Introduction

Although Realism is regarded as the dominant theoryof international relations, Liberalism has a strongclaim to being the historic alternative. Rather likepolitical parties, Realism is the ‘natural’ party of gov-ernment and Liberalism is the leader of the oppos-ition, whose main function is to censure those inpower for their complicity in maintaining the statusquo. And like historic parties of ‘opposition’, Liber-alism has occasionally found itself in the ascend-ancy, when its ideas and values set the agenda forinternational relations. In the twentieth century,liberal thinking influenced policymaking elites andpublic opinion in a number of Western states afterthe First World War, an era often referred to inacademic international relations as idealism. Therewas a brief resurgence of liberal sentiment at theend of the Second World War with the birth of theUnited Nations, although this beacon of hope wassoon extinguished by the return of cold war powerpolitics. In the 1990s, Liberalism appeared resur-gent as Western state leaders proclaimed a ‘NewWorld Order’ and intellectuals provided theoreticaljustifications for the inherent supremacy of theirliberal ideas over all other competing ideologies.After 11 September 2001, the pendulum has onceagain swung towards the realist pole as the USAand its allies have sought to consolidate theirpower and punish those whom they define as ter-rorists and the states that provide them withshelter.

How do we explain the divergent fortunes ofLiberalism in the domestic and internationaldomains? While liberal values and institutions havebecome deeply embedded in Europe and NorthAmerica, the same values and institutions lack legit-imacy worldwide. To invoke the famous phrase ofStanley Hoffmann’s, ‘international affairs havebeen the nemesis of Liberalism’. ‘The essence ofLiberalism’, Hoffmann continues, ‘is self-restraint,moderation, compromise and peace’ whereas ‘theessence of international politics is exactly theopposite: troubled peace, at best, or the state ofwar’ (Hoffmann 1987: 396). This explanationcomes as no surprise to realists, who argue that

there can be no progress, no law, and no justice,where there is no common power. Despite theweight of this realist argument, those who believein the liberal project have not conceded defeat.Liberals argue that power politics itself is the prod-uct of ideas, and crucially, ideas can change. There-fore, even if the world has been inhospitable toLiberalism, this does not mean that it cannot be re-made in its image.

While the belief in the possibility of progress isone identifier of a liberal approach to politics, (Clark1989: 49–66) there are other general propositionsthat define the broad tradition of Liberalism. Per-haps the appropriate way to begin this discussion iswith a four-dimensional definition (Doyle 1997:207). First, all citizens are juridically equal and pos-sess certain basic rights to education, access to a freepress, and religious toleration. Second, the legisla-tive assembly of the state possesses only the author-ity invested in it by the people, whose basic rights itis not permitted to abuse. Third, a key dimension ofthe liberty of the individual is the right to ownproperty including productive forces. Fourth, Liber-alism contends that the most effective system ofeconomic exchange is one that is largely marketdriven and not one that is subordinate to bureau-cratic regulation and control either domestically orinternationally. Liberal values such as individual-ism, tolerance, freedom, and constitutionalism, canbe contrasted with conservatism, which places ahigher value on order and authority and is willing tosacrifice the liberty of the individual for the stabilityof the community.

There are two striking aspects about this four-dimensional definition; each will be taken up indetail in the main sections of the chapter. First,although many writers have tended to view Liberal-ism as a theory of government, what is becomingincreasingly apparent is the explicit connectionbetween Liberalism as a political and economic the-ory and Liberalism as an international theory. ManyEnlightenment thinkers foresaw this connection.Jean Jacques Rousseau realized the force of thisargument. Progress in the realm of civil society

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would not be possible without an end to the state ofwar on the ‘outside’. Immanuel Kant sought a wayout of this dilemma with his pamphlet ‘PerpetualPeace’ (1970), one of the great liberal treatises of themodern era. The time to unravel Kant’s argument inmore detail is not yet upon us; instead, what mattersis the claim that domestic and international variantsof Liberalism have all too often been written in isol-ation, a tendency that became more pronounced inlate-twentieth-century writings. The treatment inthis chapter explicitly rejects such a separation.Properly conceived, Liberal thought on a global scaleembodies a domestic analogy operating at mul-tiple levels.1 Like individuals, states have differentcharacteristics—some are bellicose and war-prone,others are tolerant and peaceful: in short, the iden-tity of the state determines its outward orientation.Liberals see a further parallel between individualsand sovereign states. Although the character of statesmay differ, all states are accorded certain ‘natural’rights, such as the generalized right to non-intervention in their domestic affairs. On another

level, the domestic analogy refers to the extension ofideas that originated inside liberal states to theinternational realm, such as the coordinating roleplayed by institutions and the centrality of the ruleof law to the idea of a just order. In a sense, the his-torical project of Liberalism is the domestication ofthe international.

