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0:01
Patrick Theiner: Hi, I'm Patrick, and welcome back to ICEB, also known as "elders is react to international politics". What we'll do today is we will talk about the first of our theories, the first of our stories about how the world works. Remember that much like I already talked about the concepts video, theories' main job is pattern recognition. So in the following slides, remember that what theory is, is we want to look at the world we want to observe patterns and
0:29
offer an explanation for them. And the second thing I want you to keep in mind is that theories are very much like a subway map. They're an abstraction of the world. No one looks at the London tube map and thinks that's exactly what London looks like. But it's still really useful because it simplifies the world and it helps you make sense of it.
0:48
So the first theory that we'll talk about today is realism. It is the oldest theory, it used to be the most popular, it actually was, for a long time, the only real theory of international relations that was around. So where is realism coming from? Well, I already told you that theory is about pattern recognition. Look at this particular configuration, where you have a specific historic situation. And I'm not going to tell you what each side is because you're gonna have to
1:20
find that out in a second yourself. So imagine this following situation. You have a state A on the one side, which is a democracy, which leads an alliance of democracies and is very happy to support democracies abroad and elsewhere. It's primarily a naval power with a large navy. Its society is fundamentally based on on liberal ideas and freedoms. And it is a strong trading power. It's happy to exchange with others. You have on the other side, a state B,
1:50
which is in contrast, an autocracy or maybe an oligarchy, where very few people have the power and where normally the government is not elected. It leads an alliance of similar states and is also happy to support autocracies elsewhere. It's primarily a land power, and it is a militaristic society. And its focus is not so much on exchange and trade. It is more on self-sufficiency and agriculture. So, now that you know this about the two state - of which I'm also going to tell
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you that they are in conflict with each other - pause the video for a minute or so if you have to. And see if you can come up with one specific historic episode, which specific states am I looking for here that I'm trying to describe in this table? So hit pause and we'll come back in a second.
2:46
Okay, so I don't know which one you picked. But let's see. You could have picked for example, the Cold War. Maybe you thought about state A as the United States and state B as the Soviet Union. Maybe you went back a little further and you thought about maybe the Second World War, where you had Britain or the US on one side aa state A, and you maybe had Germany on the other side as state B? Maybe you went a little further back, even maybe you remembered our first history lecture and you remember
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the Napoleonic Wars, right where you had Britain as state A, and you had Napoleon's France as state B. Maybe you went even further back to the thing that's coming up on the next slide, which is the Peloponnesian War. Maybe you thought about Athens as being state A, and Sparta is being state B. So what is interesting about this table, is that it's actually not describing just one specific historic conflict. It seems to be that there's a pattern here. There seems to be a recurring
3:50
configuration of two states that seem to generate conflict, that might be at war. And realists are all about this. They're super into this because what they're saying is yes, there are repeating patterns in history where we see always the same types of states that tend to clash. And that is really fundamentally what theory is, right? It's pattern recognition, So the Peloponnesian War. Why do we talk about it? Why is it so like I said.
4:18
interesting? You see the map here on the left, it was a conflict, roughly 400 before the Common Era, where you had Sparta - here in red, the land power, the autocracy - versus Athens - in blue, the naval power, the democracy on the other sid. And the were clashing for a number of years, as you see, the conflict was almost- the war almost went on for 30 years. Why we know so much about this was that there was an Athenian that recorded much of this, much of the goings on, his name was
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Thukydides and there is one specific episode in his writings about the whole Peloponnesian War that has often been claimed as showing a fundamental truth about the world. And that is the so called Melian Dialogue. So let me set the stage: you are on the little island of Melos. So if you follow my cursor here, this is your island of Melos. And you are quite happy there, because you are yellow, and yellow means you are unaligned with either of the two major powers in the war. So you sit
5:18
there, you have a little outlook in the tower, and the outlook suddenly shouts "Hold on. I see a lot of ships on the horizon - might be traders". But actually this time, it's not trade. It is actually an Athenian invasion fleet. The Athenians roll up to your gates, you quickly close the gate and man the battlements and there comes a dialogue between the invading Athenian force and the besieged clearly weaker Melians. So the Melian Dialogue is not a dialogue between equals but between an
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invading force and a besieged force. So the Athenians basically lay out the options for the Melians: "You can either The famous sentence from the Melian dialogue is that the let us in right away, which would really be the sensible thing. Just open the gate, let us in, we'll conquer you, we'll be nice, or you can not do that and then we will just destroy you." The Melians say "Well hold on. I mean, surely that can't be our only two options. We don't want to be conquered, but we
6:15
also don't want to be destroyed. Can we just stay neutral? I mean, we were neutral before". To which the Athenians say, "Nah, you know what, I don't think so." The Melians ask "Why? Why can't we be neutral" and the Athenian said, "Well, more or less because we say so. We came all this way with our force, you really have nothing to put against us. If we wanted to take you by force we could so why are we negotiating? Why should we listen to you?" In the course of the dialogue, the millions make
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a number of idealistic arguments. They want to be the Athenians friends. Why couldn't relations just be friendly? To which the Athenians say "Nah because we don't feel like it - because we can take what we want to anyway." The Melians even call on the gods and they tell the Athenians, "Well, what's going to happen if the gods might be on our side?" We all know that the, you know, the ancient Greek gods like to meddle in people's affairs. The Athenians just shrug their
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shoulders and basically say, "We have Gods too and you have no idea which God is going to come out on top."
