Realpolitik

Realpolitik is a German compound: real (real, practical, from Latin realis) + Politik (politics, from Greek politikē). The word was coined by the German journalist and politician Ludwig von Rochau in his 1853 book Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands ('Principles of Realpolitik, Applied to the Political Conditions of Germany'). Rochau was writing in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848, analyzing why the liberal idealists of the Frankfurt Parliament had been unable to achieve German unification. His answer was that they had subordinated the realities of power — military force, economic interest, institutional inertia — to abstract constitutional principles. 'Realpolitik,' for Rochau, was a diagnosis and a prescription: successful politics requires understanding and working with the actual distribution of power in a society, not with the distribution that ought to exist according to principle.

The word was taken up and implicitly practiced by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian statesman who achieved German unification between 1866 and 1871 through a combination of diplomatic maneuvering, selective wars, and strategic alliances that systematically set aside liberal and nationalist ideology in favor of Prussian state interests. Bismarck himself rarely used the term, but he became so strongly associated with the approach it named that Realpolitik and Bismarck are inseparable in historical memory. His foreign policy — engineering wars against Denmark, Austria, and France when he calculated they would serve Prussian consolidation — was the most celebrated and disturbing demonstration of the concept in nineteenth-century European history. The wars worked. Germany was unified. The idealists of 1848 had failed; the realist of 1866 succeeded. Realpolitik seemed vindicated.

English adopted Realpolitik in the late nineteenth century, initially in diplomatic and academic contexts, and then more broadly in the twentieth century as great-power politics made the concept increasingly central to public debate. The term entered American political discourse prominently in the 1970s through Henry Kissinger, who studied Bismarck's diplomacy as a Harvard scholar before applying Bismarckian logic as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Kissinger's rapprochement with China, détente with the Soviet Union, and general willingness to support authoritarian governments that served American strategic interests were widely described as Realpolitik — a word that captured both the logic of his approach and its moral cost. Kissinger embraced the identification; his critics used the same word as an accusation.

In contemporary usage, Realpolitik has become a general term for political calculation that subordinates ethical considerations to strategic ones — the willingness to deal with tyrants, to sacrifice allies, to pursue state interest at the expense of stated values. It is used both descriptively (as an analytical category) and normatively (sometimes approvingly, as pragmatic realism; sometimes critically, as moral abdication). The word carries a slight tang of cynicism in English, a sense that invoking it is an admission that the speaker has given up on the idea that politics should be guided by principle. This is somewhat unfair to Rochau, who meant something more nuanced: not that principles are irrelevant but that they must be reconciled with power if they are ever to be realized. The word has been simplified by usage, as useful words often are.