Neoclassical Realism Research Articles

Enlargement as high politics: New insights on the integration of the German Democratic Republic into the European Community

An essential part of the restructuring of the European security order after the Cold War is the Eastern enlargement of the European Community (EC). This article provides the hitherto missing explanation for the integration of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the EC. In alignment with neoclassical realism, I claim that high politics took precedence in this exceptional enlargement. Established theories underestimate the importance of security and power and, thereby, fall short in accounting for the fast-track accession of the GDR to the EC. I argue that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) pressed for a rapid reunification including the automatic accession of the GDR to the EC. Motivated by internal factors, the FRG’s government ventured a take-it-or-leave-it-offer that the other EC states acquiesced to under the threat of a German withdrawal from the EC with unforeseeable geopolitical consequences. The analysis builds on recently declassified, original documents collected from different archives.

Geopolitical Implications of the US-India Strategic Partnership in the Indo-Pacific Region

A geo-economics and geopolitical analysis of the shifting dynamics of the bilateral relationship between the USA and India has significant implications for the IPE in the Indo-Pacific region. This paper aims to evaluate the interaction process between the US and India, utilizing major theories related to China's emergence. This work, guided by the methodologies of realism, neoclassical realism, constructivism, and geo-economics, analyzes the strategic coordination of security defense technology and economic cooperation. It also scrutinizes how the cooperation impacts regional players such as ASEAN, Japan, and Australia, balancing the divergence of geographical perspectives and India's decoupled strategic sovereignty. The last chapter of the study analyses the transformation of the Indo-Pacific by the partnership and presents ways to advance this alliance. In fact, this paper will assist in developing a theoretical understanding regarding the great-power rivalry with the region and the importance of the bilateral partnership for the maintenance of the rule-based international order.

An Analysis of Japan’s Diplomacy towards Israel since Shinzo Abe Era: Based on the Theoretical Framework of Neoclassical Realism

Neoclassical realism theory holds that a nation’s foreign policy is the result of international systemic stimuli intervened by domestic variables. It provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing the changes of Japan’s foreign policy towards Israel. For a long time after World War II, the relations between Japan and Israel remained cold mainly under the system constraints and its contradictions with domestic variables. However, since Abe’s second term in power, Japan has significantly strengthened its diplomatic relations with Israel. The changes both in the Middle East regional system and the global system have stimulated the adjustment of Japan’s policy while the domestic variables have responded to systemic stimuli actively. Japan’s strengthening of relations with Israel is reflected in several aspects, including high-level political visits, innovative industrial cooperation, and people-to-people cultural diplomacy. On the whole, Japan’s development of relations with Israel serves the interests of both countries and has had a certain impact on the international system. However, there are obvious limitations to Japan’s intensifying diplomacy with Israel.

Peru’s leadership in the Lima Group: emergence and failure (2015–2021)

This research seeks to understand the factors that enabled Peru, a medium-sized country in Latin America, to take on a leadership role in the creation and development of the Lima Group—a multilateral mechanism whose main objective was to find a resolution to the democratic crisis in Venezuela—as well as the subsequent failure of this leadership. Using the analytical tools provided by Neoclassical Realism, this study argues that Peru’s leadership was made possible not only by the growing importance of the Venezuelan crisis on the international agenda since 2015 but also by changes in regional and global power dynamics. These shifts allowed a country like Peru to exercise such leadership and garner greater interest from the United States. Additionally, the presence of a favorable domestic political climate and clear national interests led the Peruvian government to view this leadership as beneficial, not only for the region but also for Peru itself. However, despite the Venezuelan crisis remaining on the international agenda due to Nicolás Maduro’s continued hold on power, the hardening of the U.S. stance on Venezuela and political changes at the regional level since 2018 fractured the Lima Group and undermined Peru’s leadership. Moreover, domestically, political changes led to heightened instability, weakening Peru’s external position. Finally, the surge in Venezuelan migration and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the priorities of Peru’s foreign policy, diminishing its focus on the Venezuelan crisis and contributing to the failure of its leadership.

Through the Lens of Neoclassical Realism: Understanding the Decline in Malaysia– India Relations Under Mahathir 2.0

This article suggests that since the end of the Cold War, Malaysia’s foreign policy towards a rising India has significantly intertwined with its overarching hedging calculations vis-à-vis the burgeoning power competition between the United States and China. Hedging, based on the conceptualization of Dr Cheng-Chwee Kuik, incorporates a largely structure-induced logic that encompasses a survival-driven, risk-averse and insurance-seeking behaviour to ensure the survival of less powerful states without putting all eggs in one great power’s basket due to concerns over future uncertainty. While the US and China are the most immediate and consequential structural factors impacting Malaysian foreign policy, Kuik presents the concept of dominance-denial as a sub-element of hedging, where a less powerful state aims to forge positive and functional ties with all major powers in the system based on its economic and security interests. Strengthening ties with India has been crucial in Putrajaya’s dominance-denial strategy. However, while Malaysia–India economic and defence ties continued to grow since the 1990s, bilateral relations backslid in 2019 due to former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed’s provocative stance towards New Delhi, leading to a considerable decline in economic relations. Therefore, this article seeks to theoretically explain these constraints in the relations between Putrajaya and New Delhi through a neoclassical realist lens in order to supplement Kuik’s hedging framework.

