Introduction
Although Realism is regarded as the dominant theory of international relations, Liberalism' has a strong claim to
being the historic alternative. Rather like political parties, Realism is the 'natural' party of government and
Liberalism is the leader of the opposition, whose raison d'etre is to hound the talking heads of power politics for
their remorseless pessimism. And like historic parties of 'opposition', Liberalism has occasionally found itself in
the ascendancy, when its ideas and values set the agenda for international relations. In the twentieth century,
Liberal thinking influenced policy-making elites and public opinion in a number of Western states after the First
World War, an era often referred to in academic International Relations as Idealism. There was a brief
resurgence of liberal sentiment at the end of World War II, with the birth of the United Nations, although these
flames of hope were soon extinguished by the return of cold war power politics. The end of the cold war has
seen a resurgence of Liberalism as Western state leaders proclaimed a 'New World Order' and liberal
intellectuals provided theoretical justifications for the inherent supremacy of Liberalism over all other
competing ideologies.
One of the most respected contemporary theorists in the field, Stanley Hoffmann, once famously wrote that
'international affairs have been the nemesis of liberalism'. 'The essence of liberalism', Hoffmann continues, 'is
self-restraint, moderation, compromise and peace' whereas 'the essence of international politics is exactly the
opposite: troubled peace, at best, or the state of war' (Hoffmann 1987: 396). This explanation comes as no
surprise to realists, who argue that there can be no progress, no law, and no justice, where there is no common
power. The fact that historically international politics has not been hospitable to liberal ideas should not be
interpreted as a surrender by liberals to the logic of power politics. Liberals argue that power politics itself is the
product of ideas, and crucially, ; ideas can change. So, even if the world hasn't been accommodating to
liberalism to date, this does not mean that it cannot be made into a liberal world order. Given this disposition, it
is not surprising that Liberalism is described in the literature as the 'tradition of optimism' (Clark 1989: 49-66).
Once we move beyond generalizations about the Liberal 'mind' we soon discover that there is not one
Liberalism, but many. As Box 8.1 demonstrates, liberals offer radically different answers to what they take to be
the pre-eminent dilemma in international relations, namely, why wars occur: are they caused by imperialism, the
balance of power, or undemocratic regimes? Furthermore, liberals diverge on whether peace is the goal of world
politics, or order? And how should this be established, through collective security, commerce, or world
government? Finally, liberals are divided on the issue of how liberal states should respond to nonliberal states
(or civilizations), by conquest, conversion, or toleration?
Key Points
▪ From the seventeenth century onwards, Liberalism has continued to influence the practice of world politics.
▪ The high-water mark of Liberal thinking in international relations was reached in the interwar, period in the
work of Idealists who believed that' warfare was an unnecessary and outmoded way, of settling disputes
between states.
▪ In view of the significant divergences within the liberal tradition-on issues such as human nature, the causes
of wars, and the relative importance different kinds of liberals place on the individual, the state, and
international institutions in delivering progress-it is perhaps more appropriate to think of not one
Liberalism, but contending liberalisms.
Varieties of Liberalism
Liberal thinking on international relations originated with the various plans for peace articulated by philosophers
(and theologians) from the early sixteenth century onwards. Early liberals rejected the idea that conflict was a
natural condition for relations between states, one which could only be tamed by the careful management of
power through balance of power policies and the construction of alliances against the state which threatened
international order. In 1517 Erasmus first iterated a familiar liberal theme; war is unprofitable. To overcome it,
the kings and princes of Europe must desire peace, and perform kind gestures in relations with fellow sovereigns
in the expectation that these will be reciprocated. Other early liberal thinkers placed an emphasis upon the need
for institutional structures to constrain international 'outlaws'. Towards the end of the seventeenth century,
William Penn advocated a 'Diet' (or Parliament) of Europe. Indeed, there are some remarkable parallels between
Penn's ideas and the institutions of the European Union today. Penn envisaged that the number of delegates to
the Parliament should be proportional to the power of the state, and that legislation required a kind of 'qualified
majority voting', or as Penn put it, the support of 75 per cent of the delegates.
These broad sketches of ideas from some of the progenitors of liberal thinking in international relations show
how, from Penn's plans for a 'Diet' in 1693 to the Treaty on European Union in 1992, there are common themes
underlying Liberalism; in this instance, the theme is the importance of submitting the separate 'wills' of
individual states to a general will agreed by states acting collectively (see, for example, Kant's 'third definitive
article' in Box 8.2). Yet it would be wrong to suggest that the development of liberal thinking on international
affairs has been linear. Indeed, it is often possible to portray current political differences in terms of contrasting
liberal principles. To return to the Treaty on European Union mentioned above, the debate which raged in
Britain and elsewhere, could be presented as one in which the liberal principle of integration was challenged by
another liberal principle of the right of states to retain sovereignty over key aspects of social and economic
policies.
How should we understand this relationship between autonomy and integration which is embodied in
Liberalism? One way might be to apply a historical approach, providing detailed accounts of the contexts with
which various philosophers, politicians and international lawyers contributed to the elaboration of key liberal
values and beliefs. Although the contextual approach has merit it tends to downplay the dialogue between past
and present, closing off the parallels between Immanuel Kant (an eighteenth-century philosopher-king from
Konigsberg) and Francis Fukuyama (the late twentieth-century political thinker and former employee of the US
State .Department). An alternative method, which is favoured in this chapter, is to lay bare the variety of
1iberalisms thematically rather than historically. To this end, the following section identifies three patterns of
thought as the principal constituents of Liberalism: liberal internationalism, idealism, and liberal
institutionalism.