Liberals concede that we have far to go before thisgoal has been reached. International order in themodern period has indeed been defined by a state ofanarchy, as the realists proclaim. But the absence ofa legitimate global authority with the power toenforce the law does not mean we are in a state ofwar. If anarchy is not the permissive cause of war, asit is for structural realists, how then do liberalsexplain the causes of war (and its corollary, thevexed question of the conditions of peace)? As Box8.1 demonstrates, certain strands of Liberalism seethe causes of war located in imperialism, others inthe failure of the balance of power, and still others inthe problem of undemocratic regimes. And oughtthis to be remedied through collective security,

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commerce, or world government? While it can beproductive to think about the various strands of lib-eral thought and their differing prescriptions (Doyle1997: 205–300), given the limited space permitted todeal with a broad and complex tradition, theemphasis below will be on the core concepts ofinternational Liberalism and the way in which theserelate to the goals of order and justice on a globalscale.2

In the third and final section of the chapter, thediscussion will return to a tension that lies in theheart of the liberal theory of politics. As can be seenfrom a critical appraisal of the four-fold definitionpresented above, Liberalism pulls in two directions:its commitment to freedom in the economic andsocial spheres leans in the direction of a minimalistrole for governing institutions, while the democraticpolitical culture required for basic freedoms to besafeguarded requires robust and interventionistinstitutions. This has variously been interpreted as atension between different liberal goals, or morebroadly as a sign of rival and incompatible concep-tions of Liberalism. Should a liberal polity—no mat-ter what the size or scale—preserve the right of indi-viduals to retain property and privilege, or shouldLiberalism elevate equality over liberty so thatresources are redistributed from the strong to theweak? When we are looking at politics on a globalscale it is clear that inequalities are far greater whileat the same time our institutional capacity to dosomething about them is that much less. As writerson globalization remind us, the intensification ofglobal flows in trade, resources and people has weak-ened the state’s capacity to govern. Closing this gaprequires nothing short of a radical reconfigurationof the relationship between territoriality andgovernance.

Core ideas in liberal thinking on international relations

Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham were two ofthe leading liberals of the Enlightenment. Both werereacting to the barbarity of international relations,or what Kant graphically described as ‘the lawlessstate of savagery’, at a time when domestic politics

was at the cusp of a new age of rights, citizenship,and constitutionalism. Their abhorrence of the law-less savagery led them individually to elaborateplans for ‘perpetual peace’. Although written overtwo centuries ago, these manifestos contain the

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seeds of core liberal ideas, in particular the belief thatreason could deliver freedom and justice in inter-national relations. For Kant the imperative toachieve perpetual peace required the transformationof individual consciousness, republican consti-tutionalism, and a federal contract between states toabolish war (rather than to regulate it as earlierinternational lawyers had argued). This federationcan be likened to a permanent peace treaty, ratherthan a ‘superstate’ actor or world government. Thethree components of Kant’s hypothetical treaty for apermanent peace are outlined in Box 8.2.

Kant’s claim that liberal states are pacific in theirinternational relations with other liberal states wasrevived in the 1980s. In a much cited article, MichaelDoyle argued that liberal states have created a ‘separ-ate peace’ (1986: 1151). According to Doyle, thereare two elements to the Kantian legacy: restraintamong liberal states and ‘international imprudence’in relations with non-liberal states. Although theempirical evidence seems to support the democraticpeace thesis, it is important to bear in mind the limi-tations of the argument. In the first instance, for thetheory to be compelling, supporters of the ‘demo-

cratic peace thesis’ must provide an explanation asto why war has become unthinkable between liberalstates. Kant had argued that if the decision to useforce was taken by the people, rather than by theprince, then the frequency of conflicts would bedrastically reduced. But logically this argumentimplies a lower frequency of conflicts between liberaland non-liberal states, and this has proven to be con-trary to the historical evidence. An alternativeexplanation for the ‘democratic peace thesis’might be that liberal states tend to be wealthy, andtherefore have less to gain (and more to lose) byengaging in conflicts than poorer authoritarianstates. Perhaps the most convincing explanation ofall is the simple fact that liberal states tend to be inrelations of amity with other liberal states. Warbetween Canada and the USA is unthinkable, per-haps not because of their liberal democratic con-stitutions, but because they are friends (Wendt 1999:298–9) with a high degree of convergence in eco-nomic and political matters. Indeed, war betweenstates with contrasting political and economic sys-tems may also be unthinkable because they have ahistory of friendly relations. An example here is

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Mexico and Cuba, who maintain close bilateral rela-tions despite their history of divergent economicideologies.

