Political Science Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 2

Political Science - Essay Example After the Ancient Greeks there was little attempt to how world politics work. The concepts of realism were greatly expanded by Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes to become very influential amongst people that are attempting to understand and evaluate world politics. The main aspects of the realism school are that nation states are the most important components within the contemporary international system, and that the objective of each nation state is to gain the most from that system by making realistic as well as rational foreign policy decisions. Realism stresses that nation states compete with each other to gain the most amount of power through the most effective diplomatic or military means. The nation states that are the best at using diplomacy and the threat of military force are the ones that should gain the most power and wealth from the international system. Neorealism is a theory of world politics that was developed from realism. Neorealism still contends that the nation state is the main basis for the international system. However, unlike realism the concept of Neorealism contends that nation states are influenced and possibly shaped by the international system, rather than just by the relationships between each other. Neorealism owes most of its concepts and also its arguments to the work of Waltz. It was Waltz and others that developed the notion of Neorealism to make up for the events and the organisations that realism either did not explain at all or only partially explained. Neorealism was designed in order to explain the formation of organisations such as the UN, the EU, and GATT in which nation states co-operate with each other, for their mutual benefits, actions that realism had failed to predict and could not adequately explain. Neorealism claims that non-governmental organisations have an influence over the international sys tem that has weakened the primary position of the nation state without displacing that