Schools of Thought

John Mearsheimer, the doyen of the American realist school of international relations, has become an unlikely YouTube star because of a 2015 lecture at the University of Chicago in which he pinned the blame for Ukraine's woes firmly on NATO and the EU. A shorter article from 2014 makes much the same points but also usefully describes the liberal-realist dichotomy: "Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy." Though the Western discourse on Russia looks like it will be dominated by a clash of the realist and liberal schools, it's worth noting that there is also a third to consider: constructivism. This emphasises socially constructed ideas over material factors. These ideas include national identities (e.g. Vladimir Putin's insistence that Ukraine isn't really a nation), historical justification (e.g. Putin's reassesment of the Bolsheviks' support for national self-determination as a betrayal), and norms about state behaviour (e.g. if the population of Ukraine is being "liberated", civilian casualties must be avoided, or at least downplayed). 

The liberal IR school is founded on the idealist view that peace can best be achieved through cooperation, and not just between states but at all levels of society. To this end, it advocates the benefits of trade and the value of international institutions and NGOs. It also emphasises the pacific tendencies of democracy and the importance of a robust civil society in restraining adventurism (neither is entirely reliable, as 2003 proved). In contrast, realism is founded on the Hobbesian view that the natural condition of the world is anarchy, that the sovereign state is paramount and motivated by self-preservation, and that states collectively are in perpetual competition for resources, respect and hegemony (realism is subdivided into defensive and offensive perspectives that believe states prioritise balance and hegemony respectively - Mearsheimer is of the latter tendency, hence his belief that NATO expansion could only be considered an existential threat by Russia). Though the field of international relations traces its intellectual lineage back to Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, it's really a product of the twentieth century. That's not to say that theories of state relations didn't already exist, but that they were subsumed into broader ideas about empire, religion and race. The discipline really comes into its own after World War One and the dominance of the Wilsonian idealism that led to the creation of the League of Nations. 

Realism was a critique of this idealist tendency that was heavily influenced by first the rise of Fascism and Nazism, with their emphases on national competition and the struggle for resources, and then by the emergent Cold War and the revived idea of a balance of powers. The early 1950s marks the highpoint of realism in the form of the Truman Doctrine and the theory of containment.  But while this remained the dominant paradigm in terms of US-Soviet relations, it started to weaken as an all-purpose explanatory framework in the face of the Third World liberation struggles of the 50s and 60s and the growing nonaligned movement. This resulted in a revival of the idealist framework (now called liberal) with its emphasis on institutions, trade and soft power, culminating in the superpower détente of the early-70s. Superficially, the Reagan years marked a revival of hardnosed realism (despite fantasies like the "Star Wars" Strategic Defence Initiative), but in reality this was the beginning of the dominance of the liberal school in the form of the Washington Consensus and globalisation. Though it possessed a theory of peace, liberalism was obliged by its expansion to develop a theory of war, which birthed the liberal interventionism of the 1990s. This would eventually run into the sand in Iraq, and latterly exit down the runway of Kabul airport, prompting revived interest in the realist framework.

Moscow's current attitude clearly has a constructivist dimension, not only in terms of Putin's ideas about Russia's historic role and the reality of Ukraine as an independent country, but also in a belief that the West looks down on Russia and is fundamentally malevolent. There is clearly a desire to humiliate the US and the EU as much as Ukraine's pro-Western government. Some of this can be attributed to blunders by the West, or more specifically the US, but it also points to a very real determination to block Russia's full integration into the first world order: to keep it as a second or even third-tier power in a unipolar world. The expansion of NATO in an essentially nominal manner (e.g. "tripwire" troop deployments in the Baltic states) was a liberal initiative intended to symbolically extend that order to Russia's borders but no futher. While this prompted a compensatory Eurasianism among some Russian thinkers, the main response was simple resentment at the all too obvious slight. This has been personalised by Western commentators as "the warped vision of one man", or as evidence of his "mental instability" and "sick political imagination". Such views are typical of a tradition that treats the rulers of Russia as all-powerful but prone to paranoid isolation and mania. This "personalism" avoids any realist engagement with Russia's actions - i.e. treating them as rationally self-interested and reflecting broader social forces than just the whims of the ruler. Instead, we end up with shallow psychoanalysis: a cross between old-style Kremlinology and a daytime TV inquisition.

