Approaches to the Study of International Politics:  Realism, Liberalism and Marxism

 

As we saw in Chapter 1, world politics affects people in many important ways. "'When you think about the number of high-stakes issues and the wide variety of historical and cultural contexts within which people have tried to under­stand those issues, it is not surprising that insights about world politics come pack­aged in very different intellectual traditions and worldviews. The two oldest are realism and liberalism. Realists emphasize the prevalence of conflict; liberals focus on finding ways to promote individual liberty and to identify and achieve common objectives. Dating almost as far back as the liberal tradition is the Marxist tradition, which analyzes class conflict and presents a normative critique of capitalism. In re­cent years, a number of new intellectual schools, such as feminism, have appeared alongside these older traditions.

A worldview is an intellectual tradition built on a distinctive set of ideas and arguments about political life. Each such tradition embodies a set of concerns-for example, security, wealth, liberty, or social justice. It also includes a body of causal reasoning about how the political world works, particularly in ways deemed relevant to explaining the identified concerns. Intellectual traditions tend to grow out of dis­tinctive historical eras or cultural contexts as people ponder the ends and means of politics with a particular set of concerns in mind. Each tradition thus highlights cer­tain types of issues, actors, goals, and types of relationships-typically those that de­fined the era in which the ideas originated and reflect the values of the advocates for these perspectives-while ignoring or deemphasizing others.

 

This chapter examines the major intellectual traditions that have emerged for analyzing world politics. It also explains the "levels of analysis" problem, which refers to a disagreement about whether world politics can be understood better by looking at characteristics of people, the nature and structure of social relationships, the norms and structure of the interstate political system, or a global level of analysis.

 

The Realist Tradition

 

Realism, as Robert Gilpin once observed, "is founded on a pessimism regarding moral progress and human possibilities." From the realist perspective, incompatible goals and conflict are the defining features of world politics. Without enforceable interna­tional rules, decision makers have little choice but to compete with other states for se­curity, status, and wealth. The competition is expected to be difficult, since the others are also likely to view their power resources and security positions in relative terms. According to Kenneth Waltz, realists thus expect "the necessities of policy [to] arise from the unregulated competition of states.... Calculation based on these necessities can discover the policies that will best serve a state's interests ... [and] the ultimate test of policy ... is defined as preserving and strengthening the state."

 

The Pessimistic Assumptions of Realism

 

Realism-which has two major strands, classical realism and neorealism (also called structural realism)-is based on several fundamental assumptions. First, realists assume that politics is driven by the choices and actions of group actors that have competitive goals. As we shall see below, realists sometimes disagree about the origin of those incompatible goals, even as they share the core assumption that in­compatible goals, competition, and conflict are inescapable and defining features of world politics. The second core assumption that connects realist thinkers is the be­lief that politics takes place in an environment without a neutral authority that can enforce rules and decisions. The realist world is, therefore, a self-help world. As a direct consequence of these first two assumptions, realists are drawn to a third: ac­tors must focus on relative gains, relative power positions, and security in order to compete effectively. In the case of states, this assumption leads to the conclusion that the leaders of states must put foreign policy considerations first; that they should try to achieve domestic goals only when doing so doesn't get in the way of achieving security objectives internationally.

 

The roots of realist thinking go back thousands of years. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the conflict between the ancient Greek city­states of Athens and Sparta, links those wars and their outcomes to arguments by the actors in which realist beliefs featured strongly. This led Thucydides to conclude that "what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta."3 Thucydides also attributed one of the most famous, and bleakest, observations in the Western intellectual tradition to an Athenian gen­eral besieging a far weaker force on the island of Melos: "For you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is in question only among equals in power, while the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must."4 Less well known, but equally blunt, are the words of Frangois de Callieres, adviser to Louis XIV in 1713: "When a prince or state is powerful enough to dictate to his neighbors, the act of negotiation loses its value, for there is need for nothing but a mere statement of the prince's will."5

 

It is important to be aware that realist worldviews are not limited to Western thinkers. Realist assumptions about the nature of humans and the inevitability of classical realism A worldview based on the assumption that the principal sources of conflict in politics lie in human nature because people are self-interested, competitive, and power hungry.

