Deconstructing Realpolitik.

• Author: Lind, Michael

John Bew, Realpolitik: A History (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2015), 408 pp., $27.95.

In the lexicon of world politics, "realism" suffers from polysemy. Sometimes the word means nothing more than expedience or prudence in the pursuit of the interest of a state or even a stateless nation. Others use the term to connote raw power politics--the pursuit of interest at the expense of legal norms or ethical ideals. At the other extreme, some self-described realists believe that states must take into account the interest ot the international system as a whole. These are all prescriptive doctrines. Realism is also used for a school of international-relations theory in the United States that purports to describe and even predict the behavior of states.

In his comprehensive Realpolitik: A History, John Bew seeks to unravel this conceptual knot by carefully tugging on one particular thread: the term "realpolitik." A professor in the War Studies Department at King's College London and Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, Bew is the author of Castlereagh: A Life, a study of one of the statesmen who is often held up as an exemplary realist. Bew follows the method of the Cambridge School of intellectual history, associated with scholars like Quentin Skinner, in tracing the evolution of the word and concept "realpolitik":

This holds that political ideas, and associated political discourse, should be understood in the context of the historical era in which they were used. They should be treated as products of time and place, rather than as vessels of perennial "truths." Bew's project depends on distinguishing realism, as a broad tradition that includes premodern thinkers like Machiavelli, from realpolitik--a term coined by August Ludwig von Rochau in 1853 in Foundations of Realpolitik. In that book, and in a second volume published in 1869, Rochau, a German politician, journalist and liberal nationalist, argued that the unification of the German nation, divided among numerous states, could only take place as a result of realpolitik, not Gefuhlspolitik (sentimental politics) or Prinzipienpolitik (principled politics). After helping to form the Progressive Party in Prussia, Rochau lived to see the unification of Germany outside of the Habsburg domains by Otto von Bismarck and won a seat in the Reichstag in 1871. In 1873, Rochau died while writing a biography of Bismarck's counterpart Count Camillo Cavour, who was a leader in Italy's unification.

For Rochau, realpolitik was part of an intra-German debate--should most or all Germans be united under a single state, and if so, how? Bew states that the German historian Hajo Holborn

insists that the term should not be used except for statesmen who entered the scene in the decade after 1848, and even then it needed exact definition. As the use of the word proliferated after 1853, however, its original meaning became blurred. It either came to denote a policy contemptuous of all ideas and ideologies or a policy exclusively employing power for the achievement of its ends. According to Bew, the key figure in the generalization and vulgarization of realpolitik was Rochau's fellow National Liberal Heinrich von Treitschke.

While Rochau had rejected anti-Semitism and...