Irrespective of the scholarly search for an answerto the reasons why liberal democratic states are morepeaceful, it is important to note the political con-sequences of this hypothesis. In 1989 Francis Fuku-yama wrote an article entitled ‘The End of History’which celebrated the triumph of Liberalism over allother ideologies, contending that liberal states weremore stable internally and more peaceful in theirinternational relations (Fukuyama 1989: 3–18).Other defenders of the democratic peace thesis weremore circumspect. As Doyle recognized, liberal dem-ocracies are as aggressive as any other type of state intheir relations with authoritarian regimes and state-less peoples (Doyle 1995b: 100). How, then, shouldstates inside the liberal zone of peace conduct theirrelations with non-liberal regimes? How can thepositive Kantian legacy of restraint triumph over thehistorical legacy of international imprudence onthe part of liberal states? These are fascinating andtimely questions which will be taken up in the finalsection of the chapter.

Two centuries after Kant first called for a ‘pacificfederation’, the validity of the idea that democraciesare more pacific continues to attract a great deal ofscholarly interest. The claim has also found its wayinto the public discourse of Western states’ foreignpolicy, appearing in speeches made by US presidentsas diverse as Ronald Reagan and William JeffersonClinton. Less crusading voices within the liberaltradition believe that a legal and institutionalframework must be established that includes stateswith different cultures and traditions. Such a beliefin the power of law to solve the problem of war wasadvocated by Jeremy Bentham at the end of theeighteenth century. ‘Establish a common tribunal’and ‘the necessity for war no longer follows from adifference of opinion’ (Luard 1992: 416). Like manyliberal thinkers after him, Bentham showed that fed-eral states such as the German Diet, the AmericanConfederation, and the Swiss League were able totransform their identity from one based on conflict-ing interests to a more peaceful federation. AsBentham famously argued, ‘between the interests ofnations there is nowhere any real conflict’.

The idea of a natural order underpinning human

society underpins the contribution of anotherEnlightenment figure to liberal thought. AdamSmith, the Scottish political economist and moralphilosopher, argued that by pursuing their own self-interest, individuals are inadvertently promoting thepublic good. The mechanism which intervenesbetween the motives of the individual and the ‘ends’of society as a whole, is what Smith referred to as ‘aninvisible hand’. Although Smith believed that thenatural harmony between individual and statedid not extend to a harmony between states(Wyatt-Walter 1996: 28) this is precisely what wasemphasized by mid-nineteenth-century thinkerssuch as Richard Cobden. In common with many keyfigures in the liberal tradition, Cobden was a politicalactivist as well as a writer and commentator on pub-lic affairs. He was an eloquent opponent of the exer-cise of arbitrary power by governments the worldover. ‘The progress of freedom’, he compellinglyargued, ‘depends more upon the maintenance ofpeace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion ofeducation, than upon the labours of cabinets andforeign offices’ (Hill 1996: 114).

Cobden’s belief that free trade would create amore peaceful world order is a core idea of nine-teenth-century Liberalism. Trade brings mutualgains to all the players irrespective of their size or thenature of their economies. It is perhaps not surpris-ing that it was in Britain that this argument found itsmost vocal supporters. The supposed universal valueof free trade brought disproportionate gains to thehegemonic power. There was never an admissionthat free trade among countries at different stages ofdevelopment would lead to relations of dominanceand subservience.

The idea of a natural ‘harmony of interests’ ininternational political and economic relations cameunder challenge in the early part of the twentiethcentury. The fact that Britain and Germany hadhighly interdependent economies before the GreatWar (1914–18) seemed to confirm the fatal flaw inthe association of economic interdependence withpeace. From the turn of the century, the contradic-tions within European civilization, of progress andexemplarism on the one hand and the harnessing ofindustrial power for military purposes on the other,could no longer be contained. Europe stumbled intoa horrific war killing fifteen million people. The war

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not only brought an end to three empires but alsowas a contributing factor to the Russian Revolutionof 1917.

The First World War shifted liberal thinkingtowards a recognition that peace is not a naturalcondition but is one which must be constructed. In apowerful critique of the idea that peace and prosper-ity were part of a latent natural order, the publicistand author Leonard Woolf argued that peace andprosperity required ‘consciously devised machinery’(Luard 1992: 465). But perhaps the most famousadvocate of an international authority for the man-agement of international relations was WoodrowWilson. According to this US President, peace couldonly be secured with the creation of an internationalorganization to regulate the international anarchy.Security could not be left to secret bilateral diplo-matic deals and a blind faith in the balance of power.Just as peace had to be enforced in domestic society,

the international domain had to have a system ofregulation for coping with disputes and an inter-national force which could be mobilized if non-violent conflict resolution failed. In this sense, morethan any other strand of Liberalism, idealism restson the domestic analogy (Suganami 1989: 94–113).

In his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ speech, addressedto Congress in January 1918, Wilson argued that ‘ageneral association of nations must be formed’ topreserve the coming peace (see Box 8.3)—the Leagueof Nations was to be that general association. For theLeague to be effective, it had to have the militarypower to deter aggression and, when necessary, touse a preponderance of power to enforce its will. Thiswas the idea behind the collective security systemwhich was central to the League of Nations (seeCh.13). Collective security refers to an arrangementwhere ‘each state in the system accepts that the

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security of one is the concern of all, and agrees tojoin in a collective response to aggression’ (Robertsand Kingsbury 1993: 30). It can be contrasted withan alliance system of security, where a number ofstates join together usually as a response to a specificexternal threat (sometimes known as collectivedefence). In the case of the League of Nations, Article16 of the Legue’s Charter noted the obligation that,in the event of war, all member states must ceasenormal relations with the offending state, imposesanctions, and if necessary, commit their armedforces to the disposal of the League Council shouldthe use of force be required to restore the status quo.

