Roleplay, realpolitik and ‘great powerness’: the logical distinction between survival and social performance in grand strategy
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661211048776 |
| Author | David Blagden |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
E
JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211048776
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(4) 1162 –1192
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13540661211048776
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Roleplay, realpolitik and
‘great powerness’: the logical
distinction between survival
and social performance in
grand strategy
David Blagden
University of Exeter, UK
Abstract
States exist in an anarchic international system in which survival is the necessary
precursor to fulfilling all of their citizens’ other interests. Yet states’ inhabitants – and
the policymakers they empower – also hold social ideas about other ends that the state
should value and how it should pursue them: the ‘role’ they expect their state to ‘play’
in international politics. Furthermore, such role-performative impulses can motivate
external behaviours inimical to security-maximization – and thus to the state survival
necessary for future interest-fulfilment. This article therefore investigates the tensions
between roleplay and realpolitik in grand strategy. It does so through interrogation
of four mutual incompatibilities in role-performative and realpolitikal understandings
of ‘Great Powerness’, a core – but conceptually contested – international-systemic
ordering unit, thereby demonstrating their necessary logical distinctiveness. The
argument is illustrated with brief case studies on the United States, China, France,
the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. Identification of such security-imperilling
role motives thus buttresses neoclassical realist theory; specifically, as an account of
strategic deviation from the security-maximizing realist baseline. Such conclusions carry
important implications for both scholarship and statecraft, meanwhile. For once we
recognize that roleplay and realpolitik are necessarily distinct incentive structures,
role motives’ advocates can no longer claim that discharging such performative social
preferences necessarily bolsters survival prospects too.
Corresponding author:
David Blagden, Strategy and Security Institute, Knightley, University of Exeter, Streatham Drive, Exeter,
EX4 4PD, UK.
Email: d.w.blagden@exeter.ac.uk
1048776EJT0010.1177/13540661211048776European Journal of International RelationsBlagden
research-article2021
Article
Blagden 1163
Keywords
Realism, constructivism, realpolitik, role theory, socialization, power
In realist international thought, there is no higher imperative than safeguarding state
survival. State security protects citizens in an anarchic system, and so is the necessary
precursor to all other goods. Yet as even avowedly ‘structural’ realists – those who privi-
lege relative capability distributions over individual states’ ‘contents’ in explaining inter-
national politics (Mearsheimer, 2001; Waltz, 1979) – recognize, in moving from systemic
outcomes to individual units’ behaviour, those contents have substantial causal effects
(Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007; Waltz, 1967).1 Furthermore, those ‘contents’ – the people
making a state’s policies and the (s)electorate empowering them – hold social ideas about
what else the state should value and how it should advance those values in international
politics: the ‘role’ they want their country to ‘play’ in the world. And sometimes, such
role motives drive states towards strategic choices that diminish or imperil their own
security: the very precursor to fulfilment of their other interests.
This article therefore presents a role-derived neoclassical realist account of grand-
strategic ‘error’ (Schweller, 2004: 168).2 Specifically, it demonstrates that roleplay is
an analytically distinct incentive structure from doing what it takes to survive in an
anarchic international system (realpolitik)3 – and that those distinct incentives can
produce strategic deviation from a realist baseline of maximizing state survival pros-
pects. Describing such role-motivated choices as ‘error’ is not a pejorative judgement;
role-performative pressures can be powerful for good reasons, and such choices are
therefore eminently defensible. That said, it acquires normative-prescriptive connota-
tions when role-motivated reduction of the state’s material security itself negatively
affects citizens’ welfare.
Why does such a contribution matter? After all, roleplay and realpolitik may align
much of the time; discharging particular social-behavioural expectations can improve
states’ survival prospects under certain mutually reinforcing conditions. Role advo-
cates contend, meanwhile, that the two are actually synonymous: that performing a
particular normative role in world politics delivers national security.4 Sometimes,
however, roleplay and realpolitik pull in different directions; the desire to fulfil a set of
social-behavioural expectations instead diminishes national security and complicates
long-term survival prospects. The article illustrates this with the following three case-
pairs: the United States/China, the United Kingdom/France and Germany/Japan. For
scholars, explaining role-performative impulses’ divergence from realpolitikal impera-
tives illuminates both state behaviour and the systemic outcomes that follow. For prac-
titioners, meanwhile, recognition of different behavioural motivations – and the
tensions, trade-offs and contradictions that role-performative impulses versus realpoli-
tikal imperatives can entail – may improve prospects for making strategic choices that
adequately fulfil ideational preferences without simultaneously harming their state’s
relative power, provoking or inviting unnecessary confrontations, and ultimately jeop-
ardizing long-term survival.
To continue reading
Request your trial