>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C.
>> Well, good afternoon.
My name is Jason Steinhauer and I'm a Program Specialist
at the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress.
On behalf of Dr. Carolyn Brown, Director of the Office
of Scholarly Programs, and the entire Kluge Center staff,
I'd like to welcome you to this afternoon's program.
Before we began please take a moment to check your cell phones
and other electronic devices and please set them to silent.
Thank you.
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as well as our Kluge Center YouTube and iTunes channels.
So, I encourage you to visit these sites
to watch past programs featuring hundreds of current
and former scholars, including many scholars on foreign policy
and international relations.
Today's lecture is presented by the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
The Kluge Center is a vibrant scholar center on Capitol Hill
that brings to get their scholars and researchers
from around the world to stimulate and energize one another,
to distill wisdom from the library's rich resources, and to interact
with policymakers and the public.
The center offers opportunities for senior scholars and postdoctoral
and doctoral fellows to do research
in the Library of Congress collections.
We also offer free public lectures, conferences, symposia
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which is a lifetime achievement for the fields of humanistic
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For more information about the Kluge Center and some of our opportunities
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to learn more about future programs and opportunities.
Today's lecture is titled, "Excavating Realpolitik,
Real Realpolitik: a History".
It is the third in a three-part series hosted by the Kluge Center
and our current Kissinger Chair Dr. John Bew,
which explores what realpolitik looks like in practice as well
as theory and asks the question, "How relevance realpolitik is
to today's international challenges".
Dr. Bew's conclusion, I believe, is that it is
and in a few minutes he will explain why.
I was thinking about today's lecture and my introduction and it struck me
that war and conflict can do wonders for our vocabulary.
Neologisms seem to go hand-in-hand with conflict,
perhaps because instability and rupture reveals new things
about the world around us and ourselves for which
in turn requires new words.
Scholar and folklorist, Louise Pound mused in 1941
about new expressions appearing in the Webster's dictionary as a result
of World War Two, including "all out" and "total".
Scholar Michael Tilby suggests that 2,000 words were introduced
into the French language during the time of the French Revolution.
And in 1848, after a wave of bloody revolutions across Europe,
another new word was born, realpolitik.
And as we'll hear from John, the term was born
out of a particular time and place in specific circumstances
and with particular implications about how to affect liberal changes
on a stubbornly authoritarian world.
But as language tends to do, the term has evolved
and has been adopted, appropriated, and manipulated
for an array of purposes.
So today, John well help us sort out this puzzle
and provide us a framework for applying this sophisticated concept
to our most complicated of 21st Century worlds.
Before I introduce John though, I'd like to take a moment
to recognize the chair position which he holds.
The Kissinger Chair is made possible by the generous donations
of the friends and admirers of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger.
It establishes a nonpartisan focus in the nation's capital
for discussion of key issues in foreign affairs and acts
as a catalyst for the fresh analysis
of foreign affairs in the global era.
One distinguished researcher is appointed annually to be
in residence at the Kluge Center and research any aspect
of foreign policy, or international relations involving the United
States using the Library of Congress collections.
Our past chair holders have included an ambassador
who researched the likely evolution of the relationship between India
and the United States, a member of the British Diplomatic Service
who researched Pakistan's strategic culture
and how it shapes U.S. foreign policy goals,
and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
who researched the growing division between European union, NATO,
and the former Soviet Union.
Our 14th Kissinger Chair will be announced later this year
and we are eager to hear from you,
nominations for who should be our 15th Kissinger Chair.
So please, visit our website to learn more and note
that applications and nominations
for this chair position may be submitted
from now through November 1st.
Finally, onto Dr. Bew.
As mentioned, Dr. John Bew is the 13th Chair Holder
of the Henry A. Kissinger in Foreign Policy and International Relations
at the Library's John W. Kluge Center.
He is a reader in History and Foreign Policy
at the War Studies Department at Kings College and Director
of the International Centre for the Study
of Radicalization and Political Violence.
John also contributes regularly to the New Statesman and War
on the Rocks and we are grateful to both War on the Rocks
and to King's College where John teaches
for their promotional support of this three-part series.
At the library, John is researching and writing a history
of Anglo-American Realpolitik to be published
by Oxford University Press.
His prior monograph, "Castlereagh: A Life," was named one of the Books
of the Year for 2011 by the Wall Street Journal, Sunday Telegraph,
The Spectator, BBC Parliament Book Talk, and Total Politics.
On a personal note, the Kluge Center has benefited extraordinarily
from John's presence these past six months.
He has been a vocal advocate for the Kluge Center and the Library
of Congress and he has contributed greatly to the collegiality
of the center through the mentoring of younger scholars.
He wonderfully embodies the Kluge Center's core values
of bringing a reflective, scholarly understanding to issues
of global significance and he epitomizes the value
of deep scholarship born from the collections
of our premier research libraries, such as this one.
He is also, I might add, one
of the least objectionable Manchester United fans I've ever met
[audience laughter] and that may be the highest compliment
that I can pay him.
So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. John Bew.
[ Applause ]
>> Dr. John Bew: Thank you Jason, for those extremely kind remarks.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm extremely privileged and honored
to hold the Henry Kissinger Chair at the Kluge Center for 2013 and '14.
I would like to thank the Friends of Dr. Kissinger,
who endowed this position and the Kissinger Chair Committee
for providing me with such a fantastic opportunity.
A special mention must also go to the Librarian of Congress,
Dr. James Billington, who has been hugely supportive and interested
in my work since my arrival here at last October,
and to Dr. Carolyn Brown, the Director of the Kluge Center,
and her dynamic and committed team who support all
of the scholars and residents here.
There is, I would suggest, no better place to do work of this nature
than the Kluge Center, by which I mean research that is grounded
in scholarship and makes use of the seemingly bottomless pit
of resources here at the Library, but also scholarship that aims
to be present-minded and at least conscious of the needs of those
in the Hill and other Departments of State.
