Liberalism, International Terrorism, and Democratic Wars

Abstract

Despite its claim that the questions ‘Why do wars occur?’ and ‘How can a stable peace be achieved?’ are fundamental to its raison d’etre, IR has been relatively slow to re-evaluate its theoretical frameworks in light of the violence generated by terrorist groups and the responses to these threats by state actors. This short article argues that such a re-appraisal is of some urgency. The so-called war on terror has highlighted the fact that certain liberal democracies are highly war-prone, and their ‘enemies’ are represented as being existential threats to the Western way of life. Moreover, the institutions that are purportedly meant to constrain executive authority from engaging in wars of aggression have failed to prevent illiberal interventions. War-like behaviour towards those who fi ght without just cause and who do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants does not in itself refute the argument that democracies have forged a ‘separate peace’; indeed, defending this zone might be regarded as a historic duty. At a theoretical level, advocates of liberalism take the challenge posed by international terrorism seriously. While their historic rivals, the realists, can invoke the domestic–international divide to argue that terrorism does not materially affect the international system, liberals see terrorism as an ideological challenge. While liberalism is about toleration, civility and progress, terrorism takes us down an altogether different path – one of violent intolerance where human life is lived in fear and dies in anger. It is commonplace to draw distinctions between the various strands of liberal thought. This made a great deal of sense during the 1980s when neo-liberal institutionalists sought to make liberalism compatible with social scientifi c methods of inquiry. In so doing, a space was opened up for normative liberals to re-assert a values-based version of liberalism which centred on the claim that liberal states were more peace-prone. I would argue that this distinction is no longer relevant. Post9/11, many former liberal regime theorists (such as Robert Keohane and Ann-Marie Slaughter) have grafted onto their once positivist approach a strong normative distinction between liberal and illiberal regimes. In place of the distinction between positivist and normative conceptions of liberalism, the main fault-line in relation to the war on terror has been between defensive and offensive variants. Pre-9/11, the dominant narrative inside liberalism was about the pacifi c character of liberal states. Post-9/11, a signifi cant number of infl uential liberals have defended the right of Western states to wage war on terrorist groups and those that allegedly harbour them. The legal basis for such action has been contested in domains as varied as the UN Security Council and parliaments where the validity of the use of force against Iraq has been vigorously debated. The tendency for legal