The realist tyranny

One of the greatest successes of the new right has with no doubt been its ability to appear as the only coherent, feasible and consequentialist political option. From this view while leftists might be concerned with values and ideas, these are political choice which lie ultimately in wishful thinking and very theoretical constructions. New Right wingers are supposed to be the greatest representatives of “realpolitik”, and ideology which is the only one capable to make difficult choices in the real world. These are the politics of TINA, “there is no alternative”, you have to make very hard sacrifices in order to get what you actually want. Any divergence from this way of thinking is qualified as unfeasible and just theoretical.

This discourse has consequences in the real world. In the times of war against terrorism and the clash of civilizations, western societies are called by neoconservative prophets to make hard choices as an inevitable price for maintaining our way of life. Some of these dilemmas are freedom against security, Islamic democracy or secular dictatorship, hard power politics or soft power politics, rule of law or effective fight against crime,… This article will try to make a criticism on both philosophical and practical grounds on this ideology.

A pair of precisions are worth to be done first. What it is called realpolitik here is an ideology, not a political theory. Realpolitik in this article is not a coherent set of principle or values, but just a political discourse. Thus, it does not coincide with what is called “realism” in international politics (the theory whose central assumption are statocentrism, the hobbesian environment and the undifferentiated nature of states), although it is probably linked. Neither does it coincide with “neoconservatism” as a coherent set of principles (1).

What is meant here by realism is that ideology which claimed to follow the machiavelian principle that “ends are justified by means”, that view that consider that there is no possible trade off between ends and means and a hard choice has to be made between both if favour of the latter.

Choice, values and risk

The basic principle of realipolitik is its concern with practice. Practice and consequences is all that need to be taken into account, theory and values can not prevail. However, this point of view is fundamentally flawed, and the truth is that what is meant by “practice and consequences” are by-products of theory and values.

How are choices made? When choosing the way to act, people has inevitably to asses the expected relative costs of each action, and for this two elements are needed: a hierarchy between outcomes and a assessment of the probability of each of these outcomes to be achieved by each action. In other words; a factual judgement (the risk of each action) and a normative judgement (the desirability of each outcome).

This very essential nature of choices is ignored by the concern with practice of political realists. The claim that values do not matter implicitly assumes a set of values which are not made explicit and qualified as irrevocable. Values is the tool we use to asses the hierarchy between outcomes, and if there is no hierarchy between outcome it is not possible to make a choice.

 Also, some realists do not deny this set of values. However, they claim that given such values, the only possible choice is the one they claim to be unavoidable. The part of the choice that is being manipulated here is the factual part; there is an implicit conception on how the world is ruled an which choices are possible.

The problem with this view is that that description of the world (the assessment of risk which is need to take an action) which is the basis for the choice is usually distorted or biased by ideology. There is no intellectual justification, no empirical evidence of this state of affairs. The possibility frontier is taken as given.  A good example is about the so called “clash of civilizations”; Amartya Sen (2) has complained about the perspective according to what civilizations would be collective actors with homogeneous values that fight against each other; identity is much more than civilizational and viewing civilizations as clashing imply a very simplistic view of what identity actually is. The same can be said about the impossibility of redistribution in the era of globalization or the freedom-security dilemma: the picture that is being depicted is just not true.

No success without legitimacy

There is some paradox in the view of advocates of realipolitik. While they call for a strong defence of the values in which our society is founded, they usually advocates for hard restrictions on what those values imply. Since they are concerned with practice, they don’t care about “secondary” objectives such as values or the rule of law.

Suppose that we adhere to this practical view of the world. In war as well as in love, everything is permitted. Policy makers do not have (and actually don’t need) values, they have well defined objectives and act as machiavelian autocrats in order to achieve them.

The point is that, even if we adhere to this “realist” view, legitimacy will be needed. For some reason, policy makers need something more than just their own will (in democracies they need voters, in international relations they also need allies). They need support and it is at least rare that support can be managed without some, at least formally assumed, values. Voters do not trust politicians that declare to be only concerned with ends and not with means, countries that deny any values are not trusted. Legitimacy (eg“soft power”) in to some extent a sort of political capital which is as necessary as military means and security forces. The same applies to the rule of law.

In the real world there is a need for social capital, that is, institutions, norms, values and laws that structure society and guide people when acting. Someone which refuse to play according to this principle will just lose in the medium term. The reason is that realistic action has information externalities: they reveal something about what can and can not be done and they weaken norms institutions which are just mantained by its spontaneous respect.

A very clear example of this can be found with the actual situation in the Middle East. The Bush administration invaded Iraq violating international law, against european public opinion and with motives that have been proved to be false. This could be justified on the grounds of “realipolitik”. However, today the legitimacy of the US is extremely weakened. They are not able to enforce international law against the Iran nuclear program, since they themselves violated it. Secondly, their commitment not invade Iran is not credible, especially among Arabic public opinion which support the nuclear program a defensive device. Finally, the leadership of the US is more and more contested at the global level. In the medium run realpolitik solutions find themselves as being impossible to implement since they lack any adherence.

Asking the right questions, giving efficient answers

What is annoying in realpolitik is that it is somehow a totalitarian discourse in the sense that it does not allow any dissidence. They have the monopole of what is feasible and any intent to question that conventional wisdom is qualified as “irrealistic”, idealistic or “naive”.

To be sure, there is a good case to be done for scepticism against wishful thinking and it is true that some ideas are unfeasible and irrealistic. However, many of the political, social and economic recipes that are presented as not having any alternative and requiring intense sacrifices are based in, at best, very questionable judgements and at worst in simple myths. They are usually based in rigid preconceptions of the world which lack any rigour and which are usually more than questionable when a closer look is taken.

In reality, any coherent, rational and consequentialist view of the world should energically reject “realpolitik”. If coherence means to ask honest questions and give efficient answers,  realpolitik fails in both.

(1) A heroic defence of neoconservatism as opposed to what is called here “realpolitik” can be found in the book of Francis Fukuyama “America at the crossroads”.

(2) His book “Identity and violence: The illusion of destiny”

This entry was posted on Viernes, Febrero 1st, 2008 at 17:45 and is filed under English Version, internacional, masturbación intelectual . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.