The League’s constitution also called for the self-determination of all nations, another foundingcharacteristic of liberal thinking on internationalrelations. Going back to the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, self-determination movements in Greece,Hungary, and Italy received support among liberalpowers and public opinion. Yet the default supportfor self-determination masked a host of practical andmoral problems that were laid bare after WoodrowWilson issued his proclamation. What wouldhappen to newly created minorities who felt no alle-giance to the self-determining state? Could a demo-cratic process adequately deal with questions ofidentity—who was to decide what constituency wasto participate in a ballot? And what if a newly self-determined state rejected liberal democratic norms?

The experience of the League of Nations was a dis-aster. While the moral rhetoric at the creation of theLeague was decidedly idealist, in practice statesremained imprisoned by self-interest. There is nobetter example of this than the United States’ deci-sion not to join the institution it had created. Withthe Soviet Union outside the system for ideologicalreasons, the League of Nations quickly became a talk-ing shop for the ‘satisfied’ powers. Hitler’s decisionin March 1936 to reoccupy the Rhineland, a desig-nated demilitarized zone according to the terms ofthe Treaty of Versailles, effectively pulled the plug onthe League’s life-support system (it had been put onthe ‘critical’ list following the Manchurian crisis in1931 and the Ethiopian crisis in 1935). Indeed,throughout the 1930s, the term crisis had becomethe most familiar one in international affairs. Theword was used by E. H. Carr in the title of his polem-ical introduction to international relations, The

Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939 (1939). Carr bril-liantly attacked the moral double standards of theLeague’s supporters. In common with previous peacesettlements, the overriding aim had been to createan order convenient to the victor powers—what wasnew in 1919 was the spin that sought to persuade therest of the world that the new institutional arrange-ment was to everyone’s advantage. James L. Richard-son neatly sums up Carr’s argument against liberalidealists: ‘the defence of the status quo in the nameof peace was not necessarily more legitimate thanchallenging it in the name of justice’ (1997: 17).

Although the League of Nations was the principalorgan of the idealist inter-war order, it is importantto note other ideas which dominated liberal think-ing in the early part of the twentieth century. Educa-tion became a vital addition to the liberal agenda,hence the origins of the study of International Rela-tions as a discipline in Aberystwyth in 1919 with thefounding of the Woodrow Wilson professorship.One of the tasks of the Wilson Professor was to pro-mote the League of Nations as well as contributing to‘the truer understanding of civilizations other thanour own’ (John et al. 1972: 86). It is this self-consciously normative approach to the discipline ofinternational relations, the belief that scholarship isabout what ought to be and not just what is, that setsthe idealists apart from the dominant strand of post-1945 liberal thinking with its emphasis upon thecreation of regimes and institutions for the man-agement of international order.

According to the history of the discipline of Inter-national Relations, the collapse of the League ofNations dealt a fatal blow to idealism. There is nodoubt that the language of Liberalism after 1945 wasmore pragmatic; how could anyone living in theshadow of the Holocaust be optimistic? Yet familiarcore ideas of Liberalism remained. Even in the early1940s, there was a recognition of the need to replacethe League with another international institutionwith responsibility for international peace and secur-ity. Only this time, in the case of the United Nationsthere was an awareness among the framers of theCharter of the need for a consensus between theGreat Powers in order for enforcement action to betaken, hence the veto system (Article 27 of the UNCharter) which allowed any of the five permanentmembers of the Security Council the power of

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veto. This revision constituted an important modifi-cation to the classical model of collective security(Roberts 1996: 315). With the ideological polarity ofthe cold war, the UN procedures for collective secur-ity were still-born (as either of the superpowers andtheir allies would veto any action proposed by theother).3 It was not until the end of the cold war that acollective security system was put into operational,following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq on 2 August1990 (see Box 8.4.)

An important argument advanced by liberals inthe early post-war period concerned the state’sinability to cope with modernization. DavidMitrany, a pioneer integration theorist, argued thattransnational cooperation was required in order toresolve common problems (Mitrany 1943). His coreconcept was ramification, meaning the likelihoodthat cooperation in one sector would lead govern-ments to extend the range of collaboration acrossother sectors. As states become more embedded in anintegration process, the ‘cost’ of withdrawing fromcooperative ventures increases.