 

neorealism (also called structural realism) A worldview based on the assumption that the anarchic nature of the interstate system is the principal source of conflict in world politics.

conflict can be found in the writings of Chinese philosophers. And, several centuries before the birth of Christ, the Indian writer Kautilya counseled,

 

Any power inferior to another should sue for peace; any power superior in might to another should launch into war; any power which fears no external attack and which has no strength to wage war should remain neutral; any power with high war-potential should indulge in invasion; any debilitated power should seek new alliances ....6

 

Classical Realism versus Neorealism: Two Different Sources of Conflict

 

All realists see conflict as prevalent in politics, particularly in world politics. But two quite distinct sources of conflict have been emphasized by different realist writers. Classical realism typically begins from a pessimistic notion of human nature. Self­interested, competitive, and power-hungry behavior is seen as rooted deeply in the human condition. To preserve himself, Hans Morgenthau argues, each person must, to some extent, act selfishly. Morgenthau believes that this tendency typically leads to conflict: "What the one wants for himself, the other already possesses or wants, too. Struggle and competition ensue.... Man cannot [therefore] hope to be good, but must be content with not being too evil." 7 In the same spirit, the Renaissance Florentine statesman and writer Niccolo Machiavelli argued that "how men live is so different from how they should live that a ruler who does not do what is generally done, but persists in doing what ought to be done, will undermine his power rather than maintain it."

 

Out of these ideas has come an unsentimental approach to international strategy: prudent statesmen should avoid optimism about others' goals and should limit their objectives to those that they can sustain if things go badly. Thus Henry Kissinger cautioned Israeli and U.S. leaders to be wary of Syrian and Palestinian intentions in negotiating a Middle East peace settlement:

It is likely that agreements will be reached ... because the alternatives will, in the end, seem more dangerous. But when this happens, we must avoid euphoria.... An agreement will represent a strategic interlude for the Syrians and most of the Palestinians, not a commitment to a new world order.9

 

In short, classical realism sees competition and conflict as inevitable, with the roots of conflict in the nature of human beings. Human beings compete for scarce resources they value and desire power over their fellow people. Neither of these pat­terns can easily be overcome. Given these expectations about human behavior, clas­sical realists often emphasize the importance of organizing individuals into groups that can protect their members through a focus on improving the group's relative power position over others.

 

A second strand of realist thinking, neorealism (also sometimes called struc­tural realism), sees interstate conflict as rooted not in human nature, but in a spe­cific characteristic of the interstate environment: the absence of legally binding rules. Neorealists argue that the absence of a neutral authority that can enforce rules and agreements creates an insecure, self-help situation in which all policy makers are pressured to act competitively, regardless of their individual natures or personal preferences.

 

This argument is not entirely new; it was a key theme in the work of seventeenth­century English thinker Thomas Hobbes. In his book Leviathan, written during the English Civil War, Hobbes contended that in a world without a common power that could guarantee security, people had a "right of nature" to use any means necessary to preserve themselves. But Hobbes also assumed that "all mankind ... [has] a per­petual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death.""

 

The modern neorealist tradition drops the assumption that people desire power because of an innate inclination and focuses exclusively on the incentives created by the absence of a neutral authority that can enforce rules in interstate politics. Kenneth Waltz, for example, contends that the main cause of war must lie in some regularity at the level of the interstate system, rather than within particular leaders or states, since war has been waged for all sorts of specific reasons and by "good" as well as "bad" leaders." That regularity, according to Waltz, is the self-help pres­sures created by anarchy. Without enforceable interstate rules, states must either resist possible domination by others through a policy of balancing against others' power capabilities, or by bandwagoning-joining a coalition that supports an aggres­sive state, in hopes of turning its aggression elsewhere. Waltz believes that large states have the capacity, and thus often the willingness, to resist the strength of others. The result, as he sees it, is a tendency for competitive policies among the major states regardless of their leaders' views or the nature of their domestic politi­cal systems.

 

Notice that the prediction contained in this argument does not differ from the one often made by classical realists. Based on their assumptions about people's na­tures, they also expect policy makers to act competitively. Where Waltz differs from many earlier realists is in the way he reaches his conclusion. The competitive pres­sure exerted on all national decision makers by the anarchic character of the in­terstate system, he contends, is the dominant influence on their behavior. Power­oriented strategies arise because political leaders need to compete for security, not because they desire power as an end in itself. Waltz sees states and leaders as more alike than different in this sense; all must adjust their strategies to the imperatives of self-help. 12 Where states differ is not in that objective but in the strategy for achiev­ing it that their power positions make possible.