As Box 8.2 demonstrates, many of the great liberal figures such as Immanuel Kant believed that human
potentiality can only be realized through the transformation of individual attitudes as well as the binding of
states together into some kind of federation. In this sense, Kant combines a commitment to international
institutions (embodied in both idealists and liberal institutionalists) as well as the liberal internationalists' belief
that democratic forms of government are inherently superior. Like Kant, the thinking of many other great liberal
thinkers reaches beyond the boundaries of any single category. For this reason it is important not to use the
categories as labels for particular thinkers, but as representations of a discernible strand in the history of liberal
thinking on international relations.
Liberal Internationalism
Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham were of the leading liberal internationalists of he Enlightenment. Both
were reacting to the barbarity of international relations, or what Kant graphically described as 'the lawless state
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 lawless savagery led them individually to elaborate plans for
'perpetual peace'. Although written over two centuries ago, these manifestos contain the seeds of key liberal
internationalists' ideas, in particular, the belief that reason could deliver freedom and justice in international
relations. For Kant the imperative to 'achieve perpetual peace required the transformation of individual
consciousness, republican constitutionalism and a federal contract between states to abolish war (rather than to
regulate it as liberal realists such as Hugo Grotius had argued). This federation can be likened to a permanent
peace treaty, rather than a 'superstate' actor or world government.
Jeremy Bentham tried to address the specific problem of the tendency among states to resort to . war as a
means of settling international disputes. 'But, establish a common tribunal', Bentham argued, and 'the necessity
for war no longer follows from a difference of opinion' (Luard 1992: 416). Like many liberal thinkers after him,
Bentham showed that federal states such as the German Diet, the American Confederation, and the Swiss
League were able to transform their identity from one based on conflicting interests to a more peaceful
federation. As Bentham famously argued, 'between the interests of nations there is nowhere any real conflict'.
Note that these plans for a permanent peace imply an extension of the social contract between individuals in
domestic society to states in the international system, in other words, subjecting the states to a system of legal
rights and duties. But crucially, liberal internationalists-unlike the idealists of the interwar period-believed that a
law-governed international society could emerge without a world government.
The idea of a natural order underpinning human society is the cornerstone of liberal internationalism. For the
clearest statement of this-position, we must turn to the Scottish political economist and moral philosopher,
Adam Smith. By pursuing their own self-interest, individuals are inadvertently promoting the public good. The
mechanism which intervenes between the motives of the individual and 'ends' of society as a whole, is what
Smith referred to as 'an invisible hand'. Although Smith believed that the natural harmony between individual
and state did not extend to a harmony between states (Wyatt-Walter 1996: 28) this is precisely what was
emphasized by liberal internationalists in the nineteenth century like Richard Cobden. Like many key figures in
the Liberal tradition, Cobden was a political activist as well as a writer and commentator on public affairs. He
was an eloquent opponent of the exercise of arbitrary power by governments the world over. 'The progress of
freedom', he compellingly argued, 'depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and
the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of cabinets and foreign offices' (Hill 1996: 114). For Cobden,
politics was too important to be left to politicians.
It was primarily this liberal idea of a natural 'harmony of interests' in international political and economic
relations which E. H. Carr attacked in his polemical work The Twenty Years' Crisis. Although Carr's book
remains one of the most stimulating in the field, one 'which leaves us nowhere to hide' (Booth 1995: 123), it
could be argued that Carr incorrectly targets idealists of the interwar period as the object of his attack rather than
the liberal internationalists of the nineteenth century. As we will see in the following section, rather than relying
a natural harmony to deliver peace, idealists fervently believed that a new international order had to be
constructed, one which was managed by an international organization. This line of argument represents a
significant shift from the nineteenthcentury liberal internationalism to the idealist movement in the early part of
the twentieth century.
Idealism
Like liberal internationalism, the era of idealism. (from the early 1900s through to the late 1930s) was motivated
by the desire to prevent war. However, many idealists were sceptical that laissez faire economic principles, like
free trade, would deliver peace. Idealists, like J. A. Hobson, argued that imperialism-the subjugation of foreign
peoples and their resources-was becoming the primary cause of conflict in international politics. For Hobson,
imperialism resulted from underconsumption within developed capitalist societies. This led capitalists to search
for higher profits overseas, which became a competitive dynamic between states and the catalyst for militarism,
leading to war. Here we see a departure from the liberal internationalist argument that capitalism was inherently
pacific. The fact that Britain and Germany had highly interdependent economies before the Great War
(1914-18), seemed to confirm the fatal flaw in the liberal internationalist association of interdependence with
peace. From the turn of the century, the contradictions within European civilization, of progress and
exemplarism on the one hand and the harnessing of industrial power for military purposes on the other, could no
longer be contained. Europe stumbled into a horrific war killing fifteen million people. The war not only
brought an end to three empires it was also a contributing factor to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The First World War shifted liberal thinking towards a recognition that peace is not a natural condition but is
one which must be constructed. In a powerful critique of the idea that peace and prosperity were part of a latent
natural order, the publicist and author Leonard Woolf argued that peace and prosperity required 'consciously
devised machinery' (Luard 1992: 465). But perhaps the most famous advocate of an international authority for
the management of international relations was Woodrow Wilson. According to the US President, peace could
only be secured with the creation of an international institution to regulate the international anarchy. Security
could not be left to secret bilateral diplomatic deals and a blind faith in the balance of power. Like domestic
society, international society must have a system of governance which has democratic procedures for coping
with disputes, and an international force which could be mobilized if negotiations failed. In this sense, liberal
idealism rests on a domestic analogy (Suganami 1989:94-113).