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Athenians at last, exasperated, tell the Melians "Look, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must, and that's just the way of the world. There's really nothing you can say to convince us that we shouldn't just take what we can." The end result is that the Melians don't let the Athenians in, but they are betrayed, the Athenians break through their walls eventually after a long siege, they massacre all the men and they enslave all the women and children and they raze the
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the island to the ground. So this pretty dark outcome, now is claimed by our first theorists - the realists - as showing a fundamental truth about the world: There is always weaker ones, there's always stronger ones. And in almost all cases, if not all cases, the strong can just do what they want. And the weak can't really do anything about it. And that's just how the world works. And some might say that's exactly the lesson that Thukydides intended to convey. Maybe - we can't ask him
8:24
anymore. But so this is claimed as one of realism's foundational documents in that shows - so realists say - a fundamental truth about the world: words don't matter, friendliness doesn't matter, friendship doesn't matter. What really matters is how powerful you are, and whether you're the strong one or the weak one. There's a number of other early thinkers that are claimed by modern realists because obviously, this is a modern political science theory. There's other theorists that
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are- there's other thinkers that are claimed. There is the Indian thinker Chanakya who wrote a sort of hard-nosed guide on how to run your government all the way to suggesting that you should send spies to other countries and assassinate your
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your opponents. You have, of course, Niccolo Machiavelli, who you probably all familiar with, because he is basically synonymous with the type of sort of cynical, power grabbing, power hungry, I'll-do-anything kind of politics. And you have Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, in which he talks about the fact - what he says is the fact - that the world exists in a state of nature of the war of all against all, and it is only by having a really strong state on top that is keeping us all from
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murdering each other all the time. Now, I'm not going to talk about all of these in detail because there's just no time but I will pick out Niccolo Machiavelli for a second and see why realists are so in love with his texts, and claim him as one of those people that might have recognized an interesting pattern that they're also claiming for themselves. So remember that Machiavelli wrote this in 16th-century Italy, which was a very chaotic place.
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Imagine, you know, roaming mercenary hordes, city states constantly at war, people being assassinated, people being executed, there was just a general state of- often a state of disorder. And what Machiavelli thought is, "Well, look, this is not how things can go. I think it would be best for everyone if rulers could provide stability." So what he did is- and they would provide stability by staying in power as long as they can. So what he wrote essentially was, "Hey, you know
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what - here's 'Ruling for Dummies'. Here's your guide, here's your- here's your crib sheet. Here's your little notes on how to stay in power once you are in power." So this is a normative guide in that he tells you what to do - you as a prince, you as "Il Principe", which is what the text is originally called. And of course, his text is very well known, because he broke with sort of the customs at the time because what he said is, "Look, if you want to stay in power,
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you really need to do whatever you must." There's none of this, like, you know, "be a good Christian king", in this kind of in this kind of writing. And you, for example, if you want to stay in power, Machiavelli says, you cannot be always bound by morality, you have to be willing to break all kinds of moral bonds and promises and all kinds of things left and right as it- in any way that serves you. The thing that you shouldn't do ever
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- because nothing good can come of that - is that you should not deprive men of their property or their women. So you see, obviously, this is the 16th century. You should absolutely be willing to break your word, and you should be ready to be feared rather than loved, which is the one thing that everyone always remembers from Machiavelli. What he means by that essentially that fear is more sustainable than love. If you buy your citizens' loyalty by throwing, you know, gold off
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your tower every morning, he says, "You know what, the day you stop doing that the people will become ungrateful immediately, and they will do away with you because they hope that the next guy is giving them more gold." While if you rule by fear, if you immediately, you know, decisively crush any opposition, and you execute those involved and you show absolutely no mercy - well, that fear is going to stay with people and sometimes I think he might have- he might have hit on
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something fundamentally true here. And now, this was such a revolutionary book that he couldn't even publish it in his lifetime because he was so scared that if the church would get wind of all of this, it would basically lead to his excommunication or maybe he would have even been burned. So this was only published after his death, which probably for him made a lot of sense. There are those that say, "Look actually, what Machiavelli did
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was not really write a guide on all the things you should do." And they say that Machiavelli did the equivalent of writing "lol jk" in a group chat, which is really that what he wrote in the Principe was a satire. So what he intended to do was, he wanted to satirize how the world worked at the time, and he wanted to show how bizarre the Princes' behavior was. And he was hoping that that would entice people to maybe act differently. So, a couple of maybe hard truths about the
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world, you know: don't be bound by your word, don't be bound by morality and so on. And when I say by the way that this was a product of its time, let's not forget that, for example, wars all throughout history were fought for the dumbest possible reasons. So if you think, you know, "Oh my god, Machiavelli's time sounds chaotic", remember that we found- we fought wars over buckets, over ears, and over footballs - great Wikipedia tensions on all of those things. So it's no wonder that in a
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world that is so chaotic and seems so prone to war, that Machiavelli's overriding concern was, "Look, I'll do away with any morality, if only it will give me stability."