And in fact, my main observation of my time here in D.C. is
that there is a real appetite for history and strategy and this type
of perspective when it comes
to contemporary issues of Foreign Affairs.
And if there is sometimes a distance between scholars and policymakers
on matters of foreign-policy, I would suggest
that the fault does not necessarily lie with the latter.
My research here and my lecture this afternoon begins
with one word, realpolitik.
And I want to do two things with that word
in the course of my remarks.
The first is to excavate the real origins of realpolitik
in mid-19th Century Europe, and the second is
to examine how realpolitik has been used in Anglo-American discourse
about foreign affairs ever since as a window into the soul if you will
of the Anglo-American worldview.
Much of what stands for modern realpolitik deviates
in my view significantly from the original meaning of the term.
Nonetheless I do believe as Jason said already that there is something
in that original meaning which is still relevant today.
So real realpolitik may surprise but it will also I hope enlighten.
Now there was a time of course, when the very notion
of an Anglo-American worldview might have been more contentious
and tomorrow, the 11th of April, is the 200th anniversary of the Treaty
of Fontainebleau which marks the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte
and France after more than 20 years -- more than 20 years of warfare.
Now Britain's victory in Europe in 1914 freed her up to do --
to deal with some rather smaller troubles that were occurring
in her former American colonies at that time and a few months later,
in August 1914, British Redcoats flooded into Washington D.C.
and burned down the White House and also much of the Capitol,
which gratefully was subsequently rebuilt.
Now I mention this in part by means of confession,
in the sense that my last book was a biography of Lord Castlereagh
who was the British Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822,
and who must therefore bear some responsibility
for Britain's unforgivable actions on that day.
And also in the interest of full disclosure,
I should probably also mention that the man who actually led the troops
into Washington, D.C. that day, General Robert Ross,
was born in exactly the same part of the world as me,
in the north of Ireland, just outside of Belfast,
the same place incidentally as Lord Castlereagh.
So, while I speak this afternoon as a Brit,
let me end by my introductory remarks with an apology
for the historical wrongs committed by at least two
of my troublesome forefathers from the North of Ireland,
and also on a more serious note, to submit that the notion
of an Anglo-American worldview does still stand
up to critical scrutiny despite the more difficult episodes
in our shared past.
So the premise of my lecture today is that realpolitik is back
in fashion again and of course, recent events in Crimea
and the eastern Ukraine have been interpreted in this light.
But I would suggest that realpolitik was already undergoing a renaissance
in Anglo-American political discourse before the events
of the last few months.
And the reasons for a return to realpolitik are
in themselves no mystery and there's no need
to recount them at length here.
Suffice to say that in recent years, much of the optimism and sense
of exceptionalism which crept
into the Anglo-American worldview following the end of the Cold War
and even lasted into the period after 9/11 has been eroded,
and the chastening experience of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
and the revival of great power rivalries have set the stage
for what some have called,
"the return of history and the end of dreams".
We are also in the midst of one of our periodic Machiavellian moments
in which a slew of new books on Machiavellian statecraft appear,
each trying to identify some kernel of wisdom
which we can apply to today's problems.
This time around however, realpolitik has some new friends
and I would say unlikely advocates.
It is increasingly said that the Obama Administration's approach
to the world has been defined by realpolitik
and that the President has been as realist as any of his predecessors
in the conduct of foreign affairs.
Last May, the German weekly Der Spiegel ran an article declaring
that President Obama was the heir to Kissinger's realpolitik,
quoting the editor of The National Interest here in Washington,
D. C. to the effect of that the President may even start talking
about foreign affairs in a German accent.
Tellingly, this is a level which those
in the administration have embraced.
"Everybody always breaks it down between idealist and realist",
said Obama's former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, in April 2010.
"If you have to put him in one category,
he's probably more realpolitik, like Bush 41, i.e. you have to be --
you've got to be cold-blooded about the self-interests of your nation.
Obama's own use of Ronald Nemer [assumed spelling],
whose papers are here in the library
and whose words echoed throughout his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance
speech, also speaks to a convert --
conscious invocation of a liberal realist tradition,
a phrase also used by Professor Joseph Nye.
Thus far, I have used realpolitik in a conventional sense
that is both positively and pejoratively and interchangeably
with a series of other evocative terms, Machiavellian, cold-blooded,
self-interested, realist, and realistic.
Yet, what I want to argue is that real realpolitik is more than this.
It is one of those words borrowed from another language
that is much used but not fully understood.
And here I take my cue from the British historian A. J. P. Taylor
who wrote in 1934, of course, a crucial year
in international relations,
that a nation's foreign-policy is based upon a series of assumptions
with which statesmen have lived since their earliest days,
in which they regard as so axiomatic as hardly to be worth stating.
"It was the duty of a historian," Taylor said,
"to clarify these assumptions
and to trace their influence upon the course of everyday policy."
So that is what I hope to do.
Realpolitik is not, as is often assumed,
as old as statecraft itself nor,
is it part of a seamless creed stretching back to [inaudible]
and running through Machiavelli, Cardinal Richelieu, Thomas Hobbes,
up to figures like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan,
and Henry Kissinger himself.
Crucially real realpolitik was born in an era
which more closely resembles that in which we find ourselves today,
or at least more closely than the world of Renaissance era statecraft
in which Machiavelli operated.
It emerged in mid-19th Century Europe from the collision
of the enlightenment with the realities
of state formation and power politics.
This was a world experiencing the quintessential problems
of modernity, a unique combustion of new ideas about freedom
and social order, alongside rapid industrialization, class antagonism,
sectarianism, great power rivalry, and the rise of nationalism.
Indeed, the creation of the concept of realpolitik, I would argue,
was an early an attempt to answer a conundrum
which has been the organizing dialectic at the heart
of Anglo-American foreign-policy ever since.
That is how to achieve liberal-enlightened goals in a world
that does not follow liberal-enlightened rules.
The word itself was coined by the German writer,
Ludwig August von Rochau in his 1853 treatise,
The Principles of Realpolitik .
Rochau, who added a second volume in 1869 in which he refined some
of his earlier arguments,
is a largely forgotten figure today despite the fact
that realpolitik lives on.
So who was he?
Ludwig August von Rochau, to borrow a loaded phrase and to do
so with some intent, might best be described
as a liberal mugged by reality.
The illegitimate son of a soldier, he was a publicist, journalist,
and a radical member of the Vormarz,
the movement for liberal political reform in the German states.
And the efforts of that liberal movement,
like those of their sister movements across Europe,
culminated in the rebellions of 1848 which spread
across the European continent and were intended
to establish constitutional liberal representative government.
Rochau, who had been in exile in Paris before the uprising
and had also visited Italy, returned to Germany and tried
to attend a seat in the liberal Frankfurt Assembly
which was established that year.
Although he failed, he became a well-known figure
in the National Liberal Party and eventually became a deputy
in the German Reichstag, in 1871.
In some respects, and permit me a loose analogy,
the 1848 revolutions were 19th Century Europe's equivalent
of the Arab Spring.
Uprisings which began in the name of freedom
and constitutional rights swiftly fell victim
to other political phenomena.
The liberal gains of 1848 were soon lost as they were swatted
down by coercive governments, or in many cases,
swallowed up by more powerful social forces such as class,
religion, and nationalism.
Over the following two decades, Germany was indeed to be united
as the liberals in Germany had hoped but not by the means
that they wished to achieve this.
Rather than constitutionalism and representative government,
it was the blood and iron of the Prussian Chancellor,
Otto von Bismarck that provided the motor for the creation
of the German Empire in 1871.
And as Rochau watched the dreams of European liberals go up in smoke,
he thought it time for some hard thinking.
"The castles that they had built in the sky have evaporated
into blue mist," he wrote in a phrase which is very hard to read
without turning one's mind to more recent events.
"A work that had begun with endless enthusiasm and carried
out with an overestimation of one's capabilities
and didn't dishonor and injury."
The great achievement of the enlightenment, in Rochau's view,
had been to undermine the notion that might equals right in politics.
The mistakes that liberals had made however,
was to assume that this meant the law
of the strong had suddenly evaporated overnight just
because it was unjust.
When it became a matter of trying to bring down the walls of Jericho,
Rochau wrote, "The real Realpolitiker thinks
that lacking better tools, the most simple pick ax is more effective
than the sound of the most powerful trumpets."
I will return to Rochau in a moment but let me say something briefly
about the afterlife of realpolitik, first in Germany and then
in the Anglo-American world
which has been the real main focus of my research.
In Germany following Rochau,
the concept of realpolitik was seized upon by the historian
and fellow national liberal politician, Heinrich von Treitschke,
who set out to show the German people and this is a quote,
"How brilliant realpolitik is," and thought Rochau's work despite being
that of a journalist was worth more
than 1,000 books on political theory.
Treitschke's influence and his ideas of racial struggle
and war represented an increasingly rightward turn in German liberalism,
in which the liberal side of the equation was, if you like,
"Put down the pecking order as compared to the cause
of national independence."
Whereas Rochau himself remained opposed to Bismarck,
Treitschke ultimately fell into his arms
and effectively became the historian of the Prussian court
and the German national cause.
It was thus then, by a strange twist of fate, that the phrase
that von Rochau -- that Rochau had coined in opposition
to Bismarck became increasingly associated
with the figure of Bismarck himself.
It was now used to describe Bismarck's brand of practical
and ruthless statecraft in the domestic and international arena.
His astute management of different social forces within the state,
and there was an element of Rochau in that, but also his ability
to combine diplomacy with the use of force in the international arena.
By the time of Bismarck's fall from power in 1890 at the hands
of the Kaiser, usage of the word was widespread but increasing detached
from its original meaning.
For example, it was argued that the Kaisers' desire for imperial glory
and colonial expansion, what he called, "Weltpolitik," --
world politics --
was a megalomaniacal rupture from Bismarck's more cautious realpolitik
in foreign affairs, the Kaisers' rejecting alliances
and streaming headlong into a war onto [inaudible],
which was ultimately to destroy Germany after 1914.
In the intellectual sphere, taking up the mantle of realpolitik
from Treitschke was Frederick Mineka who became the foremost historian
of Machiavellianism and the national interest
and another cheerleader for German expansionism.
By the way, a much more subtle thinker and I would steer anyone
if they're interested in Machiavelli to his book on Machiavellianism.
As a self-professed exponent of German realpolitik however,
Treitschke and Mineka had missed a key dimension of Rochau's work,
which can be partly linked to Germany succumbing
to a more chauvinistic and aggressive form of nationalism.
Treitschke and Mineka styled themselves as unsentimental
and tough-minded thinkers, but they were both virulent anti-Semites.
And in fact, Rochau had denounced anti-Semitism in German politics,
both as a moral wrong and a gross misconception.
Because of their social force, wealth, and intelligence,
he believed that German Jews were not only entitled
to political representation, they were a huge asset to the nation.
Anti-Semitism was irrational therefore.
Anti-Semitism was anti-realpolitik.
At this point, the history of realpolitik could go in a number
of directions and into a number of other national stories.
Notably, those on the receiving end of German nationalism were the first
to become conscious of the term outside of the country,
or at least what the term had become
since Rochau's caveats were swept away
in the process of German unification.
To give one notable example, Tomas Masaryk, the German-educated founder
and first President of Czechoslovakia,
who made his name partly by opposing anti-Semitism,
put a new twist on realpolitik.
He adopted what might be called a liberal realists strategy
in the fight for Czech independence
in which he made his idealism a political asset.
As a foreign correspondent of The London Times wrote in the 1920s,
this is Wickham Steed, who's a great admirer of Czechoslovakia,
he taught that unlike the German notion of realpolitik,
realism in politics consists not of a cynical disregard of principles
but of a scrupulous reckoning with facts, moral, and material,
that honesty is not only the best policy but the only safe guide
in public as in private life, and that character not astuteness
or trickery, is the first requisite in a statesman,
that success if you like, and this is my twist in this,
need not look like Machiavelli's, The Prince.
Considerations of realpolitik also featured
in early discussions among Zionist intellectuals
about what an ideal state Israel would and should look like.
Rosenzweig, a Jewish theologian, German war hero
of the First World War, and a student of Mineka ,
you can start to see the links, wrote a critique of realpolitik
in 1917, from the Macedonian front as nothing but calculating jingoism.
In the same vein, was Hans Kern, a German-speaking proud Jew
who regarded Masaryk as his inspiration
and spent his life alerting the English-speaking world the malignant
influence of realpolitik and chauvinistic nationalism.
On the eve of the Second World War, Kern wrote a famous article
on foreign affairs on the influence of Treitschke
and explaining Nazi aggression.
So one can see, I hope how the various strands begin
to tie together, drifting from Europe
into the Anglo-American world.
Rather than get lost in the sub-plots however,
I want to focus the rest of my remarks
on the Anglo-American history of realpolitik
which as I say is the main area of my research focus.
From its German origins, realpolitik seeped into the English language
and the Anglo-American conscience in two ways and in two distinct waves.
The first was in the slow buildup to Anglo and German antagonism
in the late 19th and early 20th Century.
For Britain's increasingly cautious of threats to their position
as the leading global superpower,
and here my American friends may notice some themes,
realpolitik as practiced by Bismarck
and then the Kaiser was an unpleasant
and disconcerting discovery.
It became a byword for German bastardliness,
taken to imply civil -- cynical and uncivilized conduct
on the international stage, a lack of respect for the treaties
and laws, which in the British mind, provided some semblance
of order in global affairs.
From 1891, it was used in the English press
with ever-increasing frequency
as the Anglo-German rivalry began to gather pace.
realpolitik was identified as the cause of a gangrene
in German philosophy and intellectual life.
The traditions of Goethe and Kant, which had been so admired
in England had been marginalized by what seemed
to be a neo-Machiavellian obsession with power and national destiny.
In 1895, The Times bemoaned the fact that there were so few survivors
of the period when the old-fashioned idealism
of the German character had not been superseded
by what is now called realpolitik.
And by 1904, as German Naval rearmament gathered pace,
The [inaudible] Review complained
that the German state works exclusively upon a science
of self-interest, more definitely methodized
than in any other foreign office and applied
with more tenacious consistency.
If you can detect a certain hypocrisy
in this English denunciation of realpolitik
and in condemning rival nations for working in a science
of national interest or self-interest,
you would not be the first to do so.
Not everyone accepted the implication
that realpolitik was a uniquely German phenomenon.
In 1902, the radical English columnist, J.A. Hobson,
a huge influence on Lenin ultimately, published "Imperialism:
A Study" in which he suggested that the growing ambitions
of all the great powers reflected in colonialism and huge military
and naval rearmament programs were all symptoms of the same sickness.
As he wrote, "It was this greedy type
of Machiavellianism entitled realpolitik in Germany
where it was made which has remodeled the whole art of diplomacy
and has erected national aggrandizement without pity
or scruple as the conscious motive force of foreign-policy."
Writing for The New York Times in 1914,
the Irish Socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw pushed the
argument further.
"Let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian wealth
and the British land, the Prussian Machiavelli,
and the English evangelist.
As for the Kaiser, the British were his great masters in realpolitik."
Despite this, by the end of the war, the dominant narrative
in England remained that realpolitik was a German problem first
and foremost, and a scourge of the international system,
and in some respect the whole field of international relations was set
up as an antidote to realpolitik.
Realpolitik has been the true and dominating doctrine
of every important German statesman, German soldier, and German thinker
for two generations at least.
That was Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary in 1918.
Of all the great powers, the United States came last to realpolitik.
Before its entry into the Great War, America was often chided
in the English press for its lack of understanding
of the true nature of realpolitik.
In 1911 the British Writer, Sydney Brooks, a regular contributor
to Harper's Magazine, suggested America's understanding
of international politics,
was lacking because of her relative security.
He wrote, "Americans live in an atmosphere
of extraordinary simplicity, spaciousness, and self-absorption,"
if I haven't offended you enough,
"until from very boredom they are forced
to make international mountains out of molehills,
a diversion which is itself proof enough of their unique immunity
from the serious realities of realpolitik."
It was a cruel irony then that Brooks, who became strong advocate
of American entry into the war,
was to die on board the SS Toscana a luxury liner carrying American
troops to Europe in 1918 when it was hit by a German torpedo.
Indeed the exceptional growth of American power
in the early 20th Century caused Europeans
to swiftly adjust their opinions
about the American capacity for realpolitik.
They ascribed to us more foresight than we possess,
not really realizing, "How often we have happily blundered into success,
how often we have pursued realpolitik in our sleep,"
wrote Walter Weyl of the New Republic
after a visit in Europe in 1916.
"We Germans," a Berlin professor recently told me, "write fat volumes
about realpolitik but understand it no better than babies in a nursery.
You Americans," he added, "I thought enviously,
understand far too well to talk about it."
President Woodrow Wilson is sometimes painted as the archetypal,
naive idealist by modern American exponents of realism,
and yet his decisive entry into World War One, coming in the wake
of two decades of creeping American expansionism was taken as an example
of America's own willingness to enter the realm
of power politics and to create effect.
Indeed it was another of Wilson's cheerleaders,
like Walter Weyl before him, another New Republic writer indeed,
Walter Lippmann, who was the first to make a plea
for the American people to adopt what he called their own brand
of realpolitik, in his 1917 book, Stakes of Diplomacy .
