Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … Perpetual Peace or War?
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … Perpetual Peace or War?

Summary/Abstract: “One observer has likened the embarrassment that the end of the Cold War caused us as scholars of international relations and national security to the effects the sinking of the Titanic had on the profession of naval engineers.” Indeed, one can hardly find anything written in the post-Cold War period about IR theory that does not mention the discipline’s (especially neorealism’s) failure to predict this event. After the end of the Cold War rival theories increasingly challenged the neorealist domination of the field. Constitutive of this challenge was the liberal effort to prove that neorealism is degenerating while democratic peace theory is progressive. In this paper I would like to evaluate Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” and John J. Mearsheimer’s “Back to the Future” in a naïve and a sophisticated “three-cornered fight” based on their predictive power. To do this, first I argue that these different theoretical approaches are commensurable and comparable, I explain which theories I chose and why, and claim that prediction is the appropriate criterion of evaluation. Second, I briefly summarize the theories. Third, I evaluate the theories in what I call “naïve three-cornered fight”, where I simply focus on the predictions of the theories and I compare them with European empirical evidence. Fourth, I evaluate the theories in “sophisticated three-cornered fight”, where I translate the theories into Lakatosian terms, trying to assess them in the context of their theoretical tradition using the “Methodology of Scientific Research Progammes” (hereafter MSRP). Finally, I conclude that Fukuyama’s prediction fares better in the present case than that of Mearsheimer. Due to the limitations of length, some aspects of the paper are severely compressed.

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