It also plays into the liberal idea that international relations depends on cooperation at other levels within society: in other words, a form of soft decapitation strategy in which the head of state is bypassed and becomes little more than a figurehead, obliged to accept the international liberal order. This reached a peak in the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin (while actually laying the foundations of today's capitalist autocracy) became a parody of the disempowered and eccentric Tsar. From the perspective of Russians, this was deeply humiliating, but the shame arose not merely from Yeltsin's drunken incapacity but from the trashing of the economy during the years of shock-therapy and the failure to resist or moderate the West's interventions in the former Yuogslavia. It also became clear at this stage that Russia was being offered a particular development path that meant being held at arms-length by the West. The model of globalisation Russia was encouraged to adopt was based on a third world template: an extractive economy, dependent on foreign capital investment and imports, and vulnerable to the fluctuations of commodity markets and the predations of politically-connected criminals. It made some rich but it also rankled. In this context, NATO expansion was seen as part of a wider strategy of condescension and discipline.

Russia is poorer, more isolated and weaker than it should be given its history and resources (compare its trajectory with the other so-called BRICS, notably China and India). Some of this is self-inflicted, but much of it is down to the disaster capitalism of the 1990s and the subsequent inability, or lack of enthusiasm, to break away from the extractive economic model and invest sufficiently in its own productive and intellectual capital. It should not be forgotten that Putin came to power on a promise to end the chaos of that era. His realist offer of security was more compelling than the alternative offer of futher liberal adventure. While this has led to another era of stagnation, the liberal offer remains unattractive. Viewed from Russia, the liberal world is prone to financial crises and destabilising foreign interventions. The West's intentions do appear plausibly threatening - NATO has expanded and it and the EU have (perhaps carelessly) encouraged Ukraine and Georgia to believe that accession will happen. And we shouldn't ignore Putin's long-running campaign to paint the West as decadent - hence the instrumental homophobia, anti-feminism and Islamophobia that so thrills his rightwing Western admirers. While any resolution of the current crisis may require a strong dose of realism, it's important to recognise how much Russia sees international relations in ideational rather than material terms.

But the material remains important. We think of oligarchs as heading energy combines with murky origins, or having taken over factories in semi-criminal ways, but they're perhaps better thought of as a comprador class - i.e. as agents of international capital - taking a cut from imports as well as exports and facilitating foreign direct investment. This is one reason why they spend so much time in the world's financial centres. But despite being personally liberal in many cases, or at least happy to enjoy the fruits of a liberal society in their Italian Villas and London townhouses, the oligarchs aren't going to lead a bourgeois revolution against Putin precisely because their comprador status depends on the maintenance of the current economic model. The revolutionary class in Russia today is arguably the domestic middle class that formed after the recovery in 2000, who lack accessible foreign assets but have become dependent on foreign imported goods and so are vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations. These are the people trying to withdraw dollars and euros from Russian banks this week. The urban working class and pensioners bore the brunt of the shock therapy of the 1990s, but they are less exposed in today's economy because basic needs can still be supplied domestically in rubles. 

If Putin is to be challenged, it will come about through the anxiety of the class most likely to suffer from continuing economic sanctions by the West because of their restricted buying power. The Russian Central Bank can potentially hold out for a long time if oil and gas revenues (which aren't currently affected by the SWIFT embargo) continue to provide a flow of foreign exchange to offset frozen foreign assets, but the middle class will struggle to maintain their living standards in the face of rising prices for imported goods and high interest rates on mortgages and bank loans. This is also the class most likely to welcome a liberal future and thus urge a compromise with the West. The internal opposition to Putin, which coalesced around the mercurial Alexi Navalny, is a contradictory mix of a working class that wants protection from neoliberalism (which it identifies with the 1990s), a growing middle class that would happily embrace it (and which identifies it with the relative prosperity of Eastern European members of the EU), and an elite layer imbricated with the oligarchs and the upper classes of the media and culture that remains pro-capital and unenthusiastic about reducing inequality (e.g. by introducing progressive taxation).

But just as the domestic opposition to Putin is fragmented and largely incoherent (repression and the corruption of Putin's inner circle have been the unifying factors), so the West hasn't presented a consistent front. This isn't simply a matter of the hypocrisy (or realpolitik, if you prefer) of Western leaders first cultivating Putin after the Second Chechen War and then admonishing him over Georgia and Crimea. Nor is it just about the different attitudes in the European Union correlating with dependency on Russian gas imports. More fundamentally it reflects the tension between the realist and liberal worldviews and their internal contradictions. For example, this week we have seen liberals eulogising Ukraine as a bastion of democracy but also demanding that NATO impose a no-fly zone at the risk of triggering a nuclear exchange on its territory: the perpetual peace of the grave. Meanwhile, realists have not been shy in blaming NATO, the EU and Ukraine for allowing the Minsk Agreements to curdle, yet seem almost blasé at the prospect of a massive increase in German military spending and the EU becoming a military actor.  

