Towards Realistic Universalism?, or: Provincializing Realism! An Interview with Matthew Specter

In his book The Atlantic Realists, Matthew Specter presents a genealogy of modern realism as a discourse between US-American and German intellectuals. An interview about the origins of the central theory on power politics, imperialism, and the relationship of realism and international law.  

Dear Matthew, before we turn to your latest book, The Atlantic Realists, I would like to briefly draw our readers’ attention to the book you wrote earlier: your biography of Jürgen Habermas – a thinker who clearly advocates a global legal peace in the tradition of German liberal philosopher Immanuel Kant. Is this seemingly contradictory choice a coincidence? Or to put it another way: why did you write a book about realism after the Habermas project?

The connecting link is Carl Schmitt. In my study of the evolution of Habermas’s political and legal thought from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, I used Bourdieu’s concept of “intellectual field” to historicize Habermas’s philosophical and political projects, which I argued are more closely interrelated than had been recognized. The influence of conservative Staatsrechtslehre on that field, a legacy of Schmitt and prominent pupils like Ernst Forsthoff, went a long way towards explaining Habermas’ project of democratizing the Rechtsstaat, or in Anglo-American terms, connecting the civic republican and liberal faces of democratic theory. The defining leitmotif of Habermas’ political thought, I would still argue, is the critique of Schmitt’s constitutional theory. As I was finishing the dissertation in 2003-5, I was turning to questions of international political theory because of the US conduct of the “war on terror.” Habermas was making a similar turn to international questions so by following him, I found my way back to questions that had concerned me as a student coming of age in the Reagan years. There was a lot of discussion at the time about how to interpret the neoconservative thinkers around Bush—and leftist scholars like Chantal Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben and Gopal Balakrishnan found nourishment in various aspects of Schmitt’s critical apparatus. Left-Schmittians and neoconservatives alike seemed ready to junk the Kantian project. By contrast, I thought “he who invokes humanity wants to cheat” was a dead-end for critical political theory. My desire to write a critical genealogy of realism, which places Schmitt more or less at its center, emerged from my frustration with that intellectual cul-de-sac.

Your new book deals with the historical roots of realism as a school of international political and legal thought. Unlike many scholars in International Relations and International Law, you do not start in the mid-20th century, but at the end of the 19th century and with a view on a transnational US-American/German discourse. To what extent does it challenge conventional narratives of realism?

Realism is a slippery fish: like other “isms” it is challenging to historicize in part because it is hard to define. The dominant approach to the history of realism is to narrow the question: instead of tracing the broader thought-style in the political public sphere, (aka, “international political thought” or “international intellectual history”) one opts to trace the emergence of a self-consciously “realist” school in international relations theory. Thus narrowed, the standard story points to the period from about 1948-1954 as the breakthrough period for the consolidation of an academic realist paradigm in the US spaces where international relations was taught. But I found two major problems with this narrative. First, it could not really account for the roots of realism in the 1930s, be it in Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings—critical for both E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau or the legacy of Schmitt. Second, it created an artificial break between three moments: the geopolitical tradition in international thought that gets formed in the years 1880-1910—Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén, Alfred Mahan, and Halford Mackinder are the key figures, the interwar spatial theories of Carl Schmitt and Karl Haushofer, and the critique of international liberalism by Carr and the émigré generation of Morgenthau, John Herz and Wolfers. In a forthcoming H-Diplo forum, and elsewhere, I defend my argument that there is more continuity than discontinuity between “realism” and “geopolitics” than is usually conceded, even if realism was able to shed the racial chauvinism and nationalism that characterized geopolitics in its high imperial chapter.

In terms of the overall emplotment, my book thus aimed to defamiliarize the familiar story of the Germanization of the American mind—realism as an old world knowledge (Bismarckian balance of power politics) imported by German emigrés who tutored the callow and idealistic Americans in the realities of power politics. By tracing the German-American knowledge-transfer as a bidirectional affair—and one that unfolded over two generations before the 1930s, I tried to show that the realist sensibility that the emigrés sought to instill in the Americans did not come from nowhere. It dovetailed with an indigenous realist tradition, and didn’t only emerge from the chastening of a European generation of liberals by the rise of fascism and Nazism.

One of your central arguments is that realism was not so much shaped by realpolitik, which had been emerging since the mid-19th century (Rochau), as by ideas of empire, namely “Großraumpolitik” and “Weltpolitik”. Can you explain that in more detail?

