Anya Palkowski

The Importance of Multi-Level Analysis: Defining Liberalism and Neoclassical Realism in the Theoretical Field

Theory of World Politics | Professor Erica Chenoweth | Wesleyan University | 2010

Whether purely systemic neorealist views or domestic-centric liberal views of preferences formation, theories of international relations have traditionally tended towards monocausal views of international analysis.  In the recent history of the field, a gradual tendency towards integration of levels of analysis has resulted in hybrid theories like neoclassical realism, which in form resembles liberalism in many key aspects but is in fact a distinct theory of international politics with unique explanatory methods.  Though this theory shares theoretical underpinnings and aspire to similar predictions of foreign policy behavior as the more well-known liberal paradigm, the exclusive and overly narrow focus of liberal theory ultimately makes it less useful than neoclassical realism as an explanatory vehicle for international relations.

A diametric opponent to the cynical view of human nature as selfish and exclusively self-serving, liberal theory finds its main opponent in the realist paradigm.  Its emphasis on imperfect information distribution, shared in some respects by neoclassical realism, gives it a focus separate from the traditionally realist balance of power theory.  As justification against its ongoing stigma as a “utopian” and unrealistic theory, liberalism “rejects the utopian notion that an automatic harmony of interest exists among individuals and groups in society,” conceding instead that “scarcity and differentiation introduce an inevitable measure of competition”[i] into the international system.  However, it assumes that “where social incentives for exchange and collective action are perceived to exist, individuals and groups exploit them,”[ii] giving rise to the paradigmatically liberal notion that under the circumstances that cooperation is possible, states will tend towards rather than away from it.  Liberalism is known for casting the state as a “representative institution constantly subject to capture and recapture, construction and reconstruction by coalitions of social actors,” a manipulable unit pressured by “the central decision makers to pursue policies consistent with their preferences.”[iii]

Neoclassical realism seeks to bridge the gap between this state-centric liberal view of the world and the power-and-prestige-driven classical realist theory, borrowing assumptions from both and devising an environment wherein the motivator of conflict is the “natural desire of all states to wield external influence”[iv] and the power of a state to act in the international system “depends not just on control over resources, but on the ability of states to extract those resources from society”[v].  This theory holds that the state occupies a middle ground between decisional autonomy and the constraints of the international system: “while the international system sets the stage for policy choice and shapes the policy environment… its causal influence on national policy responses is tempered… by domestic political competition and institutions”[vi].  Neoclassical realism’s expectations diverge importantly from its realist forerunner by weighting material capability differently: while realists assert that material power is an “objective, universal, and unalienable political instrument”[vii], neoclassical realists argue that it is a mix of domestic and international factors that influences the path of state policy decisions.

The similarities of liberalism to neoclassical realism are so patent that scholars have claimed that they “[undermine] (if not [eliminate]) the theoretical distinctiveness of NCR as a form of realism by rendering it indistinguishable from nonrealist theories about domestic institutions, ideas, and interests”[viii].  Though many facets of the two theories intersect, a number of key departures establish the former as theoretically and predictively superior to the latter.

Before considering the role of the state in forming international relations, a theory must distinguish its views of that state’s power to affect the international system, decide whether states as international players are unitary in their decisions and determine whether or not the internal play of domestic politics is sufficient to deeply affect foreign policy choices.  Both theories view the state as the most important actor; liberalism is devoted to the unit-level behaviors of states in a global environment where international system is subordinate to domestic concerns in the hierarchy of causes for conflict, while neoclassical realism engages the idea of the “metus hostilis”[ix] – the fear of enemies – to posit that a human tendency towards forming groups creates an international system wherein the state is the highest form of sovereign power.  However, the effects various domestic groups have on a state’s particular set of “preferences,” and how exactly that set is defined, remains a point of contest between the two theories.

Neither theory falls prey to what critics of realism call “the assumption that state preferences are fixed”[x].  Liberal theories maintain that states’ preferences and decisionmaking unity are malleable by means of cultural, economic or ideological internal pressures; thus they are seen as units “aggregating the demands of different societal interest groups or economic classes”[xi]. Contrarily to realist thought, liberal views suggest that states are not so constrained by the international system that they will act similarly regardless of cultural background and regime type; an example of this decisional variation would be to consider either the ideological conflict between Islam and American culture or an economic design on oil as incentive for the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, rather than its highly publicized hard security reasoning.  Liberals view states’ diverse collections of preferences as mostly unitary in their decisions, little but accumulations of all viewpoints represented within.  The subtly systemic considerations of liberalism indicate that state preferences “may well vary in response to a changing transnational social context”[xii], and are therefore not based on hard notions of power but instead on the flexible internal construction of individual states.

On a slightly higher level of analysis, connecting domestic preferences with the behavior states actually pursue, neoclassical realism and liberalism promote different views of how the state forms foreign policy decisions.  A highly attuned focus on domestic groups and pressures as motivations for behavior in the international forum is a fundamental pillar of liberal thought; liberal theory holds that “government policy is… constrained by the underlying identities, interests, and power of individuals and groups (inside and outside the state apparatus) who constantly pressure the central decision makers to pursue policies consistent with their preferences”[xiii], and that states “pursue particular interpretations and combinations of security, welfare, and sovereignty preferred by powerful domestic groups enfranchised by representative institutions and practices”[xiv].  This view considers domestic groups powerful to the extent that they exclusively drive foreign policy formation, leaving no room for the hard-coded pressures of the international system to homogenize state decisions.

Neoclassical realism disagrees, instead taking the position that though states’ perceptions of national interest and favorable security strategy are “filtered through domestic groups”[xv], their foreign policy decisions are not ultimately determined by domestic politics.  Though domestic pressure groups, economic incentives and other “low” political motivations may shape the nature of a state’s immediate response, that response will largely be in keeping with the course of action that is logical within the constraints of the international system.  Liberals call the idea of domestic power over policy decisions the “transmission belt,” whereas neoclassical realists propose a subtler iteration: the transmission belt is “imperfect,” and does not always provide domestic groups with direct influence over the security sector.  Even when these groups do affect foreign policy executives, that influence is shallow and inconsequential in determining important security decisions.

Liberalism and neoclassical realism also differ in their theoretical view of the relationship between the domestic situations of states and the international system in which they participate.  While liberalism demands a bottom-up view of state decisions, claiming that the decisions of the state themselves form the structure of the international system, neoclassical realism maintains that “systemic forces ultimately drive external behavior”[xvi], and that the structure and pressures of the international system, not the pressures of its domestic coalitions, ultimately define the decisions of a state’s foreign policy executive.

Conflict causation represents yet another divide between liberalism and neoclassical realism.  In keeping with their realist predecessors, neoclassical realists attribute at least some conflict to power imbalance and unequal military capability.  Also consistent with underlying claims that a foreign policy executive’s relative autonomy is what allows policies to be made without much domestic interference, an executive’s inability to “convert the nation’s economic and military power into foreign policy actions”[xvii] may lead to suboptimal policy decisions and ineffective prevention of war.

Conversely, liberals believe that this power play is not always a main motivator, and that just as the preferences of states are malleable, so too are their goals; thus competition for survival is not a solitary, or even regular, cause of conflict.  Liberal views about state interactions are based on “preferences, beliefs, and information”[xviii] rather than simple imbalance of power, and are in fact powerful enough to “trump the direct and indirect effects of material power”[xix].  In turn, conflict is attributed to a number of domestically perceived factors, including “divergent fundamental beliefs, conflict over scarce material goods, and inequalities in political power”[xx], the latter two of which are consistent with neoclassical realism’s emphasis on the conflictual and competitive nature of the world.  Economic incentives, considered a low and inconsequential form of politics by realists, are also key factors in determining a state’s foreign policy path; liberals consider that the domestic concern of “socioeconomic regulation and redistribution” represents a “social identity central to foreign policy”[xxi] and thus plays an important role in whether a state will seek conflict.  Finally, perpetuating the liberal emphasis on preferences as motivators of conflict, liberalism predicts war and conflict when preferences are “conflictual enough to motivate willingness to accept high cost and risk”[xxii].

Balancing, a traditionally realist concept, receives different treatments from liberalism and neoclassical realism.  Neoclassical realism adapts the realist balance of power theory into a domestic theory of the foreign policy executive, claiming that “state leaders are concerned about shifts in components of power of foreign states that will alter the broader systemic and subsystemic balance of power”[xxiii].  This view also implies that the effect of power distribution on domestic policy is neither direct nor perfect, and that while balancing may emerge as an outcome, it may or may not be the direct result of a state’s policy choice.  The neoclassical realist argument adds dimensions of imperfect information and domestic collective failures to the constant systemic trend towards balance; as a result of the foreign policy executive’s variable decisional autonomy, it may happen that his or her aforementioned inability to mobilize domestic support for a foreign policy goal provides a reason for lack of visible balancing behavior.

Rather than adopt aspects of balance of power theory, liberally focuses on purely domestic reasons for what realists choose to call “balancing behavior:” for example, defending against the United States’ World War II-era containment policy, “… traditionally treated as the embodiment of realism”[xxiv], liberals and neoclassical realists alike might claim that the balance of power was not its only goal; however, where liberals would claim that “shifting state preferences explain the outbreak and eventual passing of the conflict”[xxv], neoclassical realists might take a more comprehensive view, saying that the pressures of an imbalanced international system and the domestic perceptions of ideological difference are integrally linked in forming a state’s decision to engage in power-balancing behavior.

Equally useful in distinguishing liberalism from neoclassical realism are their theoretical shortcomings.  The assumption of a purely self-help system has led to inconveniences of explanation for realist theories, including, to a lesser extent, neoclassical realism.  The assumption of self-aggrandizement at all costs, a traditionally realist idea, leads to gaps in explanation when faced with instances of “outright self-abnegation”[xxvi].  Realist considerations of fixed preferences make it difficult to assume that a foreign policy executive completely devoted to either pursuit of power or external influence would act on a suboptimal foreign policy decision – for example, as did U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson in the endorsement of a strategically unfavorable war in Vietnam for domestic concerns of issue linkage and gaining political favor[xxvii].  Liberalism’s focus on the existence of goals other than fixed desires for self-help thereby gives it more plausible explanatory power over instances of self-harm such as voluntary relinquishment of resources in favor of alliance construction or passage of unfavorable policies because of image-linking or internal pressures.

However, this malleable view of state behavior, seemingly liberalism’s savior in terms of explaining self-abnegation, also leads to the question of variation in theories.  Without the normalizing constraints of the international system (a factor that neoclassical realism carefully provides for) we would observe patterns of behavior in international relations as products of individual state makeup alone[xxviii].  Examples of similar behavior in the fabric of international relations – the similar imperialistic tendencies of Germany towards France in 1940 or Iraq towards Kuwait in 1990, or repeated tendencies towards balancing coalitions such as that formed by the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France against Germany’s rising power in 1920s and 30s[xxix], among others – betray the need for overall pattern consistency and logic at a systemic level.

Given the overall autonomy assigned to state foreign policy executives in neoclassical realism, we should not see policy decisions against interest despite the incentives that may be provided by domestic factors; in fact, “domestic actors are far more likely to influence the timing and style of a state’s national security policies than the definition of the national interest”[xxx].  However, decisions like Deng Xiaoping’s to “adopt a softer stance” regarding China’s position on Taiwan in 1996 are notably attributed to the influences of “powerful provincial leaders and Shanghai business-minded elites”[xxxi].  A more deeply security-related issue lies in Soviet Russia’s overproduction of nuclear warheads during the Cold War: despite an economy ill-equipped for the production of expensive weapons, domestic concerns of image maintenance, coupled with subservience to “kingmaking” coalitions of economic actors with interest in mass production of strategically unnecessary weapons, the Soviet Union’s missile production[xxxii].  Neoclassical thought bridges this inconsistency by claiming that although the foreign policy executive is best equipped to act upon national interest, misperceptions of power or failure of autonomy in foreign policy decisions may yet prevent selection of the best policy choice and lead to suboptimal behavior, such as the failure of British executive Neville Chamberlain to cut economic ties with Germany in the 1930s based on pressure from internationally-oriented economic “kingmakers”[xxxiii].

A marked weakness of realist theories that both neoclassical realism and liberalism remedy is the assumption of perfect information flow.  The idea that states act in accordance with precise views of relative power implies a level of perception that is infeasible at the modern level of interstate communication and intelligence practices.  Liberalism and neoclassical realism both factor in imperfect information and attribute conflict and world politics in general to misperceptions of the preferences and power levels of other states.  However, when neoclassical realism filters the imperfect perceptions of power through a specific construction of the state decisionmaking hierarchy, it achieves a greater level of understanding about what groups, factors and influences matter most in determining how information flow affects state policy decisions.

Alongside this topic of relative influence is one of neoclassical realism’s shortcomings: its prescriptions on what types of domestic groups are most likely to influence the course of foreign policy.  Neoclassical realism’s view that the parameters, cohesiveness and issue focus of a domestic pressure group determine its effectiveness and ability to sway important policy decisions in its favor[xxxiv] leads to prescriptions contradictory by way of the weak and inconsequential status they assign to domestic groups seeking to influence the preferences of their state.  As suggested by neoclassical realists, “the direct interests of domestic actors in, and their willingness to interfere with, foreign security policy-making… should be low”[xxxv].  Coupled with the idea that “groups with very narrow interests normally lack the power or authority to harness the state for their own ends”[xxxvi], this treatment depicts the domestic coalitions of states as fundamentally inconsequential despite neoclassical realism’s claims that domestic politics factor, however insignificantly, into the formation of foreign policy.