In his famous 'fourteen points' speech, addressed to Congress in January 1918, Wilson argued that 'a
general association of nations must be formed' to preserve the coming peace. The League of Nations, was of
course, the general association which idealists willed into existence. For the League to be effective, it had to
have the military power to deter aggression and, when necessary, to use a preponderance of power to enforce its
will. This was the idea behind the collective security system which was central to the League of Nations.
Collective security refers to an arrangement where 'each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the
concern of all, and agrees to join in a collective response to aggression' (Roberts and Kingsbury 1993: 30). It
can be contrasted with an alliance system of security, where a number of states join together usually as a
response to a specific external threat (sometimes known as collective defence). In the case of the League of
Nations, Article 16 noted the obligation that, in the event of war, all member states must cease normal relations
with the offending state, impose sanctions, and if necessary, commit their armed forces to the disposal of the
League Council should the use of force be required to restore the status quo.
The experience of the League of Nations was a disaster. Whilst the moral rhetoric at the creation of the
League was decidedly idealist, in practice states remained imprisoned by self-interest. There is no better
example of this than the United State's decision not to join the institution it had created. With the Soviet Union
outside the system for ideological reasons, the League of Nations quickly became a talking shop for the
'satisfied' powers. Hitler's decision in March 1936 to reoccupy the Rhineland, a designated demilitarized zone
according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, effectively pulled the plug on the League's life-support system
(it had been put on the 'critical' list following the Manchurian crisis in 1931 and the Ethiopian crisis in 1935).
Indeed, throughout the 1930s, the term crisis had become the most familiar one in international affairs.
Although the League of Nations was the principal organ of the idealist interwar order, it is important to note
other ideas which dominated liberal thinking in the early part of the twentieth century. Education became a vital
addition to the liberal agenda, hence the origins of the study of International Relations as a discipline in
Aberystwyth in 1919 with the founding of the Woodrow Wilson professorship. One of the tasks of the Wilson
Professor was to promote the League of Nations as well as contributing to a `truer understanding of civilizations
other than our own' (John et al. 1972: 86). It is this self-consciously normative approach to the discipline of
International Relations, the belief that scholarship is about what ought to be and not just what is, that sets the
idealists apart from the institutionalists who were to carry the torch of liberalism through the early post-1945
period.
Outside of the military-security issue area, liberal ideas made an important contribution to global politics
even during the cold war. The principle of self-determination, championed by liberal internationalists for
centuries, signalled the end of empire. The protection of individuals from human rights abuses was enshrined in
the three key standard setting documents: the 1948 Universal Declaration, the Covenant on Economic, Social,
and Cultural Rights, and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Even the more radical calls in the
mid-1970s for a 'New International Economic Order' emanating from poorer post-colonial states contained
within it the kernel of a liberal defence of justice as fairness. The problem of the uneven distribution of wealth
and power between the 'developed' and the 'developing' world is one which has been championed by a
succession of liberal stateleaders, from the 1980 Brandt Report (named after the former West German
Chancellor Willy Brandt) to the recently published 1995 report by the Commission on Global Governance,
chaired by Ingvar Carlson (the Swedish Prime Minister) and Shridath Ramphal (former Secretary-General of the
Commonwealth).
Liberal Institutionalism
According to the history of the discipline, the collapse of the League of Nations signified the end of idealism.
There is no doubt that the language of liberal institutionalism was less avowedly normative; how could anyone
assume progress after Auschwitz? Yet certain fundamental tenets remained. Even in the early 1940s, there was a
recognition of the need to replace the League with another international institution with responsibility for
international peace and security. Only this time, in the case of the United Nations there was an awareness among
the framers of the Charter of the need for a consensus between the Great Powers in order for enforcement action
to be taken, hence the veto system (Article 27 of the UN Charter) which allowed any of the five permanent
members of the Security Council the power of veto. This revision constituted an important modification to the
classical model of collective security (Roberts 1996: 315). With the ideological polarity of the cold war, the UN
procedures for collective security were still-born (as either of the superpowers and their allies would veto any
action proposed by the other). 3 It was not until the end of the cold war that a collective security system was
operationalized, following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq on 2 August 1990 (see Case Study 1, Box 8.3, for an
analysis of the Gulf War and collective security).
An important argument by liberal institutionalists in the early post-war period concerned the state's inability
to cope with modernization. David Mitrany, a pioneer integration theorist, argued that transnational co-operation
was required in order to resolve common problems (Mitrany 1943). His core concept was ramification, meaning
the likelihood that co-operation in one sector would lead governments to extend the range of collaboration
across other sectors. As states become more embedded in an integration process, the 'cost' of withdrawing from
co-operative ventures increases.
This argument about the positive benefits from transnational co-operation is one which lies at the core of
liberal institutionalism (and remains central to neo-liberal institutionalists, as noted in the following section).
