- This article is about the generic foreign affairs term. See The National Interest for the political journal.
The national interest, often referred to by the French term raison d'État, is a country's goals and ambitions whether economic, military, or cultural. The notion is an important one in international relations where pursuit of the national interest is the foundation of the realist school.
The national interest of a state is multi faceted. Primary is the state's survival and security. Also important is the pursuit of wealth and economic growth and power. Many states, especially in modern times, regard the preservation of the nation's culture as of great importance.
In early human history the national interest was usually viewed as secondary to that of religion or morality. To engage in a war rulers needed to justify the action in these contexts. Many authors believe that the first thinker to advocate for the primacy of the national interest is Niccolò Machiavelli, though this question has been largely debated. The practice is first seen as being employed by France in the Thirty Years' War when it intervened on the Protestant side, despite its own Catholicism, to block the increasing power of the Holy Roman Empire. The notion of the national interest soon came to dominate European politics that became fiercely competitive over the next centuries. States could now openly embark on wars purely out of self-interest. Mercantilism can be seen as the economic justification of the aggressive pursuit of the national interest.
There are many who would disagree with this, however, finding the argument anachronistic. Historian Benedict Anderson demonstrates in "Imagined Communities", his seminal treatise on the origins and history of the phenomenon of nationalism, that prior to the late 18th century, the concept of nationhood was unconceivable and that the political sentiments held by Machiavelli and Cardinal Richelieu, to take from the examples of the preceding paragraph, were substantively different from nationalist sentiments. Machiavelli's Florence was an independent polity with an identity and ambitions independent of any concept of Italian-ness; the invention of Italy, as anything other than a vague geo-political and historical concept, was yet to come. The geography now known as Italy was, at Machiavelli's time, a politically and culturally diverse collection of polities and dependencies with no shared sense of common history, destiny or culture. The Italian peninsula was just as culturally and historically Greek, Germanic and Frankish as it was Florentine and Machiavelli's strategic thought was not rooted in nationalist ambitions for glory or protection. What Machiavelli advanced was a ruthless political paternalism, something world leaders in Machiavelli's future, a nationalized future he could not have conceived of, borrowed liberally from and put to the service of nationalist ambitions. Cardinal Richelieu, likewise, did not have a nationalistic sense of Frenchness at heart when he strategized to increase the power of the King for whom he worked. In both of these cases, the conflation of the term "nation" with the concept of the "nation-state", and then the conflation of the "nation-state" with the concept of the polity (that is to say, the use of the term "nation" to mean any sovereign political organization at all) is the stumbling block here.
A foreign policy geared towards pursuing the national interest is the foundation of the realist school of international relations. The realist school reached its greatest heights at the Congress of Vienna with the practice of the balance of powers, which amounted to balancing the national interest of several great and lesser powers. Metternich was celebrated as the principal artist and theoretician of this balancing but he was simply doing a more or less clean copy of what his predecessor Kaunitz had already done by reversing so many of the traditional Habsburg alliances and building international relations anew on the basis of national interest instead of religion or tradition.
These notions became much criticized after the bloody debacle of the First World War, and the concept of the balance of power was replaced with the idea of collective security, whereby all members of the League of Nations would "consider an attack upon one as an attack upon all," thus deterring the use of violence forevermore. The League of Nations did not work, partially because the United States refused to join and partially because, in practice, nations did not always find it "in the national interest" to deter each other from the use of force.
The events of World War II led to a rebirth of Realist and then Neo-realist thought, as international relations theorists re-emphasized the role of power in global governance. Many IR theorists blamed the weakness of the League of Nations for its idealism (contrasted with Realism) and ineffectiveness at preventing war, even as they blamed mercantilist beggar-thy-neighbor policies for the creation of fascist states in Germany and Italy. With hegemonic stability theory, the concept of the U.S. national interest was expanded to include the maintenance of open sea lanes and the maintenance and expansion of free trade.
