The quest for power
foucaultisdead
may be of interest. It's an analysis of a book by John Mearsheimer on the
impetus behind state power seeking. I'm only a quarter of the way through
at the moment but it definitely gives food for thought about the underlying
motives behind the state aggression.
The full article can be found at this url:
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25003.shtml
or as a pdf file here:
http://www.newleftreview.net/PDFarticles/NLR25003.pdf
Here are the opening paragraphs:
New Left Review 16, July-August 2002
John Mearsheimer's Tragedy of Great Power Politics disdains liberal-imperial
rhetoric for a tough-minded theory of 'offensive realism'. Peter Gowan
argues that, whatever its merits, the behaviour of states in the
international system cannot be dissociated from the internal dynamics of the
political orders they protect.
PETER GOWAN
A CALCULUS OF POWER
Forget globalization. Clear your mind of euphemisms like planetary
'governance'. Drop the idea that the foreign policies of Western democracies
are devoted to liberal goals, controlled by popular opinion or dedicated to
peace. The inter-state system generates rivalry and war, today and tomorrow
just as much as yesterday. Get ready for the great-power conflicts of the
twenty-first century. Simply put, such is the scandalous message of The
Tragedy of Great Power Politics. [1] The book, however, is complex enough.
Its author, John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic
voice in America's complacent foreign-policy elite-one who, not by accident,
has spent his career in scholarly work in universities, rather than serving
as a functionary in the national-security bureaucracies whence conventional
apologias for Washington's role in the world are furnished. Not only is his
writing refreshingly free from the cant that normally surrounds the world
role of the United States, it is extraordinarily accessible: forceful,
direct and clear, without a trace of the usual academic jargon. But it is
also both erudite and sophisticated on complicated and disputed subjects
within the field. Combining historical depth and theoretical vigour, it is
likely-notwithstanding its heterodoxy-to have a wide readership round the
world.
Intellectually, Mearsheimer is a product of the post-war tradition of
neo-realist international-relations theory founded by Kenneth Waltz. The
postulates of the neo-realist paradigm are economical, and stark. States,
the principal agents of the international system, can be treated as so many
black boxes or billiard balls, if our purpose is to analyse their
inter-actions. Their differing domestic arrangements and pressures may be
ignored. For the main lines of any state's external policy are necessarily
driven by the structure of the international system, whose anarchy-that is,
lack of any consensual jurisdiction-forces states to struggle for supremacy
over each other, in an endless search for their own security. A great power
which fails to engage in a rational pursuit of hegemony will ultimately put
its very survival at risk. This is the tragic fate evoked in Mearsheimer's
title.
But Mearsheimer breaks with Waltz in a number of crucial ways. First and
foremost, he rejects the notion, developed by Waltz, that the logic of the
international system tends towards an equilibrium, since all states must
pursue the same aim of security, and any state that exceeds this goal,
driving towards paramountcy over others, is bound to generate a coalition of
its rivals against it. Aware of this inevitable backlash, great powers-in
Waltz's view-tend to become status-quo states, accepting balance-of-power
constraints and acting defensively to uphold them. Mearsheimer's key move is
to reject this deduction of what he terms 'defensive realism'. The
imperative of survival, he argues, is incompatible with any equilibrium
between states. For the only sure guarantee of survival, in an anarchic
order, is primacy-that is, not balance with other powers, but predominance
over them. The reasons are simple and two-fold. How can any power know what
would be a 'safe' margin of advantage over its neighbours, one that would
allow it to rest on its oars-and how could it predict the capabilities of
its rival a decade or two into the future? These inherent uncertainties of
the international order compel states, however powerful, to seek more power:
there is no resting-place for them
Given the difficulty of determining how much power is enough for today and
tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security
is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge
by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity
to become hegemon in the system because it thought it already had sufficient
power to survive. [2]
In effect, what Mearsheimer does is project into the international arena the
fundamental Hobbesian maxims: 'Because the power of one man resisteth and
hindereth the power of another: power is simply no more, but the excess of
the power of one above that of another'-
so that in the first place I put for a generall inclination of all mankind,
a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseath only in
Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more
intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be
content with a moderate power; but because he cannot assure the power and
means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.
[3]
These are the relentlessly logical premises on which Mearsheimer, correcting
Waltz, develops a doctrine of 'offensive realism'. In this world, there is
no such thing as a satisfied state. Far from behaving defensively, he
argues, 'a great power that has a marked power advantage over its rivals is
likely to behave more aggressively because it has the capability as well as
the incentive to do so'. [4]
[1] John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, W. W. Norton:
New York 2002, 555 pp, $27.95, hardback, ISBN 0 393 02025 8. Henceforward
TGPP.
[2] TGPP, p. 35.
[3] Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic [1650],
Cambridge 1928, p. 26; Leviathan [1651], London 1988, p. 161.
[4] TGPP, p. 37.