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Combining ‘incompatible’ foreign policy explanations: how a realist can borrow from constructivism

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Abstract

According to perspectivism, models and their explanations can be put ‘next to each other’ and can thus put one another into perspective, but they can hardly compete or, even less, be combined. The question whether such combination is allowed is demonstrated to have deep epistemological roots. Unfortunately, perspectivism easily leads to the compartmentalisation of research communities and a reduced interest in the real world. As argued here, seemingly ‘incompatible’ models or theories can be made to compete through conscious effort by the researcher, and eventually their effects may restrain or reinforce one another in specific explanations. Such combination — in this case realism borrowing from constructivism — is illustrated by an explanation of the puzzle why the German great power is cautious, while the smaller Sweden is today hawkish in relation to Russia (the Ukraine 2014 conflict). In fact, combination may help bridge the much debated ‘actor-structure’ cleavage in IR.

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Notes

  1. The common denominator of perspectives, approaches, models and theories (used interchangeably for the purpose of the present article) is that they all have the potential for delivering explanations (more or less rigorously).

  2. Quoted from Engelbrekt (2002: 60).

  3. Allison’s volume was first published in 1971. The work of Allison and Zelikow (1999), which has the same title, is a rewritten edition, including new empirical and theoretical insights.

  4. Interestingly, Hudson’s piece, including a survey of foreign policy analysis until the time of writing, does not mention neoclassical realism (launched in 1998), which is dedicated to foreign policy explanation.

  5. According to the perspectivism of Hollis and Smith, there are ‘always two stories to tell’, one of understanding, the other of explanation (Hollis and Smith 1990: 68–91). This is true as an initial assessment, of course, but it is too early to stop inquiry here.

  6. This is not to create a new ‘-ism’. Sterling-Folker (1997) uses the terms ‘compatible’ or ‘compatibility’ in her article.

  7. Of course, compatibilism should not be an excuse for saving false theories. I will not go further into the complex issue of precisely when to consider a theory falsified, though.

  8. Cf. Schimmelfennig (2004).

  9. According to his well-known metaphor, if the house is burning, everybody will run towards the entrances, irrespective of their individualities; if it is merely overheated, some people will open a window, while others will stay calm, depending on their psychological or physiological dispositions. Explanation of their behaviour will therefore have to add a knowledge about these.

  10. Cf. Rose (1998), Wivel (2005), Rathbun (2008), Glenn (2009), or Lobell et al. (2009), among others. See already Zakaria (1992), though.

  11. There is no ‘reason why neoclassical realism cannot incorporate unit-level variables, while at the same time maintaining the causal primacy of structural pressures arising from the international level’ (Taliaferro et al. 2009: 23).

  12. Cf. also Moravscik (1999: 679) in this regard.

  13. Because all structure is environment, but not all environment is structural.

  14. Cf. also Elman (1996) or Sterling-Folker (1997: 23) regarding this view.

  15. According to Rathbun (2008), a follower of Waltz (1979), the ‘system’ explains very little foreign policy, but it has prescriptions for it. And if prescriptions are not obeyed, punishment will follow: ‘when domestic politics and ideas interfere substantially in foreign policy decisionmaking [which they should not, according to Rathbun], the system punishes states’ (Rathbun 2008: 296). Moreover, ‘the punishment will fit the crime so that we expect a direct relationship between the extent to which domestic politics and ideas come to play a role and the severity of the rebuke’ (ibid.: 311). This is historically false, though. Remaining in the analogy, many states with a favourable location have lived a ‘criminal’ life without being punished, whereas the less fortunate have not.

  16. For an effort to make realism compatible with a branch of strategic culture studies, cf. Glenn (2009).

  17. For literature systematically discussing foreign policy explanatory levels, cf. Hollis and Smith (1990) or Hill (2002), for instance. The stipulated levels vary from one author to the next.

  18. To paraphrase the title of Goldmann (1976).

  19. Not even the US during unipolarity would qualify here. For instance, the Afghanistan intervention could not be analysed without taking September 11 as the external stimulus.

  20. In the words of Dueck (quoted from Glenn 2009: 526), ‘Culture is best understood as a supplement to and not a substitute for realist theories of strategic choice. Strategic culture can certainly help to explain “deviations” from balancing behavior, but since the very concept of such deviations presumes some sort of appropriate or expected response to international conditions, it is only within a realist framework that such explanations make any sense’.

  21. Amanpour, CNN, 20 March, available at http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/20/ (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  22. As here conceived, thus, there is not necessarily a military aspect or the shifting of alliance status to this strategy. On various notions of balancing, cf. Waltz (1979), Walt (1987), Pape (2005), or Kai He (2012), for instance. In any case, the effectiveness of balancing is promoted by the possession of credible military, political and economic counterweight.

  23. Amanpour, CNN, 20 March, available at http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/20/ (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  24. https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/450003920187043840 (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  25. https://carlbildt.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/starka-slutsatser-i-bryssel/ (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  26. ‘Angela Merkel: Russia “will not get away” with annexation of Crimea’, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10693400/Angela-Merkel-Russia-will-not-get-away-with-annexation-of-Crimea.html (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  27. ‘Steinmeier pledges additional support for Ukraine’, Auswärtiges Amt, 22 March, 2014.

  28. ‘Crimean Crisis: All Eyes on Merkel’, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/angela-merkel-plays-central-role-in-russia-diplomacy-over-crimea-a-956834.html (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  29. Ibid.

