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Interests, ideas, and the study of state behaviour in neoclassical realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2019

Gustav Meibauer Open the ORCID record for Gustav Meibauer [Opens in a new window]
Gustav Meibauer*
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London School of Economics and Political Science
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*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Ideational variables have frequently been employed in positivist-minded and materialist analyses of state behaviour. Almost inevitably, because of these commitments, such studies run into theoretical challenges relating to the use of ideas. In this article, I suggest that integrating ideational factors in positivist and materialist approaches to state behaviour requires: (1) distinguishing conceptually between interests and ideation as well as between individual beliefs and social ideas; and (2) addressing challenges of operationalisation and measurability. To that end, I employ neoclassical realism as a case study. I argue that a re-conceptualisation of ideas as externalised individual beliefs employed in political deliberation allows neoclassical realists to focus on how ideas and ideational competition intervene in the transmission belt from materially given interests to foreign policy choice. At the same time, it more clearly operationalises ideas as identifiable in language and communication. I suggest this reconceptualisation, while consistent with realist paradigmatic assumptions, need not be limited to neoclassical realism. Instead, transposed to different paradigms, it would similarly allow positivist-minded constructivists and institutionalists to avoid a conceptually and methodologically awkward equation of different ideational factors.

Keywords

International Relations TheoryForeign Policy AnalysisNeoclassical RealismInterestsBeliefsIdeas
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 20 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2019 

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124 Sterling-Folker, ‘Realist environment, liberal process, and domestic-level variables’, p. 18; Taliaferro, ‘State building for future wars’, p. 476; Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 76–7.

125 Rathbun, ‘A rose by any other name’, p. 317; Schweller, ‘Unanswered threats’.

126 Where such punishment occurs, it does not imply that the influence of ideas on decision-making will over time decrease, that decision-making necessarily ‘improves’, or that different states become identical in how they process interests and ideas. For an elaboration of this argument, see Fiammenghi, Davide et al. , ‘Correspondence: Neoclassical realism and its critics’, International Security, 43:2 (November 2018), pp. 193–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sterling-Folker, ‘Realism and the constructivist challenge’, pp. 88–9; Sterling-Folker, ‘Realist environment, liberal process, and domestic-level variables’, pp. 19–20; Taliaferro, ‘State building for future wars’, p. 476; Rathbun, ‘A rose by any other name’, pp. 309–10; Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 91–2, 124.

127 Barkin, ‘Realist constructivism’, p. 329.