Game Theory - Realism

Marx posited that a society's material development dictated its political system, so back in the bad old days you'd have slave states, and then those would develop and workers would become more productive and skilled and demand an upgrade to vassal status, and so on through industrialization and the great proletariat revolution.  I think you could apply the same reasoning to political theories. 

After all, you'd have to have something like the Concert of Europe or United Nations happen before coming up with neoliberal institutionalism rather than vice versa, correct?  And you could hardly have Marxism without the industrial revolution.  So with that reasoning, our oldest theory of international relations would be based on the most primitive society.

The reason I bring this up is because I started a new game of Civ V earlier this week, and quickly realized "Wow, I'm playing this as a realist."

The Civilization series is a much-beloved and lauded turn-based strategy game, in which players take control of one of the world's great nations, leading their civilization through thousands of years of history: war, diplomacy, trade, and all that good stuff.  The game ends when you establish your civilization as a cultural hegemon, complete a spaceship capable of reaching Alpha Centauri, become recognized as diplomatic leader of the world, or just kill everyone else.

There could be anything out there, better pack your club.

But that's the late game.  You start off with one settler capable of founding your capital, one unit of stone age warriors to scout or defend your territory, and a whole bunch of unexplored map around you.  And that's where realism comes in.

Realism is a cynical theory of international relations that can be summed up in one word: power.  The world is a dangerous place, filled with jerks out to advance themselves at your expense, and since there's no moral or legal authority that can protect you, the only way to play the game is to do unto others before they do you in.  You have to be strong enough to defend yourself, and strong enough to assert yourself, and you can't afford to be squeamish about what you'll need to do.

This is incidentally a pretty good summation of the first two or three thousand years of your average game of Civilization V.  The player explores, uncovering new lands for future settlement, or ancient ruins to plunder.  Eventually you'll bump into other units, sometimes belonging to other civilizations, sometimes barbarians that will attack you on sight.  If you lose your early military, or send it trotting off to the other side of a continent, you face a very real danger of being overwhelmed by barbarians before settling your second city.  Even when you've gotten started, barbarians will periodically spawn somewhere you can't see them and come raid your territory.

What's England's angle?

This isn't to say that you're safe if your neighbors belong to a proper civilization.  Your rivals may always try for an early knock-out, and sometimes the only warning you'll get is a declaration of war immediately before their units cross your borders.  If your neighbor has a name like "Attila" or "Montezuma," you should know to watch them carefully, but other faction leaders are less transparently aggressive, and therefore less predictable.  They may totally ignore you for a millennium only to launch a blitz once they think your guard is down, and have a mean poker face.

The solution, of course, is to play as a realist.  Maintain a big enough army to defend yourself, or even better, to launch a counter-invasion if anyone tries something.  Expand aggressively, claiming choice lands before your neighbor can, even if this stresses your research or economy - better to have a large but struggling empire rather than a small successful state surrounded by a potential enemy.  When someone gets cozy with a nearby independent city-state, drop enough money on it to ensure that it only works with you - or maybe conquer it.  If you scatter a barbarian camp and find that the savages have captured a rival's settler, don't return it, keep it for yourself as a worker - otherwise they'll have one more city to their name, in lands you might have wanted for yourself.

Now Civilization is only a game, and in real life there's no handy pop-up designating which group of shaggy armed men in the distance are hostile barbarians and which are not-yet-hostile scouts belonging to a neighboring civilization.  But it's easy to see why realism emerged so early in human history, so that a force from Athens explained to the people of Melos that their city-state was being conquered because Athens was stronger, and would look weak if it let Melos remain independent, and wouldn't tolerate the possibility of Melos joining another empire.  Even in Classical Greece the world was a dangerous place, where invaders could burst upon you from beyond the borders of the map, and no distant power was going to save you.

The thing is, though, that as a game of Civ goes on, it changes.  Unclaimed territories get settled, so there's less land-grabbing (if more coveting of settled lands).  Barbarians eventually disappear as your borders expand and the lands around your city are brought under control.  More importantly, you start to figure out your neighbors: you realize that the Netherlands is mainly interested in trade, England's too busy with chronic barbarian problems to have a real international agenda, China is a non-issue since they settled in a miserable desert, and Germany is going to spend the entire time bitching about that time you built a city near it back at the start of the game, and will probably try and take it at some point.

Deutsch douche.

More importantly, the world system evolves as well.  Civilizations gain the ability to form alliances with each other, making war a riskier option.  Nations form blocs based on their shared ideologies.  A World Congress emerges with the potential to discipline international troublemakers through trade embargoes and other measures.  Technology and other developments can make armed conflict counter-productive, or offer civilizations new avenues for victory that don't involve brute strength.  While it's possible to continue playing like a realist, new options will emerge to allow different, less cynical strategies.

And that's how it happened in the real world, with the aforementioned neoliberalism and Marxism and constructivism and so forth emerging as history got increasingly interesting over the last few centuries.  We built international regimes, came up with new ways of looking at the world, and some of us decided that maybe you could let morality or values dictate your politics, or work with other states to make the world something other than a zero-sum game.

The thing is, realism still exists.  Thucydides wrote "The Melian Dialogue" back in the day, Machiavelli wrote The Prince sometime before 1513, and Morgenthau wrote Politics Among Nations in 1948.  Obama, for all his liberal rhetoric at home and abroad, has a firm grasp of realpolitik when it comes to implementing the Obama Not-A-Doctrine.  And I think that's the difference between Marxism's view of history and how realism and other theories developed.

Marxism is pretty deterministic, with politics being dictated by economics, and history developing towards a specific goal, after which it will end in an eternal classless paradise.  You don't slip up and go from industrialism back to feudalism, or heavens forbid backslide into capitalism from communism.  But while political theories emerge based on world developments, they don't supersede each other in the same way - you can be an international institutionalist up until the League of Nations sits on its hands while a foreign empire invades, after which point realism may start to look quite sensible.  And even if states are performing similar actions, they may ascribe different reasoning for them - some may say they're working with others based on their shared liberal values, others may bluntly admit that they're balancing a more powerful rival. 

Political theories are just ways of conceptualizing the world, play styles.  And while it takes a lot of technological advancement to win a Space Race Victory, and you have to create the United Nations before a Diplomatic Victory is possible, a Domination Victory is available from turn one.  It'd be nice to know that none of your potential rivals are going for that military victory, but since there's no way of knowing, well... like Morgenthau said, “If the desire for power cannot be abolished everywhere in the world, those who might be cured would simply fall victim to the power of others.” 

Might be good to keep some spearmen standing by in your cities, just in case.