Winds of change? Neoclassical realism, foreign policy change, and European responses to the Russia-Ukraine War

Winds of change? Neoclassical realism, foreign policy change, and European responses to the Russia-Ukraine War

An Evaluation of Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Pasha's Foreign Policy

Abstract Historiographical tradition has tended to view the Köprülü-era foreign policy as one of conscious expansion, fueled by religious fervor. The descriptions of the seventeenth-century Ottoman chroniclers to that effect influenced the researchers of the twenty-first-century, too. However, in the reports of European diplomatic representatives active in Istanbul at the time, we see that the expansionary policy in the Köprülü period was not actually a pre-planned phenomenon with religious motivations; it was more likely that the grand viziers responded to the urgent problems arising from the political conjuncture of the period. To be more precise, this study argues that events such as the Érsekújvár Expedition (1663), the Siege of Candia (1667-69), and the Campaign of Kamieniec (1672), which all took place during the reign of Köprülü Fazıl Ahmet Pasha (r. 1661-76), could not be explained by religious motivations alone. Instead, the present study argues that a better way to understand Fazıl Ahmed Pasha's foreign policy is interpreting it from an international relations perspective through the neoclassical realist parameters of the individual, state structure, and international system.

Neoclassical realism(s) vis-à-vis other theories of foreign policy: taking the indistinguishability problem seriously

Neoclassical realism (NCR)’s opponents have considered it an incoherent and indistinctive approach because of its interest in addressing ideational and institutional factors. Specifically, they have denounced NCR’s fuzzily established internal and external conceptual boundaries, corresponding to central dimensions of this approach’s ‘indistinguishability’ problem. Even though NCR has responded in a sophisticated manner to its critics, such a response still falls short of advancing some subtle strategies to forge NCR’s theoretical identity and research design. To fill this gap, I distinguish several neoclassical realist theories (Types I, II, IIA, IIB and III) to clarify NCR works’ common ground and the several options available to the analyst to cope with the indistinguishability problem’s internal dimension. Furthermore, I compare neoclassical realist theories with organizational, bureaucratic, realist, liberal and constructivist approaches to foreign policy to discuss the indistinguishability problem’s external dimension. Dealing with this dimension entails acknowledging that neoclassical realist theories provide a top-down, as compared to a bottom-up approach to explain foreign policy as a policy rather than a process. It also provides a thorough explanation rather than a parsimonious account aimed at distinguishing independent and intervening variables. With different intensities, neoclassical realist theories embrace specific, refined logics of consequentialism rather than appropriateness to explain distinct state preferences rather than assuming power maximization or security seeking as pre-fixed state goals.

Neoclassical Realism and Armenia’s International Orientation: An Attempt to Determine Patterns or Mechanisms of their Application?

The article examines neoclassical realism and Armenia’s international orientation as one of the directions in the transformation of the theory of international relations of small states. In this article, neoclassical realism is analyzed from the point of view of subjective aspects of policy formation and the influence of domestic political features of a small state on its foreign policy. Taking into account that neoclassical realism is a completely independent development of neorealism with a complementary elemental level of analysis of international politics. In terms of content, neoclassical realism of Armenia clarifies such concepts as resilience, national security, balance of power, balancing policy and others. The neoclassical model of Armenia’s foreign policy as a small state allows us to study the conditions under which great powers and small states deviate from the policy of balancing. From this point of view, the article proposes to analyze international politics through the prism of a global rollback to state-centric politics. The article takes into account that globalization presents new challenges for small countries such as Armenia, which risks being marginalized as a result of the restructuring of both global and regional economic relations.

U.S. Technological Decoupling from China: A Neoclassical Realist Explanation

U.S. Technological Decoupling from China: A Neoclassical Realist Explanation

Economic Statecraft of Small States in Response to Great Power Strategic Rivalry-Take Malaysia as An Example

The foreign economic statecraft of state actors in International Relations (IRs) have often attracted much attention and discussion among scholars, but most of the existing research focuses on the economic statecraft choices of great or medium-sized powers, and there is a lack of discussion on the economic statecraft of small state actors. From the perspective of International Political Economy (IPE), this paper takes Neoclassical Realism (NCR) as the theoretical basis and adopts case studies and process tracing to analyze how Malaysia has responded to the competition of great powers such as the United States, China and Japan with different economic statecrafts. The results show that small states, like great power, possess the ability to implement different economic statecrafts, and the ability threshold, initiative, and rationality of goals are the conditions that shadow whether small countries can implement economic statecrafts. State favorability at the system level and interest preferences at the unit level jointly shape the three modes of economic statecrafts that small states use to cope with great power competition, including: offensive economic statecraft, defensive economic statecraft, and composite economic statecraft. Depending on their relative relationship and status with great powers, small states flexibly apply different economic statecrafts to realize the goals of foreign economic development and maintain national security.

