BPSC 134 Introduction to International Relations Solved Question Paper June 2026 for Bachelor of Arts (General) BAG

Classical realism is the oldest of the mainstream approaches to International Relations. It explains world politics as a struggle for power that grows out of human nature itself. Its roots lie in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Kautilya's Arthashastra, Machiavelli's The Prince and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

In the twentieth century, E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939) attacked the idealism of the interwar years. Hans J. Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations (1948) then gave classical realism its best-known form through six principles of political realism.

Morgenthau's six principles

1. Objective laws: Politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws rooted in human nature. Because human nature does not change, a rational theory of politics is possible.
2. Interest defined as power: The central concept is interest defined in terms of power. It lets the observer think as a statesman thinks and keeps politics separate from economics, ethics or religion.
3. Interest is not fixed in content: Interest as power is a universal category, but what it means at a given time depends on the political and cultural setting in which foreign policy is made.
4. Morality filtered through circumstance: Universal moral principles cannot be applied to state action in the abstract. Prudence, the weighing of the consequences of an action, is the supreme virtue in politics.
5. No nation owns morality: The moral aspirations of a particular nation are not the moral laws of the universe. Realism warns against crusades that dress national interest in moral language.
6. Autonomy of the political sphere: The realist asks one question of every policy: how does it affect the power of the nation? Other standards are kept below the political one.

Beyond Morgenthau's list, classical realists share a few working assumptions. The state is the main actor. The international system is anarchic because there is no world government above states, so each state must rely on self-help. Survival and national interest come first, and the balance of power is the main device that keeps order among rival states.

Classical realism is also pessimistic about human nature. Morgenthau traced conflict to the animus dominandi, the human lust for power, and Reinhold Niebuhr wrote of human sinfulness. This is what separates classical realism from neo-realism, which places the cause of conflict in the anarchic structure of the system rather than in people.

Critics say the idea of power is too vague to measure, that the approach ignores non-state actors, economics and cooperation through institutions, and that claims about human nature cannot be tested. Liberals and constructivists add that state interests can change over time.

Even so, classical realism remains the starting point of the discipline. Its principles, above all national interest defined as power and the value of prudence, still shape how foreign policy is studied and practised.

Constructivism is an approach to International Relations which holds that the world of states is shaped by shared ideas, beliefs and norms, not by material power alone. Nicholas Onuf introduced the term in World of Our Making (1989). Alexander Wendt's article "Anarchy is What States Make of It" (1992) and his book Social Theory of International Politics (1999) made it a mainstream theory.

The approach gained ground after the Cold War ended peacefully, an outcome that neither realism nor liberalism had predicted. Other leading constructivists include Friedrich Kratochwil, John Ruggie, Peter Katzenstein and Martha Finnemore. Its salient features are as follows.

1. Social construction of reality: Facts such as sovereignty, borders or the state exist because people collectively accept them. Wendt's well-known example is that 500 British nuclear weapons worry the United States less than 5 North Korean ones, because the two relationships carry different meanings.
2. Identities shape interests: Interests are not fixed in advance or given by power alone. A state's identity, built through interaction with others, tells it what it wants. A state that sees another as a friend behaves differently from one that sees it as a rival.
3. Anarchy is what states make of it: Anarchy has no single logic. Wendt describes three cultures of anarchy: Hobbesian (enemies), Lockean (rivals) and Kantian (friends). Which culture prevails depends on how states treat one another.
4. Agents and structures make each other: States and the international system constitute each other. States produce the system through their practices, and the system in turn shapes state identities.
5. Norms define actors: Norms do more than regulate behaviour; they also define who actors are. Constructivists speak of a "logic of appropriateness", where states act as their identity and shared rules say they should, as with the spread of the norm against colonial rule.
6. Change is possible: Because structures rest on ideas, they can change when ideas change. Gorbachev's "new thinking" in the late 1980s is the standard example of new ideas reshaping superpower relations.
7. A middle ground in theory: Constructivism stands between rationalist theories (realism and liberalism) and reflectivist ones such as post-modernism. It accepts that a real world exists but studies it through meanings, often with interpretive and historical methods.

Critics argue that ideas and identities are hard to measure, that constructivism explains change better after it happens than before, and that Wendt's version remains as state-centric as realism.

Still, constructivism added a social dimension to the study of International Relations. By showing that identities, norms and interests are built rather than given, it explains both continuity and change in world politics.