  30. ‘Germany’s Russian rethink: How Merkel lost faith in Putin’, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/20/us-germany-russia-crisis-insight-idUSBREA2J15720140320 (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  31. http://www.thelocal.de/20140905/merkel-holds-firm-at-nato-summit-russia-ukraine-reaction-force (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  32. Jan Bo Hansen, ‘Good cop, bad cop’, Weekendavisen [Danish weekly], 5 December, 2014.

  33. http://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/EN/Artikel/2014/11_en/2014-11-17-ukraine-nach-g-20-2_en.html (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  34. As (proximate) balancing is defined above, it can take any form — military or diplomatic; diplomatic means may be used to obstruct or otherwise irritate a power asserter (Pape 2005). The main thing about the concept as stipulated here, of course, is that it is non-systemic (proximate).

  35. For a European great power of today (like France or Germany), this means the European Union, approximately. For a sole superpower, its sphere of interest being global, proximate balancing is tantamount to systemic balancing.

  36. Duffield’s formulation (1999: 218), pertaining to the first decade after the Cold War.

  37. Specifically, Germany and Russia have completed the ‘Nord Stream’ Baltic Sea gas pipeline from the Bay of Finland to Greifswald in Germany; this project has been ascribed geopolitical motives by the Baltic countries and Poland, whose roles as transit countries have been diminished by it.

  38. ‘Angela Merkel is rewriting Germany’s post-war handbook on relations with Russia’, http://qz.com/194695/angela-merkel-is-rewriting-germanys-post-war-handbook-on-relations-with-russia/ (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  39. Ibid.

  40. The following paragraphs (regarding lessons 1 and 2) are based on Mouritzen and Wivel (2012: 128–29) with the written permission of Lynne Rienner (although amended for our purpose here).

  41. It is still a valid objection, for instance, that one’s opponent is ‘not thinking in terms of history’ (Landler 2007).

  42. See also ‘Poll of German view on Crimea’, Spiegel, 19–20 March, 2014, available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/bild-961711-674691.html (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  43. ‘Which War to Mention?’, http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21599410-angela-merkel-and-her-foreign-minister-crisis-throwback-worse-times-which-war (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  44. Of course, we lack the ‘smoking gun’ at this stage of research (such as leaks from a confidential conversation between Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier).

  45. ‘We did not accept that Milosevic’s Serbia intervened militarily in other ex-Yugoslav republics by referring to the protection of people with a Serbian passport [like Russia claimed to protect Russians and Ossetians with a Russian passport in South Ossetia]. And we should remember how Hitler little more than half a century ago applied precisely this doctrine to undermine and attack significant parts of Central Europe’ (quoted from Mouritzen and Wivel 2012: 130–31). The first analogy is a positive one: ‘we’, presumably the West, should do the same as in relation to Milosevic. The second one is negative: remember how tragic consequences followed from the acquiescence in Hitler’s assertiveness; by inference, the opposite of the 1930’s appeasement policy should be practiced now.

  46. This paragraph (a) is adapted from Mouritzen and Wivel (2012: 132, with the written permission of Lynne Rienner).

  47. Author’s interview with Ann-Sofie Dahl, 20 November, 2008.

  48. In general, European states’ positionings between the US superpower and Russia have not been correlated with government ideology (Mouritzen 2006).

  49. Ibid.; interview with high-level civil servant, 19 and 20 January, 2009.

  50. http://carlbildt.wordpress.com (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  51. https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/533634339222085632 (accessed 10 November, 2014).

  52. The possibilities for explanatory combination have been briefly mentioned in Allison and Zelikow (1999: 404), whereas they are denied by the early Allison. However, none of the volumes are sufficiently clear and consistent on this crucial point.

  53. Epistemological realism should not be mistaken for IR realism, of course.

  54. For a criticism of Wight and realism, cf. Käpylä and Mikkola (2011) based on a pragmatist theory of knowledge. The article would have benefited from an empirical illustration, though.

  55. In the view of Allison and Zelikow (1999: x) models apparently ‘channel our thinking’, whether we allow it or not.

  56. For an excellent formulation of model-neutral evidence from East Asia, cf. Goldstein (2007). This allows him to confront expectations from the power-transition theory and the institutionalist theory, respectively, with this evidence and accept that mechanisms from both theories may be at work simultaneously.

  57. Cf., for instance, the ‘luxury theory’ (Mouritzen 1997) integrating geopolitics with Coser’s (1956) sociological theory that external conflict strengthens a group’s internal cohesion. Thus, it is asserted that external conflict or danger limits the ‘luxury’ of domestic politics playing a role in foreign policy-making.

  58. An argument against the additive model of an empirical nature has been made by Fordham (2009), in my view overstating the difficulties of distinguishing between ‘internal’ and ‘external’.

  59. To round off with a ‘nerdish’ sounding deduction from the present section, a neo-classical realist must, logically, be an epistemological (ontic) realist — as must any researcher combining different levels in one explanation. A true Waltzian, sticking to systemic explanation, must not. Waltz’s theory of truth is probably instrumentalism (‘theory as an instrument’), cf. Waltz (1975: 8).

  60. Analytical eclecticism is ‘focused on seeking the best answer for a problem at any given time, on the basis of relevant insights drawn from existing theories and narratives’ (Sil and Katzenstein 2010: 16). In spite of this sensible undertaking, eclecticism has no place in the establishment phase for any given theory, of course.

  61. It is not at issue here, whether in fact attraction to the US is just a means towards balancing China. If that is the case, only proximate balancing is at work.

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Mouritzen, H. Combining ‘incompatible’ foreign policy explanations: how a realist can borrow from constructivism. J Int Relat Dev 20, 631–658 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2016.2

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