Today, the concept of "the national interest" is often associated with political Realists who wish to differentiate their policies from "idealistic" policies that seek either to inject morality into foreign policy or promote solutions that rely on multilateral institutions which might weaken the independence of the state. As considerable disagreement exists in every country over what is or is not in "the national interest," the term is as often invoked to justify isolationist and pacifistic policies as to justify interventionist or warlike policies.
One of the most notable recent realists is the former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was a great fan of Metternich.
National Interest
International relations are built upon two different concepts: realism and idealism. Political idealists believe that international politics should be governed by ideals, morals, or ethics. Political realists on the other hand believe that international politics should be motivated for the desire for security, or military and economic power. Essentially political realists believe our foreign policy should be governed by our national interest.
A state’s national interest can be defined as a given state’s goals whether they be military, economical, political, or cultural.
Although national interest is a realist term that is not to say that by asserting our national interest one is without morals:
To say that a political action has no moral purpose is absurd; for a political action can be defined as an attempt to realize moral values through the medium of politics, that is, power. The relevant moral question concerns the choice among different moral values, and it is at this point that the realist and the utopian part company again. If an American statesman must choose between the promotion of universal liberty, which is a moral good, at the risk of American security and, hence, of liberty in the Unites States, on the one hand, and the promotion of universal liberty, on the other, which choice ought he make? The utopian will not face the issue squarely and will deceive himself into believing that he can achieve both goods at the same time. The realist will choose the national interest on both moral and pragmatic grounds; for if he does not take care of the national interest nobody else will, and if he puts American security and liberty in jeapordy the cause of liberty everywhere will be impaired.[1]
Foreign policies that are governed by morals and not a state’s national interest are bound to fail. In domestic politics it is possible to have moral ideals guide policy making. That is because the state has a “uniform” or “universal” set of morals. The morals in the US for instance are different then the set of morals the people in the state of Saudi Arabia hold. For this reason when a state appeals to “moral principles” in the international arena that idea is vague because there is no universal moral set: “In consequence, the appeal to moral principles by the representative of a nation vis-à-vis another nation signifies something fundamentally different from a verbally identical appeal made by an individual member of the same national society. The appeal to moral principles in the international sphere has no concrete universal meaning."[2]
Given this concept it is essential that a state always thinks first of its national interests before that of another state or other international actors. Political realists often refer to the world we live in as anarchic. Anarchy literally means there is an absence of laws, therefore in an anarchic system all states must fend for themselves. In a system like this then it is essential for states to put their national interest first. “Self preservation both for the individual and societies is, however, not only a biological and psychological necessity but, in the absence of an overriding moral obligation, a moral duty as well.”[3] From this point of view then international law and policies fall below a given state’s national interest.
The national interest is therefore a concept that justifies both the constitutional independence of the sovereign state, and implies a political relation binding the general will to the autonomy of the state. To pursue the national interest, the state must be independent of external obligations, but, in the words of George Kennan, also ‘from the demands emancipating from the rough and tumble of its own society.[4]
Therefore, when President George W Bush pulled out of the International Criminal Court and withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol he could cite our nations national interest as a reason to overstep international law. However, what makes the national interest difficult is because at times it is difficult to decipher what exactly the national interest is. Many people could argue that by removing the US from the ICC and the Kyoto Protocol President Bush was not acting in our national interests. Our national interest can only be determined by the amount of information a policy maker has, which at times can be little.
At times there are disagreements between two states given conflicting states national interest. It is then up to decision makers within the two states to attempt to compromise and accommodate as much of their own national interests as possible, while being flexible.
The task of ascertaining what one’s own nation needs and wants in order to be secure, and what the other nation needs and wants in order to be secure, and whether there is inescapable conflict or the possibility of accommodation between these needs and wants—this task is an intellectual one, the highest of those constructive tasks which the Hamiltons, the Pitts, the Cannings, the Disraelis, and the Churchills face and solve, and whose existence is ignored by amateurs.[5]
At times, however, different states or states and international actors cannot compromise and a clash cannot be settled through peaceful methods such as diplomacy. This can be considered the case between Nazi Germany and Britain and France during World War II. Recently one can attribute this to the US governments unwillingness to negotiate with terrorist organizations.
See also
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