The left is divided on Ukraine. Though this has been portrayed by both media participants on the left (e.g. Paul Mason and George Monbiot) and critics on the right as a division between the instinctively anti-American (to the point of dismissing some of them as neo-Stalinist "tankies") and those demanding solidarity in support of national self-determination (in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky), it is better seen as a more straightforward divide between liberals and realists. This isn't new. The left has always had this tension, founded on a materialism that bends towards realism and an idealism that bends towards the revolutionary and utopian urges of Kantian liberalism. The divide is perhaps more evident in the US than in the UK, the latter discourse being polluted by the opportunism of the current Labour leadership in labelling any call for peace a one-sided attack on NATO and grounds for expulsion. Ben Wallace-Wells describes the opposition to the liberal school in the US as "composed of China hawks, doctrinaire realists, anti-imperialists, and people exhausted by the forever wars. ... Their sensibility is tragic rather than romantic, and they come together conditionally, declaring all the while how much they can’t stand one another." The point is not merely the heterogeneity but the idea that an ecumenical realism is being constructed in opposition to the liberal orthodoxy.

That comment about the tragic and the romantic captures something essential about realism and liberalism respectively: the one pessimistic, the other optimistic (note the Gramscian echo). But the paradox is that it is optimism and romanticism on the part of the West that has led to disaster in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This isn't because, as thinkers such as John Gray would have it, liberalism in international affairs (or neoliberalism more broadly) is a teleological mania whose roots lie in 1789. If it were, NATO would now be approaching the gates of Kyiv just as it would have entered the gates of Damascus ten years ago. In reality, the US remains fundamentally realist in its outlook despite the liberal rhetoric. This is most obvious in its dealings with China and the wider Asia-Pacific arena. The truth is that there are certain parts of the world where the liberal worldview can be indulged, even through to strategic failure, simply because the consequences are limited (the War on Terror has produced relatively few casualties in the West while boosting the security state and military-industrial complex). Ukraine sits on the conceptual boundary between the liberal and realist worlds, and is further complicated by a constructivist adversary, which makes liberal adventurism too risky (though it also suggests the conflict will be contained).

Though the different schools of international relations seek to explain the world, we should also recognise that they have an instrumental value: that they are tools for changing the world. As the global hegemon, the US will employ both realist and liberal perspectives to suit the circumstances (you could even map this onto the Gramscian framework of the war of manoeuvre and the war of position). In Europe it remains liberal, in the Pacific it remains realist. Likewise, China will always bias towards realism. It does not share the idealism of the West, which reflects both its cultural chauvinism and a historically-conditioned respect for non-interference. While some commentators have worried that NATO's unwillingness to intervene militarily in Ukraine will embolden China in respect of Taiwan, it should be obvious that the Chinese dismay at Russia's actions suggests a healthy realism about the dangers of destabilisation (also, China has never swayed in its belief that Taiwan will eventually be reunited, but it remains, for now, strategically patient, as it was with Hong Kong). Russia is likely to remain imbued with a constructivist viewpoint because material reality hinders its ambition to operate as a global power within a realist framework, while its domestic politics will, short of a coup or revolution, stymie the adoption of a liberal perspective. 

As for the European Union, the epochal actions this week have been Germany's decisions on military expenditure and gas supplies, and the extension of the European Central Bank's disciplinary tools from EU member states to foreign states - a hybrid approach that shows its evolution from a purely liberal regime towards one with a new realist appreciation. It is likely that we will see an increasing congruence between the EU and NATO, which will suit the US, and the emergence of the idea that membership of the union entails security guarantees and corresponding obligations. In the UK, membership of NATO has this week clearly become a substitute for membership of the EU among the liberal political class. In other words, it has stopped being thought of in purely realist terms - we need to contain Germany in Europe and support the US globally so that they will support us locally - and has instead become the vehicle for a continuing idealist project on the continent. For some, which includes both Keir Starmer and Paul Mason, this is a transparent attempt to cleave to the EU, even if they might differ on operations outside of Europe in support of the US. For a disturbingly large number of liberals, it has revived dreams of regime change.