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So we come now to what we tend to call classic realism. So we- we jump to the beginning of the 20th century, which is kind of the genesis of Political Science theory. And we find these people called realists that are building on these classic thinkers about the world. And they really say that the world is dominated by a struggle for power. And whatever else we might be doing in international politics, that's really only a facade, that's really only of secondary importance. Power is
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always what states are going for, power is always what it's about. Everyone always wants more power. And everything else is just, you know, make-up basically. And the classic realists - so the realists at the beginning of the 20th century - they were very much of the opinion that this struggle for power was rooted in human nature. So we couldn't help ourselves. So this is a little bit based on Thomas Hobbes right? Who said that in the state of nature, we all- you
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know, we're in a war of all against all because that's just how we are built. That's how we are as humans. And the realists said, "Well look, the same i think is true for the international level." Statesmen, for example, act this way because that's just in their nature. And the only way that we can find out of this potentially very dangerous and volatile situation is that power politics are reined in by enlightened statesmen and stateswomen, who recognize that that is how the
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world works: that everyone always struggles for power. And that try to work with those forces rather than against them. So don't be like the Melians. Don't try to pretend you know that other states can be your friends and all that. No, no realize that struggle for power is always there. And you just have to manage that. So this managing is very much what realism at the beginning was about. It said basically, that it's the responsibility of
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the leaders of states to create an equilibrium, to create a balance of power, and to amass enough power to keep everyone in check. So to kind of keep everything just in balance, everything just stable, and that is how we ensure that the system doesn't catastrophicly collapse, like it did, of course, in two world wars, that the people that wrote this theory would have-
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might have been a part of or certainly would have seen. So what the realists say is, "Look, history might not repeat. So you might not have the exact same thing happened again. But it sure rhymes." In that the same things- the similar things come over and over again. And it's it is our responsibility to recognize that pattern, and work with it rather than pretend that it's not there. The classic realists we won't cover in great detail though, because what really interests us is the first
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proper social scientific version of realism. And that is often called Neo realism. In the remainder of the lecture, I might well use the word realism, but what I really mean is Neorealism, so I use it interchangeably. While you should be able to differentiate Neorealism - what we're really mostly using - from classic realism. And what the neorealists say is, "look, is this really about the human nature that we're struggling for power? Because if
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this, if it is about human nature, why do we sometimes have you know, 40 years of peace? And then we have 10 years of wars? Shouldn't human nature be unchangeable?" So why does it lead sometimes to war and sometimes to peace, that doesn't seem to make a ton of sense. And why does the balance of power seemingly- is this is always a fact of life, even though the leaders change. So should we not see these some changes here, depending on who's leading the state? So in other words, isn't
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the system different at different points in time? And doesn't this also imply that some orders are more stable than others? Think about what we said about the Congress of Vienna - wasn't there a part, a time in history where things were more stable than they were afterwards? Say, for example, between the first and the second world war? So there's a couple of questions that classic realism can't answer and that neorealists say they can answer.
