Jan Pieter Beetz (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Practice makes Perfect, or at Least More Realistic. On a Contribution of Political Realism to International Political Theory

In an age of globalization, the rise of International Political Theory (IPT) can hardly come as a surprise. Economic, technological, political and social developments act as catalysts for a new set of normative questions. The core task of normative political philosophy is to prescribe desirable forms of politics. On the one hand, this concerns the question what should a political order achieve? The contemporary debate surrounds the concept of justice, often understood in socio-economic terms. On the other hand, political philosophers reflect on the question of political legitimacy. When do subjects have to accept rule over them as authority?[1] The real-world developments that animate IPT, such as climate change or the legitimacy of European integration, require political philosophers to answer these questions in a novel and dynamic environment. My claim is that the dominant methodological approaches to reflect upon these normative questions – ‘idealism’ and ‘empiricism’ – are ill suited for the task at hand. These methods remain largely insensitive to the novel context or rely on a static account thereof. An international political theory that aims to contribute toward solutions should methodologically accommodate the dynamic environment at every stage. In this article, I propose that political realism offers a particularly attractive practice-dependent method to theorize norms in this dynamic context. I will illustrate my claim through an application of this method to a salient political challenge in IPT: the EU’s democratic deficit.