This argument about the positive benefits fromtransnational cooperation is one which informed anew generation of scholars (particularly in the USA)in the 1960s and 1970s. Their argument was notsimply about the mutual gains from trade, but thatother transnational actors were beginning to chal-lenge the dominance of sovereign states. World pol-

itics, according to pluralists (as they are oftenreferred to) was no longer an exclusive arena forstates, as it had been for the first three hundred yearsof the Westphalian states-system. In one of the cen-tral texts of this genre, Robert Keohane and JosephNye argued that the centrality of other actors, suchas interest groups, transnational corporations, andinternational non-governmental organizations(INGOs), had to be taken into consideration (1972).Here the overriding image of international relationsis one of a cobweb of diverse actors linked throughmultiple channels of interaction.

Although the phenomenon of transnational-ism was an important addition to the internationalrelations theorists’ vocabulary, it remained under-developed as a theoretical concept. Perhaps the mostimportant contribution of pluralism was its elabor-ation of interdependence. Due to the expansion ofcapitalism and the emergence of a global culture,pluralists recognized a growing interconnectednessin which ‘changes in one part of the system havedirect and indirect consequences for the rest of thesystem’ (Little 1996: 77). Absolute state autonomy,so keenly entrenched in the minds of state leaders,was being circumscribed by interdependence. Such adevelopment brought with it enhanced potential forcooperation as well as increased levels ofvulnerability.

Interdependence not only challenged realist theory,

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but also undermined liberal theories of justice whichassumed that the boundaries of communitycoincided with the borders around sovereign terri-tory. In a book that many believe to be the mostimportant work of political theory in the twentiethcentury, John Rawls perpetuates the myth of self-sufficiency: according to his Theory of Justice, it wasfor each state to resolve the problem of inequality.Cosmopolitan critics of Rawls believe that such apremise of self-sufficiency is deficient on practicaland moral grounds. A resolution to the problem ofinequality, on this reading, must be international inscope. Why should we tolerate massive inequalitiesbetween communities that we would not toleratewithin them? In so far as Rawls takes for granted thefact that the basis for global social justice does notexist (Brown 2000: 131), he is inadvertently aligninghimself with the realist conception of states coexist-ing in an anarchic environment.

One such realist took great delight in attacking thepluralist argument about the decline of the state. Inhis 1979 work Theory of International Politics, Ken-neth Waltz argued that the degree of interdepend-ence internationally was far lower than the constitu-ent parts in a national political system. Moreover,the level of economic interdependence—especiallybetween the greater powers—was less than thatwhich existed in the early part of the twentieth cen-tury. Waltz concludes: ‘if one is thinking of theinternational-political world, it is odd in the extremethat “interdependence” has become the word com-monly used to describe it’ (1979: 144). In the courseof their engagement with Waltz and other neo-realists, early pluralists modified their position. Neo-liberals,4 as they came to be known, conceded thatthe core assumptions of neo-realism were indeedcorrect: the anarchic international structure, thecentrality of states, and a rationalist approach tosocial scientific inquiry. Where they differed was

apparent primarily in the argument that anarchydoes not mean durable patterns of cooperation areimpossible: the creation of international regimesmatters here as they facilitate cooperation by sharinginformation, reinforcing reciprocity, and makingdefection from norms easier to punish (see Ch.16).Moreover, in what was to become the most import-ant difference between neo-realists and neo-liberals(developed further in Ch.9), the latter argued thatactors would enter into cooperative agreements ifthe gains were evenly shared. Neo-realists disputethis hypothesis: what matters is a question not somuch of mutual gains as of relative gains: in otherwords, a neo-realist state has to be sure that it hasmore to gain than its rivals from a particular bargainor regime.

There are two important arguments that set neo-liberalism apart from democratic peace liberals andliberal idealists of the inter-war period. First, aca-demic inquiry should be guided by a commitment toa scientific approach to theory building. Whateverdeeply held personal values scholars maintain, theirtask must be to observe regularities, formulatehypotheses as to why that relationship holds, andsubject these to critical scrutiny. This separation offact and value puts neo-liberals on the positivist sideof the methodological divide. Second, writers such asKeohane and Axelrod are justly critical of the naiveassumption of nineteenth-century liberals thatcommerce breeds peace. A free-trade system, accord-ing to Keohane, provides incentives for cooperationbut does not guarantee it. Here he is making animportant distinction between cooperation andharmony. ‘Co-operation is not automatic’, Keohaneargues, ‘but requires planning and negotiation’(1989: 11). In section three we see how contempor-ary liberal thinking maintains that the institutionsof world politics after 1945 successfully embeddedall states into a cooperative order.

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Liberalism and globalization

When applying liberal ideas to international rela-tions today, we find two clusters of responses to theproblems and possibilities posed by globalization.Before outlining these, let us briefly return to the def-inition of Liberalism set out at greater length earlier,the four components being: juridical equality, dem-ocracy, liberty, and the free market. As we will seebelow, these same values can be pursued by verydifferent political strategies.

