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Realpolitik: A History , John Bew (New York : Oxford University Press , 2015), 408 pp., $27.95 cloth.
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Realpolitik is back--or if not back, at least enjoying a day in the sun more fully than it has for several decades. Chastened by the "return" of history in the new millennium, politicians, policymakers, and commentators now routinely acknowledge the value of a little more realpolitik in foreign affairs. More strikingly, and in many eyes troublingly, liberal visions across the globe are now confidently challenged by those who proclaim the inescapability and even the superior morality of realpolitik: from the "new authoritarians" to their admirers in what once seemed the European liberal "paradise" and beyond.
John Bew's Realpolitik: A History steps bravely, though not without its own agenda, into this tumult. To understand the attraction, the pitfalls, as well as the confusion surrounding this powerful term, Bew undertakes an impressively wide-ranging survey of its meanings and uses over more than a century and a half. The story begins with a paradox: despite its prominence in international affairs and foreign policy, realpolitik first emerged as a reflection on domestic politics; and although it is commonly perceived as critical of liberalism, its genesis was in the service of liberal politics.
While this may surprise those who see realpolitik as being as old as politics itself, Bew insists that it is a distinctly modern word and idea, first articulated in the fertile if generally ignored Principles of Realpolitik, penned by Ludwig August von Rochau in 1853. In the hands of von Rochau, realpolitik was born out of reflections of idealistic German liberal nationalists on the failure of the revolutions of 1848. Ideals, these thinkers soon came to understand, were an essential but insufficient foundation for successful political action. What was also required was a clear-eyed appreciation of power in politics: of the economic dynamics, social forces, and political structures prevailing in a particular society, and of the strategies they demanded.
Yet, just as these liberals had failed in their revolutionary ambitions, so too...