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The Pole of Power and the Pole of Indifference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Arnold Wolfers
Arnold Wolfers
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

In international relations, two opposing schools of thought have fought each other throughout the modern age. Ever since Machiavelli published the Prince, his “realistic” views have shocked “idealist” thinkers. As a battle of the mind, fought by and large outside the political arena, the dispute between the two schools was of great concern to philosophers and moralists; but not until Woodrow Wilson set out to bring Utopia down to earth did it become a political issue of the first magnitude. For the first time, the responsible head of one of the leading powers acted as though the world were on the verge of crossing the thresh-old from sordid “power politics” to a “new era” in which the admonitions of the idealist philosophers would suddenly become the political order of the day.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , October 1951 , pp. 39 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1951

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References

1 See Fox, William T. R., “Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,” World Politics, II, No. 1 (October 1949), pp. 67–79.Google Scholar

2 Not all authors can be classified as belonging clearly to one of the two schools, because the views which will be presented in sharp contrast are often found to shade over into each other. However, it is not difficult to discover in what direction a writer's main inclination lies. Carr, E. H. (The Twenty Years' Crisis, London, 1941)Google Scholar makes a deliberate attempt to synthesize the tenets of both schools, which he calls Utopian and Realist. (See particularly p. 125.) I think it can be said, however, that he lets the realist come out on top.

3 See Morgenthau, Hans J., Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Chicago, 1946Google Scholar, especially in the chapter on “selfishness and lust for power,” pp. 191–201.

4 Herz, John H. (Political Realism and Political Idealism, Chicago, 1951)Google Scholar, who expounds the theory of what he calls the “security dilemma” with much skill and vigor, says that “Basically it is the mere instinct of self-preservation which … leads to competition for ever more power” (p. 4). This is the view held by Thomas Hobbes, which Friedrich, C. J. discusses in Inevitable Peace, Cambridge, 1948, p. 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Morgenthau, , op.cit., p. 71.Google Scholar

6 Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations, New York, 1948, p. 21.Google Scholar Actually, he adds a third type, described as a nation pursuing a policy of prestige. Prestige, however, in contrast to maintenance and acquisition of power, “is but rarely an end in itself,” he says (p. 50); “it is rather an instrument through which the other two ends can be achieved.”

7 Schuman, Frederick L., International Politics, 3d ed., New York, 1941, pp. 262–63, 274–75. 279.Google Scholar

8 Strausz-Hupé, Robert and Possony, Stefan T., International Relations, New York, 1950, pp. 2Google Scholar, 9.

9 Spykman, Nicholas John, America's Strategy in World Politics, New York, 1942, pp. 18Google Scholar, 20.

10 Max Weber emphasizes the difference between more “isolationist” and more “expansive” powers, as well as their changing attitudes in his respect. (See From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and G. Wright Mills, New York, 1946, chapter VI on “Structures of Power,” p. 159b.) “For general reasons of power dynamics per se,” he writes, “the Great Powers are often very expansive powers.” “But,” he continues, they “are not necessarily and not always oriented toward expansion.” See also Fox, William T. R. (The Super-Powers, New York, 1944)Google Scholar who distinguishes between the “quest for security (power not to be coerced)” of some nations and the “quest for domination (power to coerce)” of others.

11 The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, ed. by Ray S. Baker and William E. Dodd, New York, 1927, p. 259.

12 President Wilson's State Papers and Addresses, introd. by Albert Shaw, New York, 1918, p. 177.

13 For criticism of idealist thought in international relations, see Carr, op.cit.; Morgen-thau, Scientific Man; Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York, 1944.Google Scholar

14 Dunn, Frederick S. (War and the Minds of Men, New York, 1950)Google Scholar emphasizes the importance of supplementing the picture of international affairs that reveals itself when attention is focused on interstate relations by one that places social or human relations between individuals in the center of the scene (p. 12). He warns, however, against the illusion that a shift to the goals and values of individuals will help us to escape “from the sickening recurrence of international crises and war.” “Political conflicts,” he rightly insists, “arise from the existence of competing values among sovereign states.”

15 The term “power” is used here and throughout this article in the restricted sense in which it occurs in the popular use of such word combinations as “power politics” or “struggle for power,” meaning to cover the ability to coerce or, more precisely, to inflict deprivations on others. This leaves out other ways of exerting influence, e.g., by bestowing benefits which are not ordinarily connected with or condemned as “power politics.” (See Harold, and Sprout, Margaret, in the new 2d rev. edition of Foundations of National Power, New York, 1951, p. 39Google Scholar, where they explain their reasons for choosing a much broader definition.) The term “resort to power” will be used to mean reliance on the ability to inflict deprivations, “resort to violence” as actual coercion by the use of physical force.

16 Some political scientists would exclude by definition from what they call “political” anything but the problems of power. But the consequence is that a “foreign policy” must then be called political in one respect and nonpolitical in all others, the latter including all policy ends other than power itself.

17 Walter Lippmann has consistently advocated such prudence. “The thesis of this book,” he says in reference to his U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston, 1943), “is that a foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power. The constant preoccupation of the true statesman is to achieve and maintain this balance.”

