Introduction
Realism in the background of international relations includes a diversity of hypotheses and advances, all of which allocate a belief that states are chiefly inspired by the desire for military and financial power or safety, rather than ideals or morals. This term is often identical with power government. (Brodsky, 1996)
The realist approach has the following key statements:
- The international structure is anarchic. There is no power over the states able to control and regulate their communications; states must come to contact with other states on their own, but not on someone other’s desire.
- Independent states are the key actors in the international structure.
- States are rational unitary actors each moving towards their own national attention. There is a universal doubt of long-term collaboration or coalition.
- The overwhelming ‘national interest’ of each state is its state safety.
- Relations among states are defined by their relative level of power obtained chiefly from their military and financial capacities.
Realists suggest that mankind is not essentially generous but rather competitive. This Hobbesian viewpoint, which regards human nature as selfish and conflictual unless given suitable conditions under which to collaborate, contrasts with the approach of acceptance to international relations. Further, they believe that states are intrinsically violent and/or preoccupied with safety; and that territorial expansion is only limited by opposing authorities. This aggressive build-up heads to a safety dilemma where escalating one’s own safety can bring along larger unsteadiness as the opponent builds up its own forces. Thus, safety is a zero-sum game where only comparative gains can be created. (Sittser, 1997).
The origins of war
Neville Chamberlain’s politics of pacification were motivated by good reasons; he was perhaps less inspired by deliberations of individual power than were lots of other British prime ministers and he searched to keep peace and to guarantee the happiness of all distressed. Yet his actions led to the Second World War. Sir Winston Churchill’s reasons, on the other hand, were much less general in extent and much more barely oriented toward individual and state power, yet the foreign policies that originated from these substandard reasons were surely greater in the ethnic and political extent to those chased by his forerunner. (Thompson, 1960).
A realist approach of international politics also avoids the other well-liked erroneous belief of comparing the foreign policies of a statesman with his philosophic or political preferring, and of deducing the previous from the following. Statesmen, particularly under fashionable situations, may well make a habit of offering their foreign actions in terms of their philosophic and opinionated sympathies in order to gain admired support for them. Yet they will differentiate with Lincoln among their “official duty,” which is to regard and act in expressions of the state interest, and their “individual desire,” which is to see their own honest charges and political rules applied all over the world. Political realism does not necessitate, nor does it overlook, unresponsiveness to political perfects and moral regulations, but it necessitates indeed a sharp difference between the attractive and the possible-between what is pleasing everywhere and at all times and what is probable under the tangible circumstances of time and place.
It stands to motive that not all foreign policies have always pursued so rational, purpose, and dispassionate a course. The dependent components of behavior, bigotry, and subjective favorite, and of all the limitations of intellect and determination which flesh is the successor to, are bound to repel foreign policies from their balanced course. Particularly where foreign strategy is ruled under the situations of democratic regulation, the need to marshal popular sentiments to the maintenance of foreign policy cannot be unsuccessful to damage the sagacity of foreign policy itself. Yet hypotheses of foreign policy which claims at judiciousness must for the time being, as it were, theoretical from these unreasonable components and search to make an image of foreign policy which offers the balanced concentrate to be found in familiarity, without the conditional divergences from sagacity which are also stated in understanding. (Lee, 1998).
The first fact to mention about the current realist situation is that it is essentially anti-utopian. This school of thought is clarified by Morgenthau to comprise the idea that:
The world, imperfect as it is from the rational point of view, is the result of forces inherent in human nature. To improve the world one must work with those forces, not against them. This being inherently a world of opposing interests and of conflict among them, moral principles can never be fully realized, but at best must be approximated through the ever temporary balancing of interests and the ever precarious settlement of conflicts. This school, then, sees in a system of checks and balances a universal principle for all pluralist societies. It appeals to historic precedent rather than to abstract principles and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good.
This turns to be reasonably confirmed in the notion of the origins of the Second World War. It clearly explains the reasons, why Hitler, aiming to conquer Europe faced the resistance of the world powers, which led to the outbreak of the war.