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Now the first guy that really came up with the first fully formed theory of Neorealism was Kenneth Waltz, who died a few years ago. And his main core insight is in the very title of his book, which I think is extremely convenient and I think everyone should do this. And what he says is, "Look, it's neither human nature - "man" on the title - that gets the states to go to wars. Nor is it actually different systems of government, because we see all kinds of governments go to war
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and all kinds of governments be at peace. It's not just that democracies never wage war. And it's not that autocracies are never at peace. So it's neither "man" nor "the state" that leads to war. But it is the- what he calls the anarchical international system that makes conflict inevitable. So it is the structure of the system, and neither the people inside of it nor the states can really do much about it, because that means that there is an overarching ordering principle
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that compels everyone to act in a certain way. And there's really not much you can do about it. So look at this a little bit and you will notice that this is almost like he's trying to formulate like a physical law, right? The universe doesn't really care what you think about gravity, gravity is going to affect you nonethelessn. In the same way, he says the international system is anarchic, and that will compel certain behaviors, whether you want it or not. So he says, the
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conflicts are coming out of how the system is structured, and not how people are or how states are organized. Which is already a pretty major insight. Now there's a couple of people I'm just going to show you for a second, they are essentially other main proponents that you will see in the required and recommended readings and in the further readings. And the one thing I want to stress just really briefly is that much like Machiavelli, we can think of
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Neorealists also as very much being a product of their time. You see, all of these are white dudes, all of these are Americans. So this is very much a northern American theory that came up during the early and middle part of the Cold War, so the saw the world around them and they created a theory that to them at least explained their world properly. And let's keep that in mind for the for the theories that are coming here. By the way if you think like "Okay, do these people really
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see themselves in the tradition of the earlier - what they claim are realist thinkers - this is I kid you not the absolutely legit homepage of John Mearsheimer who I showed you here on the slide before, who is one of the major still living exponents of neorealism. And his website looks like this. He basically photoshopped himself onto the body of Machiavelli to show how much of a continuation of that guy's thinking he believes his neorealism is. I'm not sure if Neorealists like just don't
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understand what irony is or the just don't want to get it. Not sure.
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So, what are the core tenets, then of neorealism. Because neorealism's main advantage is that it's fairly simple, which also means that is often attractive to students because it's not really that hard to get your head around how it works. So there's five core things about the international system that we have to understand, say realists. So they treat these things almost as laws of nature, these are fundamental to the system, and they cannot be changed. First: okay, the
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international system is anarchical, I talked about what an anarchical system is in the concepts lecture. If you forgot, go back to that one and check it out. It's an anarchical system where there's no overarching legitimate use of force by a level that's higher than states. And the main actors that we're looking at are great powers. Forget about Monaco, forget about Austria, forget about New Zealand, what really matters are the great powers. So the states that are the most powerful and
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that have - number two - the most material capabilities. So realists are obsessed with counting physical objects. So what really matters in Neorealism is tanks, guns, soldiers, planes, bombs, you know, size of your territory, whether or not you have an ocean between you and others. It's like the physical reality of the world. So power- whether a state is powerful or not is very much based in material capabilities. And more specifically, it's really just about how much of an
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army you can field, how much offensive capabilities do you have? How much destructive potential do you have?
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States are - three - fundamentally uncertain about each other. And what that just means is, you know, just because France hasn't attacked Britain in like, you know, 170 plus years or something, doesn't mean that they can't do that next Tuesday. Yes, you might think that's very unlikely, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. They could do that. So they are fundamentally uncertain. They're also a little bit uncertain about each other's means. So they can't ever be quite sure,
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for example, how many bombs the other one has or many soldiers, how fast they can mobilize, and so on. But what they're fundamentally uncertain about is others' aims. So they cannot, you can't rely on anyone. Four: states are unitary and rational actors. So it doesn't really matter what's going on inside of states. And we'll explore that in a couple of slides. It doesn't really matter how your state looks like, doesn't matter if you're a democracy, or a dictatorship, because remember: it's the
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structure of the system that compels everyone to act the same. No one wants to be the Melians, no one wants to be destroyed. So however your state looks, you have to follow the same rules and obey the same obey the same laws. And then - five: states' main goal is survival. So really, what you don't want to do is you don't want to be destroyed. You don't want to be conquered. You don't want to be subjugated. And so what neorealists say is that these five basic things about
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the system- about the structure of the system, they result in what they call a self help system. You can't rely on anyone if you're attacked, you're really- your own capabilities are the only ones you can rely on.
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And states will compete for more power, they want to have more power in order to be more secure, and to be safer from destruction and therefore ensure the survival. So, all these interactions of these states in this uncertain, very conflictual, very power-hungry system lead to what is called a security dilemma. And we'll talk about that in three or four slides. And this what a security dilemma is essentially is, everyone would like to be more secure, but they really can't be
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because that's not how the system works because you can't ever trust anyone. The only reliable way out of the security dilemma - out of you being uncertain about your own security - is what's called the balance of power. You have to make sure that the system is just balanced, right in the middle between all the great powers really. You have to be just sure enough that no one can get more powerful than you. But this is, of course, fundamentally inefficient. So
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these five things, these five facts about the international system, this is what neorealists take as gospel. This is how the world is and this is not up for negotiation. So if we want to think about the world in a slightly more whimsical way, what realists are really doing is they are showing us a world that's very much like Game of Thrones if you watched it, basically constant backstabbing, you can ever trust anyone, there is a constant vying for power, a constant upheaval. If you've
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ever played a Risk game, you very much know that there's no friends in Risk right, there can only be one winner. It's all about moving armies around, and your army strength is the only thing that you really care about. And you're constantly at war with others. So that's kind of the type of world that the realists are painting for us here.
