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Gang GUO
Department of Political Science
University of Rochester
March 23rd, 2000
In the contemporary international relations field, Neorealism and Neoliberalism are the most influential approaches. Neorealism's classical counterpart, Realism, had Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes as its intellectual ancestors, who "emphasized international anarchy, reliance on self help, the utility of military force, and the importance of balance-of-power calculations" (Baldwin 1993:11). However, the touchstone of realism is Morgenthau's text in 1948. As he stated, the "main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power" (1960/85:5). Power was defined by him as "man's control over the minds and actions of other men", and political power "is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the impact which the former exert on the latter's minds" (1960/85:32). Waltz's Theory of International Politics in 1979 was the touchstone of Neorealism. Waltz retains many features of Realism, such as the focus on state relations and the preoccupation with anarchy and with power. On the other hand, he also deviates from the Realist tradition in several respects. He takes on fundamental issues of philosophy of science by devoting the first part of the book in discussing basic terms like "laws" and "theories" (Knutsen 1997:271). According to Keohane, Waltz's "scientific ambitions gave it wide appeal" (1993:271). However, the most important deviation (or improvement) that Waltz made from the classical Realism was the employment of systems theory in the field of international relations and hence the revision of some of the basic concepts in traditional Realism. To him, a system is composed of a structure and of interacting units (1979:79). Structures are defined according to the principle by which a system is ordered, by the specification of functions of differentiated units, and by the distribution of capabilities across units (1979:101). As Waltz admits, "in doing so I have broken sharply away from common approaches", as he abstracts from every attribute of states except their capabilities and focuses on how things at the systems level affects its interacting parts (1979:99). This allows him, among other things, to look at some of the basic concepts of classical Realism in new light. For example, his definition of power is definitely different from that of Morgenthau, as cited above. Waltz dismissed the "definition that equates power with control" (1979:191) and insisted that "to be politically pertinent, power has to be defined in terms of the distribution of capabilities; the extent of one's power cannot be inferred from the results one may or may not get" (1979:192). Instead, he offered his own definition of power as "an agent is powerful to the extent that he affects others more than they affect him" (1979:192). Because of these continuities and important deviations from Realism, the research paradigm started by Waltz was also termed as "structural Realism" (Baldwin 1993:10).
Traditional Liberalism, according to the terms used by Moravcsik and Baldwin, had three separate variants: ideational (or sociological) liberalism, commercial liberalism, and republican liberalism. Ideational (or sociological) liberalism refers to theories linking transnational interactions with international integration, which focuses on the compatibility of social preferences across fundamental collective goods like national unity, legitimate political institutions, and socio-economic regulation. Commercial liberalism refers to theories linking free trade and peace, which focuses on incentives created by opportunities for transborder economic transactions. Republican liberalism refers to theories linking democracy with peace, which focuses on the nature of domestic representation and the resulting possibilities for rent-seeking behavior (Baldwin 1993:4, Moravcsik 1997:524). Compared with the continuation and deviation from Realism to NeoRealism, Neoliberalism (or neoliberal institutionalism, as commonly termed (Baldwin 1993:10)) has a much weaker relationship with its putative classical counterpart, Liberalism. As Baldwin pointed out, the "immediate intellectual precursors of liberal institutionalism are theories of international regimes (Krasner 1983a)" (Baldwin 1993:4). Keohane explicitly states that "it is crucial to remember that [Neoliberalism] borrows as much from realism as from liberalism: it cannot be encapsulated as simply a 'liberal' theory opposed at all points to realism. Indeed it is almost as misleading to refer to it as liberal as to give it the tag of neorealism" (1993:272). Moravcsik also argued that "most of the analytic assumptions and basic causal variables employed by institutionalist theory are more realist than liberal" (1997:536). The borrowing from Realist assumptions and from cooperation theory in institutional economics (Knutsen 1997:269), in my opinion, constitute the most important aspects where Neoliberalism improves from Liberalism. Neoliberalism's assumptions have a lot in common with Neorealism. Neoliberalism retains the most important Realist assumptions of anarchy, egoism, and rationality (Keohane 1984:29) (hence the Liberal criticism that "like realism, institutionalism takes state preferences as fixed or exogenous" (Moravcsik 1997:536)). It also regards the states as the most important actors in international relations, and emphasized the role of power ("Relationships of power and dependence in world politics will therefore be important determinants of the characteristics of international regimes" (Keohane 1984:71)). These are important improvement on Liberalism, as they allow for "predictions about state behavior on the basis of relatively sparse information .... Knowledge of the structure of the situation facing decision-makers provides the analyst with clues to state action, since leaders, being rational egoists, will respond to the incentives and constraints provided by the environment in ways calculated to increase the wealth, security, and power of their states" (Keohane 1984:66). Therefore, instead of focusing on the Liberalist "configuration of state preferences", which is relatively complex and hard to specify as an analytic variable, Neoliberal institutionalism bridges the relatively simple and parsimonious Realist assumptions about world politics and "the formation of institutionalized arrangements, containing rules and principles, which promote cooperation" (Keohane 1984:67). Keohane also shows that Neoliberalism can survive the relaxation of the Realist assumption of rational egoist. Besides sharing basic assumptions with Realism, Neoliberalism also improves on Realism or Neorealism, first by emphasizing the existence of common or complementary interests, which is not given much attention in both Realism and Neorealism. By doing so, Neoliberalism was able to envision a much larger set of potential situations of international cooperation. For example, in a world with a hegemon, international cooperation is achieved not only because of the hegemonic power resources, but also because of the common or complementary interests of the hegemon and the lesser states, realized by international regimes based on shared purposes (Keohane 1984:137). Second, Neorealism emphasizes the valuable functions performed by international regimes of reducing the costs of legitimate transactions, while increasing the cost of illegitimate ones, of reducing uncertainty, and of affecting incentives for compliance by linking issues together. Therefore Neoliberalism provides us with a different picture of the effects of structural changes of state capabilities in the world. One of the most important predictions that Neoliberalism made was "in the contemporary world political economy, since it is endowed with a number of important international regimes, created under conditions of American hegemony but facilitating cooperation even after the erosion of U.S. dominance" (Keohane 1984:246). Postwar events, and especially those of the 1970's, appeared to support this view, as Grieco put it, "governments had not transformed their foreign policies, and world politics were not in transition, but states achieved cooperation through international institutions even in the harsh 1970's" (Grieco 1993:121).