Lippmann's is worth quoting, if only because one can see the echoes of it
in a contemporary debate about American foreign policy.
He wrote, "If we are to grapple with the issues which distract the world,
we have got to enter the theaters of trouble.
This I realize, is a terrifying program
to most Americans, it terrifies me.
If we wish to let the world go hang, we maybe to defend our shores
and establish a kind of hermit security for ourselves,
but that security will be precarious.
Our only choice is between being the passive victim
of international disorder or resolving
to be the active leader in ending it."
In other words, early American realpolitik was anti-isolationist
and urged a front-footed engagement with the world,
and also urged the propping up of the same international order
which had benefited English self-interest in the 19th Century.
Wilsonian Internationalism lost of course, much of its gloss
with the collapse of the League of Nations, the rise of fascism,
and America's drift back away from Europe and again into war years.
And even Walter Lippmann who had supported the war
but regarded Wilson's crusade for democracy in the 14 Points
as a step too far, moved away from this emphasis
on front-footed assertiveness on the international stage
to a different form of realism
which emphasized a more selective engagement with the world
and an emphasis on American restraint, joined from 1945
by Kennan, Acheson, Morgenthau and others.
And this leads me into the final portion of my lecture,
and the second wave I mentioned earlier, the second wave
by which Americans ingested another gulp of realpolitik.
Unlike the first gulp of realpolitik,
this one was not mediated through England and English concerns.
Both Walter Weyl and Walter Lippmann had learned of the term
in 1916 attending to bets
about Britain's position during the First World War.
But it arrived from the heart of Germany itself,
so this gulp of realpolitik was of a markedly different flavor.
It was brought into America's leading universities,
Yale and Chicago in particular, through an influx
of German-speaking emigrant intellectuals
who fled Germany before 1939.
As well as sociologist, this group included, and of course scientists,
this group included a raft of uniquely talented historians,
such as Heigl Holborn, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kramer,
Felix Gilbert, and Henry Kissinger himself, all of whom were
to make an indelible impact on the course
of postwar American foreign policy, partly because of their role
in training up the postwar American diplomatic elites.
And to emphasize the interconnectedness
of our story is worth noting that Holborn
and Gilbert were personal students of Mineka and nearly all
of these scholars started at least by working
on mid-19th Century Europe.
By the outbreak of the Second World War then,
realpolitik was sufficiently established
in the American political lexicon to no longer need elaborate definition.
In 1940, the Journal of American Speech included in a list
of loan words from Germany which had become increasing prevalent
in the American Press in the preceding years,
alongside a few other unpleasant imports,
"Reich, gestapo, and putsch."
Herein lied the problem of course, the word itself is not one
which an aspiring foreign policy doyen would necessarily want
to be associated with.
In his 1951 book, In Defense of the National Interest , for example,
Hans Morgenthau, a student of Carl Schmidt's from Weimar,
Germany largely concealed the German influences in his thought,
and emphasized an English language canon of realist thinking,
which included Hamilton's Federalist Papers, and also,
and this is what sparked my interest, Lord Castlereagh's work
as Foreign Secretary at the time of the Congress of Vienna.
Morgenthau's critics, including A. J. P. Taylor,
recognized the sleight of hand.
A review in the Economist declared his books to the latest addition
to nigh considerable American Library of Sermons based
on the theology of realpolitik.
Karl J Friedrich, another emigre and theorist
of totalitarianism called Morgenthau's book
"An American version of the realpolitik."
In 1952, he was also attacked
by the Austrian-American IR theorist Frank Tannenbaum,
who stated that the "Advocates
of realpolitik would sweep away all our beliefs and foolishness's,
sentimental and moralistic."
Even by the time Morgenthau had expand and refined his views
in The Purpose of American Politics, in 1960, which he defined
by the way as, "The Achievement of Freedom".
Yet another emigre, the Marxist intellectual,
Herbert Markuze wrote to him asking.
"What might have driven the theorist of realpolitik
to transcend realpolitik?"
Notably in the '40s and the '50s,
it was President's Obama's favorite philosopher Reno Niebuhr
who came closest to finding a happy medium between what he called,
"The most rarefied heights of Constitutional idealism,
ala Woodrow Wilson and the depths of realpolitik."
But the label was hard to shake,
and when Bismarck's reputation was revived by historians in the 1950s,
A.J.P .Taylor, another biographer, but not sympathetic one,
cited the influence of W.L. Langer, another German American scholar
at Yale in the 1930s, complained that,
"Through him realpolitik had been taught to a generation of students
who would determine American foreign policy after Second World War.
There's an important point to make here,
those who had World War Two had reason had reason to be fearful
of the creep of a realpolitik mentality,
as something which threatened to debase liberalism, idealism,
and the whole essence of the Anglo-American worldview.
In his famous text, "The Road to Serfdom,"
Frederick Hayek wrote that, "If the West was to convince Germans
that there was an alternative to Nazism, it will not do
by concessions to their thought.
We shall delude them with the stale reproduction of the ideas
of their fathers which we have borrowed from them,
be it state socialism, realpolitik, or scientific planning."
As the Kissinger -- I should also quote Dr. Kissinger here,
reflecting back on these debates in 2010, and I would say
with perhaps a weary tone, "The advocates
of a realist foreign policy are caricatured
with German term realpolitik," he said,
"I suppose to facilitate the choosing of sides."
The Cold War, and perhaps above all, the association with Kissinger,
breathed new life into realpolitik and meant
that the term outlasted the bitter debates of the '50s and '60s,
though it was associated of course, with new controversies.
Mentions of realpolitik peaked in the 1970s, both in the press
and in diplomatic cables during the Nixon and Carter administrations.
In the 1980s of course,
the advocates of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy
such as Jean Kirkpatrick and Irving Kristol,
repeatedly described how America had transcended realpolitik,
and in doing so had won the Cold War,
and they used the term regularly in a pejorative sense.
