpinnings” (53). Against Believers, Preachers did not see the United States as a nation of “Destiny” but rather one existing in a contingent, precarious and dangerous world. Against the Technicians, they argued that technology and scientific progress would not be enough to save mankind from itself. This Preacher ethos in Niebuhr (chapter 3) and then Morgenthau (chapter 4) is resurrected in the final part of the book, (chapter 5 and the epilogue), where the “political implications” for the modern United States and the world are addressed. This is a fascinating book, and one which should be required reading for all theorists interested in Niebuhr and Morgenthau's impact on realist thought. Additionally, and this is of not so minor importance these days, it is beautifully written. But let me relate two disagreements I have with Tjalve's work. The more minor of the two comes from Tjalve's use of Niebuhr and Morgenthau to critique modern versions of what she titles “American Realism” in chapter 5. Tjalve is justified in using this term, as she points out, because American neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthaummer and Condoleeza Rice self-identify as “realists.” That may be, but modern-day neoconservatives are almost antithetical to any form of realism that Morgenthau and Niebuhr espoused, a point Tjalve drives home in that chapter. Calling neoconservatives “American realists” unnecessarily conflates those of us who are American and sympathetic towards the ethos of realism with the neoconservatives we find ourselves critiquing from within, and so I blanch at the use of “American realism” for a movement that is American but so incredibly detached from “reality”—a development for which the United States, and the world, are paying a price. My more pressing quibble (and that's really all it is), originates from the casting of Niebuhr and Morgenthau as “realistic utopians,” individuals who did not “entirely oppose progressivism” (p. 38). Tjalve posits both as such because they embodied in their work an ethos of the American Jeremiad, who points “to the ever present distance between promise and fact” as a way to “correct the pretensions of American society” (94). I recognize that Tjalve is not alone in this reading of at least Morgenthau. A similar case indeed has been made that Morgenthau's late work in an age of nuclear insecurity saw a world governmental form modeled after US constitutionalism as not only possible but necessary to prevent the end of the human race (Lebow 2003: esp. 44–54). Yet it is one thing to posit, as Tjalve does on page 6, a “cutting down of the national ego”—function served by the critic who contrasts the ideal with the real, if the transcendent ideal is that which is proffered by those in power. It's quite another to posit, as Tjalve does, “a deeper level, an affirmation of the transcendent ideals to which a truly liberal democracy aspires” (xiv, emphasis added). If we keep critique on the former level, we can set up those in power as performers to be ridiculed, naïve in their lofty goals that will never be realized, but nonetheless a ridiculing which forces such power to reform, if not “improve” upon its condition. That's the ethos many Americans of my generation embody. Inspirational it is not, but an ethos all the same. Admittedly, both Morgenthau and Niebuhr had accounts of the transformation of the Self, and indeed the capacity for self-reflection was one engine for such a transformation, but to equate this transformation to “progress” implies that both posited some kind of transcendental “measuring stick” that America, or any society, might use to gauge its development. Yet at any point in human history when such transcendental universals were put in front of social beings—in the form of positivist or Enlightenment principles, for example—such ideals became contaminated with the struggle for power, used as mechanisms for the further control of humanity, rather than constructs of emancipation. The tension in Tjalve's reading is for instance evident on page 112, where she posits that “without faith in transcendence … American society had lost its sense of finitude, hailing itself as absolute perfection and hence reducing political dedication to the adulation of the status quo.” Yet both Tjalve's Jeremiadic reading of Morgenthau and Niebuhr, and the American society against which they critiqued, assume transcendence as not only possible, but beneficial. Far from being “transcendent,” Morgenthau and Niebuhr saw such ideals as particularist concepts produced in specific temporal (late modernity) and spatial (bourgeois Europe, and then America) contexts which were then attempted to be indexed to the rest of the world. Yet anxiety befalls the nations or individuals which never can attain such ideals—instead of transcendent ideals leading to our emancipation and self-correction, they perpetually imprison us in our attempts to attain that which cannot be attainable. Thus, the real ethos of Morgenthau and Niebuhr's critiques exist for us to reject the transcendental and be acutely aware of our own limitations. Of course, like any powerful account, Tjalve's brilliance is in anticipating this critique. She is careful in several portions of the work to point out the particularist notions of the Self that Niebuhr and Morgenthau painted for the purposes of humility and to open the space in which democratic politics could more effectively, and then progressively, operate. And while I disagree with the “utopian” component of Tjalve's reading, that doesn't mean she is incorrect. In fact, if her balancing of transcendence with self-critique is on the mark, then she has exorcized the “ghost” which “haunted” Michael C. Williams' (2005: 203)“wilful Realism,” when he questioned whether, in his words, “a rhetoric of self-limitation [can] prevail in politics.” According to Tjalve's presentation, Niebuhr and Morgenthau, as American Jeremiads, have provided us this toolkit for a sense of “detached belonging” (153), which may allow such self-limitation to indeed “prevail.” We shall see. As we near the end of another decade of IR theory, we might take inventory of this recent trend of re-engaging the core figures of what we loosely term the “realist tradition” of political thought. What explains this collective analytical fascination with and major reformulations of, these major icons? One factor I propose is a collective concern with, and the proposed critique of eschatologies. In opposition to the panacea, these three works demonstrate the ability of humans to cautiously limit their own extremes—whether it is through negative association, a new nomos of the earth, or a critical ethos against but within the Self. Organic associations from below, rather than from “up high,” seem to be the order of the day in these works. I think we may be coming to a point in the field of International Relations theory (or “international political theory” as the case may be) where the seeds of a pluralism planted some twenty years ago are reaping a mighty harvest. What the trailblazers of the important epistemological debates of the 1980s and early 1990s could not envision was that in addition to pushing the field into vibrant forms of critical social and political theory, the pluralist infusion would allow today's IR scholars to engage classical realist texts in a critical and insightful manner. These three compelling books attest to this, infusing a vitality of critique into existing canonical texts. Whatever the past is or was, these scholars demonstrate that they our worthy of our time and attention in the present. References Doty Roxanne Lynn . ( 2007 ) ‘States of Exception on the Mexico-US Border: Security, “Decisions,” and Civilian Border Patrols’ . International Political Sociology , 2 ( 1 ): 113 – 137 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS Faulkner William . ( 1951 ) Requiem for a Nun . New York : Random House . Huysmans Jef . ( 1998 ) 'The Question of the Limit: Desecuritisation and the Aesthetics of Horror in Political Realism' . Millennium - Journal of International Studies , 27 ( 3 ): 569 – 589 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS Lang Anthony F. . ( 2002 ) Agency and Ethics . Albany : State University of New York Press . Lebow Richard Ned . ( 2003 ) The Tragic Vision of Politics . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . Schmitt Carl . ( 1950 ) Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum . Cologne : Grevin . Steele Brent J. . ( 2007 ) ‘Eavesdropping on honored ghosts’: From Classical to Reflexive Realism . Journal of International Relations and Development 10 ( 3 ): 272 – 300 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS Williams Michael C. . ( 2003 ) ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics’ . International Studies Quarterly 47 : 511 – 531 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS Williams Michael C. . ( 2005 ) The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . Williams Michael C. , ed. ( 2007 ) Realism Reconsidered . Oxford : Oxford University Press . © 2009 International Studies Association
TI - 21st Century Realism: The Past Is in Our Present
JF - International Studies Review
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2009.00852.x
DA - 2009-06-02
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/21st-century-realism-the-past-is-in-our-present-izDa2PW7H6
SP - 1
EP - 357
VL - Advance Article
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -