realism and liberalism
...erence. At that stage of the paper, after explaining what I call essence and nature, I will argue that ‘essences’ of those theories are –somewhat- different, but their ‘natures’ are identical. Liberalists were arguing that collective security would be the most influential mechanism to restore and preserve the peace. Besides the normative problems of liberalism, Carr was primarily concerned about the ‘sincerity’ of the liberalism. According to him ‘liberal internationalism’ was based on ‘the illusion of a world society possessing interests and sympathies in common’ and he argued that ‘these supposedly absolute and universal [liberal] principles (peace, harmony of interests, collective security, free trade) were not principles at all, but the unconscious reflections of national policy based on a particular interpretation of national interest at a particular time’. But Carr believed that what was claimed to be the ‘harmony of interests’ was nothing more than the selfish and particular interests of the elite within the satisfied powers: ‘just as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a vested interest of predominant powers’. As a conclusion, despite all the realist concepts such as anarchical international system, pursuit on national interests, balance of power, etc. [concepts which are associated to directly to ‘realism’ due to the ontological and epistemological distortion of ‘modern realists’] his comprehensive perspective was ‘the kind of explanation one could expect from a historian who believed that history was a sequence of cause and effect which could only be properly appreciated by intellectual effort’. Carr, as his intellectual ancestors such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau was naïve in his ontological and epistemological considerations. That is why I would prefer to classify Carr as a ‘traditional realist’ rather than ‘modern realist’. IS NEO-REALISM REALLY DIFFERENT FROM MODERN REALISM? In an historical analysis, one will notice that Waltz’ neo-realism is ‘a substantial intellectual extension of a theoretical tradition which ...