Now, I realize that I'm rushing through the '70s and the '80s,
and this not simply because I'm running at the end my talk,
but also because of the simple fact that the more ubiquitous the use
of realpolitik became, the less it really meant anything.
And this indeed is one of themes of the book,
that looking at realpolitik in this period
and in this way actually tells us more about ourselves
than it necessarily tells us about the world around us.
So what, finally, would Ludwig von Rochau have made of all
of this -- of all of this?
I began by saying that I thought that his original conception
of realpolitik was still of relevance to us.
So I will end by giving you two reasons why.
First of all, it provides us with a way of looking
at contemporary politics which is deep and rigorous, but not dependent
on method or formula, and this
of course is a historian's instinct here.
Rochau was journalist, and not a jurist.
For him realpolitik was not a theory, but, and I quote,
"A mere measuring, and weighing, and calculating, of political facts
that need to be processed politically."
It was not without depth either.
He was influenced by an eclectic and rather messy range
of political philosophy which included the Scottish Enlightenment,
Edmund Burke, and French social theorists of the early 19th Century.
As though this was simply thrown into the pot, and mixed together
with strong dose of history, as he put it himself, "realpolitik dealt
with the historical product, accepting it as it is,
with an eye for its strengths and weaknesses
and remained otherwise unconcerned with its origins and the reasons
for its particular characteristics."
The second point is that Rochau incorporated the conditions
of modernity, mass politics, and the public sphere in his analysis
in a way that is entirely understandably absent
from Machiavelli.
He was, as much as anything else, a theorist of public opinion
for which he used the German term "Psycast", and he wrote things like,
"Bourgeois class consciousness, the idea of freedom, nationalism,
the idea of human equality --
are completely new factors of social life for many
of today's states," he wrote.
And you can think of the Arab Spring echo again.
"realpolitik," he continued, "would contradict itself if it were
to deny the right of the intellect, of ideas, of religion or any other
of the moral forces to which the human soul renders him homage."
Patriotism for example, was not a delusion
or a distraction from realpolitik.
It was a serious asset to any state trying to carve out a place
for itself in international arena.
Not every idea was of equal political important, of course.
"It was often the case," Rochau wrote,
"That the most beautiful ideal
that infuses noble souls is a political melody,
when it came to phantoms or fantasies like eternal peace,
international fraternity and equality with no will
and no force behind them," he put it in a very memorable turn of phrase,
"realpolitik passes by, shrugging its shoulders.
On the other hand," he warned,
"that the craziest notion may become a very serious realpolitik matter."
And by this, it is worth noting he had
in mind both Communism and Anti-Semitism.
Ultimately then, it is worth ending by noting that father
of realpolitik was a critic of utopian-ism, not idealism.
It was not that his liberal colleagues were ambitious,
optimistic, and idealistic that was the problem,
it was that they allowed their critical faculties to atrophy
into what he called, formless ideas, impulses, emotional surges,
melodic slogans, naively accepted catchwords
and habitual self-delusions, and the misguided pride
which characterizes the human mind.
161 years later, wherever one finds oneself on the political spectrum,
these are words I submit, which are still worth heeding.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
I think there are, there's time for questions
and there are few mics roving around the room.
Don't be shy.
Oh.
>> In the popular discourse, it often seems
that realpolitik is connected with sort of just hardball tactics,
you know, most recently say Putin.
How do you regard that, I mean, as a component as realpolitik?
I mean is it also possible for something like say the Marshall Plan
to be realpolitik, even though it's a sort of a model of soft power.
>> Dr. John Bew: I would say absolutely, would be my response.
I think a key consideration here is that Rochau
in the first instance was a theorist --
or not theorist, he was somebody who's analyzing a domestic
political scene.
So something gets lost as his idea is applied
to the international arena, but as someone
who analyzed the domestic political scene, he was very cognizant of
and very literate about the different social forces
and the structures of society.
So French Social Theory as I said,
was a big aspect of what he writes about.
The reason why he thinks the bourgeois is going
to win ultimately is not because their ideas are best, necessarily,
but that where social forces grinded him best.
So if you're to extend the analogy,
and if I was to do exactly what I've been cautioning against
and misapplying realpolitik,
the Marshall Plan would be a prime example of that.
Something that recognizes that structures, shapes,
and forces do not necessarily have to exist at the simple sort
of military level or the, you know, simple Machiavellian level,
so absolutely would be my response.
>> Hi, Ryan Evans, Center for the National Interest.
John, what would you say were Morgenthau's innovations
if anything, or did he just borrow sort of in whole
from his German influences,
and the same question is how would you discuss the sort of transition
from realism and realpolitik as a something that historians study
to something political scientists
and [inaudible] theorists studied with Waltz?
>> Dr. John Bew: Both are a question of time and place.
First of all, the criticisms
that Morgenthau was somehow [inaudible] concealing the German
influences in his thought, the reason why he was doing that,
because he was very conscious that it was very --
too easy to dismiss him as a sort of pro-German figure.
But Morgenthau, is not misty-eyed and sentimental
about the Germany he had to flee as a German Jew.
Morgenthau is a deeply patriotic American,
I think that's a crucial consideration here.
I wouldn't sort of, you know,
denounce in any respect in that regard.
Quite innovative his thinking was.
Yes, it was innovating and I don't want get into the sort
of historical aspect of it, I would say there was an element
which I think is perhaps, and this leads into your second question,
historical cherry picking which I think exists in some forms
of international relations theory, where you pick an example
or a moment to illustrate your point,
and I give as an example, his use of Castlereagh.
Not a fully rounded discussion of what Castlereagh is doing,
it's a useful way to say,
that there's an English language way of doing this as well.
So as innovative thinker, there are elements, strong elements
of innovation and its whole generation of IR theorists
and I possibly couldn't do that full justice.