Furthermore, the standards expanded as part of the Law of War have various, and practically stronger grounds than Just War Theory, as a result of their various backgrounds of expansion. For Just War Theory, having expanded within Catholic ethic divinity can be viewed as provincial. Supporters of political realism of the sort connected with Machiavelli or, in our era, Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State during the Vietnam war – or certainly, moral skeptics in universal – need feel no reluctance about ignoring disagreements about the appropriate submission of, say, the Doctrine of Double Effect. The Law of War, on the other hand, is part of worldwide agreements entered into by conditions and is enforceable by unlawful examination. Structures such as the worldwide Criminal Court compose sensible submissions of fortifications of civilians in the time of war, embodying some of the key standards, such as favoritism applied to bludgeons, to be found in Just War Theory. While the overlie between international law and Just War Theory is far from absolute, the development of legal protections for civilians is an important advance in our evolving conceptual frameworks of responses to violence. Non-combatant combatant immunity is much more strongly supported as a binding principle than before World War II.
Balance of Power
In international relations, a balance of power exists when there is parity or stability between competing forces. As a term in international law for a ‘just equilibrium’ among the members of the family of populations, it articulates the doctrine proposed to prevent any one nation from becoming satisfactorily strong so as to enable it to implement its will upon the rest.
The balance of power is usually described as one of the essentials of Political Realism, and the violation of this balance leads to war. Germany, in the late 1930s, had too large political ambitions and tried to bite more than could chew. It claimed to annex Czech Republic, Austria, and then capture all the other Europe, attacking Poland and France almost simultaneously.
By attacking the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hitler enlarged the scale of the war, committing what today is regarded as a strategic blunder. Leaving a defined United Kingdom at his rear, as result, opened up an incapacitating two-front war. Hitler also suggested that the Soviet Union could be conquered in a fast-paced and relentless assault that capitalized on the Soviet Union’s ill-prepared state. (Kimball, 2004).
But the key reason as always lies in the very root of the occasions. Realistic approach states, that the victors of the First World War took no actions to prevent Germany from becoming strong again. Partly this was due to their reaction against the slaughter of 1914-18. Another war, they reasoned, would be even more destructive than the first, and therefore had at all costs to be avoided. Also, they believed that Hitler had just grievances, which ought to be removed. By the 1930s it was widely regarded that the First World War had not been reasoned by German hostility: therefore Versailles had been built on false principles and ought to be adjusted. Why should Germans be forced to limit the size of their army? Why should they not have troops on their own territory, including the Rhineland? Why shouldn’t all Germans be united in a single state, if that was what they wanted? On the other hand, the British and French governments, while hoping that Hitler would soon stop making demands, did prepare for the worst by rearming in case they had to fight.
It presented the pattern of the late 1930s and the 1940s as a planetary crusading arena in which a triumvirate of St. Georges-Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin – were bravely united in a holy war to slay the Nazi dragon. Even before the latter had shot himself in a Berlin bunker, Roosevelt and… Churchill had begun to suspect that their erstwhile Soviet fellow crusader for freedom, justice ami peace was more of a menace to utopia than the Nazi “madman.” In due time, even his successor was revealed to be a threat to the Free World, although he had snatched Stalin from the Kremlin display window and buried him like any ordinary mortal.
It has long since been observed that historical truth is the first casualty of war. American historiography was sadly ailing before September 1939, and was mortally ill by Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. The great majority of (historians ardently supported intervention in the European maelstrom.
Works Cited
Black, Jeremy. World War Two. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Brodsky, Patricia Pollock. “Dressed like a Soldier: World War II in Central Europe in Two GDR Novels.” Symposium 49.4 (1996): 250-261.
Hadler, Mona, and Joan Marter. “World War II: Reverberations.” Art Journal 53.4 (1994): 6.
Kimball, Warren F. “Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34.1 (2004): 83.
Lee, Loyd E., ed. World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the War’s aftermath, with General Themes: A Handbook of Literature and Research. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Sittser, Gerald L. A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches & the Second World War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Thompson, Kenneth W. Political Realism and the Crisis of World Politics: An American Approach to Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.