For writers such as Haas, international and regional institutions were a necessary counterpart to sovereign states
whose capacity to deliver welfare goals was decreasing (1968: 154-8). The work of liberal institutionalists like
Mitrany and Haas, provided an important impetus to closer co-operation between European states, initially
through the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. Consistent with Mitrany's hypothesis,
co-operation in the energy sector provided governments with the confidence to undertake the more ambitious
plan for a European Economic Community enshrined in the Treaty of Rome in 1956.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of scholars (particularly in the US) influenced by
the European integration literature, began to examine in greater analytical depth the impact of modernization on
the states system .4 In particular, they rejected the state-centric view of the world adopted by both traditional
realists and behaviouralists. World politics, according to liberal institutionalists (or pluralists as they are often
referred to) were no longer an exclusive arena for states, as it had been for the first three hundred years of the
Westphalian states system. In one of the central texts of this genre, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argued that
the centrality of other actors, such as interest groups, transnational corporations and international
non-governmental organizations, had to be taken into consideration (1972). Here the overriding image of
international relations is one of a cobweb of diverse actors linked through multiple channels of interaction.
Although the phenomena of transnationalism was an important addition to the International Relations
theorists' vocabulary, it remained underdeveloped as a theoretical concept. Perhaps the most important
contribution of pluralism was its elaboration of interdependence. Due to the expansion of capitalism and the
emergence of a global culture, pluralists recognized a growing interconnectedness between states which brought
with it a shared responsibility for the environment. The following passage sums up this position neatly:
We are all now caught up in a complex systemic web of interactions such that changes in one part of the system
have direct and indirect consequences for the rest of the system. (Little 1996: 77)
Clearly absolute state autonomy, so keenly entrenched in the minds of state leaders, was being circumscribed by
interdependence. Moreover, this process is irreversible (Morse 1976: 97). Unlike realists however, liberal
institutionalists believe that the decline of state autonomy is not necessarily regrettable, rather, they see
transnationalism and interdependence as phenomena which must be managed.
Key Points
▪ Liberal internationalism: The strand in liberal thinking which holds that the natural order has been
corrupted by undemocratic state leaders and out-dated policies such as the balance of power. Prescriptively,
liberal internationalists believe that contact between the peoples of the world, through commerce or travel,
will facilitate a more pacific form of international relations.
▪ Idealism: Although there are important continuities between liberal internationalism and idealism, such as
the belief in the power of world public opinion to tame the interests of states, ide- alism is distinct in that it
believes in the import- ance of constructing an international order. For idealists, as opposed to
internationalists, the free-dom of states is part of the problem of interna-tional relations and not part of the
solution. Two requirements follow from their diagnosis. The first is the need for explicitly normative thinking:
how to promote peace and build a better world. Second, states must be part of an international
organization, and be bound by its rules and norms.
▪ Central to idealism was the formation of an international organization to facilitate peaceful change,
disarmament, arbitration, and (where necessary) enforcement. The League of Nations was founded in 1920
but its collective security system failed to prevent the descent into world war in the 1930s. The victor states
in the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany pushed for a new international institution to represent the
society of states and resist aggression. The United Nations Charter was signed in June 1945 by fifty states
in San Francisco. It represented a departure from the League in two important respects. Membership was
near universal, and the great powers were able to prevent any enforcement action from taking place which
might be contrary to their interests.
▪ Liberal institutionalism: The third figure in the pattern of Liberalism. In the 1940s, liberal institutionalists
turned to international institutions to carry out a number of functions the state could not perform. This was
the catalyst for integration theory in Europe and pluralism in the United States. By the early 1970s,
pluralism had mounted a significant challenge to realism. It focused on new actors (transnational corporations,
non-governmental organizations) and new patterns of interaction (interdependence, integration).
Three Liberal Responses to Globalization
The previous section has delineated three elements in the history of liberal thinking on International Relations.
Below, the chapter will bring this conversation between contending liberalisms up to date, hence the prefix 'neo'
attached to each variant. Although the underlying arguments within each element remain constant, there have
been discernible shifts in the political purposes to which those arguments have been utilized.
Neo-Liberal Internationalism
One of the 'big ideas' in the theory and practice of international relations in the 1990s is known as 'the
democratic peace-thesis'. The kernel of this argument, which can be traced back to Kant's philosophical sketch
on Perpetual Peace, is that liberal states do not go to war with other liberal states. In this sense, liberal states
have created what Michael Doyle has termed, a 'separate peace'. Although liberal states are pacific in relation to
other liberal states, Doyle recognizes that liberal democracies are as aggressive as any other type of state in their
relations with authoritarian regimes and stateless peoples (Doyle 1995b:100).
Although the empirical evidence seems to support the democratic peace thesis, it is important to bear in mind
the limitations of the argument. In the first instance, for the theory to be compelling, supporters of the
democratic peace thesis must provide an explanation as to why war has become unthinkable between liberal
states. Over two centuries ago, Kant argued that if the decision to use force was taken by the people, rather than
by the prince, then the frequency of conflicts would be drastically reduced. But logically this argument implies a
lower frequency of conflicts between liberal and non-liberal states, and this has proven to be contrary to the
historical evidence. An alternative explanation for the 'democratic peace thesis' might be that liberal states tend
to be wealthy, and therefore have less to gain (and more to lose) by engaging in conflicts than poorer
authoritarian states. Perhaps the most convincing explanation of all is the simple fact that liberal states tend to
be in relations of amity with other liberal states. War between Canada and the US is unthinkable, perhaps not
because of their liberal democratic constitutions, but because they are friends. Indeed, war between states with
contrasting political and economic systems may also be unthinkable because they have a history of friendly
relations. An example here is Mexico and Cuba, who although claiming a common revolutionary tradition
nevertheless embrace antithetical economic ideologies.