 

Realism has been an influential way to analyze world politics for hundreds of years, and it is easy to see why. Much of history has been laden with conflict. When states' goals conflict, one can expect leaders to pay close attention to their relative power positions. As you will see in Chapters 6 and 7, the classical realist worldview appealed to many statesmen during the period that states were evolving in Western Europe-an era rife with conflict, as medieval forms of rule broke down and rulers asserted new claims to authority against feudal lords or the Pope. It jumped to the United States when the experiences of World War II were followed by the onset of the Cold War. Neorealism later emerged when the bipolarity of the Cold War drew analysts' attention to the effects of the structure of the interstate system.

 

However, while realism has important insights to offer about some sets of cir­cumstances in world politics, its value is limited when its distinctive assumptions about the nature of actors' objectives and political life don't fit as well. What hap­pens to the value of realism, for instance, when actors value building legitimate relationships or when there is little conflict because they have compatible goals? What happens to the value of neorealism when policy makers' calculations are affected more by domestic considerations than by interstate security concerns? These limitations of the realist worldview are highlighted by liberalism, which is, in many ways, its mirror opposite.

 

The Liberal Tradition

 

Unlike realists, liberals are optimists about the human condition and the possibilities for cooperation. Instead of viewing world politics as a "jungle"-a metaphor com­monly used by realists-liberals see it as a cultivatable "garden" in which peace as well as war can grow.13 For liberals, the building block of politics is the individual acting alone or, more typically, as part of voluntary groups. The more liberty indi­viduals have to pursue their goals within and across societies, the more harmonious and peaceful political life will be. Liberals view much of realist thinking as a self­fulfilling prophecy: If one expects competition and acts accordingly, others will tend to respond in kind. Liberals' main concern is to understand the conditions under which this cycle can be broken. As Michael Doyle points out, they expect this to happen when "the good of individuals has moral weight against the good of the state

or nation."14

 

The Optimistic Assumptions of Liberalism

 

Traditional liberalism is based on the following fundamental assumptions: First, people writing in this tradition assume that actors' goals can be compatible and, con­sequently, that joint gains are possible. We can all get better off together. Second, they assume that people will act cooperatively as long as the environment makes it possible to succeed through cooperation. For liberals, the anarchic character of the interstate system does not imply that policy makers face an unchanging situation of international conflict. The prospect of economic, technological, and cultural bene­fits may give policy makers reasons to cooperate with other states. But the positive effects on politics that flow from these two assumptions are undercut by a third: that the existence of compatible goals and the possibilities for joint gains through coop­eration are frequently blocked by misperception, a lack of understanding, and polit­ical structures that create false antagonisms. In particular, liberals worry that a lack of individual liberty within countries may block the opportunities for cooperation and productive exchange within and among states. Given these views, the liberal tra­dition emphasizes the importance of (1) making the world more transparent and thereby minimizing the likelihood of misperception, so the compatibility of actors' goals can be revealed; (2) eliminating institutions and norms that restrict individual liberty and promote false antagonisms; and (3) focusing on absolute, as opposed to relative, gains so we can all become better off together.

 

This liberal worldview has been shaped by many writers interested in democracy, peace, and individual prosperity. Liberals believe that the actions of states reflect in­ternal bargaining among politically active groups. It follows from this, according to liberals, that states cannot focus on international problems and ignore domestic pol­itics. Even in dictatorships, foreign policy significantly reflects domestic incentives. Based on this reasoning, liberals expect state behavior abroad to reflect the way cit­izens' rights are treated domestically. Consequently, the freer a state is internally, the likelier it is to be influenced by other like-minded societies. Also, liberals believe that the importance of military coercion in world politics has declined over time. As democracy, economic and social ties among societies, and international institutions have developed, liberals believe that force has become a relatively less effective tool of international statecraft. This does not imply a complete end to war, but it does suggest that a distinct "zone of peace" can develop among internally liberal, inter­connected societies.

