Definition of "realpolitik"
realpolitik
noun
countable and uncountable, plural realpolitiks
(politics) Pragmatic government policy concerned with perceived interests of the state.
Quotations
It is Realpolitik in sport, and a Realpolitik which is not wholly unknown in England; but while the spirit of Realpolitik is still perceivable in German sport, it is equally perceivable that the standard English way of viewing sporting competition is becoming more and more approached in Germany.
1913, Stanley Shaw, William of Germany, page 357
Possibly the Germans themselves regard their Realpolitik as but the continuation of the philosophic tradition of disillusionment: like Xenophanes they would remind us that the gods of the Ethiopians are snub-nosed and swart, of the Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired, and that if oxen had gods their gods would be oxen.
1918, Hartley Burr Alexander, Liberty and democracy: and other essays in war-time
Twenty-first century nation states will no longer tolerate even the mild humiliation of hosting the detritus of 18th- and 19th-century empires. Most European empires were born of the realpolitik of power, mostly the treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Paris (1763). The same realpolitik now ordains their dismantling. An early purpose of the United Nations was to bring this about.
2013 August 14, Simon Jenkins, “Gibraltar and the Falklands deny the logic of history”, in The Guardian