Modern realism has become merely liberal idealism, making crisis inevitable
Cunliffe 20 (Philip Cunliffe, Postgraduate Tutor in IRDR, responsible for overseeing the department's research degree programme, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London, taught at the University of Kent and in the Defence Studies and War Studies departments of King's College London, where he also completed his doctorate in War Studies in 2009, 2020, “The New Twenty Years’ Crisis”, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 978-0-2280-0102-7 | czx )
Yet is IR realism sufficient to our needs? As we saw in previous chapters, the revival of classical realism in IR carries with it many of the traits of post-political liberalism, so much so that it might best be called “cosmopolitan realism.”8 Slavoj Žižek has observed that contemporary Western culture is characteristically “decaffeinated” – that is, many domains of life have had the dangerous elements pre-emptively extracted to avoid risk. Thus we have coffee without caffeine, beer with low or zero-alcohol, tightly controlled algorithmic dating in place of falling in love – and in politics, wars with zero casualties (for our side), and we might add in human rights, rights without rights … To this series we might also add that we now have realism without realism – that the intellectual revival of classical realism in IR offers us a decaffeinated version in which the dangerous, disruptive elements – those of political power, the state and political interests – have been extracted, leaving a more tepid brew barely distinguishable from the proverbial liberal idealism, no less focussed on cosmopolitanism, ethics, international cooperation. It is probably already too late to make realism more real again.
In the domestic sphere, so-called left Schmittianism has, unsurprisingly, fed through into the delusions of left Euro-populism, such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.9 Weber’s own dramatic posture of crisis offers us only an atavistic revisionism as the basis for politics. This would not serve us well, as it would merely act to reproduce our problem – to recreate the spectre of catastrophism. Unlike Carr, Weber was, after all, writing at the start of the twenty years’ crisis, not at its end, and his political realism evinced his desire to overthrow the nascent Paris peace system. Invoking Weberian realism today would simply reproduce the twenty years’ crisis, not help us get beyond it – not to mention the fact that Weber’s putative realism is built on a foundation of romantic political existentialism and bitter revanchist nationalism.