 

The Ebbs and Flows in the Popularity of Liberalism

 

Like realism, the persuasiveness of liberal arguments has varied with the circum­stances that thinkers and statesmen faced over the centuries during which this tradi­tion developed. Beginning in the seventeenth century, one group of thinkers con­ceived of liberty in terms of a small, unobtrusive government. This variant was introduced by Englishman John Locke and was later supported by the French philosopher Voltaire and early American thinkers such as Thomas Paine. For them, as for Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Jeremy Bentham, who focused (during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) on the benefits to the individual and society from unrestricted international commerce, the goal was to give individuals as much freedom as possible, consistent with public safety and order. Among other things, this broad objective meant that individuals should be able to exchange goods and services freely across state boundaries. Living in eighteenth-century Prussia-a more repressive political atmosphere than England or America at that time-Immanuel Kant contributed to liberalism the argument that war stemmed from authoritarian regimes, since governments based on popular consent were less likely to take actions that ordinary citizens would find costly in human lives and money.

 

Variants on these themes have been picked up and elaborated since the end of the nineteenth century. President Woodrow Wilson believed that German militarism in the decades before World War I reflected the authoritarian political patterns in that society. Only a world of democracies, he claimed, would ultimately be peaceful. In the meantime, he argued that an international organization devoted to keeping the peace-the League of Nations-could check the impulse to wage war by pledging to resist aggression before it could succeed. As the twentieth century wore on, vari­ous thinkers and statesmen championed the idea that international organizations, by taking some decision-making authority away from independent states, could ease the rivalries often associated with international self-help. Greater world peace and prosperity were expected to follow. This reasoning laid the foundation for creating the United Nations and many other contemporary international organizations, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

 

Liberalism has thus come to signify at least the possibility of progress toward a more prosperous, freer, and safer world. In the words of Stanley Hoffmann, such hopes rest on "the possibility of devising institutions based on consent ... [institu­tions] that will make society more humane and just, and the citizens' lot better." 15 Clearly, these are ambitious expectations. In part for that reason, liberal thinkers have tended to focus on distinct pieces of the overall process by which they believe that liberty and cooperation can be achieved. Let us examine more closely three of these strands of liberal thinking.l6

 

The Emphasis on Free Trade

 

One important set of liberal arguments has focused on the benefits of free trade. Not only does trade make the actors directly involved better off; entire societies benefit too, since goods and services that cannot be efficiently produced at home can be ob­tained abroad. At times, various liberal writers have argued that international trade brings other advantages as well. In 1913 Norman Angell said,

 

Even where territory is not formally annexed, the conqueror is unable to take the wealth of a conquered territory, owing to the delicate interdependence of the financial world (an outcome of our credit and banking systems), which makes the financial and industrial security of the victor dependent upon the financial and industrial security in all considerable civilized sectors; so that widespread confiscation or destruction of trade and commerce in a conquered territory would react disastrously upon the conqueror.'7

 

Coming as it did on the eve of World War I, Angell's argument has since been at­tacked as naive. Today, analysts would be less likely to assume that leaders will always prefer the expected gains from trade to the expected gains from war. Still, free trade may at times foster the effects Angell anticipated. For example, the deep economic ties among the Western states since World War II have probably helped to prevent any remote possibility of war among the United States, Europe, and Japan.

 

Liberals also claim that trade can foster the development of democracy. Trade opens societies to new people-to-people connections and rewards innovative domestic groups, both of which erode the power of authoritarian leaders and in­crease the influence of those committed to an open society. Finally, liberals often argue that economic exchange fosters joint decision making and predictability among governments. When societies become economically connected, each has to take the likely behavior of others into account to achieve its own goals. As one lib­eral scholar put it, "The growing interdependence of the world economy creates pressures for common policies, and hence for procedures whereby countries discuss and coordinate actions that hitherto were regarded as being of domestic concern exclusively."18

 

The Emphasis on Democracy and Peace

 

A second strand in liberal thinking sees democratic states as more reluctant to go to war than non-democracies. Kant began this line of argument in 1795 with the pub­lication of his Perpetual Peace:

 

Now the republican constitution, besides the impeccability of its origin in hav­ing sprung from the pure source of the concept of right, has also the desired consequence in prospect, namely the eternal peace, for this reason: If assent of the citizens is required (as cannot be otherwise in this constitution) to resolve on "whether there shall be war or not," nothing is more natural than that they will much deliberate to start such an ill game, since they would have to bring down on themselves all the calamities of war.... 19

