Fo' Realizm

To echo what was said in class, I too found it interesting that much of Tuesday was spent trying to refute Machiavelli’s relevance today, and yet in Friday’s class everyone agreed that- as Adam says in his post, “Culture, alliances, subservience, military strength, geography, and economic power were all ideas proposed for how various states secure their borders and continue to exist and flourish.”
Machievelli – 1
PTJ’s Class – 0
That being said, there has been one fundamental change in the world since 1513. As Dustin mentioned, the rise of democracy. No longer are nations governed by squabbling royalty. The people have a much larger say in the way the world is run. However, I don’t think Machiavelli completely overlooked this. He writes:
“A new prince has never been known to disarm his subjects, on the contrary, when he has found them disarmed he has always armed them, for by arming them these arms become your own, those that you suspected become faithful and those that were faithful remain so, and from being merely subjects become your partisans.”
Fast-forward 500 years. We are still partisan and loyal to our nation-states. We still value our identity both culturally and nationally. Both when Newt Gingrich was speaking last week and in our SIS Gateway class we’ve been asked how many of us view ourselves as “citizens of the world” over American citizens. Personally, I certainly see myself as an American before a global citizen. Though it may be trendy to be anti-establishment, a sense of unity and pride in our culture is important in keeping a nation-state together. This might be what ultimately keeps organizations like the EU from overtaking "traditional" nation-states. An example being Ireland's citizens voting against the Lisbon Treaty (if the Irish had been voting as "citizens of the EU" it would have been in their interests to pass it).
The Layne article claims that the US should pursue offshore balancing, that it would mean we no longer had an obligation to provide humanitarian aid, that we could “pass the buck” to other nations to deal with larger issues, and that the US would benefit from rivalries- economic or otherwise- between Europe and China. Yet it is our very cultural ideology that makes this unacceptable. We support our allies not just for their economic benefit to us but for the ideologies we share, lend a helping hand to developing nations, and try to be the “compassionate” superpower. The current administration notwithstanding, we generally accomplish this, which has – just as the Realists predict- made and kept the US the greatest superpower the world has known.
Realism is not the foolproof, perfect ideology everyone’s looking for, but we can definitely draw from it that the nation-state’s cultural legitimacy and territorial security is paramount.