International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

ing about interstate relations in terms of power politics or balance-of- power 
politics can be traced back in history as far as Thucydides. However, this ar-
gument only holds true if we take into account the core of political thinking 
about power politics that is found in all strands of realist theory. For the pur-
pose of our book, it might therefore be useful to differentiate between realist 
thinking and neorealist theory right from the beginning. This difference is 
important because the type of theoretical construction and nature of theoreti-
cal explanation found in neorealism as a theoretical approach will be the cen-
tral issue for our discussions. However, as one aspect of dealing with our 
theoretical approaches will be questions about the normative perspective, we 

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will come back to realist thinking in terms of realist international politics at 
the end of this unit. 
These points are closely related to a final aspect, the relevance of theory 
for the practice of international politics. Realist thinking and neorealist theory 
clearly belong to the most influential perspectives of International Relations. 
This can be seen through their role as a guide to the political actions of US 
administrations after World War II until the 1970s and again since the 1990s. 
In the US, the study of IR was (and often is) closely tied to a practical politi-
cal purpose: to optimize American foreign policy under “new” conditions of 
international politics, such as of superpower rivalry after World War II, 
world economic turbulences with the oil price shocks in the 1970s, following 
the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, or now against the background of new 
rising powers such as China. In the early years it was Hans Morgenthau’s re-
alism as formulated in his Politics among Nations (1948), together with the 
work of John Herz, Reinhold Niebuhr, subsequent US Secretary of State 
Henry Kissinger and Arnold Wolfers, which shaped American foreign policy. 
Neo-realism, developed by Waltz as a critique of early realism, along with the 
diverse strands of neorealist theory today, have also mainly been developed and 
modified in the US. The frequently debated move of the US from multilateral-
ism to unilateralism since the 1990s and the hopes that the Obama administra-
tion would bring a new multilateralist approach to US actions cannot be rea-
sonably understood without taking into account the relevance of a (neo)realist 
world perspective. Much of international security politics, not only in America, 
is guided by (neo)realist perspectives. Investigating the neorealist perspective 
thoroughly is thus not only a theoretical endeavor but also helps us to better 
understand the perspectives behind much of contemporary world politics. 
Step 1: 
Background and core question 
The differentiation between realist thinking and neorealist theory in the mod-
ern usage of the terms provides a good starting point for illustrating the back-
ground behind the formation of neorealist theory. Realist thinking, with its 
central categories of “political power” and the “national interest”, formed the 
core of IR after World War II. This tendency increased with the advent of the 
Cold War. However, approaches to International Organizations and conflict 
studies have also constituted a large part of the academic study of IR since 
the 1950s; their role should not be downplayed. The dominance of realism 

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within IR was the answer to politically motivated questions at the core of the 
American discipline until the late fifties and sixties. At this point, there was a 
move towards more basic or fundamental research. Comparative studies – us-
ing systematic comparison as a method to find general explanations for inter-
national relations (since the 1950s) – and theories applying game theory to 
the social sciences/International Relations (especially since the 1960s) were 
attempts to find scientific explanations for international relations. In the US, a 
strong dominance of decision-making approaches to International Relations 
was the result of a transfer of emphasis from politics to foreign policy studies 
(Snyder R.C./Bruck, H.W./Sapin, B. 1962). Foreign policy decisions such as 
the American choice in favor of the Korean War were at the core of these theo-
retical programs. In terms of theory, the controversial point was whether these 
studies should be classified as foreign policy studies or as studies of interna-
tional relations. These are questions closely related to the level-of-analysis 
problem, which was an issue of our discussions in Unit 4 of the book. They re-
flect the fundamental problem of how best to explain international politics in 
terms of “locating” the most relevant explanatory variables. 
Out of the belief that theories of foreign policy do not constitute adequate