Contemporary IR Theory and the Washington Policy Debate

Contemporary IR Theory and the Washington Policy Debate
With pardonable exaggeration, Daniel Deudney has described the eighteenth century as the “big bang” of international theory. A great part of the resulting fireworks can be understood as a clash between Realism and Liberalism, but two features of that dialogue are especially notable: one is that we find thinkers who have both “realist” and “liberal” beliefs and find no inconsistency between them; a second is that each of these respective schools, as we imagine them, are often to be found riven by internal division. Who is a liberal? What is a realist? The truth is, it’s hard to say. Nevertheless, in the interstices of this great argument between realism and liberalism we see the outlines of the constitutional tradition, which takes the pursuit of the national interest to be a primary duty of political leaders but also seeks the regulation of power by law and ethics.
One can get to all the main problems in international relations by studying the classical thinkers, but there is always something new to say in assessing the relative importance of these ideas for our own time. Because so many minds have been at work for so many years on these problems, it is basically impossible to say anything genuinely original about any of the important questions we have taken up thus far. In that respect, social theorists are like the people of Abraham Lincoln’s generation, who stood in worship and awe of the founders of the United States. How, Lincoln asked, could we surpass them when the “field of glory” had already been harvested? Lincoln went on to say that men would arise who were not content with this splendid inheritance, who disdained to fill the offices of the government. “What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path . . . It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious.”1
For most of its propositions, alas, social theory cannot escape its dependence on previous thinkers, or can do so only by ignoring them or leaving them unacknowledged. This state of affairs may not satisfy the theorists who covet the distinction of profound originality, but for the rest of us it presents a not unpleasing picture. So what if our best ideas are derivative? As there is no degradation in such indebtedness,2 we are free to search for truth without the onerous burden of trying to say something utterly new and original. It is not as if the acknowledgement of our incapacity gives us nothing else to think about. In seeking to understand the ever-shifting present, in other words, we are still impelled to forge new ways of reassembling the traditions and to assess their relevance to new social facts. The present chapter assesses contemporary authors who have done this and who offer distinctive syntheses of realism and liberalism. Then we turn to the curious role that these “isms” have played in the Washington policy debate.
Most IR textbooks describe a field divided into Realist, Liberal, and Constructivist approaches, but the labels can be confusing. Though Constructivism defines itself in opposition to academi...