The first alternative is that of ‘the Liberalism ofprivilege’ (Richardson 1997: 18). According to this

perspective, the problems of globalization need to beaddressed by a combination of strong democraticstates in the core of the international system, robustregimes, and open markets and institutions. For anexample of the working out of such a strategy inpractice, we need to look no further than the successof the liberal hegemony of the post-1945 era. The USwriter, G. John Ikenberry, is an articulate defender ofthis liberal order. In the aftermath of the SecondWorld War, the USA took the opportunity to ‘embed’certain fundamental liberal principles into the

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regulatory rules and institutions of internationalsociety. Most importantly, and contrary to realistthinking, the USA chose to forsake short-run gains inreturn for a durable settlement that benefited allstates. According to Ikenberry, the USA signalled thecooperative basis of its power in a number of ways.First, in common with liberal democratic principles,the USA was an example to other members of inter-national society in so far as its political system isopen and allows different voices to be heard. Foreignpolicy, like domestic policy, is closely scrutinized bythe media, public opinion, and political committeesand opposition parties. Second, the USA advocated aglobal free-trade regime in accordance with the ideathat free trade brings benefits to all participants (italso has the added advantage, from the hegemon’spoint of view, of being cheap to manage). Third, theUSA appeared to its allies at least as a reluctanthegemon that would not seek to exploit its signifi-cant power-political advantage. Fourth, and mostimportantly, the USA created and participated in arange of important international institutions thatconstrained its actions. The Bretton Woods system ofeconomic and financial accords, and the NATOsecurity alliance, are the best examples of the highlyinstitutionalized character of American power in thepost-1945 period. Advocates of this liberal hege-monic order note wryly that it was so successful thatallies were more worried about abandonment thandomination.

The post-1945 system of regulatory regimes andinstitutions has been successful in part due to thefact that they exist. In other words, once one set ofinstitutional arrangements becomes embedded it isvery difficult for alternatives to make inroads. Thereare two implications that need to be teased out here.One is the narrow historical ‘window’ that exists fornew institutional design; the other is the durabilityof existing institutions. ‘In terms of Americanhegemony, this means that, short of a major war or aglobal economic collapse, it is very difficult to envis-age the type of historical breakpoint needed toreplace the existing order’ (Ikenberry 199x: 137).

Let us accept for a moment that the neo-liberalargument is basically correct: the post-1945 inter-national order has been successful and durablebecause US hegemony has been of a liberal character.The logic of this position is one of institutional con-

servatism. In order to respond effectively to globaleconomic and security problems, there is no alterna-tive to working within the existing institutionalstructure. This is a manifesto for managing an inter-national order in which the Western states who paidthe start-up costs of the institutions are now experi-encing significant returns on their institutionalinvestment. At the other end of the spectrum, thecurrent order is highly unresponsive to the needs ofweaker states and peoples. According to the UnitedNations Development Programme, the resultingglobal inequality is ‘grotesque’. One statistic is par-ticularly graphic: the richest 1 per cent of the world’spopulation receives as much income as the poorest57 per cent.5

Given that Liberalism has produced such unequalgains for the West and the rest, it is not surprisingthat the hegemonic power has become obsessed withthe question of preserving and extending its controlof institutions, markets, and resources. When thishegemonic liberal order comes under challenge, as itdid on 11 September, the response is uncompromis-ing. It is noticeable in this respect that PresidentGeorge W. Bush mobilized the language of Liberal-ism against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and also Iraq. Hereferred to the 2003 war against Iraq as ‘freedom’swar’ and the term ‘liberation’ is frequently used bydefenders of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.

Given the primacy of a neo-conservative ideologyin the Bush cabinet, one needs to proceed with cau-tion when stumbling upon liberal principles in con-temporary American foreign policy. Nevertheless,the official discourse of US foreign policy overlaps ininteresting ways with a number of liberal values andideas (Rhodes 2003) as can be seen in Bush’s speechat the West Point graduation ceremony in June 2002.A key opening theme in the speech is how force canbe used for freedom: ‘we fight, as we always fight, fora just peace’. Bush then goes on to locate this argu-ment in historical context. Prior to the twenty-firstcentury, great power competition manifested itselfin war. Today, ‘the Great Powers share commonvalues’ such as ‘a deep commitment to human free-dom’. In his State of the Union address of 2004, heeven declared that ‘our aim is a democratic peace’.Box 8.5 further illustrates the connections betweenLiberalism and the Bush foreign policy.

The potential for Liberalism to embrace imperi-

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alism is a tendency that has a long history (Doyle1986: 1151–69). We find in Machiavelli a number ofarguments for the necessity for republics to expand.Liberty increases wealth and the concomitant drivefor new markets; soldiers who are at the same timecitizens are better fighters than slaves or mercenaries;and expansion is often the best means to promote astate’s security. In this sense, contemporary US for-eign policy is no different from the great expansion-ist republican states of the pre-modern period suchas Athens and Rome. Few liberals today wouldopenly advocate imperialism although the linebetween interventionist strategies to defend liberalvalues and privileges and imperialism is veryfinely drawn. Michael Doyle advocates a policy mixof forcible and non-forcible instruments that oughtto be deployed in seeking regime change in illiberalparts of the world (see Box 8.6).

