Abstract
“Realist” has different senses in different uses—necessarily and appropriately, but with considerable potential for obscurity or even confusion. This lack of precision and clarity, I will argue, is inescapable. (If it is a “problem,” it is irresolvable.) There is no defining core to realism; no set of criteria by which we can sort arguments, explanations, actions, or outcomes as realist or non-realist. “Realism” is a complex and multidimensional “thing” that, as we will see as we proceed, appears in our analytical practice in varied ways. This essay seeks to specify some of the principal ways that “realism” addresses “the world” in order to improve our understanding of the character and content of explanatory appeals to “realism.”
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Notes
- 1.
Most would also agree with Mearsheimer ’s claims, at least if we interpret his claim that survival is the most basic motive driving states to to mean that states, if forced to choose, usually would rank survival above all other objectives.
- 2.
This distinction between theory and model is common in natural science disciplines that have been intensively formalized through mathematics. It also seems to me broadly consistent with standard usage in self-consciously social-scientific IR. See, for example, King et al. (1994: 49–53, 106–107).
- 3.
Keohane and Martin (2003), Stein (2008), and Keohane (2012) provide good brief overviews. I treat neoliberal institutionalism both as a school that is part of a broad tradition of liberal international thought and a part of a broad institutionalist approach that has generated a variety of theories and models.
- 4.
See section below on structural realism .
- 5.
See section below on neoclassical realism .
- 6.
To argue otherwise is likely to lead us dangerously close to confusing “realist explanations” with “explanations often (or even typically) offered by realists.” Were this error not so obvious, once noted, it might merit further discussion.
- 7.
It may bear repeating that external power in anarchy is a universal feature of international systems and that has no special connection to realism (even if realism does have a special attachment to some of the problems it poses).
- 8.
“The essential structural quality of the system is anarchy ” (Waltz 1988: 618). “The logic of anarchy does not vary with its content” (Waltz 1990b: 37). “The basic structure of international politics continues to be anarchic” (Waltz 1993: 59. Cf. Waltz 2000: 5, 10, 40). As the Index of Theory of International Politics put it “Structure, anarchy and hierarchy as the only two types of.”
- 9.
In particular, the so-called effects of anarchy are not effects of anarchy. See, for example, Wendt (1992), Snidal (1991a, b), Milner (1991), and Powell (1994: esp. 314). Wagner (2007: 16–18, 21–29) offers a particularly spirited rationalist refrain. Donnelly (2015) comprehensively critiques IR’s fundamentally Waltzian construction of anarchy.
- 10.
Waltz (1979: 74–77) does reference selection and socialization. Both, however, are, in Waltz’s terms, matters of interaction, not structure. (Socialization is especially distant from structure.) And he offers not even a hint of an account of when we should expect these mechanisms to work (or not work).
- 11.
In Donnelly (2012: 610–616), I look at simple hunter-gatherer societies, which are anarchic and composed of people that wish to survive (who are also equal and equally armed) but who pursue security not through self-help balancing but by what I call binding through sharing. Waltz ’s only-two-requirements claim is simply empirically false. Where we see balancing, other factors are present and essential to the explanation.
- 12.
- 13.
It is important that we not confuse levels of analysis in general, understood as the location of causal forces, with Waltz ’s particular three level (individual, state, system) model. For example, Waltz himself (1979: 62, 68, 99) speaks of “the level of (the) interacting units.”
- 14.
In Donnelly (2015: 210–211), I stress the importance of not jumping from absence of a “ruler” (government) to absence of “rule” or absence of “rules.”
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Donnelly, J. (2019). What Do We Mean by Realism? And How—And What—Does Realism Explain?. In: Belloni, R., Della Sala, V., Viotti, P. (eds) Fear and Uncertainty in Europe . Global Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91965-2_2
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