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So let's quickly go through a couple of connections between these core concepts that I've now touched on in the previous slides. So we know that the world is anarchic, and that means there is no- there's no higher power than you can appeal to as a state if you're in danger. That means that you're almost- you're always under an existential threat. So your existence is always threatened because, you know, you can't call the police on the international level. You have
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egoistic rational states, so states that are only worried about their own wellbeing. And those states when they're existentially threatened, they will pursue security. So they want to be safe. They want to ensure their survival, because everyone is trying to do that. What really happens is that everyone is trying to accumulate power, everyone is trying to amass power. And we are competing- we're all competing for power. Everyone wants to have the biggest army, the most
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land, the strongest economy, and so on. And this leads to security dilemmas where we would all like to be safer, but because we can't trust anyone, we end up being just as unsafe as we were before we started. The only way out of this system of constant power competition is to reach a state of a balance of power, where everyone has just about the same level of power, no one's far ahead and can threaten all the others. But this balance of power still cannot do away with this
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fundamental uncertainty. So just because everything's balanced can't mean that it can't topple the next day. And this is a very inefficient system because of course, it would be much easier if you could just trust people instead of having to build massive armies.
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So I've said the word security dilemma, a couple of times and I just want to explain that in a little greater detail, because it's such a fundamental component of how neorealists think about the world. So we already said that all states pursue security, they want to ensure their survival. But security is a zero-sum game. Imagine the following situation: if we were in a lecture hall, and I, you know, after a few lectures, I just feel like I don't like this audience, the
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seem like the might be, you know, maybe they'll attack me if I do a bad job on the theories or something. So in the next lecture, I just come in and bring a gun into lecture hall, because that increases my security. Right? It's just for protection. And, but then, of course, while I've increased my security, I've decreased your security because you're sitting there and you're going, "Hold on a second. I'm sitting in a lecture hall here, and the guy's lecturing and he has a gun. That
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is clearly not a safe environment for me." So maybe the thing that you're doing is, you're buying your own gun now. For the next lecture Now, obviously, if we're not on an American campus, luckily, so this isn't something that's going to happen. But what I essentially mean is that whenever I increase my security, I automatically decrease your security. If my army is bigger than yours, then your security is a little bit lower than it was before I increased my army
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size. So what happens here and why this is a dilemma is that there is a paradox here, because everyone is trying to be safer, but every time they are increasing their power to be safer, they're making others more unsafe, more unsafe. And that means everyone's trying to do that, but no one is actually any safer. You see this expressed in this little graph on the right hand side. So imagine you start here with state A. So we know already that you know, states always have to be fundamentally
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uncertain about each other. If you think of state A as Britain and state B as France. Britain is unsure about France's aims. Yes, France hasn't waged a war. But that doesn't mean that they couldn't, of course they could. So Britain wants to ensure its own security versus France. And to do that they are increasing their power: we build another aircraft carrier, we hire more soldiers, we build a few more nuclear missiles, that are conveniently pointed towards France. Now the problem is that
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there is another side of this equation. And that other side of the equation is France. France is just as uncertain about Britain's intentions. France also wants to ensure its security. But what it sees is "Hold on a second, did Britain just buy an aircraft carrier and point a couple of nuclear missiles at us, that's not a good sign. So maybe to ensure our security, we should probably also increase our own armaments, point a few nuclear missiles at them and buy a few aircraft
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carriers." So they increase their power to be more sure- to be more secure. But then, of course, Britain sees that and goes, "Hold on a second. They just bought a couple of nuclear missiles, we should buy a few more" and so on. Until you end up in this spiral here, where everyone is constantly trying to increase their power in reaction to others also increasing their power. And that is fundamentally the paradox. Everyone is trying to be safer and more secure. But by by increasing the power to do
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so they're increasing- they're decreasing others' security, who then have to increase their security through the pursuit of power, and thereby decrease the first state's. So that's the paradox. You want to be safer. But whatever you're doing, you're making someone else unsafe, who's doing the same thing from the other side.
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A real world expression of this mechanism that realists think they've discovered about the world is, of course, arms- an arms race. So we saw that, from the end of the Second World War, we had this insane arms race between the US and the Soviet Union in terms of how many nuclear warheads they could possibly buy and point at each other. And as we all know, if you just look at the scale here, you can see that at the its highest point, the United States had 30,000 nuclear warheads. And
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if you think each of them is like Hiroshima-sized, that might give you an impression. But those 30,000 wasn't the only warheads around. Actually at the- at a higher point here in the 1980s, you had at some point 70,000 or so nuclear warheads lying around, in the world. Now, the paradoxical thing is: of course, that didn't make either state any safer. But they also couldn't stop because whenever they would stop building more nuclear warheads, they were worried that the other state was
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going to build more and decrease their security. So they had to keep up, they had to escalate- keep escalating the arms race because they felt they could not afford to fall behind. And so arms races are one probable outcome of a security dilemma. No one really can stop even though in the end, of course, the world was much less secure, I would argue, with all these nuclear warheads pointed at each other. We saw in the Cuban Missile Crisis, what can happen with even one nuclear warhead?