British defense policy against ISIL in Iraq and Syria under David Cameron 2014-2016

The purposes of this research to investigate how the UK's decision to engage militarily against ISIL, under Operation Shader, aligns with the principles of neoclassical realism. This research employs a qualitative methodology. The qualitative descriptive approach employed is one of data analysis. This approach is not limited to the presentation of numerical or statistical data. Instead, it focuses on the interpretation and description of the phenomenon under investigation, employing a narrative format. This approach prioritizes the collection of empirical evidence derived from observational studies, interviews, and the analysis of various documents. The results are how UK and US continues to defend itself against ISIL's presence and movements and seeks new strategies to drive them out of the international system.

Assessing Japan’s Taiwan Policy: Systemic Clarity, Political Survival and Bureaucratic Prudence

ABSTRACT What are the patterns of Japan’s foreign policy behavior toward Taiwan in the post-Cold War era? It is generally taken for granted that the origin of Japan’s foreign policy to Taiwan has been derived from a unitary strategic calculation related to East Asian international politics and its maritime security in the Asia-Pacific region. This conventional interpretation is insufficient. While external pressure and states’ relative material capabilities within the structure of the international system are crucial in explaining Japan’s policy toward Taiwan, interpretations based solely on the system level of analysis fail to provide a persuasive explanation of Japan’s foreign policy behavior. By conducting three case studies in 2006, 2019 and 2021 through the theoretical lens of neoclassical realism and empirical investigation based on primary and secondary Japanese-language sources, this article argues that Japan’s Taiwan policy has been shaped by the combination of three factors: the degree of systemic clarity at the international level, the Japanese prime minister’s political survival and bureaucratic prudence over the Taiwan issue at the domestic level. Since 2021, Japan has adopted a subtle approach to Taiwan, driven more by a defensive and precautionary response to the heightened sense of crisis across the Taiwan Strait.

Climate Diplomacy from a Neoclassical Realist Perspective: The Jordanian Model

This study aims to model Jordan’s climate diplomacy in light of neoclassical realism (NCR) theory as it uncovers how domestic and systemic factors shape Jordan’s multilevel strategy, in addition to testing the hypothesis that Jordan’s multilevel strategy combines local, institutional and national factors as part of its climate diplomacy. The data collected from various sources hypothesize that the multilevel climate response of small-income countries overlaps in a national and international way. The study found that Jordan’s act of internationalism is a systematic, long-term strategy that can play at various stages, and all levels have welded with one another in a spider’s web succession. Internationalism can be observed in Jordan’s active participation in mitigation-related activities through the Paris Agreement and the Green Climate Fund. NCR has proven to be a sound method to analyze the Jordanian case. The unique determinants and solutions for the case provide new ways to think about coping with climate change. At the same time, the central finding highlights the significance of future research on the role of domestic politics and external environmental conditions in shaping behaviour and in the international negotiations process in general. It contributes to the relevance of NCR in climate diplomacy. It expands its usefulness from the interest-based explanations of countries’ foreign policies in the international system to a broader scope of realism.

Towards NATO Membership: Looking into the End of Sweden's Neutrality Amidst Strategic Shift in Europe

The year 2022 marked the re-outbreak of a chaotic war, between Russia and Ukraine, in Eastern Europe. While military attacks between the two warring countries were not directed to countries around the region, and Sweden does not have a shared border with both countries, Sweden decided to apply for NATO membership a few months after the war began. This decision contradicted with Sweden’s long-standing tradition of neutrality in foreign affairs for almost two centuries. Using the framework of neoclassical realism along with the concept of alliance, the shifting stance is explained through systemic incentives and intervening variables, which comprised of (1) the inconsistency in the utilization of Russian military capabilities and (2) the European Union's defense challenges; (3) the Swedish military posture, (4) the Swedish Prime Minister's perception, and (5) the majority support within the Riksdag (Swedish Parliament). This research also indicates that Sweden’s neutrality would be maintained during international competition or the growth of alliances with significant power capabilities in the region. However, the neutrality did not extend to non-military aspects such as trade and transportation access.

Emotionality in Transboundary Water: A Case Study of Helmand River.