Degeneration is a prominent accusation against theories claiming to draw upon realist foundations.  Liberal critics accuse multicausal realist prediction of state behavior of “[imposing] almost no constraint on state behavior, because it subsumes the entire spectrum of possible motivations of states from pure harmony to zero-sum conflict”[xxxvii].  Neoclassical realism is subject to this realist infalsifiability, in that it has taken the two tenets of anarchy and self-help and used it to marry classical realism with liberalism, but this semantic shortcoming does not offset its usefulness as a theory.  Furthermore, as much as the omni-inclusivity of realism is pandered and named as a reason for rejection of the paradigm as a whole, liberal theories may be subject to the same judgment: “liberal theories can be analytically reinforcing even where they do not make parallel predictions,” states a proponent of liberal theory, “anomalies within one variant of liberal theory may be resolved by considering other variants”[xxxviii].  This gives liberalism the stigma of infalsifiability most often attributed to realism, making it as guilty of degeneration as some believe realism to be.  Conversely, with mechanisms and assumptions unique from both its realist and liberal lineage, neoclassical realism can be evaluated as a stand-alone theory of international relations and needs the crutch of neither realist nor liberal alternate theories to supplement anomalous findings.

We find that neoclassical realism builds upon the core weakness of liberal theory  – that is, an overly intense focus on the internal determinants of foreign policy without a deep enough consideration of hard structural influences – and hybridizes them with the proven successes of neorealist structural analysis, thus becoming both a systemic theory and a second-level explanatory vehicle.  By stressing systemic factors as third-level determinants of international political outcomes and filtering them through a lens of domestic influence to determine individual foreign policy, neoclassical realism appropriately weights the dimensions of economic interdependence, belief and cultural systems, and other domestic concerns against the constraints of an anarchic international system.

On many counts, neoclassical realism seems to surpass liberalism in explanatory versatility, achieving power in as both a systemic and unit-level theory.  Some argue that neoclassical realism’s very inclusion of domestic variables might indeed make it better suited for the liberal rather than the realist paradigm, but just as “the coherence of theories is not defined by their intellectual history, but by their underlying assumptions and causal mechanisms”[xxxix], so its semantic faults do not defeat its usefulness.  We have seen that, among other things, neoclassical realism’s hierarchy of explanation is consistent even with strict Waltzian views about levels of analysis: while keeping the third image as a “coherent basis for a systematic and internally consistent theory of international politics,” it incorporates second-image factors in order to “explain why a given state [takes] a given foreign policy decision at a given time”[xl].  In contest with liberalism as a theory of international relations, it becomes apparent that neoclassical realism does indeed offer a “richer portrait or the dynamism and complexity of foreign policy-making” and overall a more explanatorily powerful theory of both the choices available to states and the ones they end up choosing.

The plausibility of a multicausal, rather than monocausal, view of state decisions may indicate that the dangers of “reductionism,” disparaged by realist scholars like Kenneth Waltz as the “temptation to seek the causes of state behavior in the messy process of domestic preference formation”[xli], are less detrimental than assumed to the formation of a comprehensive theory about state behavior.  Further theories that take this view may adopt the view that the international system still largely determines state choices and is considered the foremost constraint on and determinant of foreign policy choices, but the effects of domestic politics are no longer to be left by the wayside and dismissed as trivial, as they are by systemic-oriented theories like Kenneth Waltz’s neorealism.  Instead the field may tend towards a proliferation of “‘general equilibrium’ theories that account simultaneously for the interaction of domestic and international factors”[xlii], foregoing strictly formulated levels of analysis in favor of views that accommodate the highly interdependent security environment of a public and globalized international setting.  These theories could be the precursors to hybrids of complex interdependence and realist underpinnings, assuming that the inflexibility of human nature can yet lead to opportunities for cooperation and that the most beneficial actions available to states come to intersect due to economic interdependence and the sense of accountability presented by the increasing power of IGOs.  Factors termed “characteristics of the present,” including “interdependence, the role of trade, transnational actors [and] permeability”[xliii] will continue to hybridize our understanding of the linkages between domestic factors and international systemic pressures.  These, in turn, may represent steps towards the formation of a variable-based method of analyzing state behavior, with the admittedly utopian goal of diminishing conflict caused by misinformation and truly understanding the criteria by which state actors make critical foreign policy choices.

Endnotes