Political Realism And The Peloponnesian War

As an International Relations’ theory, realism has a long and complicated history whose roots can be traced back to the writings of the antique philosophers of Greece, Rome, and China. However, political realism increased in usage in the twentieth century after Edward Hellet Carr’s Twenty Years Crisis came to lead the rest of the schools of thought present in the field of International Relations. Soon, others joined Carr’s views: Schuman (1933), Nicolson (1939), Niebuhr (1940), Schwarzenberger (1941), Wight (1946), Morgenthau (1948), Kennan (1951), Butterfield (1953), and Waltz (1969). Realism emphasizes the fact that the states should rely on themselves in order to guarantee their own security in the anarchic international system. The hostile security interests and the changes in the balance of power will lead to conflicts. As for the term, although it is unsure where its origins lay, most scholars have agreed that either E.H. Carr, or Hans Morgenthau might have coined it (????).

In his analytical study of the Peloponnesian War (431-415 B.C.), Thucydides presents the ancient Greek war between Athens and Sparta as a consequence of Sparta’s fear towards Athens’ growth, city-state that felt the need to guarantee its own security through violence. The emphasis is on human nature, which is reflected, in the behavioural pattern of the state, but it is connected to the domestic politics and to the national wealth. Followers of Thucydides’ type of realism, identified as neo-classical realism, base their fear on the idea that the more a state extends, so will its imperialist tendencies, because it will need more resources; and the more resources you have, the more your ambitions will grow. It is something similar to a vicious cycle.

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...States’ emergence as a superpower with no opponent on the political, economic, and technological arena. However, even the United States’ hegemony was unable to avoid conflict in the new post-Cold War world.

The realist approach got a fresh boost with Waltz’s new interpretation of realism. To him, state behaviour was the product of competition between states. His book, Work Theory of International Politics brought a new debate to the fading realism. In the beginning of the 1990s, the relist approach lost most of its support, influenced by international events, the most notable one being the end of the bipolar world. Slowly, a new type of realism emerged: neorealism. If we take into account different stages of the Cold War and the post-Cold War era, we reach the conclusion that realism was, is and will be the dominating theory in the field of international relations.