Carr vs.

Idealism: The Battles Rages On / The Twenty Years Crisis

Realism:
➔ States are the main actors in world politics and that they are deeply committed to
pursuing power at each other’s expense.
➔ States, the principal actors in international politics, care greatly, although not
exclusively, about power.
➔ For Carr & Mearsheimer states are still the main actors in the world stage and are
likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. Those will continue to worry a great deal
about the balance for power. That action shape much of what they do.
➔ Statism is a central assumption of realism and involve two claims.
1. The state is the pre-eminent actor in world politics.
2. State sovereignty signifies the existence of an independent political
community, on that has the control over its territory.
➔ Survival is the primary objective of all states, for realism survival is the supreme
national interest to which all political leaders must adhere.
➔ No other state or institution can be relied on to guarantee your survival (self-help)

Power in politics
➔ Power is an essential element of politics.
➔ International politics are always power politics, so its impossible to eliminate power
from them.
➔ Why do states want power? What is the underlying logic that explains why great
powers compete for it? [realism insists that states seek for power but there’s no
reason why]
➔ How much power do states want? How much is enough? The exercise of power
always appears to cause the appetite for more power.
➔ Utopia and reality are the facets of political science, and therefore any political
thought must be based on both utopia and reality.
➔ States are not motivated by power alone. There is a well-developed and accepted
body of liberal norms in the international politics. These liberal norms prescribe
acceptable forms of state behavior in peacetime as well as in wartime.
◆ Most leaders want their state to behave according to those ideals and norms
and also the state behavior often conforms to these general principles.
➔ In Carr’s words, the key is to find the proper “combination of utopia and reality”.
Military power
➔ Military instrument lies in the fact that the ultima ratio of power in international
relations is war. Every act of the state is directed to war as a weapon which it is used
as the last resort to use.
➔ As potential war being a dominant factor in international politics, military strength
becomes a recognised standard of political values.
➔ In the modern world, “Powers” are graded according to the quality and efficiency of
its military equipment. Recognition as a Great Power is normally the reward of
fighting a successful large-scale war. [For example Germany after the Franco-
Prussian War, the US after the war with Spain and Japan after the Russo-Japanese
War]
➔ The foreign policy of a country is limited also by its military strength to that of other
countries.

Economic Power:
➔ Economic strength has always been an instrument of political power, if only its
associated with the military instrument. The wealthiest city or state could hire the
largest and most efficient army of mercenaries and military equipment.
➔ Since wealth is a source of political power, the state should seek actively to promote
the acquisition of wealth [by stimulating production at home, to buy as little as
possible from abroad, and to accumulate wealth in the form of precious metals]

Power over opinion

➔ Is not less essential than military and economic power, but it has always been closely
associated with them. Persuasion has always been a necessary part of the
equipment of a political leader.
➔ The reason for the increasing prominence attached to power over opinion is the
broadening of the basis of politics, which increased the number of those whose
opinion is politically important.

These types of power are closely interdependent, and though they are theoretically
separable, it is difficult in practice to see a country possessing one kind of power in isolation
from the others.

Idealism
 ➔ Is the antithesis of Realism. Idealism pays little attention to power when thinking
about international politics and has an utopian overview of world politics.
➔ The argument idealism uses is that our moral referent shouldn’t be the state, but the
individual or all humanity.
➔ Idealists focused on changing how states should relate to each other.
➔ This ideology was determined to change drastically world politics and to create a
peaceful international order where statements wont no longer care about the
balance of power.

The utopian belief:

➔ Carr the described the utopian as the person who believes in the possibility of more
or less radically rejecting reality, and substituting his utopia for it by an act of will.
➔ In a idealism context, Carr pointed out that idealist intellectuals are particularly
reluctant to recognize their thought as conditioned by forces external to themselves.

Two types of idealists

➔ Although both types of idealists still have an imperative to change the world and they
want to transform international politics so states no longer care about power and no
longer engage in security competition, but instead are happy to live together in
harmony; the way both classes of idealists want to achieve utopia is differente
1. Interwar idealists: The way they wanted to achieve utopia was by reason.
Idealists from that time believed that reason was on their side to move the
world away from realism.
2. Post Cold War idealists: The way they wanted to achieve utopia was by
discourse, instead of reason. Behavior follows from beliefs, that means that
post cold war idealists focused mainly on controlling what people think and
say.

Liberalism:
➔ Liberalism is a theory of both government within states and good governance
between states and people worldwide.
➔ Unlike realism, which argue the “international” as an anarchic sphere, liberalism
seeks to project values of order, liberty, justice and toleration into international
relations.
➔ Domestic and international institutions are required to protect and nurture these
values.
➔ Liberals disagree on fundamental issues such as the causes of war and those kind of
institutions are obligated to deliver liberal values in a decentralized, multicultural
international system.