Abstract
In a telephone interview following Moscow’s decision to hold military exercises near the coasts of Cyprus in response to Ankara’s major EEZ provocations in October 2014, I asked former Foreign Minister George Iacovou his opinion on the “pragmatic idealist” reading of Russia’s Cyprus policies. He replied as follows:
Generally speaking, I find that it is primarily the interests of states that guide their foreign policies’ decisions and actions. And yet, idealism can also play a role. I believe that this is also the case in Russia’s policies towards Cyprus. Moscow can indeed behave towards Cyprus in a way that combines its interests with idealism; by which I do not mean, though, that it would go as far as to sacrifice its interests to help us.1
This reply is akin to my conception of the real nature of Russia-Cyprus relations.
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Notes
Quoted in William K. Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 96.
See Constantine Melakopides, “Ethics and International Relations: A Critique of Cynical Realism”, in David G. Haglund and Michael K. Hawes (eds.), World Politics: Power, Interdependence and Dependence (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Canada, 1990), pp. 506–30.
Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
Ibid., p. 191. Keohane’s own chapter is entitled “Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond”.
Ibid., p. 198. On pp. 198–9, Keohane continued: “The need to find a way out of the trap means that international relations must be a policy science as well as a theoretical activity … Realism helps us determine the strength of the trap, but does not give us much assistance in seeking to escape”.
The New York Times, 24 June 1941, p. 7, quoted in Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1984 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 6 (emphasis added).
The “usurpation” of Thucydides by political realism is stereotypical but, as Laurie M. Johnson Bugby has shown, unwarranted. See her “The Use and Abuse of Thucydides in International Relations”, International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 1, Winter 1994, pp. 131–53.
Henry Kissinger’s juxtaposition of Wilsonian idealism and Theordore Roosevelt’s power politics forms the remarkable second chapter to his Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). “The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson” should be studied both for its brilliant insights but also for its author’s evident effort to shake off the widespread conviction that he is an unmitigated “hawk”. His effort is betrayed, for instance, by the following far-fetched claim: “It is above all to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has marched since his watershed presidency, and continues to march to this day”(!) (p. 30).
Charles R. Beitz, “Recent International Thought”, International Journal (Toronto), Vol. XLIII, Spring 1988, p. 183, emphasis added.
Dorothy V. Jones, “The Declaratory Tradition in Modern International Law”, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds.), Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 44.
Ibid., p. 42. According to Jones, these nine principles are the sovereign equality of states; territorial integrity and political independence; equal rights and self-determination of peoples; non-intervention in the internal affairs of states; peaceful settlement of inter-state disputes; no threat or use of force; cooperation with other states; and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Ibid., pp. 44–5.
See Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially Ch. 6, pp. 246–312. Parenthetically, Pragmatic Idealism was published a year earlier than Wendt’s celebrated opus.
See, for instance, Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
For an informative introduction to critical theory, see Richard Devetak, “Critical Theory” in Scott Burchill and Andrew Limklater (eds.), Theories of International Relations (London and New York: Macmillan Press and St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 145–78.
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© 2016 Costas Melakopides
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Melakopides, C. (2016). Revisiting Pragmatic Idealism: Assumptions, Main Concepts, and Some “Neighbouring” Theoretical Structures. In: Russia-Cyprus Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347152_3
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