Matthew Specter’s The Atlantic Realists

In The Atlantic Realists, Matthew Specter sets out to historicize a tradition of international thought—realism—whose defining feature may be its claim to exist outside history. The book “conducts a genealogy of the realist paradigm in North Atlantic international thought” (2), asking “how [realist] intellectuals… [came] to believe that specific theories offered a privileged glimpse of international ‘reality’” (2). Indeed, readers will be familiar with realism and the set of concepts—national interest, power-politics, grand strategy, geopolitics—that structure the realist approach to understanding international affairs. Born across what the British historian and early realist E.H. Carr called Europe’s “Twenty Years’ Crisis” between 1919 and 1939, and elaborated during the Cold War by intellectuals based in the United States, realism has defined itself as both an academic tradition and a set of long-inherited wisdom. Earlier sources of this wisdom, we are told, range from Herodotus and Machiavelli to Hobbes and Bismarck.

Specter, by contrast, argues that a key strand of the “Atlantic realist tradition” emerged through historically specific conditions between Germany and the United States from the 1890s into the twentieth century. Rather than a universally applicable body of received wisdom, this strand of realism becomes, in Specter’s account, the product of transatlantic intellectual exchanges occasioned by the simultaneous emergence of Germany and the United States on the world’s stage during the fin-de-siècle. The Atlantic Realists offers this chronology as a revision to other accounts of realism’s emergence, which prioritize the disillusionment of the Interwar years and the early Cold War crucible. In so doing, it joins a fruitful revisionist strain of international history, which has emphasized the crucial imperial context for the origins of twentieth-century international thought and institutions.

The argument itself unfolds across seven chapters, which proceed roughly chronologically and orbit key figures in a genealogy of realism: Alfred Thayer Mahan and Friedrich Ratzel; Karl Haushofer, Carl Schmitt and Isaiah Bowman; Wilhelm Grewe and Hans Morgenthau. In its aim to problematize and historicize the genealogy of Atlantic realism, the book is undoubtedly successful and will prove important reading for historians of empire, international thought and international law, and the Cold War, as well as historians of Germany and the United States. The chapter on Wilhelm Grewe (Chapter 4) is a particularly interesting intervention into ongoing debates about German-American intellectual exchanges during the late Weimar and early Nazi years—debates supercharged by a broader recent interest in transnational fascism.

Three of the book’s innovations will be especially fertile ground for scholars working further afield. First, Specter persuasively argues that the seeds of realist thought lay not in the Realpolitik of Otto von Bismarck but, instead, the inter-imperial competition that marked the turn of the twentieth century. Historians interested in the expansion and eclipse of empire in Europe, the United States, and Japan will find much of interest in this argument, which unfolds across the first two chapters. Second, building on this earlier chronology, Specter uses the book’s middle chapters to “tie the discussion of realism to the historiography of classical geopolitics” (12). Given its contemporary vogue, “geopolitics” demands a more extensive critical historiographical treatment, to which Specter has offered a key contribution. Third, among the book’s most piercing analyses is its critical focus on the realist “habitus,” a way of being and seeing that underlay realism’s epistemological claims. The byword for this habitus is often the German “Haltung,” that is, a clear-eyed “stance,” “attitude,” or “posture” toward the supposed harsh, universal realities of politics. Specter argues that, much like realist thought, the realist Haltung was a historically specific construction that sought to masquerade in universalist get-up.

Among the book’s central challenges is to conduct a genealogy on a “school” of thought whose thinkers did not always identify with the realist paradigm. The scale of this task is particularly relevant in the book’s first two chapters, which uncover the origins of a realist tradition avant la lettre. Specter makes a compelling case that the central problems of twentieth-century realist thought should be traced not to Bismarckian Realpolitik, but to the world-historical concerns of German Weltpolitik (literally “world policy”) and other fin-de-siècle imperial ambitions. However, this argument necessarily omits the strong strain of liberal thinking that suffused Weltpolitik. “Liberal” here meaning self-consciously modern, inspired by a racial “civilizing mission,” and optimistic about the opportunities afforded by imperial expansion and economic integration. Specter thus offers a reading of Weltpolitik that could have engaged more thoroughly with recent scholarship on Imperial Germany’s global ambitions, especially Erik Grimmer-Solem’s 2019 book Learning Empire.[1] Doubtless, Weltpolitik both drew on and fed a set of Social Darwinian discourses about power and inter-imperial struggle. But those discourses, and Weltpolitik in general, contained a prominent liberal component that does not appear in Specter’s account. There is a reason Weltpolitik proved especially popular not only with geographers and political theorists, but also with economists, determined to carve for Germany a prominent place in a globalized world of economic winners and losers.

This line of thought spilled into the Interwar period and beyond, through figures like the economist Bernhard Harms, whose work on Weltwirtschaft (“world economics”) and imperial competition would argue that Germany should pursue both a continental bloc and intensified international economic exchange.[2] Indeed, until 1929 Weimar Germany’s most prominent foreign policy expert—the Chancellor-turned-Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann—was an exponent of this liberal tradition in German nationalism, which celebrated imperial and international interconnection as a lever for national interests. Specter refers to Stresemann as a “Social Democratic foreign minister” (142). He was in fact a member, indeed, the Chairman, of the right-liberal, nationalist, pro-business Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party). After 1919, the Deutsche Volkspartei provided a political home for Germany’s disappointed former free-trade and liberal imperialists. The liberal strain of Weltpolitik endowed German politics with a long-enduring patrimony. As Kristina Spohr’s recent biography of Helmut Schmidt and William Gray’s work on West Germany as a “trading power” indicate, the Federal Republic’s return to international political relevance in the 1960s and 1970s drew on this tradition of Atlantic liberalism, as well as Atlantic realism.[3]

If anything, this criticism would seem to underline the success of Specter’s central aim—that is, to historicize a realist tradition in international relations whose discursive force often rests on claims to human nature and permanence. That, in Germany, the realist outlook was contested and forged in conjunction with a robust liberal imperialist/liberal internationalist tradition highlights the contingency of Atlantic realist thought. In this sense, The Atlantic Realists is essential reading for international historians and international relations scholars. Identifying the era of fin-de-siècle imperial “mimesis and rivalry,” especially that between the United States and Germany, is an argument at once compelling and counterintuitive.[4] Nevertheless, what might be learned from a study that paired the Atlantic realist and liberal traditions? The story of Interwar-era geopolitics, for example, seems to suggest a dialectical relationship between an increasingly unstable, networked world and new mental maps that seek the certainty of space. Might the contemporary return to geopolitics—be it Putin’s Eurasian pretensions, China’s Belt and Road initiative, or the United States’ protectionism—indicate a similar process: not the triumphant, natural wisdom of geography but anxiety about geopolitics’ inability to grasp an increasingly interconnected world? The Atlantic Realists excavates the history of a field often considered transhistorical, and in so doing makes possible further inquiry into these central questions of twentieth and twenty-first century international thought.

[1] Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[2] Bernhard Harms, Volkswirtschaft und Weltwirtschaft. Versuch der Begründung einer Weltwirtschaftslehre (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1912).

[3] Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); William Glenn Gray, Trading Power: West Germany’s Rise to Global Influence, 1963-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

[4] Jeremy Adelman, “Mimesis and Rivalry: European Empires and Global Regimes,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 1 (March 2015): 77-98.