The course aims to introduce the key assumptions of the international relations theory as a part of social science and as an analytic tool, focusing on the problems of war and peace, foreign policy decision-making, etc. The course combines historic approach and analysis of the modern political problems. The historic part shows the evolution of the international relations theory from being a part of political philosophy to its emergence as a special branch of political science, which is essential to understand the key ideas of the IR science. The lectures also include broad outline of the modern concepts and debates in the context of the contemporary political problems, such as rise of China and other emerging powers, threat of terrorism, US-Russia confrontation, etc. The lectures of the two outstanding Russian scholars and political analysts – Timofey Bordachev and Dmitry Suslov - cover such fields as the problems of international security and conflict resolution, international economic relations, foreign policy decision-making, global governance, the role of power in the IR.
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Do curso por National Research University Higher School of Economics
Understanding International Relations Theory
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National Research University Higher School of Economics
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Back to classics: the Realist Paradigm in the XXI century
The most ancient concept emerges again in the XXI century: with new conflicts, hybrid wars and power struggle between the key states realism seems to be the best to explain international politics. Does it mean that the mankind never changes and the modern world is not so different from the world of Thucydides? Or the realist theories just adapt themselves to the modern world?
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Timofei BordachevAssociate professor
Department of international relations
Dmitrii SuslovSenior Lecturer
Department of international relations, HSE
Another fundamental and crucial factor that
classical realism could not explain, was globalization.
Liberalism on the contrary was very efficient and effective in terms of
explaining globalization and the changes that globalization brought to the world.
Realism unfortunately couldn't.
The thing is globalization and
global economic interdependence was completely beyond the realist paradigm,
realist paradigm which focuses on polarity,
and the role of military power.
Globalization brought economic interdependence,
economic connectivity, internationalization of production,
and the new state of the world completely different from the considerations of polarity,
and classical national interests.
One of the ethics of globalization was the emergence of global governance,
cooperation among states on managing
the transnational globalized fields of life, spheres of life,
such as managing global climate change, managing global finance,
managing global terrorism and conducting global counter terrorist policies,
managing the preventing proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and so on and so forth.
And this cooperation was so difficult for realism to explain,
because realism explains corporation first as
an exception to the norm of international conduct,
the norm for realism is conflict.
And it was difficult for realism to explain it because it was
beyond the understanding of narrow national interests.
If you might remember,
we discussed it as one of the previous lectures that according to realism,
states engage in cooperative behavior only when they see that
their relative gains will be bigger than the relative gains on the others.
Wheres cooperation on the management of the consequences
of globalization was completely different from this logic.
States engaged in corporation on
the management of globalization despite any relative gains.
And even the question of relative gains says is absent here, right?
Who will gain more or less from preventing global climate change for instance, right?
we will all gain globalization and emergence of
global transnational challenges such as global climate change,
and international finance, and international terrorism or spread of diseases and
pandemics like source for instance for Ebola virus in Africa.
They simply pose the question of relative gains beyond the brackets.
And even the concept of transnational threats and challenges is
completely new and completely difficult for realism to reconcile with.
For according to the realist classical perspective,
all the challenges can be only national.
All the challenges are the challenges that some powers make to the other powers,
not the challenges provided by globalization.
So, realism turned out to be without
any methodological and analytical tools to explain globalization.
Secondly, realism was very difficult in terms of explaining
the consequence of globalization such as
the relative decline of the role of military power in world politics.
According to realism, according to the realist worldview
the major aspect of power is always military.
Why? Because it is military power which ensures survival.
Survival is more important even if people eat grass,
the consideration of survival of state is more important than food.
Right? Or better food.
Or is more important than the well-being of the people so according to a realist,
concept military power is much more important than economic power.
But the realities of the world in late 1980s early 1990s
and in conditions of globalization were otherwise, were different.
It was economic power which ensured the rise of China.
It was the economic power which ensured preponderance of the United States,
and American attractiveness and American technological advance over the other powers.
Again, let's come back to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Soviet Union was a military superpower, but it collapsed.
And its military preponderance,
its nuclear weapons could not prevent the Soviet collapse.
It collapsed because of domestic issues and economic issues.
So, economic power turned out to be at least no less important,
and perhaps even more important than military power in world politics.
This is grasped by liberalism,
but it was not grasped by realism.
Another consequence of globalization that realism
could not simply explain and even could not
reconcile with was transformation of state sovereignty as a consequence of globalization.
Indeed since 1990s in conditions of globalization it became absolutely evident
that not just sovereignty of small weak or failing states had troubles,
but that all countries in the world including even the United States the only superpower,
all the major great powers have problems with state sovereignty.
That in conditions of globalization,
states can no longer control the flow of ideas,
States can no longer ensure their external security.
You can't do it traditionally in conditions of international terrorism.
States could no longer ensure their internal security and safety,
transnational organized crime is the reason.
States could no longer even ensure a maintenance of
themselves as the undisputed centers of legitimacy.
Because people started to give their legitimacy to some other polls of authority,
such as international terrorist organizations for instance.
And thus transformation of state sovereignty started.
It is just absolutely evident
that it is difficult even to quarrel with it and to argue against,
domestic politics has become a very strong part of the International Relations agenda,
and we are no longer in the world when a violation of sovereignty and
intervention into domestic affairs is considered and
accepted as the rule violation of international conduct.
We all discuss domestic politics of each other.
We all interfere into domestic politics of each other.
The majority of conflicts in the world are about domestic affairs of states,
internal troubles, rather than external troubles.
The majority of wars that occur today in the international system are civil wars,
that happen inside the countries rather than interstate wars, among states.
So, it's states sovereignty started to transform,
state sovereignty became relevant and relative rather than absolute as it was before,
and it was becoming clear and increasingly clear that states sovereignty
the due conditions depends on the ability of states to fulfill certain functions.
This was a completely new thing for the realists thinking,
and they couldn't simply reconcile with it and they couldn't explain it.
And finally, there was
the other prominent consequence of globalization that realism had troubles to explain,
the rise of non-state actors such as transnational corporations,
international civil organizations, international NGOs,
international terrorist organizations, media,
and so on and so forth.
They have been becoming increasingly powerful in international relations.
It was becoming increasingly clear that
effective provision of global public goods, effective global governance,
effective management of the new transnational threats and
challenges cannot be conducted without their participation.
States themselves started to pool sovereignty,
to share sovereignty to the bottom and to the up,
to the bottom to the non-state organizations and
upwards to the international organizations.
And thus non-state actors
appeared as very important participants of the international system,
international system ceased to be state centric.
Again it was a very profound challenge to
the conventional realist course or realist theory of international relations.
Finally, just to summarize it,
transnational challenges and threats as a concept is very
difficult for realists to reconcile with cooperation among states,
in order to resist,
in order to struggle,
in order to manage these transnational challenges is
something that realism simply could not understand and could not analyze.
This is why it was widely assumed in the era of
globalization especially in 1990s immediately after the end of the Cold War,
that classical traditional realism and structural neorealism ceased to be relevant,
that their era is closed and the new era of international relations has started.
The era in which
the classical rules and patterns of realism will be irrelevant, will not work.
The new era will be based on
global interdependence and globalization on integration and on
cooperation on zero plus rather than zero sum relations among states,
global management of the global commons and provision of global public goods,
management of the consequences of globalization,
and so on and so forth.
If and in conditions of all these profound changes,
in conditions of this new era,
declared era, emerging realism really seemed outdated.
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