Irrespective of the scholarly search for an answer to the reasons why liberal democratic states are more
peaceful, it is important to note the political consequences of this hypothesis. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote
an article entitled 'The End of History' which celebrated the triumph of liberalism over all other ideologies,
contending that liberal states were more stable internally and more peaceful in their international relations
(Fukuyama 1989: 3-18). Whilst restating a familiar liberal internationalist theme, albeit with a Hegelian spin,
Fukuyama's article and subsequent book served the political purpose of underlining the superiority of American
values, thereby providing legitimacy to those who sought to 'export' liberalism. It was no longer a case of
liberalism in one country, as it had appeared to some realists during the cold war, but rather liberalism for all
countries.
What instruments are available to states to spread liberal values and widen the zone of peace? There are a
wide range of options open to Western states in their attempt to globalize liberalism. At one end of the
spectrum, the collapse of state structures (e.g. in Somalia or Yugoslavia) prompts many liberals to call for
forcible humanitarian intervention. But as any liberal realist like Hedley Bull would argue, intervention even for
liberal reasons often leads to more chaos. Since the question of humanitarian intervention is dealt with in detail
in Chapter 20, the paragraphs below will focus on the non-military instruments at the disposal of state-leaders
and international institutions for promoting liberal values in global politics.
At the political level, the powerful states in the international system are able to use institutional leverage as a
means of embedding formerly non-liberal states into the liberal world order. In other words, in order for Russia
to be accepted as one of the G7 (Group of Seven most powerful industrial economies), it must demonstrate its
liberal credentials first. The same process has been at work in the
Box 8.4. Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism as the End of History?
In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man (1993) Fukuyama celebrates the globalization of liberal
capitalism. The phrase 'end of history' is not meant to be literal, but philosophical. All history hitherto has been
the remorseless unfolding of the liberal idea. We are not condemned, he argues, to live for ever in the realist
world of inevitable conflict. Fukuyama provides two causal explanations for progressive historical change. At
the material level, the cumulative knowledge of -science facilitates inexorable economic development. At the
level of ideas, Fukuyama (like Hegel before him) argues that the historical struggle by individuals to be
recognized by others, or what he calls thymos, comes to an end with the triumph of liberalism. For the first time
in history, individuals can receive mutual recognition without subordinating it to the will of others (and thereby
denying them recognition). Just as liberalism has achieved progress in domestic society, it has transformed
relations between liberal states in international society. Like other neo-liberal internationalists (discussed
below), Fukuyama believes that liberal states have established a pacific union within which war has become
unthinkable.
relations between the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union. The goal
of Western states using institutional leverage is rapid macro-economic convergence on the part of those states
seeking to join the EU and the economies of the established memberstates.
In relations with the Third World, where there are fewer prospects for exerting regional institutional
leverage, the most effective tool has been conditionality: the policies developing countries must pursue in return
for economic benefits (e.g. loans or investment). More recently, conditionality has expanded from the
requirement to liberalize and privatize the economic sector, to include targets on 'good governance', and
compliance to human rights norms. Whilst conditionality might claim some successes, its reception in Asia has
been contested. The rapid economic development of the ASEAN states (Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia,
Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines) has made them economically less dependent on Western aid or
expertise, and at the same time they have become increasingly critical of the liberal internationalist assumption
that liberal values are universally shared. The Australian dilemma, illus-trated in Case Study 2 (Box 8.5),
between promot- ing human rights in the Asia-Pacific region without damaging its economic and security
interests, might serve as a microcosm for future relations between a weaker West and a potential economic
colossus like China.
The attempt by Western states to globalize liberalism has highlighted a number of endemic weaknesses in
the neo-liberal internationalist position. First, from an intellectual point of view, theorists like Doyle and
Fukuyama are complacent about the degree to which their own society is indeed liberal and prone to
overestimate the number of stable liberal democracies in the world (about two dozen, out of over 180 states
according to Fred Halliday). Second, a defeat for Stalinist-style communism does not mean that liberalism has
triumphed over all other ideologies. Social democracy remains an important ideology in Northern Europe, and a
variety of forms of non-liberal consitutionalism exist, for example, in Asia and to a lesser extent in Japan. Third,
Western states have done little to remove the suspicion among radicals in their own countries and public opinion
in South-East Asia, that the project of spreading liberal values is a convenient fiction for promoting the
commercial interests of Western firms. Finally, the neo-liberal internationalist agenda of the 1990s highlights
the often conflicting principles which underpin liberalism. Promoting good governance, or economic liberalization,
inevitably comes into conflict with the norms of sovereignty and self-determination. Moreover, as the
West becomes more deeply involved in the organization of developing states' political and economic
infrastructure, the less those states are able to be accountable to their domestic constituencies, thereby cutting
through the link between the government and the people which is so central to modern liberal forms of representative
democracy (Hurrell and Woods 1995: 463).