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So the way out of this situation is to reach a state of a balance of power. Now a balance of power you might have heard about or not, but the balance of power is often mentioned- it's it most commonly mentioned in a different- with a different meaning. And that is the balance of power as a descriptive fact. Like "this is the current current balance of power in the world". And that's perfectly fine way to use that term. But what we use it as, as neorealists is, we use this as a
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description of a specific state strategy. So because we already know that an increase of power in one state means that we are less secure. That means our strategy will be to balance against this increase in force. Now, sometimes we can do this internally. So we see, you know, Russia has 10 more nuclear warheads, and that means we can just buy 10 more nuclear warheads, and then we're just about evenly matched again, we can balance everything out. That's internal balancing,
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you're balancing out of your own- you're using your own strength to balance. Sometimes though - and that's what the what the graphic is implying here - sometimes you can balance externally. So you might have one very powerful actor, and then you might have several less powerful actors that are banding together to balance against that. So imagine you have the US on one side and you have, you know, an alliance of the European Union and Russia and China on the other, right, to
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balance against them. And so that is a strategy that would that we would expect weaker states, less powerful states, to pursue against the stronger state. But we mustn't forget, the world is inherently uncertain. There is no promises, there is no friends, you have no one to rely on. So whenever the situations even slightly changes, or that big, powerful, threatening state goes away, those alliances will fall apart immediately. So this is not built for- this is not built to last.
36:30
You might have already thought about this, because we've talked so much about power competition, but one of the fundamental questions that a lot of neorealists disagree on is the question of: how much power is enough? And can there be an enough of power? Now there's people that are called defensive realists like Kenneth Waltz here that says yes, a state can eventually achieve enough power. He says hegemony - so a state in which you are overwhelmingly more powerful than anyone else
37:05
in the world, and you essentially cannot be attacked - that's not really a good goal. You shouldn't really aim to accumulate that much power, because what's going to happen is, you're just going to have everyone balanced against you. And you're going to have to spend huge amounts of money and resources to really not achieve all that much. And so what states should do is they should seek an appropriate level of power. It's not always that well defined what an appropriate
37:30
level of power is. But they think that yes, you can have enough power. And if it's appropriate to your stature in the world, this will really lead to a state of the system where the security competition actually isn't all that intense. And you can think for yourself like do you think that's true? Like, is there "enough power" in the international system? And then you have people like our old buddy John Mearsheimer
37:56
who says that, as an offensive realist, he does not think that there is such a thing as "enough power". And that is because he believes that even if others are trying to balance against you, that's often inefficient. They often don't do the best possible job - after all, they can't really trust each other. So it's really just, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of a situation. And it's because he says, it's always a good idea to
38:21
maximize the amount of power that you have. Because after all, you don't really- you aren't really sure how much power the others have. So there's no real point in stopping before you have everything that you can. And that means that in a Mearsheimer world - in a world of offensive realists - that means that there's an intense security competition between states.
38:42
So the way that the power is distributed in the system and the way that the system is balanced in neorealism can take a number of distinct shapes. So the system can be structured in a variety of distinct ways. And each of these ways in how the system is structured, how the system is set up, has a specific terminology attached to it. The first one we're going to look at is a world that is unipolar. Unipolarity, in this case means you have one extremely powerful state in the middle, that is so
39:16
much more powerful than everyone else that no one can really credibly attack them. Imagining- imagine for a second if Switzerland tomorrow decides "we don't like the American policies, we don't like Trump and we will declare war on Trump now and declare war in the US". That is laughable. Actually, any state in the world - and I would argue that even include states like Russia - would probably think twice, if at all, about attacking the US as such an overwhelmingly powerful state.
39:46
Remember that the US is spending more on its military than the next 16 or so states combined. And this is a system, say realists, that is very unlikely because after all, it takes a lot of resources to get into such a powerful position. But it's a very stable system. Because of course, we expect very little conflict here. I mean, who's supposed to be in conflict? The hegemon can tell everyone what to do, essentially, because they're so much more powerful, and no one
40:11
can really credibly attack them. So even if smaller states are engaging in balancing behavior, that really isn't going to create all that much conflict, because the maximum they could ever hope for is that they can be just about as powerful as the hegemon. One example of a system like this, is that realists say just after the Cold War ended - so sort of the 1990s, right, my
40:36
youth when I was still full of vigor, that type of time, that was a so-called "unipolar moment". So United States was in a position where it was vastly more powerful than any other state, China and Russia were both no real competitors. And they could basically do whatever they wanted in the world.