I would also say crucially though, he is like all the thinkers before,
a product of time and place,
and by the way Mineka got that more than anyone.
Mineka knew that the role of historian was, in a sense,
to reflect the world around in that moment in time.
His ideas were necessarily time-bound and context bound.
I would put Morgenthau in a group of people,
slewed towards Joe Rosenthal's book on this, Righteous Realists .
It's a deeply moral discourse of American realism.
Some people say its realpolitik is somehow cynical and a kind
of mischievous elevation of the national interest.
Those post-war American realist had a deeply moral conception
in their own way.
And part of that reflected internal concerns about the direction
of America's size, and internalized reflection.
So they're immoral, I think that's the wrong criticism.
I think they're after, in some respects,
they're wrong about certain things, but that's a different debate.
I judge the realists by their own terms,
rather by than projecting either some sort of German line
or anything else like that.
I'm sorry, the question was?
>> When you became an IR [inaudible] in this whole period?
>> Dr. John Bew: Looking at this, this whole period?
The whole discipline of IR in some ways is, covers the period
of the time I'm talking about.
IR is, first of all, and this crucial,
an Anglo-American world view, and an Anglo-American obsession.
It's primarily, you know, a kind of Anglo-American query.
A lot of this emerged among the revolution cycles,
include in the '20s and in the '30s with people sort of articulating
that IR was to be the antidote to realpolitik.
Realpolitik policy has caused the First World War
because of a bad functioning
of the way the national interest was applied by states,
and it was possible to avoid the type of thing
that the First World War had happened.
The war was not inevitable in that respect,
so IR is very much a product of time and place in that respect.
I will say also in the '50s and '60s you get a sense with a lot
of American realists that they always feel they are
on the losing side, they always feel that no one is listening to them.
And it is a recurring thing that no one gets what they are saying
and that no one is listening to them.
And there is an element of that, and I can almost see this looking
at Morgenthau's papers here, he's trying to get his students jobs,
he feels that sometimes that pushed out of the situation,
he's complaining that foreign affairs is too Wilsonian
and they never publish him, and there's an element
in which they retreat to the academy.
And I think that possibly reflects, to a certain extent the way
that IR has been criticized for lacking kind
of relevance in present mindedness.
It's become more of a sort of science or a kind of a theology
than necessarily a real realpolitik way of looking at things.
Yeah, lots of questions, gentleman here
and then we'll take my [inaudible].
>> Sure, sure.
Actually picking from up from two weeks ago and placing liberalism
which is really where you feel realpolitik is aligned,
with [inaudible], I wonder how you would define the difference
between neo-Conservatism and liberalism
as inheritors of the tradition.
>> Dr. John Bew: This gets us into a minefield,
for various reasons [audience laughter] and one reason is,
I mean this is a feature of my book,
so I'm not going to ignore the minefield.
I'll go into in the manner of a North
of Irish soldier at Somme in 1914.
I've considered this a lot.
Irving Kristol, as you take him, as, you know,
pretty much if you planned --
you know, if there's a neoconservative thinker,
it's Irving Kristol.
Irving Kristol had a strange relationship with realpolitik,
and I'll tell you why I think this is important.
In the '60s, he celebrated it, actually the word,
and he celebrated what he called the Europeanization
of our foreign policy because in that time he had in mind,
naive critics of American foreign policy in his view,
people who took their opposition to Vietnam too far in terms of,
you know, articulating a sort of different position.
So, Irving Kristol was receptive to the idea as a kind
of counterintuitive response to the sort
of prevailing wisdom that he saw in Academia.
By the '70s and the '80s, and Norman Poleaxe [assumed spelling]
and other neoconservatives claimed some credit for this,
he is attacking realpolitik as realpolitik ala Disraeli, he says,
talking about a 19th Century British Prime Minister as un-American.
So he changes his tune in that way.
Now, the prevailing reasons he changed his tune I think are partly
his understanding of where he was at that moment in time
in terms of time and place.
Also domestic politics, I think this is an aspect
of what I want to say more broadly.
I mean neo-Conservatism is in the first instance,
it arises out of an internal discourse
in American politics, that's the bottom line.
In the '50s and the '60s [inaudible] prevailing concerns,
and of course it has a foreign policy application,
I mean that comes after.
But I'd say the same of realism, and that's in a way, my point.
And it is a point, and you can see it with Britain in the 19th Century,
it comes relative luxury and security.
Because the other thing about the Anglo-American worldview is
that our wars are wars by and large, wars of choice.
Even you could push this to Britain in 1914 and 1939,
so that relative security means that, you know,
in some respects our debate on foreign --
foreign affairs and foreign policy is a luxury,
it's not a debate about survivalism.
So I kind of discussed neo-Conservatism,
perhaps quite you said, "How does liberalism compare
to neo-Conservatism," there's others better equipped
to answer that, I'm not sure I could.
Michael -- yeah, here's a microphone?
That's there --
>> John, you've mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr, who's a favorite,
I wouldn't say philosopher but a theologian of mine,
and also the President's.
One of the themes he championed and was famous for was the
"Just War theory," so how does that chime with realpolitik?
>> Dr. John Bew: Niebuhr again, German speaking and very aware
of the German work I'm talking about as well, not to be confused with,
I mean he was an American first foremost,
his father came here early in the 20th Century.
"Just War Theory" and Niebuhr in particular, I think,
I think Niebuhr's influence is the biggest influence of the discourse
of 20th Century American foreign policy,
thereafter from the '40s and '50s.
And it's not so much necessarily --
I mean he wrote about everything right, I mean huge amounts
at the Library of Congress.
I gave up after a few weeks in the manuscripts room.
I couldn't go any further, others have done it better.
He wrote specifically about certain foreign policy episodes
and proscribed them and did it in the context of "Just War".