 

Much effort over the last few decades has gone into testing Kant's hypothesis. Most of the evidence suggests that Kant was correct when it comes to wars among democracies, which seem to be far less common than would be expected among any types of states chosen at random.20 Two explanations have been offered for this pattern. One, suggested by Kant himself in the passage above, is that political lead­ers in democracies cannot get popular support for war or fear the consequences for their hold on office if they choose war. A second explanation is that democratic governments respect others of the same kind as expressing the popular will in their societies, and thus deal with those societies in a non-coercive manner.21

 

It is also possible that these two processes reinforce each other: because democratic govern­ments can only choose policies that the people will support, other democracies see those states as belonging to a like-minded, rule-governed community. That bond is strong enough, from this point of view, to rule out the use of force.

 

The Emphasis on International Institutions

 

A third strand in liberal thinking views international organizations such as the Council of Europe, the World Bank, and the Arab League as helpful in achieving common purposes among states. Some thinkers who take this position contend that for such organizations to exist at all, the member states must already share important values. Once such organizations are created, they foster even deeper cooperation down the road.22 Another version of this argument sees international organizations as limited tools through which governments can act together to deal with certain specific problems. They do this mainly by spreading information about members' behavior-particularly their behavior in carrying out agreed commitments. Armed with that kind of information, the members can use the organization to put pressure on states that violate the agreements, making it more likely that agreed objectives will be achieved.23

 

Not surprisingly, the contributions and limitations of liberalism mirror those of realism. Liberals have analyzed important reasons for international cooperation and many of its implications. Having found reasons to open their societies to others, po­litical leaders can "appreciate that the existence of other liberal states constitutes no threat and instead constitutes an opportunity for mutually beneficial trade and (when needed) alliance against non-liberal states."24 But just as the value of realism is limited by the assumption that conflict and competition are the defining or essen­tial issues of political life, the value of liberalism is limited by its inability to offer meaningful guidance for dealing with situations in which actors' objectives are not compatible. In those situations, actors' relative power positions do matter. Like real­ism, liberalism helps us interpret certain cases-those in which actors' goals fit its assumptions.

 

The Marxist Tradition and Critical Theory

 

As we explain in Chapter 9, Marxism became a highly influential way to analyze pol­itics and society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Karl Marx (who wrote some of his work and publicized much of it with the help of Friedrich Engels, the radical son of a textile manufacturer) argued that political conflict stems from antagonistic relationships among socioeconomic classes-groups whose members share important economic, political, and perhaps cultural features. During the mid­nineteenth century, when Marx did his writing, industrial capitalism-an economic system in which the means of production and exchange are privately controlled­began to replace agriculture, with its often communal economic arrangements, as the dominant way of organizing the economy in much of Europe and North America. In historical terms, Marx saw this development as progressive. Industrial capitalism took power away from landed elites, who relied on inherited aristocratic privileges to maintain their positions, and fostered technological changes of long­term benefit to society. But while it was historically progressive, Marx argued that capitalism also impoverished and alienated workers. Fortunately, from Marx's perspective, capitalism carried the seeds of its own destruction at the hands of the working class and would be replaced by a classless, and just, communist society.25

 

A Different Set of Assumptions about What Is Important and How We Should Understand It

 

Karl Marx believed both that capitalism was evil and that it was a historically in­evitable stage on the way toward a communist revolution that would produce a just, classless society. Traditional Marxism makes three basic assumptions: First, people's position in society is determined by the way in which they are connected to patterns of economic activity. In every society, the divisions between classes (peasants, landowners, merchants, and so on) are determined by what is produced, how it is produced, and how goods and services are exchanged. Second, everything else in so­ciety, including ideas, laws, and religion, reflects the economic structure. In other words, the foundation of society is seen as materialist; social life is run and trans­formed not by any independent set of ideas, but rather through the technological and socioeconomic forces at work in a given period. Marx emphasized that even the most creative ideas are ultimately products of the material environment in which they arise. This view led him to argue that industrial societies would necessarily generate far different notions of legitimate government, law, and social order than fishing or farming communities.26 Third, Marxists see the world as evolving through a dialectical process. A dialectic is a process of development (and reasoning) in which progress occurs through stages. At each stage there is an ordered development of a thesis (a prevailing idea or set of relationships), an antithesis (the opposite of the pre­vailing system), and a synthesis (a new and superior thesis that resolves the previous contradictions between thesis and antithesis). Just as traditional agricultural-based economic systems were challenged by those based on skilled crafts and then indus­try, so capitalism would confront its own internal contradictions and be replaced by a new-and final-synthesis, communism.