Neo-Idealism
Like the idealists of the inter-war period, neoidealists have a good deal in common with liberal internationalism:
both share a commitment to democratic forms of government, and both believe that interdependence breeds
peace. That said, neoidealists believe that peace and justice are not natural conditions, they are the product of
deliberate design. Moreover, the processes of globalization have added to the enormity of this task. Encouraging
or even coercing non-liberal states to become more democratic is only part of what is required in order to bring
about a truly liberal world order. Consistent with the original idealists, neoidealists argue that reform needs to
take place at the international level: like states themselves, international institutions need to be made more
democratic. Similarly, neo-idealists believe that global social movements must be brought into the
decision-making structures, since these are often closer to ordinary people than their own governments. In
addition to tackling the global 'democratic deficit', neo-idealists are more prone to point to the dark side of
globalization than liberal internationalists. These arguments are discussed in greater length below.
Liberal internationalists tend to use the term globalization in positive ways, as though we lived in a global
village, signifying economic and moral interconnectedness. Yet for more radical neoidealists, the world seems
more like a scene from the film Blade Runner with post-modern technologies coexisting with ethical anarchy
and urban decay. Neo-idealists like Richard Falk recognize that globalization and community are frequently at
odds with each other. 'This tension between the ethical imperatives of the global neighbourhood and the
dynamics of economic globalistation', he argues, is 'an evasion that has been characteristic of all post-Wilsonian
variants of liberal internationalism' (1995a: 573). In this sense, neo-liberal internationalism has fallen prey to the
neo-liberal consensus which minimizes the role of the public sector in providing for welfare, and elevates the
market as the appropriate mechanism for allocating resources, investment, and employment opportunities.
Although the globalization of liberalism has improved the per capita income of the vast majority of the world's
population, the rate of increase among the powerful states has been far greater. According to the United Nations
Development Programme 'the richest billion people around the world command 60 times the income of the
poorest billion'; by poor the UN means those without clean drinking water or enough food to maintain minimum
standards of nutrition.'
Neo-idealists offer a radically different set of prescriptions to liberal internationalists. At the level of
international institutions, writers such as David Held, Norberto Bobbio, and Danielle Archibugi (Archibugi and
Held 1995) among others, believe that global politics must be democratized. Held's diagnosis begins by
revealing the inadequacies of the 'Westphalian order' (or the modern statessystem which is conventionally dated
from the middle of the seventeenth century). During the latter stages of this period, we have witnessed rapid
democratization with a number of states, but this has not been accompanied by democratization of the society of
states (Held 1993). This task is increasingly urgent given the current levels of interconnectedness, since
'national' governments are no longer in control of the forces which shape their citizens' lives (e.g. the decision
by one state to permit deforestation has environmental consequences for all states). After 1945, the UN Charter
set limits to the sovereignty of states by recognizing the rights of individuals in a whole series of human rights
conventions. But even if the UN had lived up to its Charter in the post-1945 period, it would still have left the
building blocks of the Westphalian order largely intact, namely: the hierarchy between great powers and the rest
(symbolized by the permanent membership of the Security Council); massive inequalities of wealth between
states; and a minimal role for non-state actors to influence decisionmaking in international relations.
In place of the Westphalian and UN models, Held outlines a 'cosmopolitan model of democracy'. This
requires, in the first instance, the creation of regional parliaments and the extension of the authority of such
regional bodies (like the European Union) which are already in existence. Second, human rights conventions
must be entrenched in national parliaments and monitored by a new International Court of Human Rights. Third,
reform of the UN, or the replacement of it, with a genuinely democratic and accountable global parliament.
Without appearing to be too sanguine about the prospects for the realization of the cosmopolitan model of
democracy, Held is nevertheless adamant that if democracy is to thrive, it must penetrate the institutions and
regimes which manage global politics.
Neo-idealism emphasizes not just macro institutional democratic reform, but also democratization at the
'grass-roots'. Radical liberals like Richard Falk argue that global civil society has massive emancipatory
potential. The evolution of international humanitarian law, and the extent to which these laws are complied
with, is largely down to the millions of individuals who are active supporters of human rights groups like
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (Falk 1995: 164). Similarly, global protest movements have
been largely responsible for the heightened global sensitivity to environmental degradation. This emphasis by
neo-idealists on what Falk calls 'globalization from below' is an important antidote to mainstream liberalism's
somewhat status quo oriented world view which sanctifies market forces, and seeks only piecemeal reform of
international institutions such as the UN.
Neo-Liberal Institutionalism
In the 1980s, pluralism metamorphosed into neoliberal institutionalism. One of the problems with the former
'label' is that few of the thinkers actually identified themselves with the movement. By contrast, liberal
institutionalism has attracted some of the most prolific and influential thinkers in the field, and has become the
new orthodoxy in a number of key North American schools of International Relations. In addition to a high
degree of self-identification on the part of contemporary liberal institutionalists, the second important revision to
the earlier pluralism can be identified in the far more focused research agenda of liberal internationalism. The
third and most substantive revision to pluralism concerns the shift back towards a state-centric approach to
world politics (a shift signalled by Keohane and Nye in 1977).
What are the defining features of neo-liberal institutionalism? The core principles of neo-liberal
institutionalism can be distilled into the following four principles:
▪ Actor: Liberal institutionalists take for granted the state as a legitimate representation of society. Although
emphasizing the importance of nonstate actors in his early pluralist work, Robert Keohane's understanding
of neo-liberal institutionalism admits that non-state actors are subordinate to states (Keohane 1989: 8).
▪ Structure: Liberals broadly accept the structural condition of anarchy in the international system, but
crucially, anarchy does not mean cooperation between states is impossible, as the existence (and
proliferation) of international regimes demonstrates. In short, regimes and international institutions can
mitigate anarchy by reducing verification costs, reinforcing reciprocity, and making defection from norms
easier to punish.
