To call a book thought-provoking can be taken as damning with faint praise. But in this case, it is simply the apt description. Matthew Specter has written a truly excellent book that invites the reader to question their preconceived notions about a subject with which they probably felt familiar. Specter seeks to provide a genealogy of realism. In doing so, he posits that realism is a historical artifact, rather than a value-neutral, objective tool of analysis based on the ancient and immutable laws of international relations. Specter deftly demonstrates the ways in which realism developed through a two-way interchange between Germany and the United States, as well as how the American definition of “geopolitical” realism as being particularly German prevented Americans from confronting the similarities of their imperial history with that of their Atlantic interlocutor.
Specter locates the beginning of Atlantic realism in the writings and rhetoric of the 1890s, and especially in the work of Americans Alfred Thayer Mahan and Paul Reinsch, and Germans Max Weber and Friedrich Ratzel. Realism, he argues convincingly, “did not descend from Realpolitik but from its competitor Weltpolitik” (19), to which these four thinkers helped give birth (whether or not they used that word). Thus severing realism's origins from its generally-presumed Bismarckian heritage, Specter elucidates the connection between realism and the perceived need for overseas empire. This “first Atlantic realist moment” (50) lasted until World War I. The period that followed is often thought of as one in which Wilsonian liberal internationalism dominated thinking on foreign relations. But Specter detects instead the emergence of a second Atlantic realism, coalescing around German and American geopolitical thought. The received wisdom was, in fact, based on a construct generated by thinkers like E. H. Carr.
In Specter's telling, the period that followed was shaped especially by the ideas of the highly influential German Carl Schmitt. He and others undercut the conception of Anglo-American exceptionalism. But Specter cautions against attempts by the Left to co-opt Schmitt: progressives, he advises, should consider whether Schmitt's theory “enables critical and emancipatory views of international relations, or whether it contains any resources for resisting empire” (90). The following chapters focus on German legal scholar-diplomat Willem Grewe; the rebirth of Atlantic realism during World War II; and Hans Morgenthau, the hugely important German émigré who is considered by so many to be the intellectual father of postwar realism. With Morgenthau, as with Schmitt, Specter cautions that “nowhere did he question the prerogative of the United States to order the entire world's affairs in its interests; in short, its imperial prerogative” (166). Specter finishes with the story of the unlikely restoration of realist thought in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Particularly fascinating is Specter's treatment of the Nazi period. All of the crosspollination became extremely problematic in the 1930s and 1940s, when Geopolitik seemed to be an intellectual handmaiden for Nazi expansionist policies: the search for Lebensraum. The result was what Specter calls “anxieties of influence” (127): fear that American “political geography” owed a little too much to ideas that were then being portrayed by Americans as uniquely German. The appellation “realism” thus emerged in no small part as a “semantic refuge for fugitives from the discredited discourse of Nazi geopolitics” (135).
One might note that the chapter on Wilhelm Grewe seems out of place. Specter is able to demonstrate Grewe's “assiduous contributions to the [Nazi] regime's foreign policy goals” (108). But even if Grewe's realism was a lone “residuum” (117) of the appalling ideology and policies of the Third Reich, this does not advance Specter's argument about realism itself. Additionally, Specter engages in some strong rhetoric, never more so than when he writes that a study such as this “can help to emancipate ourselves from realism's tyranny over the political imagination” (17). But is this an overstatement? Does realism actually possess such a stranglehold on the minds of both academic theorists and policymakers? The flourishing of constructivism (mentioned on page 137) as a challenge to academic realism suggests that it does not. It would thus have been useful if Specter had addressed himself, however briefly, to the influence of such scholars as Alexander Wendt (who appears only in the endnotes), Martha Finnemore, and others. It is also worth asking if the policy elite, while proclaiming themselves hard-nosed realists, in fact often act as constructivists in practice. If so, then Specter is more successful at scholarship than at advocacy. But his scholarship is superb – a model for how international intellectual history can be done.