The key thing about Niebuhr is the way he talks
about American foreign policy and the way he talks
about the responsibility of foreign policy and the willingness
to resist evil on the one hand and the need
to exercise restraint on the other.
And I said at the start of my remarks that Rochau had pointed
to the organizing dialectic of American foreign policy,
of Anglo-American foreign policy, how to achieve good
as a theologian would want to, in a world that sometimes in which
where you try to achieve good, you end up achieving bad.
That's kind of a problem, and his influence on the President kind
of wraps it nicely in a circle for me,
because a lot of this debate is theological
and this relates to my previous question.
It's about having a coherent worldview.
So if neo-Conservatism or American realism comes
out of American's first instance
about domestic political considerations,
it's essentially an attempt to find a job, what the President's using,
like the President's using Niebuhr,
is an attempt to find an articulate coherent world view.
Okay? And we like to do that in the West, this is partly
because of the influence of Protestant theology.
We like to have an articulate, coherent worldview.
But that's a theological viewpoint,
rather than necessary realpolitik viewpoint.
It's not necessarily reflective of how the world looks around you,
it's reflective of how you want to square the circle if you like.
And a great deal of international relations shares
that theological instinct, to characterize
and theorize at that meta-level.
Just had two questions back here.
>> So you mentioned in your talk that there was a distinction
at first, that some people drew a distinction
between Bismarck's realpolitik and the Kaiser's realpolitik,
but by the time World War One starts people are using are realpolitik
to describe what the Kaiser is doing.
So I guess the question comes fundamentally down to,
"Is realpolitik -- is it more -- how do I phrase it?
Is the problem with realpolitik, do more people view it
in this calculating way, or is it the problem
that people have is they view it in this aggressive way
that got applied to World War One, more.
So what would you say, is it calculating or aggressive.
>> Dr. John Bew: I think you can see both -- both of those tendencies.
So there are subtle, and a lot of times the genuine experts
in Germany are saying this in the 1920s and '30s,
"You don't understand what it really meant."
So I think both those threads are what exists,
and they exist throughout my book, and willingness to start,
"The positive interpretation of it as calculating and therefore useful
to how you approach politics.
As an antidote to naivete, as a corrective to naivete,
you'd have to be realistic about the world.
Wilson got it wrong, he got too naïve on the other hand
and on the other hand, those who say, "No."
Because when you're correcting liberalism too much,
when you're comprising it too much, you will lead on a path
in which anti-Semitism becomes okay,
in which you essentially elevate the national interest and cynicism
so much, you forget about the IR ideal.
And by the way these are the sort of terms, precisely the sort of issues
that Mineka wrestles with after the First World War.
He discusses this at length, and he wants to try
and find a compromise between the two.
But again a lot of that, as real policy in the seventies
and eighties, and the later of this last century,
it becomes political football so that kind of, it loses that meaning.
But those two threads actually do exist simultaneously throughout the
19th century.
As the debate goes, people say "Real-polity bad"
and then German emigres say, "You don't understand what it is,
it's more subtle than that."
And then people like A. J. P. Taylor who did understand what it is,
or Tannenbaum critics
of totalitarianism we do understand what it is,
we know you're not crazy, we know you're trying to call for Bismarck
and not the Kaiser, but it's still a problem.
Because it leads to a creep and a sickness within liberalism.
And by the way that was most smart criticism of --
Rochau comes from a German Christian comes Constantine France,
and he says precisely that.
"This is my problem with realpolitik, that it causes,
it provokes the very essence of Liberalism,
because Liberalism is not about success,
it's about our Christian spirit
of benevolence," that's what France says.
So people identify this early on,
here's the issue with his philosophy.
Yeah, Tom, in the middle there, yeah, how are you?
Last one, sorry.
>> I'm struck by your comment about the sorrows and the frustrations
of the Realpolitikers in the Anglo-American tradition and even
as the move into the academy, the frustrations of them.
You had to begin your story someplace, in time,
I'm wondering if you would entertain the idea that --
>> Dr. John Bew: I know where you're going with this.
>> Well okay, you knew where I was going,
which is why I asked the question if you would entertain the idea
that it was an uphill slog, even before the mid-19th Century
that there was an Anglo-American strategic culture
that was inhospitable to this fundamental way of thinking,
that has sort pf always left Realpolitikers out in the cold,
lamenting the sorrows of empire.
>> Dr. John Bew: You could put one reason, as you know Tom,
from the Elizabethan period, you know could put that to,
I think the fact that these are protestant nations
and laterally evangelical nations
in 19th Century is a key critical component,
and that makes the sort German departure slightly intriguing
as well, because they're sort of a protestant nation,
so that's a key aspect of it,
the way the enlightenment impacted these nations
as well is I think another important aspect of this.
Exactly, you could education --
Taylor's, "The Troublemakers" which is about the sort of critics
and opponents of prevailing foreign policy wisdoms
and push it back right to the Elizabethan period.
I wrote about Castlereagh who was constantly, and I think hounded
to his death, by the critics of his foreign policy
for being too realpolitik, to cynical.
And that Britain should be than that and more ideological.
I would say it's the irreducible core and you can never eradicate
that instinctive core in the way Britain
and America conduct their foreign policies.
Also I think for a strategically self-interested reason,
which is that they are relatively island nations whose interests it is
to have a world system crafted in their image.
Now there argument is of course, of course you want democracy, freedom,
free trade and freedom of waterways, because it suits us.
And there is a good argument that it's not, its basis to context
and this sort ideologically history, hundred percent agree though,
that Anglo-American strategic culture, call it what you will,
much predates all the period I'm talking about.
I think I've gotten them all, I have to end it there.
So contact your organization.
[ Applause ]
>> We do have to end it there, unfortunately.
I just want to remind you that this event was filmed,
as were our previous two in this series, and they will be
on library's website and YouTube channels
in the coming weeks and months.
Please do sign up for our list in the back to get notified
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Thanks again [applause].
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
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