▪ Process: Integration at the regional and global level is increasing. Here the future direction of the
European Union is considered to be a vital test case for neo-liberal institutionalism.
▪ Motivation: States will enter into co-operative relations even if another state will gain more from the
interaction, in other words, 'absolute gains' are more important for liberal institutionalists than 'relative
gains' (emphasized by neorealists).
It is vital to bear in mind the context out of which neo-liberal institutionalism developed. Leading neo-liberal
institutionalists such as Axelrod, Keohane, and Oye, developed their ideas in response to Kenneth Waltz's
theory of neo-realism outlined in his 1979 work Theory o f International Politics. Moreover, this response was
from within the mainstream as opposed to the radical critical theory challenge from the margins which also
developed in the 1980s (Ashley 1984; Cox 1981). Given this context, it is not surprising that neo-liberal institutionalism
often seems closer to contemporary realism than to the tradition of liberal thinking about
international relations.
As the analysis of neo-idealism demonstrates, radical liberals do not take the state for granted. Legitimacy is
not something that states possess by right, but something which has to be earned through humane government
and democratic procedures. Moreover, early liberal institutionalists, such as Mitrany and Haas, were sceptical
about whether states could deliver liberal goals of order and justice even if they had the will. Accordingly, they
prescribed devolving power down to local government/regional assemblies or up to supra-state organizations or
world government.
Apart from a considerable divergence between the complacent statism of neo-liberal institutionalism, and the
scepticism towards the state shown by early liberal institutionalists, there is one other significant demarcation
between neo-liberal institutionalism and the other two elements in liberal thinking. Both liberal internationalism
and idealism were wider ranging, more critical, and above all, more political than contemporary neo- liberal
institutionalism. This argument is power fully made by David Long in a recent critique of the so-called 'Harvard
School' of neo-liberal institutionalism:
Keohane's neoliberal institutionalism is an emasculated liberalism, shorn of its normative concerns with the liberty
and well-being of individuals, focusing on economic variables, using the utilitarian discourses and theories
of liberal economics, and making states the agents in international relations (Long 1996: 496).
In his defence, Keohane is justly critical of the naive assumption of classical liberal internationalists that
commerce breeds peace. A free trade system, according to Keohane, provides incentives for co-operation but
does not guarantee it. Here he is making an important distinction between cooperation and harmony.
'Co-operation is not automatic', Keohane argues, 'but requires planning and negotiation' (1989: 11). On this
point, we see an interesting overlap between the inter-war idealists and neo-liberal institutionalism. However,
the fact that both camps see co-operation as the handiwork of individuals and institutions (as opposed to being
part of a natural order) should not blind us to the point that the 'Harvard School' see the role of institutions as
regulating interests rather than transforming identities, as neo-idealists believe.
Key Points
▪ The research agenda of neo-liberal internationalism is dominated by the debate about liberal states: how far
the liberal zone of peace extends, why relations within it are peaceful, and what pattern is likely to evolve in
relations between liberal states and authoritarian regimes? Crucially, in the post-cold war era, neo-liberal
internationalists have lent their voices in support of Western (particularly American) attempts to use the
levers of foreign policy to put pressure on authoritarian states to liberalize.
▪ Neo-idealists have responded to globalization by calling for a double democratization of both international
institutions and domestic state structures. Radical neo-idealism is critical of mainstream liberalism's
devotion to 'globalization from above' which marginalizes the possibility of change from below through the
practices of global civil society.
▪ The most conventional of all contemporary liberalisms is neo-liberal institutionalism. At the centre of their
research programme is how to initiate and maintain co-operation under conditions of anarchy. This task is
facilitated by the creation of regimes. Notice that neo-liberal institutionalists share with realists the
assumption that states are the most significant actors, and that the international environment is anarchic.
Their accounts diverge, however, on the prospects for achieving sustained patterns of cooperation under
anarchy.
Conclusion and Postscript: The Crisis of Liberalism
There is something of a crisis in liberal thinking on international relations in the 1990s. The euphoria with
which liberals greeted the end of the cold war in 1989 has to a large extent been dissipated; the great caravan of
humanity, kick-started with the revolutions of 1989, is once again coming to a spluttering halt. Successive
post-cold war conflicts, in Afghanistan, Liberia, Chechnya, Somalia, Burundi, and Rwanda (to name a few)
remind us that in many parts of the world, the conditions which fuelled these tensions in the cold war period
remain in place; for example, the geopolitical rivalry to grant massive arms transfers to states involved in `civil'
wars.
The audit of global politics in the 1990s, from a liberal point of view, begins to take on a much darker hue
when the wars of the former Yugoslavia are included. Unlike the tragedies of Rwanda and Burundi, the conflict
in Bosnia took place on the doorstep of the liberal zone. How could the national hatreds exhibited by all the
warring parties take root once again in Western soil? Liberal internationalists like Michael Ignatieff despaired
that acts of genocide had returned to haunt Europe forty years after the Holocaust. After all, it was the
Enlightenment which provided a vocabulary for articulating liberal ideas such as human rights and humanitarian
law. 'What made the Balkan wars so shocking' argued Ignatieff, 'was how little these universals were respected
in their home continent' (1995).