40:55
Unknown: So that's one way of how the system could be set up a unipolar system. Now that could be the next evolution of this, that could be a bipolar system. Which really just means that there's two very, very powerful states, they are much more powerful than any other state, but they are about evenly matched. So you have two power centers. This, say realists, is fairly likely, partially because achieving hegemony - being the one most powerful state is so unlikely - it is, they say a
41:27
very stable system, because everything is very predictable. You have two giant states opposing each other that know a lot about each other, and that don't really- that aren't really worried about other states threatening them. So that's a very predictable situation. It is a high noon-type situation right? You have a you have a gun, the other guy has a gun, and you're on the main street of your western town. And that is all you have to worry about. There's no other people you are-
42:00
you feel threatened by. And what happens in a bipolar system is that smaller states will just kind of gravitate, like little moons around big planets, smaller states will just gravitate around one of the two power centers. And I don't have to point this out because it's already in the graph: but the Cold War is an example of such a system. So neorealists were unsurprised that the Cold War never actually erupted into a hot war, because they think that a bipolar system like this is so
42:28
stable and so predictable.
42:31
Patrick Theiner: The last way of how realists think a system can be set up is a multipolar system. And you already know by the sheer- you can already see by the sheer number of arrows here, that is a system that is a little more chaotic than the other ones. It's a system of a number of roughly equally powerful states. Doesn't mean that everyone's exactly equally powerful, but there is no one that is the clear frontrunner here. This system really realists hate. They hate it
43:02
because it's extremely unstable. Everyone is kind of credibly threatening everyone else. And there's no one, for example, like a hegemon that could just step in and say, "Nope, that's not happening. And if you do guys fight, I will take you both out." It's a very unpredictable system. And it's one where realists expect a lot of miscalculations and overreactions because there are so many equations and so many variables you have to worry about at the same time. So the
43:31
best thing you can hope for even in a system like this is that you have, kind of, a varying alliances that kind of sometimes come about sometimes go away of, you know, A versus- A and B versus C and D, D versus A, B, and C and so on. And we have plenty of examples from world history: we have Europe before the Thirty Years' War, we have - realists argue - that was how Europe looked before World War One, if you go back to the first history lecture, and you look at the system of alliances, that
44:04
was very much that. We at the time of the Three Kingdoms in China, maybe even the world today, and you can think for a second, you know, how is the world set up today? Is it do you think a unipolar system? Is it a bipolar system? And if so, what are the poles? And or is it a multipolar system? And the easiest way to think of a multipolar system is to think of a type of Mexican standoff. And that will also show you why that system is - realists say - so terrible and so unpredictable.
44:33
It's essentially think of multiple people all credibly threatening each other. And you don't have to be especially creative to know that a system that is only held in the balance by this, is very, very prone to just erupt into all-out warfare and all-out conflict at the first slight little movement, or the first miscalculation of any of the actors.
44:59
So This is how the system is potentially- this is the different ways in how the system is set up. Now, I want to talk for a second about something that we haven't really tackled. And that is the issue of relative gains, and how states are motivated by this. So we've already talked about power competition a lot. And we talked about how the struggle for power is essentially a zero-sum game. So anything that I gain, you lose, and the other way around. That's really what a zero-sum
45:31
game is. And so under a neorealist- in a neorealist world, what states tend to do is they try to maximize their relative gains. Let me illustrate relative gains with a very simple example. I have a brother who I used to like not very much, I'm not sure if you have siblings, but think about
45:50
that type of situation. Now think about your parents offering you the following deal: You get 1 pound if we can give your sibling 100 pounds. Would you take that deal? Now, if you're a neorealist, you would say, "that is dumb." Like, I mean, yes, afterwards, you would have one pound. "But why is my brother or sister getting 100 pounds? That's super unfair, that's not good. I'd rather have nothing, then them getting so much more than me." If that is how you thought, then you are
46:24
motivated by relative gains, and you are a neorealist. If on the other hand, you said to yourself, "Well, I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter how much money they get, because I have 1 pound more afterwards than I had before. Why would I give that up?" then you are motivated by absolute gains. Realists say the world works on relative gains and states are only motivated by relative gains because the cannot afford someone else getting ahead even slightly, because over time,
46:55
even very small relative differences, like you see in the graph, will eventually add up to a bigger difference, and will eventually add up to the other actor overtaking them. So they would never take a deal like that where they would get 1 pound out of it while the other one gets 100 pounds out of it. And this will also make, realists say, cooperation very unlikely. Because in almost all cases, if you cooperate with someone - think about a group project - it's very rare that
47:25
everyone is getting- putting exactly the same resources in, and getting exactly the same things out of it. And so therefore, in a real- relative gains world, we wouldn't think that cooperation is particularly likely. So that also means that realists in general are just unconvinced that cooperation is a thing that happens all that much. We have to remember that states are very uncertain of each other. We have to remember that everything is a zero-sum game: I lose, you win, or the
47:55
other way around. Kind of a very Trumpian way of thinking about the world. We cheat whenever we can, remember Machiavelli is still in full play here. We cheat whenever we can. We're not bound by promises, or morality or whatever. So why would we ever really expect cooperation? At best, we can maybe hope for a little bit of cooperation in two instances. The one is, we just created an alliance because we want to balance. But then once that threat goes away, we're
48:26
going to go our own ways. Or we have a hegemon, an overwhelmingly more powerful state, that for whatever reason, basically just tells us to knock it off and cooperate for a little while. Maybe that's just how they- what they feel like or they want us to shoulder the cost of something that the hegemon doesn't want to. But so those are really the only ways in how - in a neorealist world - we would expect states to cooperate. So because this is a fundamental fact of the world,
48:55
this uncertainty, this competition, and this conflict - this is something that cannot be changed. There's really nothing we can do about it, we can do whatever we want, we will not be able to change these fundamental facts about the universe, or at least the universe of states. So we would never really expect cooperation to really amount to much.