While a substantial body of literature perceives rationality as the only path for negotiations over the use of the transboundary shared watercourse, recent scholarship has unveiled the role of emotion in decision-making processes over the use of the shared water. This research aims to challenge the conventional approach-rationality-by exploring affective dynamics of the riparian nations of the Helmand River (shared between upstream Afghanistan and downstream Iran) and how decisions over the use of the shared Helmand River are ingrained in the emotional dispositions of the riparian nations. Taking an integrated approach combining emotional political ecology and neoclassical realism, this research unravels the intricate emotional dynamics of the riparian nations to the flow of the Helmand River. The staggering increase in water withdrawal-both surface and groundwater resources- coupled with the population growth, and adverse effects of climate changes has stimulated the negative emotional dispositions of the borderland communities- the sufferings of farming communities due to lack of access to water-resulting in water conflict escalation in the Helmand River Basin. Finally, it is asserted that negotiations over the use of Helmand River are considered to be ill-equipped unless emotionality and rationality-a pluralistic approach- are equally weighed or gauged in water allocation and utilization by the co-riparian nations.

Janus of Yeŋiçeri: Analysis of The Ambivalence of Turkey's Foreign Policy Toward Israel

This article aims to explain the ambivalence of Turkey's foreign policy towards Israel during President Erdoğan's leadership in 2014 – 2018. The problem that arises is: Why does Turkey implement a foreign policy that is ambivalent towards Israel? This article uses the theoretical basis of neoclassical realism and groupthink to solve the problem. The method used in this research is explanatory-qualitative with interviews. The findings in this research showed that the ambivalence in Turkish foreign policy towards Israel during President Erdoğan's leadership (2014 – 2018) was influenced by aspects of systemic international politics and local political dynamics as well as Neo-Ottoman views in the formulation of their national interests.

Quo Vadis, Historical International Relations? Geopolitical Marxism and the Promise of Radical Historicism

John Maclean’s 1988 call “Marxism and IR: A Strange Case of Mutual Neglect” has generated a rich bounty of Marxist studies and paradigms in International Relations (IR). This cross-pollination merged in the 1990s with the “historical turn” and shaped the sub-fields of International Historical Sociology and International Political Economy. But has it left its mark on how IR is practised today? We argue that while Marxism has spoken significantly to the discipline, mainstream IR, even Historical IR, has been largely impervious to Marxist arguments, drawing the standard charge of economism and structuralism. Rectifying these critiques, we suggest that conventional historical studies of “the international” remain methodologically and substantively impoverished. We exemplify this by showing how leading Historical IR studies of “systems change” fail to explain the inside/outside and public/private differentiations constitutive of the modern international order and to integrate the “levels of analysis” they presuppose. We further argue that this rejection has been facilitated by influential Marxist IR paradigms, which ultimately privilege structuralism over historicism: While Neo-Gramscians initially mobilised “historicism” to dissolve claims about the “sameness” of international relations across time and space, the approach became identified with the reified master-category of “hegemony”. Uneven and Combined Development, in turn, has gravitated towards matching Neo-realism’s claim to theoretical universality by insisting on transhistorical model-building and nomological “grand theory”. Both approaches remain over-sociologised and fail to address international politics. Drawing on radically historicist Political Marxism, this article shows how its substantive socio-political premises explain the historical formation of the contemporary international order and re-unite the “levels of analysis” theoretically to provide a framework for non-reductionist and non-economistic accounts of historical international relations. This requires an answer to the agentic challenge of Neo-Classical Realism by reincorporating grand strategy, diplomacy, and international politics into a reformulated perspective of Geopolitical Marxism to track the full historicity of the making of international orders.

China's Health Diplomacy Strategy During COVID-19 Crisis 2020-2022

In time of crisis like COVID-19 outbreak, China’s health diplomacy has become a spotlight in terms of its international momentum in dealing the virus. This research is important to know how health diplomacy can be used as an effective foreign policy. The research question in this paper asks how did China conduct health diplomacy during the COVID-19 crisis from 2020 to 2022. This research used descriptive and literature research methods by collecting secondary data from related research and international organization, WHO, as main source for COVID-19 data. The data were analyzed using neoclassical realism theory. Not to mention, there is not much literature that analyzes China's before until the recent "New Normal" situation. When COVID-19 emerge, it simultaneously transforms its health diplomacy into vaccine diplomacy that begins from the first outbreak of the virus. It underwent scrutiny and criticism from other countries as they were sceptical about whether it is purely on conducting global health diplomacy or China's way of promoting a strategic framework. It also has a clear intention that its action is also to appease the world view toward its role since the virus is from Wuhan, a city in China. This research concludes international system can affect state behaviour toward its relations with other countries by examining China's health diplomacy. Keywords: China’s Foreign Policy, Global Health Diplomacy, Vaccine Diplomacy

Afghanistan Through the Lens of Neo-Classical Realism

Afghanistan Through the Lens of Neo-Classical Realism