 

In sum, Marxism argues that history moves through a process of dialectical mate­rialism. Dialectical materialism assumes (1) that people's position in society­including not only their income but also their ideas and their ability to develop fully as human beings-is determined by the ways in which they are connected to patterns of economic production; (2) that a society's dominant ideas, laws, and institutions are all determined by its economic structure; and (3) that the world evolves through a pre­determined sequence of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Marx believed that these processes were at work in the development of nineteenth-century capitalism. Because he anticipated that the rate of profit would fall over time in developed economies, Marx expected factory owners, bankers, and other capitalists to continually increase the scale of their enterprises to survive. In doing this, Marx argued, weaker capitalists would be driven out of business and pe­riodic depressions would occur when factories churned out more goods than the un­derpaid workers could purchase. At some point, the workers' frustrations would boil over and capitalism would be overthrown.

 

Marx did not spend much time analyzing the nature of the utopian society that would replace capitalism or any specific scenario by which revolution would occur. The presence of any detailed guidance on a revolutionary strategy probably seemed unnecessary to him. Capital was becoming concentrated in fewer hands and the working class was growing rapidly. It seemed logical to Marx that the remaining cap­italists would eventually be reduced to such a small number that revolution would be all but inevitable.

 

Even though revolutionary political action would often be confined to specific states for tactical reasons, traditional Marxists saw the ultimate objective as world­wide revolution. To achieve that goal, they tried to understand how the stages of his­torical progress unfold and how societies relate to one another depending on their respective developmental stages.27

 

Lenin Shifts the Focus to Imperialism

 

In the early twentieth century, followers of Marx concluded that the historical pro­
gression of different means of production would require a close look at a topic Marx
largely ignored-imperialism. Although Russian revolutionary VI. Lenin is best
known as the founder of the Bolshevik party and the first leader of the Soviet Union,
he played a central role in shifting the focus of the Marxist tradition to the relation­
ship between capitalism and imperialism (see the discussion of Lenin in Chapter 9).


Lenin's pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was written in
Switzerland, where he was living in exile, in 1916. In this essay, he drew on the writ­
ings of several people: John Hobson, a British liberal economist (see Chapter 9);

 

Rudolf Hilferding, an Austrian socialist thinker; and Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish rev­olutionary thinker and activist. They had noticed two tendencies in the political economy of Europe beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. One was a resurgence in imperialism-the control by more powerful states over less developed areas. Another was the advent of finance capital. As modern corporations replaced family­owned firms, the capital needed by large businesses came increasingly from financial institutions such as banks and holding companies. Just as banks try to control the means of production domestically to maintain high and stable prices, they do the same with investments abroad.28

 

While these thinkers disagreed on whether imperialism was inevitable under modern capitalism, Lenin synthesized their work into an argument that made pre­cisely that point, asserting that industrial firms and financial institutions needed to ex­pand abroad. Industry needed guaranteed supplies of raw materials at stable prices to operate efficiently; banks needed profitable investment outlets. At first on their own, then acting through their governments, banks and industrial firms solved their prob­lems by dominating and exploiting large areas of Asia, Africa, and South America.29

According to Lenin, imperialism would have two consequences. Workers in the underdeveloped areas would become a new target of opportunity for exploitation by capitalists in developed nations. Until those workers took political control in their countries from the capitalists, their nations could expect to remain poor. And as the governments in the developed states-which, by this reasoning, were controlled by capitalists-realized that their firms needed new areas to exploit, conflict among those states for acquisitions abroad would follow.

