● Thucydides trap

○ Fear drives nations to war, mistrust

○ Limited room to maneuver
○ Cannot respond to the shift of power balance by decreasing strength
○ International politics is driven by laws of history
○ Classical realism
○ “The Athenian perspective on the issue of morals is the following, the Athenians
say, right as the world goes is only in question between equals and power, while
the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. So we see that
according to the first statements or the classical religious tradition, their morasl
and their rights, and that justice can exist only between equals and power.”
○ Edward Hallet Carr
■ Morality and politics is not derived from normal morality in relations
between people
● Decline of classical tradition
○ Universal state civilization, pax romana
○ Eternal war between the civilized world and uncivilized periphery
○ Chinese empire never considered neighbors as equals
○ Christian universalism
○ Christian tradition viewed history as a permanent transformation
○ Kingdom of heaven
○ Renaissance returned the classic tradition of IR
○ Renaissance was the birth of first centralized states, westphalia
○ Niccolo machiavelli
● New kind of realism
○ Conflict emerges not when interests are different, but when two powers want the
same thing
○ Decline of the authority of the roman pope
○ The prince, published ten years after it was written because of opposition from
the Church
■ War should be the only study of a prince
■ Classical realism, war is the normal condition, because states are always
in competition
■ Every solution, victory, or compromise is only preparation for another war
■ The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a
necessity of the present.
■ “any prince responsible for his country, for his state, must give any
promises to the other countries and has no moral responsibility with
regard to the others, he has only one more responsibility is to protect his
power, and is to protect the people who live in his country”
■ Politics has no relation to morality
■ “one cannot approach politics with a normal human attitude to the
questions like morals, justice, humanism, and the other important things
which exist between the people within the society”
■ Only power matters, rulers must be ruthless
■ Morality and ethics is an indicator that a ruler is incompetent
○ Thomas Hobbes
■ Human beings lived in the condition of war against everyone
■ people seek to escape the state of nature to achieve personal security
and to find a solution, and the solution is to establish state
■ Hobbes suggested placing old power to a certain sovereign state, which
he calls Leviathan, a state authority or supreme ruler, that would maintain
order and end anarchy
■ Without order, no economic development, art, or knowledge is possible. It
leads to establishment of a social contract
■ “This is a very important difference between liberal and realist
tradition. For the realist, the most important unit is the state under
the government, for the liberals, this is the individual.”
■ The dilemma between internal order and international anarchy.
● Internal order is the reason for international anarchy
● Kings and princes are jealous of each other, like gladiators
● Consistent espionage against neighbors
● “one of the main reasons for rivalry and competition between the
states is their independence.”
● More the states are independent, more they are capable to
compete with the others
● “the main purpose of the state policy, according to the realist
tradition, is survival, because the states are the gladiators. They
need to survive, and they need to use all means in order to
survive”
● achievement of personal security and domestic security for the
creation of a state leads to international insecurity, which is rooted
in the anarchy of the state system
● “Therefore, anarchy is a normal and eternal state of the
international system”
● Inspired by the thirty year war
● Habsburgs represented the idea of universalism
● Thirty years war was a war against the habsburg hegemony
○ Led to the westphalian peace