Self-described realists, Morgenthau and Kissinger for example, often presented themselves as modernizers of the 19th century Realpolitik as exemplified by statesmen like Metternich or Bismarck. At the same time, it is correct, as the latest scholarship of Morgenthau (see, for example, Scheuerman 2009, Rösch 2015, and Karkour/Rösch 2024) reveals, to note that his version of realism was never equivalent to an amoral Realpolitik of tactical flexibility, nor a Machtpolitik oriented to military force above all. Still, as John Bew’s history of Realpolitik shows, modern Anglo-American and continental realist international thinkers of every generation since Treitschke utilized the concept if in various and contradictory ways. Bew argues that all of these usages represent a departure from what was meant by August Ludwig von Rochau, the German liberal and ‘48er who coined the term. While “realpolitik” is often taken as a synonym for the sobriety about power relations and allergy to moralism characteristic of the realist tradition, what interested me was the way German and American thinkers around 1900—Max Weber, the political scientist Paul Reinsch, and the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel –all posited the need for a “truer Realpolitik” which they named “Weltpolitik”. In the various texts that provided evidence of this shift, I found that Realpolitik was associated with a continentally focused, balance of power politics whereas Weltpolitik articulated the new consensus that German and American imperialism would need to develop the naval power necessary to project power beyond continental boundaries and across the seas. Alfred Mahan, the US naval theorist, whose writings gained a boost from the Spanish-American War, was translated into German at the behest of the German emperor Wilhelm II. The old Bismarckian politics of balance were, Weber and others argued, inadequate to the heightened competitiveness of a world in which imperial frontiers were closing. Realism, in its modern sense, I argue, emerged from a transatlantic conversation, chiefly between Germans and Americans, about what it took to achieve the status of a first-rate world power. Realism was a project of comparison, a way of holding up a mirror to peer nations and ascertaining what the mature, rational, unsentimental imperial gaze upon the world required.

For Mahan, the Monroe Doctrine was a particularly generative text with which to think. With the Roosevelt Corollary, the doctrine transformed from a mostly negative means of excluding European powers from the Western hemisphere to a positive endorsement of US interventionism. For Mahan this was tribute to its living, dynamic character—its ability to adapt to the changing “necessities” of US national interests. For Mahan, the Monroe Doctrine helped the US link its interests in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Like Ratzel and Kjellén, Mahan saw empires as quasi-organic entities that required Lebensraum. A generation later, Schmitt and Karl Haushofer, the leading figure in German geopolitics, would turn these ideas (integrating some ideas from Mackinder too) into a brief for German domination of the European continent. Where Mahan conceived the Monroe Doctrine through the lens of naval power, Schmitt took it as the inspiration for a new version of the old Pan-German League of empire by land rather than by sea. To the expanding Third Reich of 1939, Schmitt offered a “Germanic Monroe Doctrine” as his ideological gift. Faced with interrogators after the war, Schmitt and Haushofer both defended their Grossraumpolitik with reference to comparable ideas in the Anglo-American tradition. They were not wrong to make the comparison.

You have written a genealogy of realism from the 1880s to the 1980s. It is striking that central political realists such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe were lawyers by training. Is legal training reflected in their engagement with international relations?

All three thinkers generated immanent critiques of legal liberalism, the ways in which liberal legal theory repressed questions of the authority that decides on the exception to the norm, or who refuses to submit conflicts to impartial adjudication. This was the theme of Schmitt’s early legal theory, which offered a response to the image of a neutral, unpolitical, and self-executing Rechststaat that was the ideology of the Kaiserreich. Schmitt’s critique resonated with Morgenthau and fellow realist-trained-in-law, John H. Herz. Indeed, Morgenthau and Herz attempted to combine impulses from Viennese jurist Hans Kelsen (Herz’s teacher) with Schmitt (Kelsen’s arch-foe). While Morgenthau’s politics were wholly distinct from the racial chauvinism and hypernationalism of Schmitt, the terms of his liberalism critique are clearly adopted from Schmitt’s. This proved an unstable combination. Both thinkers thought they could utilize Schmitt’s critique of legal liberalism as a stage in the realistic reconstruction of liberal cosmopolitanism, but the valorization of national interests muddied the waters and vitiated the reformist liberal dimension of realism.

Wilhelm Grewe is well-known to historians of postwar German diplomacy (he was the West German Ambassador to the US during the Kennedy Administration, among other prominent roles), and to historians of international law (for his 1984 Epochs of International Law, a critically acclaimed history). But he has never been written into the canon of IR realism before my book. Grewe’s career in West Germany was interesting to me for several reasons. First, he was a student of Schmitt’s student, Ernst Forsthoff, and in lifelong communication with Schmitt, who admired Grewe in turn. Thus, I envisioned my chapters on Morgenthau and Grewe as “two paths from Schmitt,” on either side of the Atlantic. Noone had looked at Grewe’s legal writings during the Third Reich in any depth before I had. It was astonishing to find the architect of Westbindung in the 1950s and honored diplomat writing fine-grained monthly reports on how the Nazi regime could navigate international legal challenges. This was the context in which he finished Epochs in 1944. In general, all three thinkers write with the benefit of a training in law, but their writings burst the disciplinary frame of law to incorporate insights from the sociology, psychology and political science of their day. Judith Sklar has written of the irony that the realists—those great critics of legalism in international relations—created a mirror image of legal formalism when they claimed the autonomy of “the political” sphere, as if law, morality, and politics could be neatly separated. She considered these aspects of the IR realists’ framework ideological.

Have the ideas of political realism, as you understand it, remained relatively constant during this time, or do you find discursive turning points?