 

Late Twentieth-Century Perspectives Sympathetic to the Marxist Tradition

 

The Dependency Perspective In recent decades, analysts building on the Marxist tradition have gone in two notable directions. One, the dependency perspective, tries to explain the continued poverty in much of the Third World (see Chapter 10). Why is it, these analysts have asked, that despite impressive growth in the world economy as a whole, vast sectors of the population in these societies remain poor while the distribution of income has become even more unequal? Their answer is that despite attaining legal independence from their colonizers, these areas are still tied economically to the capitalist economies. As Theotonio dos Santos put it, "by dependence we mean a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected."30 Many poor states rely on the wealthy ones for technology, financing, export markets, and basic imports. Because the most productive economic sectors in these societies tend to be controlled by business firms headquartered in the industrialized countries, there is little opportunity for independent economic development. Whatever benefits these firms bring in the form of technology or in­vestment capital, more wealth tends to be taken out than created on a self-sustaining basis. Politically, the poor countries cannot break out of this bind, since local polit­ical elites typically depend for their support on domestic factions that are tied eco­nomically to the exploiters.31

 

Critical Theory Critical theory is another influential set of ideas that builds on the Marxist intellectual tradition. Critical theory grew out of the work of a group of intellectuals in Frankfurt, Germany, beginning in the 1920s. This group rejected the assumption that the world can be understood objectively, arguing that the analysts' ideas and values are always embedded in their political and social observations: "Theory is always for someone and for some purpose."32 Given this perspective, crit­ical theorists analyze existing political and economic relationships with an eye to­ward determining who benefits from them at whose expense. In Robert Cox's words, critical theory stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about. Critical theory, unlike problem-solving theory, does not take insti­tutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing.33

 

As this quotation suggests, critical theorists ultimately want to change the world, not just to understand it. They seek to open dialogue with those who have been margin­alized by existing arrangements and construct new kinds of communities that break down existing barriers.

dependency perspective An interpretation of economic development that views capitalism as responsible for keeping the countries of the Third World poor by forcing them to specialize in producing commodities and other primary products for export while importing expensive industrial and high­technology goods from rich countries.

 

As you might imagine, arguments in these traditions have been very controver­sial. On the one hand, the Marxist and critical theory traditions provide ethical lenses through which important issues can be examined. For example, one might ponder the legitimacy of a world economy in which 1.2 billion people (about one out of every six) lived in dire poverty in 1998. This was the same number (although a somewhat smaller percentage) as in 1990.

 

During those eight years, global spending on assistance to poor countries dropped from $60 billion to $55 billion a year,34 even though many developed countries, particularly the United States, enjoyed signifi­cant economic growth.

 

On the other hand, the Marxist and critical theory traditions can be critiqued on analytic grounds. Marx's major predictions-that capitalism would succumb to a worldwide revolution, and that the middle classes would drastically shrink over time-have missed the mark. Equally off target was Lenin's assertion that World War I was but the first of an inevitable series of wars of imperialist redivision. Dependency writers have largely avoided these kinds of sweeping predictions. But this perspective has been troubled by questions about whether an intellectual tradition that usually as­sumes that poverty and underdevelopment reflect exploitation from the outside should also take domestic influences into account. Some analysts in this tradition a­cknowledge that poverty typically reflects both a country's internal problems (such as a lack of marketable natural resources or a limited population on which an internal market for industrial goods can be built) as well as the way in which outsiders exploit those weaknesses. Many others assume that only the external dependencies really matter; however, that conclusion has been widely critiqued as simplistic.35 Critical theorists also often seem to want to have it both ways: saying that theories of cause and effect in politics must be evaluated from the perspective of a particular set of values and objectives, at the same time as they appear to assert that their own inter­pretations about how the "prevailing order of the world ... came about" should be exempt from the criticism that their conclusions are biased by their values.

 

Finally, critics of the Marxist tradition emphasize the injustices created in its name. Self-proclaimed Marxist governments have been responsible for tremendous cruelty and repression. Millions of people starved to death as a result of the famine deliberately created by Soviet leader Josef Stalin in the early 1930s. The famine was designed to weaken resistance to Stalin's dictatorship and to pave the way for the forced abolition of private agriculture. Millions of people spent time-often decades-in Soviet and other communist-run political prisons. In the communist People's Republic of China, Mao Zhedong's government similarly engineered a famine that killed millions as part of an effort to collectivize agriculture. And in Cambodia, a radical Marxist government that took power in the 1970s exterminated virtually everyone who might have been an opponent of the regime. The Cambodian nightmare was later portrayed in an extraordinarily powerful film, The Killing Fields.