Neorealism and Neoliberalism help us better explain international politics in different ways. For Neorealism, Helen Milner (1991:70, 81-82) identifies the "discovery of orderly features of world politics amidst its seeming chaos" as "perhaps the central achievement of neorealists" (Baldwin 1993:5). As Waltz put it, "what emerges is a positional picture, a general desceiption of the ordered overall arrangement of a society written in terms of the placement of units rather than in terms of their qualities" (1979:99). Using the example of European Economic Community, Waltz shows that his theory "can describe the range of likely outcomes of the actions and interactions of states within a given system and show how the range of expectations varies as systems change. It can tell us what pressures are exerted and what possibilities are posed by systems of different structure" (1979:71). Therefore, Neorealism, by focusing on international structure and its interacting units, provided us with a succinct analytical framework to explain the contemporary international politics. The advantage of this positional picture is that many systems can be seen as similar regardless of the particular substantive context in which the units interact. As Stein tells us, "the view most widely held among international relations theorists, for example, is that the global distribution of power is the structural characteristic that determines the nature of global order" (1993:48). This contrasts, to a large extent, with the classical Realism, which offers a somewhat narrower and more particular explanation of international politics, exemplified, among others, by the following statement: "what gives the factors of geography, natural resources, and industrial capacity their actual importance for the power of a nation is military preparedness. The dependence of national power upon military preparedness is too obvious to need much elaboration" (Morgenthau 1960/85:139).
Neorealism also offers a better explanation of international outcomes than Liberalism. In Man, the State and War, Waltz explains why the constraints that define the strategic setting in which the actors interact (the "third image" "within the state system" (Waltz 1959:12) provides us with a better explanation of international results than the "first image" ("from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulse, from stupidity" (1959:16)) and the "second image" (the internal organization of states"). Powell also gave a simple example from microeconomic theory (monopolized market versus competitive market) to illustrate the potential importance of third-image explanations (1994:315). On the other hand, Waltz also acknowledges that his explanations are limited to the international outcomes in world politics ("the third image describes the framework of world politics, but without the first and the second images there can be no knowledge of the forces that determine policy; the first and second images describe the forces in world politics, but without the third image it is impossible to assess their importance or predict their results" (1959:238); "A theory of international politics bears on the foreign policies of nations while claiming to explain only certain aspects of them" (1979:72)).
I have compared the neo- theories with their classical counterparts, but is it possible to say which of the neo-theories is more useful? I have shown that the neo- theories are more useful than the classical theories, but the comparison of Neorealism and Neoliberalism is more controversial, as shown by the numerous academic literature devoted on this topic in recent years (Keohane 1986, Stein 1990, Baldwin 1993, Powell 1994, etc.). I am inclined to say that Neoliberalism (or neoliberal institutionalism) seems more useful than Neorealism in today's world. Besides what I have discussed above about the advantages of Neoliberalism and the limitations of Neorealism, the reasons are as follows:
First, as Baldwin pointed out, since Neorealist tend to study security issues and Neoliberalists tend to study political economy, their difference may be related to the issue areas they study (1993:7). As the states are increasingly concerned with economic welfare while military force becomes "a possibility" (Powell 1991) in the backstage, Neoliberal institutionalism seems to be more useful now.
Second, by combining many of the basic assumptions of (Neo)realism and the subject matter of Liberalism, Neoliberal institutionalism seems to be more useful in the sense of being a step toward a synthesis of the two complementary approaches of Neorealism and Neoliberalism (Claude 1981:198, 200, Herz 1981:202, Nye 1988:238, 251, Baldwin 1993:24). This also seems in line with the "methodological pluralism" that Little advocated (1991:237).
Third, in view of the recent development of the European Community, it appears that Neoliberal institutionalism offers a more useful approach to the study of further empirical evidence. Since both Neorealists and Neoliberalists agree that theories should be systematically tested (Keohane 1993:297), it seems that the development of the European Community gives a "critical" test that tends to speak more often in favor of Neoliberal institutionalism.