To what extent does realism naturalize war?

Résumé du document

In 1991 a US-led coalition launched, with the agreement of UN, a wide military operation against the rogue regime of Saddam Hussein that had attempted to invade Kuwait in order to take over its staggering oil resources. George Herbert Bush, at the head of the coalition that was to rescue Kuwait, explained that the "First Gulf War" had been set off by the greediness of a tyrant, but above all by the selfishness of a state that had tried to seek its national interest at the detriment of another state. The operation was named "Desert storm", as if the war was bound to happen, as if its occurrence was as predictable and natural as the sound of thunder during a tempest. Unarguably the Americans reckoned that the war was necessary, and even natural, as Saddam Hussein's Iraq was jeopardizing the "new world order". It is scarcely surprising that G.H.W Bush, 41st president of the United States, had served as vice-president during the two Reagan presidencies, and that he was himself a staunch patron of a realist foreign policy.

These attempts to present war as a natural consequence of human nature and of the structure of the international system seem to be the brand of a realist foreign policy. But, as Kenneth Waltz once put it, "are wars so akin to earthquakes in being natural occurrences whose control or elimination is beyond the wit of man" ? Is it really one of the main features of the realist theory of international relations to analyze war as a phenomenon bound to occur?

Extraits

[...] That is why Hobbes claimed that is a wolf to man”. The crave to dominate the others in order to assert one's power is, according to him, deeply rooted into the human nature, and, consequently, he regarded as natural that men would always act selfishly, pursuing their personal interest and ignore any norm, moral or law. Eventually, the men grew tired of this life of perpetual defiance toward each other, a life where any new day could be the last. [...]

[...] Nevertheless, human nature is undoubtedly an endogenous explanation of war. We need now to study realist claims that self-help and power politics are given by anarchic structure exogenously to process”[13]. The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant had argued that, if States would all adopt a democratic form of government, eternal peace could be achieved. Indeed, he believed that the violence that is inherent to nature of man could be durably overcome by an effective set of democratic institutions. The realist thinking, however, denies that “arbitrary rulers are more inclined to favour war than are the people at any claiming that the behaviour of the States does not depend upon its government and its internal structures, but on the way it will relate to other states. [...]

[...] Indeed, all the individuals within a particular state live under the same government, which has an unquestionable sovereignty over the whole territory. Consequently, the realists assume that no citizen will go against the pursuit of the national interest by the state, because the interests of the individuals reflect those of the state he belongs to. Furthermore, since states are in their structure similar to individuals, they will always seek to maximise their welfare to the detriment of the other states that compose the international society. [...]

[...] the states have to accept it as it is and to react accordingly. Moreover, the realist theory is very “state-centric”, in that the state is seen as the main of international politics and somehow the only one worth of attention. The anarchic structure of the international system creates a staggering amount of uncertainties for sovereign states, whose primary objective is to ensure their survival. Nevertheless, states cannot rely on a superior organisation to rescue them if a neighbour is attacking them. [...]

[...] He claimed that two states would go to war against each other, as a natural result of their divergences. He also incurred in his writings that a prince that would try by all means to avoid a war was doomed to be defeated and ruined, because it is like to swim against the tide[8], to fight against a natural phenomenon. Moreover, war between states can occur as a result of a state seeking international credibility, recognition, which can be linked to Hobbes' third source of conflict (the pursuit of glory and honour is, for him, one of the main features of human nature). [...]