18 For some of the ethical problems involved, see my article on “Statesmanship and Moral Choice,” World Politics, I, No. 2 (January 1949), pp. 175–95.

19 In speaking of the actors on the international stage, I shall use the term “states” as a means of abbreviation. The real actors are aggregates of decision-makers acting in the name of states or nations, including in a varied order of influence such persons as statesmen, legislators, lobbyists, and common citizens. There are also, today, as there were in medieval times, actors other than states, like the Cominform, the Vatican, the United Nations, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which one could not afford to ignore in any complete theory of international politics. One might call them subnational, transnational, and supernational centers of influence and often of power.

20 As Lasswell, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham put it in Power and Society (New Haven, 1950)Google Scholar: “No generalizations can be made a priori concerning the scale of values of all groups and individuals. What the values are in a given situation must in principle be separately determined for each case.” Though they state earlier that a certain element of invariance must be assumed to “make a political science possible,” they cannot be pleading for the assumption that all actors uniformly prefer one single value, such as power. For they also say (p. 57) that: “It is impossible to assign a universally dominant role to some value or other.”

21 There will be little room in the following to discuss the factors that account for the choice of goals by the decision-makers. There is need for much more study of these factors. Growing awareness that policy cannot arise except through choices and decisions of individuals has led recently to a tendency to stress the psychological factor. But it is probable that the understanding of national foreign policies, as well as any long-run predictions concerning such policies, will be found to depend on knowledge of antecedents to action that are more general and more constant than the psychological traits and predispositions of frequently changing individuals, or even of groups, elites, and nations. To give an illustration, the pressures which the Soviet Government has placed in recent years on Turkey could have been predicted, even at the time when Moscow disclaimed any future concern with Constantinople and the Straits, on the basis of a geopolitical and historical analysis of the environment in which the Kremlin acts today and acted in Czarist days. Spykman's, prediction of 1942 (op. cit., p. 469) that “a modern, vitalized and militarized China … is going to be a threat not only to Japan, but also to the position of the Western Powers in the Asiatic Mediterranean,” which sounded almost blasphemous to some of his critics when it was made, could not have been made if it had depended on the knowledge of the future political fortunes, the psychology, and the doctrine of one who was then a little-known Communist agitator with the name of Mao Tse-tung.Google Scholar

22 The literature on the causes of imperialism is extensive. Studies have also been made bearing on such problems as the relationship between dictatorship and expansionist foreign policies; but one would wish studies like that of Cahn, Edmond N. (The Sense of Injustice, New York, 1949)Google Scholar to be extended to the international field. For where is the “sense of injustice” more “alive with movement and warmth” (p. 13) and where is the “human animal” more “disposed to fight injustice” (p. 25) than in international relations? Status quo countries will continue to live in a fool's paradise if they fail to understand the deep and manifold causes which account for demands for change and self-extension even through violence.

23 I am employing the term “security” as it is used in the everyday language of statesmen to signify not “high value expectancy” generally—as Lasswell and Kaplan define the term (op. cit., p. 61)—but high expectancy of value preservation. The two authors may have had the same thing in mind, because they specify that security means a realistic expectancy of maintaining influence. One would not say that Nazi Germany either came to be or came to feel more secure as her expectancy of successful self-extension through conquest of territory increased.

24 The degree of security-mindedness of different countries and of groups within countries depends on many circumstances which would be worth studying. Looking at the United States and France in recent times, it would seem as if countries become more ambitious in their desire for security either for having enjoyed a high degree of it over a long period or for having had much and recent experience with the sad consequences of insecurity. Burnham, James in The Struggle for the World (New York, 1947)Google Scholar argues that in the atomic age, there can be no security short of world empire, with only two candidates for such empire available today. “In the course of the decision,” he says, “both of the present antagonists may … be destroyed. But one of them must be” (pp. 134 f.).

25 As Hermann Goering is reported to have said, cynically (see Gilbert, G. M., The Psychology of Dictatorship, New York, 1950, p. 117)Google Scholar: “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. …” According to Beard, Charles A. (The Idea of National Interest, New York, 1943)Google Scholar, the interest of the nation as a whole, if it can be defined at all, is constantly being sacrificed to the interests of groups which are powerful enough to have their special interests pass for the “national interest.” If he were right, most countries would be engaged most of the time, involuntarily, in a process of national self-abnegation—and still survive.

26 See also Strausz-Hupé, and Possony, , op.cit., p. 9.Google Scholar

27 “… a government with no appetite whatsoever,” writes Fox, W. T. R. (“Atomic Energy and International Relations,” in Technology and International Relations, ed. by Ogburn, W. F., Chicago, 1949, p. 118)Google Scholar, “may start a conflict if its leaders feel sure that the opponent has for a long time been unscrupulously trading on their general unwillingness to start a war.”

28 W. T. R. Fox points out that “One state's security is not necessarily every other state's insecurity. … Greater security … is an objective toward which it is at least conceivable that all states can move simultaneously” (The Super-Powers, p. 11).

29 See Morgenthau, , Scientific Man, p. 107Google Scholar, on the difference between “the great international conflicts” and the “secondary conflicts.”