In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John J. Mearsheimer lays out certain principles that form of the basis of his theory of "Offensive Realism". The first is the fact of international anarchy, that there is no worldly power that stands above the nation-state. Vanquished nation-states that cannot protect themselves are at the mercy of the Victors. Second, nation-states are faced with the uncertainty of the intentions of their rivals. No nation can be secure that its enemies are not plotting against them, and so all nations must assume the worst. The only way that a nation-state can confidently be secure is to amass a relative level of military and economic supremacy over its rivals. Thus, invariably, each nation-state plots to increase its relative power over its enemies and competitors, that is to attain hegemony. If a nation can achieve hegemony, it will be (relatively) safe so long as it lasts. Because all nations are constantly competing against one another for military and political dominance, when the smoke clears, what emerges is an international balance of power.
Mearsheimer notes that the will to power is primarily a means to the end of survival. Ironically, in a nuclear age, the means poses the risk of negating the end. But it is important to note that a nation is motivated by a conservative interest, survival, not a revolutionary interest of usurpation. This phenomenon can also be observed in sub-national groups. The upshot is that those individuals with a revolutionary program must be mindful that most large groups or institutions will not be brought into the folds of a revolutionary struggle unless they perceive an existential threat to their existence from the status quo. An expansionist nation-state that is perceived to threaten other nations will provoke an alliance against it for its defeat and/or containment. Likewise, an elite group that, through their mismanagement of the affairs of state, succeeds in provoking a sense of existential threat in the wrong sub-national groups will place itself, and the stability of the nation-state, in great peril. The choice of a domestic enemy is always a delicate one for a ruling elite, and it is not without accident that historically the public target is a relatively powerless one that the people can rally behind. A competent elite group that governs with restraint based out of a concern for the common good will court less resistance.
For example, the American civil war was fueled by the anxieties of white laborers created by the expansion of slavery into the territories. White laborers feared the "outsourcing" of paid labor to slaves would erode the economic conditions of white laborers, reducing them in effect to wage slaves. The Dred Scott decision rendered by the Supreme Court reaffirmed these anxieties, that the Court and the Federal Government would support the big banks financing the slavery system and the capitalist slave owning class (slaves being capital goods) at the expense of workers. Had the Federal Government been more effective in restraining the roll out of the plantation economy into the territories, the Civil War might have been averted. As Lincoln coyly noted, "this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free." The sub-text of his message was that if the expansion of slavery into the territories was not stopped, white laborers would be reduced to slaves. These existential anxieties that gave rise to the Free Soil movement, the Republican party, the election of new political leadership, and ultimately, America's bloodiest war, a class struggle between labor and capital. The civil war was not fought to free the slaves, but to prevent the expansion of an inhuman economic system beyond the Southern States.
Likewise, the Communist Manifesto played upon the same anxieties of labor. Marx predicted that Capital would converge into centralized monopolies, dominate the media, legislatures and government policy, and work to maximize profits and control and to reduce wages to a pittance. Marxism obtained its rhetorical power not from its promise of a future class-less society founded on total equality, but by playing to worker fears of being permanently trapped in poverty and debt, working jobs which did not even pay enough for adequate food and shelter.
Returning back to the national level, Communism, in the developing world, gained an increasing foothold in the Twentieth Century due to its capacity to rapidly industrialize traditional societies, and allow them to catch up with the West. Because industrial production is inherently linked to the capacity to mobilize armies, Communism allowed developing countries a means to resist the dominance of European and American powers. Today, the Beijing Consensus provides a similar, but more efficient, platform for development.
In many ways, Marxist theory fails because it never took the notion of national sovereignty seriously. The model of the Marxist revolution is, in effect, a civil war, a nation tearing itself into two. Further, Marx, naively, conceived of workers developing an international class consciousness, whereby an assembly line worker in West Virginia would feel strong solidarity with an assembly line worker in Bangladesh, notwithstanding enormous differences in ethnicity, language, customs and religion. As attractive as Marx's conception is for university students, such behavior has seldom, if ever, been observed in the real world. Stalin, in his style of ruthless pragmatism, set to rectify this limitation, incorporating nationalistic elements into Soviet communism and even pushing the notion of a Pan-Slavic unity in Eastern Europe, at least until his falling out with Tito. Stalin understood that although a revolution necessarily entails a destruction of national unity, the post-revolutionary phase necessitated the resurrection of a new national body.
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