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mind that the main theories of world politics did not arise from
nowhere. They were developed by intellectuals and practitioners in
specific circumstances for very concrete and political reasons.
International theories have histories too (Knutsen 1997; Keene 2005;
Ashworth 2014).
Theories of world politics
The basic problem facing anyone who tries to understand
contemporary world politics is that there is so much material to look at
that it is difficult to know which things matter and which do not. Where
on earth would you start if you wanted to explain the most important
political processes? How, for example, would you explain the failures
of climate change negotiations, ‘Brexit’ from the EU, the 9/11 attacks,
or the rise of the so-called Islamic State (IS, otherwise known as ISIS,
ISIL, or Daesh) after the United States’ invasion and occupation of
Iraq? Why was the apparent economic boom in much of the capitalist
world followed by a near devastating collapse of the global financial
system? Why are thousands of migrants from North Africa seeking to
make the extremely dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean
Sea to the European Union? Why does the United States support
Israel in its conflict with Palestinians in the occupied territories? As
you will learn, there are very different responses to these questions,
and there seems no easy way of arriving at definitive answers to
them.
Whether you are aware of it or not, whenever you are faced with
questions like these you have to turn, not only to the study of history,
though that is absolutely essential, but also to theories. Theory is a
kind of simplifying device that allows you to decide which historical or
contemporary facts matter more than others when trying to develop
an understanding of the world. A good analogy is using sunglasses
with different-coloured lenses: put on the red pair and the world looks
red; put on the yellow pair and it looks yellow. The world is not any
different; it just looks different. So it is with theories. Shortly, we will
summarize the main theoretical views that have dominated the study
of world politics so that you will get an idea of which ‘colours’ they
paint world politics. But before we do, please note that we do not
think that theory is an option. It is not as if you can say you do not
want to bother with theory; all you want to do is to look at the ‘facts’.
We believe that this is impossible, since the only way you can decide
which of the millions of possible facts to look at is by adhering to
some simplifying device that tells you which ones matter the most.
Theory is such a simplifying device. Note also that you may well not
be aware of your theory. It may just be the view of or even ideology
about the world that you inherited from your family, social class, peer
groups, or the media. It may just seem common sense to you and not
at all complicated. But we fervently believe that in such a case your
theoretical assumptions are just implicit rather than explicit. We prefer
to try to be as explicit as possible when it comes to thinking about
world politics.
Of course, many proponents of particular theories also claim to see
the world the way it ‘really is’. Consider the International Relations
theory known as ‘realism’. The ‘real’ world as seen by realists is not a
very pleasant place. According to their view, human beings are at
best selfish and domineering, and probably much worse. Liberal
notions about the perfectibility of human beings and the possibility of
a fundamental transformation of world politics away from conflict and
hierarchy are very far-fetched from a realist perspective. Indeed,
realists have often had the upper hand in debates about the nature of
world politics because their views seem to accord more with common
sense, especially when the media daily show us images of how awful
human beings can be to one another. Again, we will say more about
realism in a moment. The point here is to question whether such a
realist view is as neutral as it seems commonsensical. After all, if we
teach world politics to generations of students and tell them that
people are selfish, then does this not become common sense? And
when they go to work in the media, for government departments, or
for the military, don’t they simply repeat what they have been taught
and act accordingly? Might realism simply be the ideology of powerful
states, interested in protecting the status quo? What is the history of
realism and what does this history tell us about its claims about how
the world ‘really is’? For now, we would like to keep the issue open
and simply point out that we are not convinced that realism is as
objective, as timeless, or as non-normative as it is often portrayed.
What is certainly true is that realism has been one of the dominant
ways in the West of explaining world politics over the last 150 years.
But it is not the only
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theory of international relations, nor the one most closely associated
with the earliest academic study of international relations. We will
now summarize the main assumptions underlying the main rivals as
theories of world politics: liberal internationalism, realism, Marxism,
constructivism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and
decolonialism, and feminism. These theories will be discussed in
much more detail in Part Three of this book; although we do not go
into much depth about them here, we need to give you a flavour of
their main themes since, after summarizing them, we want to say
something about how each might think about globalization.
Watch Sir Steve Smith discussing the value of theory in this video
Liberal internationalism
Liberal internationalism developed after the First World War, in a
period defined by competing but unstable empires, class conflict,
women’s suffrage, and experiments in international organization
(Sluga and Clavin 2017). As you will later learn, there are many kinds
of ‘liberalism’. But the main themes that run through liberal thought
are that human beings and societies can be improved, that
representative democracy is necessary for liberal improvement, and
that ideas—not just material power—matter. Behind all this lies a
belief in progress, modelled on the achievements of liberal capitalist
societies in the West. Hence, liberals reject the realist notion that war
is the natural condition of world politics. They also question the idea
that the state is the main actor on the world political stage, although
they do not deny that it is important. They see individuals,
multinational corporations, transnational actors, and international
organizations as central actors in some issue-areas of world politics.
Liberals tend to think of the state not as a unitary or united actor, but
as made up of individuals and their collective, societal preferences
and interests. They also think of the state as comprised of a set of
bureaucracies, each with its own interests. Therefore, there can be
no such thing as one ‘national interest’ since it merely represents
the result of whatever societal preferences or bureaucratic
organizations dominate the domestic decision-making process. In
relations among states, liberals stress the possibilities for
cooperation; the key issue becomes devising international
institutions in which economic and political cooperation can be best
achieved.