In the remaining paragraphs, by way of a response to Ignatieff, I suggest two explanations for the growing
disenchantment with Liberalism. First, as we have seen throughout the chapter, Liberalism does not have a
single voice; moreover, competing) liberal arguments can often be used to defend different positions. The
imperative to intervene in the wars of the former Yugoslavia, advocated by Ignatieff and other liberal
internationalists, is backed up by the cosmopolitan liberal principle of the equal worth of all individuals: a
sentiment captured by the words of the poet John Donne, 'any man's death diminishes me, because I am
involved in Mankind'. But other liberals, of a more commu nitarian persuasion, argue that our obligations to all
of humankind are less significant than our duties to citizens of our own state. On this line of argument, the
tragedy in Bosnia may diminish us all, but this is not a sufficient reason to risk the lives of our fellow citizens in
defence of abstract moral universals. How can Liberalism be our guide when, from different perspectives, it can
support intervention and non-intervention? Hoffmann is surely right to argue that the case of degenerating states
reveals how sovereignty, democracy, national selfdetermination, and human rights 'are four norms in conflict
and a source of complete liberal disarray' (1995:169).
A deeper reason for the crisis in Liberalism, and one which is prompted by Ignatieff's argument, is that is is
bound up with an increasingly discredited Enlightenment view of the world. Contrary to the hopes of liberal
internationalists, the application of reason and science to politics has not brought cornmunities together. Indeed,
it has arguably shown the fragmented nature of the political community, which is regularly expressed in terms
of ethnic,
Box 8.6. Key Concepts of Liberalism
Collective Security
Refers to an arrangement where 'each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all,
and agrees to join in a collective response to aggression' (Roberts and Kingsbury, 1993: 30).
Conditionality
The way in which states or international institutions impose conditions upon developing countries in advance of
distributing economic benefits.
Cosmopolitan Model of Democracy
Associated with David Held, and other neo-idealists, a cosmopolitan model of democracy requires the following:
the creation of regional parliaments and the extension of the authority of such regional bodies (like the
European Union) which are already in existence; human rights conventions must be entrenched in national parliaments
and monitored by a new International Court of Human Rights; the UN must be replaced with a genuinely
democratic and accountable global parliament.
Democratic Peace
A central plank of liberal internationalist thought, the democratic peace thesis holds that war has become
unthinkable between liberal states.
Enlightenment
Associated with rationalist thinkers of the eighteenth century. Key ideas (which some would argue remain
mottoes for our age) include: secularism, progress, reason, science, knowledge, and freedom. The motto of the
Enlightenment is: 'Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding' (Reiss 1991: 54).
Idealism
Idealists seek to apply liberal thinking in domestic politics to international relations, in other words,
institutionalize the rule of law. This reasoning is known as the domestic analogy. According to idealists in the
early twentieth century, there were two principal requirements for a new world order. First: state leaders,
intellectuals, and public opinion had to believe that progress was possible. Second: an international organization
had to be created to facilitate peaceful change, disarmament, arbitration, and (where necessary) enforcement.
The League of Nations was founded in 1920 but its collective security system failed to prevent the descent into
world war in the 1930s.
Integration
A process of ever closer union between states, in a regional or international context. The process often begins by
co-operation to solve technical problems, referred to by Mitrany as ramification.
Interdependence
A condition where states (or peoples) are affected by decisions taken by others; for example, a decision to raise
interest rates in Germany automatically exerts upward pressure on interest rates in other European states.
Interdependence can be symmetric, i.e. both sets of actors are affected equally, or it can be asymmetric, where
the impact varies between actors.
Liberalism
An ideology whose central concern is the liberty of the individual. For most liberals, the establishment of the
state is necessary to preserve individual liberty from being destroyed or harmed by other individuals or by other
states. But the state must always be the servant of the collective will and not (as in the case of Realism) the
master.
Liberal Institutionalism
In the 1940s, liberals turned to international institutions to carry out a number of functions the state could not
perform. This was the catalyst for integration theory in Europe and pluralism in the United States. By the early
1970s, pluralism had mounted a significant challenge to realism. It focused on new actors (transnational
corporations, non-governmental organizations) and new patterns of interaction (interdependence, integration).
Liberal Internationalism
The strand in liberal thinking which holds that the natural order has been corrupted by undemocratic state
leaders and outdated policies such as the balance of power. Prescriptively, liberal internationalists believe that
contact between the peoples of the world, through commerce or travel, will facilitate a more pacific form of
international relations. Key concept of liberal internationalism: the idea of a harmony of interests.
Normative
The belief that theories should be concerned with what ought to be, rather than merely diagnosing what is. Norm
creation refers to the setting of standards in international relations which governments (and other actors) ought
to meet.
Pluralism
An umbrella term, borrowed from American political science, used to signify International Relations theorists
who rejected the realist view of the primacy of the state and the coherence of the state-as-actor.
World Government
Associated in particular with those idealists who believe that peace can never be achieved in a world divided
into separate sovereign states. just as the state of nature in civil society was abolished by governments, the state
of war in international society must be ended by the establishment of a world government.
linguistic, or religious differences. Critics of Liberalism such as John Gray view the very idea of `moral
universals' as dangerous. The universalizing mission of liberal values such as democracy, capitalism, and
secularism, undermine the traditions and practices of non-Western cultures (Gray 1995: 1-16). But as a number
of states in South-East Asia have demonstrated in recent years, modernization can take place without a
corresponding liberalization of state and society. The key question for Liberalism as modernity draws to an end
is whether it can reinvent itself as a non-universalizing, nonWesternizing political idea, which preserves the
traditional liberal value of human solidarity without undermining cultural diversity.