"I suspect the data reflects how a broad cross-section of realist scholars have come to the conclusion that international legitimacy greases the wheels of power and makes counterbalancing less likely. Thank (or blame) the Bush administration."
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I don't think that's right. A couple of points:
(1) The survey authors conflate the empirical finding of realism with normative prescriptions. Realists themselves are largely to blame for this confusion. I think many realists would empirically observe that great powers are rarely bound by the United Nations, but that it might be a better thing if they were.
(2) Ceteris paribus, who wouldn't want the approval of the United Nations? Put in terms of an extreme hypothetical, if you told me that the UN would support whatever the US wanted to do as a matter of policy, would help share the burden of doing it, and wouldn't require any compromise by the US, then I'm pretty sure any realist would be for it. The finding doesn't say very much about realists at all until you specify how much UN approval costs.
DME: your second point, I think, is merely a restatement and elaboration of what I argued: that legitimacy greases the wheels of power. In this case, you stress burden sharing rather than threat.
Your first point? I don't know. If this were really an instance of "if wishes were horses" thinking among realists, one would not expect significant changes in support for military action with UN approval, since that UN approval wouldn't matter much either pragmatically or normatively.
Dan,
I think you misunderstood my point (or I wasn't clear enough). Imagine a powerful state arrives at the UN and basically says, "I'm going to do what I want regardless of the fact that it violates a series of widely accepted international norms. You're either with me or you're against me." And a whole series of weaker states then say, "Well, you know what. We have little to gain from opposing them, but perhaps something to gain from supporting them." So, they come on board and support the mission for no way that's meaningfully related to legitimacy. That is, unless you want to define legitimacy tautologically: anything that a state supports it must view as legitimate, and anything that is legitimate is what states support.
As for my first point, where are those psychological theories when we need them? I know a number of realists who think precisely in the way I described: the UN can't constrain a great power like the US, but the US would be better off it could. This gets to a larger, interesting subject: the dissonance of academic realists who are fundamentally liberals at heart.
Dan - as a high school student largely evaluating schools based on their IR programs, this is invaluable. Thank you for passing it along.
I would have been interested in an additional question, maybe most appropriately placed in the methodology section.
"Do you have sufficient foreign language skills to conduct research in languages other than English? If so, what languages?"
I would imagine that French and German would top the list, but I would be fascinated to see how many folks could claim research knowledge of Arabic or Japanese or Chinese, especially since these languages dominate the areas identified as strategically significant. Maybe next year...
Charlie,
Great idea. I think that should definitely be on the next survey. Luckily, I may be in a position to make that happen
Great! I look forward to next year.
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