The picture of world politics that arises from the liberal view is of a
complex system of bargaining among many different types of actors.
Military force is still important, but the liberal agenda is not as
restricted as the realist one of relations between great powers.
Liberals see national interests in more than just military terms, and
stress the importance of economic, environmental, and technological
issues. Order in world politics emerges from the interactions among
many layers of governing arrangements, comprising laws, agreed
norms, international regimes, and institutional rules to manage the
global capitalist economy. Fundamentally, liberals do not think that
sovereignty is as important in practice as realists believe. States may
be legally sovereign, but in practice they have to negotiate with all
sorts of other actors, with the result that their freedom to act as they
might wish is seriously curtailed. Interdependence between states is
a critically important feature of world politics.
Realism
Realists have a different view of world politics and, like liberals, claim
a long tradition. However, it is highly contested whether realists can
actually claim a lineage all the way back to ancient Greece or
whether realism is an invented intellectual tradition for cold war
American foreign policy needs. Either way, there are many variants of
something called ‘realism’. But in general, for realists, the main actors
on the world stage are states, which are legally sovereign actors.
Sovereignty means that there is no actor above the state that can
compel it to act in specific ways. According to this view, other actors
such as multinational corporations or international organizations have
to work within the framework of inter-state relations. As for what
propels states to act as they do, realists see human nature as
centrally important, and they view human nature as rather selfish. As
a result, world politics (or, more accurately for realists, international
politics) represents a struggle for power among states, with each
trying to maximize its national interest. Such order as exists in world
politics is the result of the workings of a mechanism known as the
balance of power, whereby states act so as to prevent any one state
from dominating. Thus, world politics is all about bargaining and
alliances, with diplomacy a key mechanism for balancing various
national interests. But finally, the most important tool available for
implementing states’ foreign policies is military force. Ultimately, since
there is no sovereign body above the
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states that make up the international political system, world politics is
a self-help system in which states must rely on their own military
resources to achieve their ends. Often these ends can be achieved
through cooperation, but the potential for conflict is ever present.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, an important variant of realism has
developed, known as neorealism. This approach stresses the
importance of the structure of the international system in affecting
the behaviour of all states. Thus, during the cold war two main
powers dominated the international system, and this gave rise to
certain rules of behaviour; now that the cold war has ended, the
structure of world politics is said to be moving towards multipolarity
(after a phase of unipolarity), which for neorealists will involve very
different rules of the game.
Social constructivism
Social constructivism is a relatively new approach in International
Relations, one that developed in the United States in the late 1980s
and has been becoming increasingly influential since the mid-1990s.
The approach arose out of a set of events in world politics, notably
the disintegration of the Soviet empire, as symbolized most
dramatically by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These events
indicated that human agency had a much greater potential role in
world politics than implied by realism or liberalism. But the theoretical
underpinnings of social constructivism are much older; they relate to
a series of social-scientific and philosophical works that dispute the
notion that the ‘social world’ is external to the people who live in it,
and is not easily changed. To different degrees, realism and
liberalism stress the regularities and ‘certainties’ of political life
(although liberalism is somewhat less adamant).
By contrast, constructivism argues that we make and remake the
social world and so there is much more of a role for human agency
than realism and liberalism allow. Moreover, constructivists note that
those who see the world as fixed underestimate the possibilities for
human progress and for the betterment of people’s lives. To this
degree, social constructivism strongly overlaps with liberalism and
can even be seen as providing the social theory underpinnings of
liberal political theories of world politics. In the words of one of the
most influential constructivist theorists, Alexander Wendt, even the
self-help international system portrayed by realists is something that
we make and remake: as he puts it, ‘anarchy is what states make of
it’ (Wendt 1992). Therefore, the world that realists portray as ‘natural’
or ‘given’ is in fact far more open to change, and constructivists think
that self-help is only one possible response to the anarchical
structure of world politics. Indeed, not only is the structure of world
politics amenable to change, but so also are the identities and
interests that neorealism or neoliberalism take as given. In other
words, constructivists think that it is a fundamental mistake to think of
world politics as something that we cannot change. The seemingly
‘natural’ structures, processes, identities, and interests of world
politics could in fact be different from what they currently are. Note,
however, that social constructivism is not a theory of world politics in
itself. It is an approach to the philosophy of social science with
implications for the kinds of arguments that can be made about world
politics. Constructivists need to marry their approach to another
political theory of world politics, such as realism but usually liberalism,
to actually make substantive claims.
Realism, liberalism, and social constructivism are generally
considered to be the ‘mainstream’ theories of world politics. This
means that they are the dominant approaches in the most influential
location for IR scholarship, which is currently in the United States. But
this is changing. And by no means should realism, liberalism, and
social constructivism be considered the only compelling theories. On
the contrary, outside the United States these theories are often
considered to be far too narrow and thus unconvincing. We now turn
to some other approaches that are highly critical of the mainstream
and move beyond it in quite far-reaching ways.
Marxist theories
The fourth main theoretical position we want to mention, Marxist
theory, is also known as historical materialism, which immediately
gives you clues as to its main assumptions. But first we want to point
out a paradox about Marxism. On the one hand, Marxist theory has
been incredibly influential historically, inspiring socialist revolutions
around the world, including during the process of decolonization, and
also in the recent global uprisings in response to the global financial
crisis since 2007, for instance in Greece. On the other hand, it has
been less influential in the discipline of IR than either realism or
liberalism, and has less in common with either realism or liberalism
than they do with each