This strategy of preserving and extending liberalinstitutions is open to a number of criticisms. For thesake of simplicity, these will be gathered up into analternative to the Liberalism of privilege that wewill call radical Liberalism. An opening objectionconcerns the understanding of Liberalism embodiedin the neo-liberal defence of international institu-tions. The liberal character of those institutions isassumed rather than subjected to critical scrutiny. As

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a result, the incoherence of the purposes underpin-ning these institutions is often overlooked. The kindof economic liberalization advocated by Westernfinancial institutions, particularly in economicallyimpoverished countries, frequently comes into con-flict with the norms of democracy and human rights.Three examples illustrate this dilemma. First, themore the West becomes involved in the organizationof developing states’ political and economicinfrastructure, the less those states are able to beaccountable to their domestic constituencies,thereby cutting through the link between the gov-ernment and the people which is so central to mod-ern liberal forms of representative democracy(Hurrell and Woods 1995: 463). Second, in order toqualify for Western aid and loans, states are oftenrequired to meet harsh economic criteria requiringcuts in many welfare programmes; the example ofthe poorest children in parts of Africa having to payfor primary school education (Booth and Dunne1999: 310)—which is their right according to theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights—is a starkreminder of the fact that economic liberty and polit-ical equality are frequently opposed. Third, theinflexible response of international financial institu-tions to various crises in the world-economy, such asthe East Asian financial crisis, has contributed to abacklash against Liberalism per se. Richard Falk putsthis dilemma starkly: there is, he argues, a tensionbetween ‘the ethical imperatives of the global neigh-bourhood and the dynamics of economic globalisa-tion’ (1995a: 573). Radical liberals argue that thehegemonic institutional order has fallen prey to theneo-liberal consensus which minimizes the role ofthe public sector in providing for welfare, and ele-vates the market as the appropriate mechanism forallocating resources, investment, and employmentopportunities.

A second line of critique pursued by radical lib-erals concerns not so much the contradictory out-comes but the illiberal nature of the regimes andinstitutions. To put the point bluntly, there is amassive democratic deficit at the global level.Issues of international peace and security are deter-mined by only 15 members of international society,of whom only five can exercise a power of veto. Inother words, it is hypothetically possible for up to200 states in the world to believe that military action

ought to be taken but such an action would contra-vene the UN Charter if one of the permanent mem-bers was to cast a veto. If we take the area of politicaleconomy, the power exerted by the West and itsinternational financial institutions perpetuatesstructural inequality. A good example here is theissue of free trade, which the West has pushed inareas where it gains from an open policy (such as inmanufactured goods and financial services) butresisted in areas that it stands to lose (agriculture andtextiles). At a deeper level, radical liberals worry thatall statist models of governance are undemocratic aselites are notoriously self-serving.

These sentiments underpin the approach to glob-alization taken by writers such as DanielleArchibugi, David Held, Mary Kaldor, and Jan AartScholte, among others, who believe that global pol-itics must be democratized (Held and McGrew2002). Held’s argument is illustrative of the ana-lytical and prescriptive character of radical Liberal-ism in an era of globalization. His diagnosis beginsby revealing the inadequacies of the ‘Westphalianorder’ (or the modern states-system which is con-ventionally dated from the middle of the seven-teenth century). During the latter stages of thisperiod, we have witnessed rapid democratization ina number of states, but this has not been accom-panied by democratization of the society of states(Held 1993). This task is increasingly urgent giventhe current levels of interconnectedness, since‘national’ governments are no longer in control ofthe forces which shape their citizens’ lives (forexample, the decision by one state to permitdeforestation has environmental consequences forall states). After 1945, the UN Charter set limits tothe sovereignty of states by recognizing the rights ofindividuals in a whole series of human rights con-ventions. But even if the UN had lived up to itsCharter in the post-1945 period, it would still haveleft the building blocks of the Westphalian orderlargely intact, namely: the hierarchy between GreatPowers and the rest (symbolized by the permanentmembership of the Security Council); massiveinequalities of wealth between states; and a minimalrole for non-state actors to influence decisionmak-ing in international relations.

In place of the Westphalian and UN models, Heldoutlines a ‘cosmopolitan model of democracy’.

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This requires, in the first instance, the creation ofregional parliaments and the extension of theauthority of such regional bodies (like the EuropeanUnion) which are already in existence. Second,human rights conventions must be entrenched innational parliaments and monitored by a newInternational Court of Human Rights. Third, reformof the UN, or the replacement of it, with a genuinelydemocratic and accountable global parliament.Without appearing to be too sanguine about theprospects for the realization of the cosmopolitanmodel of democracy, Held is nevertheless adamantthat if democracy is to thrive, it must penetrate theinstitutions and regimes which manage globalpolitics.