49:18
It should does not surprise you that nearealists are not super convinced that international institutions - like all the ones we'll talk about on the course - really do all that much. They really don't think they're that important. They think that if you have something like the United Nations, that's really only going to reflect however the world already is. So the powerful states outside the United Nations will also be the powerful states inside the United Nations. And these- all
49:47
these international organizations really can't do much. You know, they have no real power. They can't tell states what to do. They can't change the underlying logic of the system, they can't take the uncertainty away, for example. They can't make power competition disappear. So what they really are is, they are marginal phenomena. They're not that important. They don't really matter. They're there. But they're not going to change the rules of the game. The only
50:14
really, really small way that it could be relevant is that it just gives powerful states a convenient arena to exert their power in even- in one more area of international politics. So there's a famous article by Mearsheimer that he wrote in 1994 that is called "The False Promise of International Institutions". And the title already tells you how he, as a neorealist, thinks about international institutions and organizations like the UN, or the EU. So you could be asking
50:45
about this whole long story - and we've gone for 50 minutesm, so I'll wrap up in a slide - is realism a good theory? Is this a good story about how the world works, because remember, we're not looking at a story that we like, we're looking at a story that does a good job at explaining the world. So let's look at the good first. I mean, it explains a couple of things about the world. It explains, you know, conflict, power competition, war and peace. It's not a hyper
51:10
complicated theory, right? We don't need to look inside of states, we don't need to look at who's leading the state, you know, the rules are the same for everyone. It's a highly simplified, highly abstract picture of the world. And it generates very clear hypotheses and expectations. So remember that, you know, depending on whether you have a unipolar or bipolar world, we expect very specific things. And at least if we follow its hypotheses, it explains a number of the really
51:38
large patterns in history. But of course, on the other hand, we have a lot of- we might have a lot of concerns left with this theory. Because maybe it is actually too simple. Maybe it thinks about the world in slightly too abstracted terms. So first off, is that really true? Do we really think that dictatorships will follow the same rules and do the same things as a democracy like Sweden? Do we really want to neglect all small states, or states that are not- that don't
52:07
have giant armies? Do we really want to play risk all the time, you know, and move tiny tanks around on our map? Do we really also always want to talk about war and conflict? Isn't there other stuff going on in the world, right? Isn't there colonialism? Isn't there environmental degradation? Isn't there- aren't the health problems? Isn't there poverty? Like, what is the theory say about that? Turns out that it doesn't say all that much. And lastly, hasn't the world
52:33
changed? Is that really true? So even if we think that certain situations are recurring, does that really mean that the world hasn't changed in 2000 years, and we're exactly at the same point as we were in like 400 BC? Is that really true? So and you can think about yourself if that's how you see the theory. But so just to sum up, we have neorealism as a story about how the world works, that thinks that in an anarchical world, the uncertainty means that states can only rely on themselves.
53:07
Because everyone is trying to accumulate power and ensure their security, the will- this will inevitably lead to security dilemmas. And the way out of the security dilemma will only be the balance of power because states can never rely on
53:22
long-term cooperation. Hegemony - meaning becoming the biggest, the most powerful state - is possible, but it's also really unlikely because other states will try to prevent you from achieving that. And the probability of conflict will vary with how the system is structured. So do we have a multipolar system? That's the most conflict-prone. Do we have a bipolar system? Much less conflict-prone. Or do we have hegemony? Which is the least conflict prone.
53:52
So that was it from the first big story about how the world works, I hope that wasn't too long, but I tried to keep it a little bit more interesting. I will see you in the next one with the story about how the world works that liberal institutionalists are telling, which starts at a very similar point, but ends up in a completely different one. Alright, I'll see you next time.
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