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Introduction
Emotion is part of human nature. It makes life worth living and it influences our behaviour. But how important is it for explaining international politics? Most analysts view emotion as epiphenomenal at best and a source of irrationality at worst. In either case, Kenneth Waltz (1959) viewed emotion as being rooted squarely in a first-image approach to international politics. I view emotion differently in two respects. First, emotion can undermine rationality but rationality also depends on emotion. Part one of this essay discusses four approaches to emotion: as epiphenomenal, as a source of irrationality, as a tool for savvy strategic actors, and as a necessary aspect of rationality. The fourth approach is the least explored and to me the most interesting. Second, human nature and first-image approaches are not synonymous. For example, rational choice can be a first-image approach because it focuses on individual rationality, but it is primarily a normative (rather than a positive) theory and is thus unrelated to human nature (Elster 1986). Rational choice theorists do not claim to describe how people actually make decisions, but focus instead on how they ought to make decisions if they want to be rational. The closer one adheres to the normative ideal, the more rational the process and presumably the better the outcome. A first-image approach need not rely on human nature, but must an explanation that relies on human nature be a first-image approach?
Human nature can contribute to first-, second-, or third-image approaches. An 'image' or 'level-of-analysis' approach is a way to organize theory according to the explanatory variable. No level is 'better' than another and no level is necessarily more parsimonious or generalizable than another (Mercer 2005b). A 'cause' can be at any level-of-analysis. One can explain the United States (US) led preventive war against Iraq by emphasizing President Bush's misperceptions, bureaucratic politics between the State Department and the Pentagon, or an imagined US interest in access to military bases and oil. However, the Iraq war is not at a level-of-analysis. It can be sensible to organize theories by the dependent variable -- such as theories about the causes of war or about the sources of dictatorship -- but these phenomena cannot be located at a level-of-analysis. War is not at...