Radical liberals place great importance on thecivilizing capacity of global civil society. While therule of law and the democratization of internationalinstitutions is a core component of the liberal pro-ject, it is also vital that citizens’ networks are broad-ened and deepened to monitor and cajole theseinstitutions. These groups can be thought of as‘transmission belts’ between individuals, states, andglobal institutions (Kaldor 2002: 560). It is easy toportray radical liberal thinking as ‘utopian’ but weshould not forget the many achievements of globalcivil society so far. The evolution of internationalhumanitarian law, and the extent to which theselaws are complied with, is largely down to the mil-lions of individuals who are active supporters ofhuman rights groups like Amnesty International and

Human Rights Watch (Falk 1995b: 164). Similarly,global protest movements have been responsible forthe heightened global sensitivity to environmentaldegradation.

This emphasis on what Richard Falk calls ‘global-ization from below’ is an important antidote to neo-liberalism’s somewhat status quo oriented world-view. But just as imperialism can emerge from acomplacent Liberalism of privilege, the danger forradical liberals is naivety. How is it that globalinstitutions can be reformed in such a way that thevoices of ordinary people will be heard? And what ifthe views of ‘peoples’ rather than ‘states’ turn out tobe similarly indifferent to global injustice? There is asense in which radical liberal thought wants to turnback the clock of globalization to an era in whichlocal producers cooperated to produce sociallyresponsible food in the day and wove baskets orwatched street theatre in the evening. It is not clearthat such an organic lifestyle is preferable to purchas-ing relatively inexpensive goods from a multi-national supermarket outlet or finding entertain-ment on multichannel television (Brown 2002: 238–9). Perhaps the least plausible aspect of the radicalliberal project is the injunction to reform global cap-italism. Just how much of a civilizing effect is globalcivil society able to exert upon the juggernaut of cap-italism? And can this movement bridge the global-ization divide in which democratic institutions areterritorially located while forces of production anddestruction are global?

Conclusion

The euphoria with which liberals greeted the end ofthe cold war in 1989 has to a large extent been dissi-pated by 11 September and the war on terror trig-gered by it. The pattern of conflict and insecuritythat we have seen at the beginning of the twenty-first century suggests that liberal democratic valuescontinue to lack traction in practice. Images and nar-ratives from Afghanistan, Liberia, Chechnya,Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq,and Zimbabwe remind us that in many parts of theworld, anti-liberal values of warlordism, torture,

intolerance, and injustice are daily occurrences.Stanley Hoffmann is surely right to argue that thecase of degenerating states reveals how sovereignty,democracy, national self-determination, and humanrights ‘are four norms in conflict and a source ofcomplete liberal disarray’ (1995: 169).

A deeper reason for the crisis in Liberalism is that itis bound up with an increasingly discreditedEnlightenment view of the world. Contrary to thehopes of Bentham, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Paine, theapplication of reason and science to politics has not

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brought communities together. Indeed, it has argu-ably shown the fragmented nature of the politicalcommunity, which is regularly expressed in termsof ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences. Critics ofLiberalism argue that the universalizing mission ofliberal values, such as democracy, capitalism, andsecularism, undermines the traditions and practicesof non-Western cultures (Gray 1995: 146). When itcomes to doing inter-cultural politics, somehow lib-erals just don’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer. TheMarxist writer Immanuel Wallerstein has a nice wayof expressing the dilemma over universalism. Lib-erals view it as ‘a “gift” of the powerful to the weak’which places them in a double bind: ‘to refuse thegift is to lose; to accept the gift is to lose’ (in Brown1999: ).

At the outset, the chapter pointed to a tensionwithin Liberalism. The emphasis on personal liberty,unfettered trade, and the accumulation of propertycan lend itself to a society riven with inequality, sus-picion, and rivalry. Pulling in the opposite direction,Liberalism contains within it a set of values that seekto provide for the conditions of a just societythrough democratic institutions and welfare-

oriented economies. Projecting this tension on to aglobal stage leads to two possibilities for Liberalismin an era of globalization. The neo-liberal variant isone where international rules would be minimaland institutions relatively weak and status quooriented. In this world economic growth would bestrong but unevenly distributed. As a consequence,preventive military action remains an ever-presentpossibility in order to deal with chaos and violenceproduced by dispossessed communities and net-works. The more progressive model, advocated byradical liberals, seeks to heighten regulation throughthe strengthening of international institutions. Thisis to be done by making institutions moredemocratic and accountable for the negative con-sequences of globalization. The charge of utopian-ism is one that is easy to make against this positionand hard to refute. In so doing, liberals of a radicalpersuasion should invoke Kant’s axiom that ‘ought’must imply ‘can’.

For further information and case studies on thissubject, please visit the companion web site atwww.oup.com/uk/booksites/politics.

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