Liberal International Order

This chapter shows that current IR (International Relations) theorizing finds liberal order a difficult topic. It confirms the concern voiced at the beginning of the volume that the IR academy in its use of liberalism as a label for theorizing the international has at once endowed liberal internationalism with more idealism than it can rightfully claim whilst at the same time has shorn liberalism of its normative and value-based foundations. It suggests that, paradoxically, when going back to ‘liberal basics’, some versions of realism are in fact based upon a specific vision of politics, which gives rise to liberal order. Liberal orders are not, and cannot be based on an ahistorical ‘view from nowhere’, but have to face an ever-changing historical setting. As result the philosophy cannot provide a final foundation, but nor can liberals — or for that matter realists — do without it.

‘The fear of universal monarchy’

This chapter engages with debates in liberal political philosophy. It asserts that contemporary forms of liberalism have blinded us to alternative conceptions of liberty and seeks to recover a conception of international liberty before Kantian and Wilsonian accounts denounced the balance of power as anathema to liberal world order. The chapter returns to English debates in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to excavate at least one intellectual context within which the balance of power became recognized as an indispensible ordering practice for maintaining the ‘liberties of Europe’. It shows that post-Restoration English debates about foreign policy remind us that historically, the balance of power has been conceived as a vital international ordering practice in the maintenance of liberty.

Liberal Imaginations

This chapter outlines a historical conceptual framework for understanding how liberal order came to be what it is today and how it has been imagined under different conditions and contexts across four centuries of intermingled liberal ordering practices and liberal ideas about world order. It asks ‘what is “the liberal” in liberal world order?’ and points to the use of narrativity and shared knowledge for constituting otherwise neutral concepts as liberal concepts. The aim is to increase our understanding of the political present by imbuing the past with historical meaning and political interpretation. For this purpose the chapter incorporates insights from constructivist and critical thinking, as well as from historical sociology and practice theory.

Introduction

The current liberal order is fading and has failed to deliver on some of its most fundamental promises. Yet, rather than taking flight from liberal order, this book suggests that liberal orders in the past always have been historically constituted and institutionally contested. Although liberal order's current crisis is not disputed, it suggests that the crisis has partly been constituted by the specific account of liberal order offered by ‘new liberalism’, which in its quest for a scientific method has shorn liberalism — and with it liberal order — of its critical and normative potential. The observation places liberal order's alleged crisis in a new light, where attention to liberal values and ordering practices invite consideration of those aspects of liberal order that are resilient and enduring.

Internationalism and Interventionism

This chapter argues that the spectre of imperial orders continues to haunt internationalism and has recently been resurrected with the increasing use, and expectation, of interventionism. It contemplates how the internationalist categories of ‘pluralism’ and ‘solidarism’ have conceived of the many dilemmas associated with the practice of intervention. Two different sets of reasons are usually offered for this practice — that liberal internationalists have enjoyed a significant power advantage, or, somewhat more sympathetically, that liberal internationalists are driven to intervene by moral purposes. The chapter concludes by showing how pluralism offers insights into how R2P, as a policy for guiding action in extreme cases of humanitarian catastrophe, could be decoupled from the moral vision of a world in which individual rights-based governance is the only acceptable comprehensive doctrine.

Democracy Promotion as a Practice of Liberal World Order

This chapter asks what the durability and centrality of democracy promotion suggest about the nature of liberal order. Is democracy promotion essentially based on an imperial or perhaps an integrative ordering practice, and how may we explain its long-lasting qualities? The chapter is clear in asserting the importance of democracy promotion, arguing that the promotion of liberal democracy plays a central role in liberal order both as a means to the end of a liberal order, but also an end itself. It concedes that democracy promotion has an undeniable expansionist dimension, but it doubts if democracy promotion as a practice of liberal internationalism is imperialist in its logic or consequences, although it clearly involves hierarchical and power-related practices.

Theoretical Foundations of Liberal Order

This chapter draws on the writings of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberal writings to show how, mainly British, liberals campaigned for the moralization, reform, or regulation of international relations. It demonstrates how contemporary liberal theories have lost connection to the moral and normative articulations of a century or so ago and that the meaning and value of many key liberal terms and concepts have changed significantly. As an example, the chapter shows that, although the relationship between liberalism and democracy appears inseparable today, a century and a half ago liberals were apprehensive about democracy. Liberals were devoted to the rule of law and representative government but, for many, democracy raised the spectre of the tyranny of an uneducated and potentially debased majority.

Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in Eurocentric Liberal International Theory

This chapter examines the validity of the postcolonial view that liberalism is inherently imperialist and culturally monist. In so doing it examines the claim that classical liberal international thought is committed to individual liberty and human dignity in the domestic realm and anti-imperialism and non-interventionism in the international realm. It points to a schizophrenic set of practices where interdependence, non-intervention, and anti-imperialism apply only to relations between ‘civilized’ states but not to the relations between ‘civilized’ and non-European powers. It suggests that the relationship between liberalism and imperialism is a highly complex one, and that liberalism is neither inherently imperialist nor anti-imperialist, but that classical liberalism was inherently and consistently Eurocentric — and perhaps still is.

Grand Days, Dark Palaces

Exploring contradictions inherent in liberal orders, this chapter questions the treatment of liberalism in the International Relations academy as a relatively straightforward set of beliefs about the individual, the state, the market, and political justice. It asserts that the contradictions and tensions within liberal internationalism are in fact deep and troubling. Highlighting some of liberalism's obscured and sometimes denied contradictions — between liberal ‘statism’ and liberal ‘cosmopolitanism’; between liberal ‘proceduralism’ and liberal ‘consequentialism’; and between liberal ‘absolutism’ and liberal ‘toleration’ — the chapter explores their implications for liberal ordering practices internationally. It concludes that liberal political engagement necessitates a more reflective standpoint and more historical sensibility if we are to be aware of how contradictions have shaped liberal orders in the past and are likely to continue to do so in the future.

States of Empire

This chapter addresses the complex and contingent interplay between liberal order and empire. It draws attention to the seemingly irresolvable dilemma that the United States maintains imperial relations with other political communities, whilst also rejecting the legitimacy of empire. The solution has been to ‘democratize’ imperial functions and to vest them in multilateral international organizations and to ensure that they as much as possible reflect the consent of the international community. Deploying an original framework of analysis based on ideal types of empire, the chapter advances the argument that imperial structures may be found embedded in at least three different variations of imperial logics in surprising settings, including inter-governmentalist liberal practices in UN peacekeeping operations and neo-trustee arrangements, such as those following the NATO intervention in Kosovo and NATO's role in Afghanistan.