I appreciate the question because a reader of my book might have the impression that I think there is a unitary thing called “Atlantic realism”—and one that didn’t evolve significantly over the 20th century. That would be a mistaken impression. For a long time, the working title was “Atlantic realisms” in the plural, and I always sought to lay out a tradition that evolved in ways that were cumulative—this is the “relatively constant over time” part—but also evolved in the face of each generational challenge. The Monroe Doctrine is an intriguing throughline in my story, appealing as it did to both Germans and Americans; today’s America Firsters also make the Monroe Doctrine a key touchstone for a realistic grand strategy for the US. Another long-term continuity in my story is a mode of “seeing like an empire,” something I think gets conserved and transmitted through a realist educational habitus.

On the other hand, I describe several turning points in the book too. WWI broke the first moment of transatlantic German-American synthesis, setting up Wilsonian liberalism as the antipode to German antiliberal geopolitics and making it harder to see that the US continued to think and act as an empire. Explicit geopolitics became taboo after WWII: this represented another change in emphasis in the realist tradition. But as I argue in a forthcoming essay, the alleged break between geopolitics and realism is much overstated. I’ve learned a lot from my dialogue with Lucian Ashworth, Michael Williams and Jean-François Drolet on this point. Morgenthau and Herz tried to downplay geopolitics and even political geography suffered a decline in influence on IR after the death of Nicholas Spykman in 1943, but the tendency to naturalize international relations remained, albeit now with an emphasis on the laws of human nature as opposed to the laws of human geography.

The next question brings us back—dialectically, so to speak—to the beginning of our conversation: in a new project, you are again working on liberal scholars, specifically on German peace researchers. One of them was Ernst-Otto Czempiel, incidentally, as you know, one of the founding fathers of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, my home institution. What sparked your interest in German peace research in times where the world seems to be again experiencing a realist turn, a Zeitenwende, to use the German term?

In the early 1970s the political scientist Hans-Peter Schwarz reviewed Grewe’s Play of Power in World Politics. He called it the rare and “belated echo” in the West German public sphere of the 1950s American realists whom Schwarz admired. This sensitized me to the asymmetric development of realism in postwar West Germany and the postwar US—an artifact of the discredit Nazism threw upon an assertive nation-centred power politics. A decade later, Schwarz wrote a book called The Forgetfulness of Power—a plaidoyer for a more aggressive realist posture vis the USSR. He reproached West German elites for a “pacifist-idealist syndrome” that he blamed primarily on the network of peace research institutes that Willy Brandt’s coalition had funded and whose growth was underpinned by faith in East-West détente. So the realist complaint about peace research’s retarding influence on Germany was one source of my interest in it. This obviously links up with the discourse today about the need for a Zeitenwende in German military strategy. But I think this time the wake-up call about the Russian threat is necessary whereas in the 1980s I think the Soviet threat was overstated.

The second was the link back to the Frankfurt School. I discovered a conference held in 1968 at which realists like Morgenthau’s leading West German disciple, Karl-Gottfried Kindermann, Morgenthau and RAND’s Hans Speier—all realists—faced off against Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and others in a debate between realists and “utopians.” Kindermann concluded the proceedings by arguing that the binary realist-utopian could and should be transcended. I show how this moment of productive crisis of classical realism was eclipsed at the end of the 1970s by a reassertion of realist fundamentals by Grewe, Schwarz, and Helmut Kohl. Scholars of realism have noted that there was a shift afoot in realism in the 1960s—incorporating more global, transnational, and ecological perspectives. I’m working on reconstructing and theorizing connections between for example, Czempiel and John Herz, Dieter Senghaas and the Frankfurt School, Czempiel, James Rosenau and Harold and Margaret Sprout—in order to find what is living and dead in German peace research. I think it holds resources that can help us chart a path beyond merely reheating liberal internationalism or accepting that a conservative realism is the best we can do.

To conclude: As you make clear in your book, your aim is to provincialize realism. What does that actually mean for the present? Does your history of realism give us hope in the authority of international law?

By tracing the history of how a North Atlantic varietal of empire talk became the common sense of a discipline purporting to interpret global developments, I hoped to highlight the contingency of dominant assumptions in IR. Provincializing realism means making room for fresh thinking not weighted down by unnecessary 19th and 20th century baggage about the inevitability or naturalness of empire or the solipsism of national interest.

When I began the project in the oughts, I was concerned by the way that the left-Schmittian critique of US empire and the neoconservative promotion of empire converged in their disdain for international law and the broader ideal of a cosmopolitan perspective on justice and rights. Today the ideal of a global order that conjoins legality and legitimacy seems more remote than ever. While the rulings against Hamas and Israel alike by the International Court of Justice illustrate the ongoing “facticity of the normative,” to use Habermas-speak, the outlook for the authority of international law governing major political questions is dim. Nor when I finished the book in 2021 was I under any illusion that the global rule of law would be dramatically aided by a critique of realist foreign policy and international relations theory. So no, my work doesn’t lend hope to the authority of international law. Realist power politics has often worked through the medium of law, so I don’t think of law as the pure “outside” or “other” to power politics. But I do think it reasonable to hope for and work towards a world beyond empire and hegemonic spheres of influence. Whether this takes the form of solidarities between nation-states, or at the global, subnational or regional level, is for us as a species to figure out.