The Ethical Foundations of Liberal Internationalism

Abstract

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE COLD WAR several optimistic assessments emerged about the future of world politics, in sharp contrast to the assumptions rooted in political realism that had guided the discipline of international relations (IR) throughout the cold war. According to some, liberal internationalism was undergoing a renaissance.(f.1) More cautious voices have understandably been raised since then. Of course, realists have had a direct stake in contesting the increased tenability of liberal ideas. Some have pointed to the recurrent conflict in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, while others have argued that the peaceful features of the post-cold war world are superficial and historically contingent.(f.2) Nonetheless, even those who are somewhat sympathetic to liberalism have urged continued deliberation and debate about its substantive principles rather than uncritical celebration. Two who take this stance are Stanley Hoffmann and Craig N. Murphy. According to Hoffmann, who can be characterized as a realist-sceptic, the most recent resurgence of liberal internationalism masks a deeper 'crisis' in its ranks because a cluster of tensions and unresolved paradoxes in the liberal world-view have not - perhaps cannot - be reconciled. Echoing the thought of Isaiah Berlin, Hoffmann suggests that liberal internationalism succumbs to the 'the fallacy of believing that all good things can come together.'(f.3) Writing from a Gramscian perspective, Murphy claims some sympathy with the reformist aims of liberal internationalism. However, he argues that liberalism's many (unfulfilled) promises of peace and freedom obscure fundamental conflicts between classes and, moreover, among states and regions.(f.4)These important warnings about the limitations of liberal internationalism are familiar to students of IR. They recall the tangled web of realist and marxist-derived criticisms in E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939). The liberal myths of a laissez-faire economy and a 'harmony of interests' among classes and states were, according to Carr, 'utopian.'(f.5) Unlike Hoffmann and Murphy, however, Carr imposed more coherence on his contemporary internationalists than actually existed. Recent scholarship demonstrates that he assembled a strawman out of the diverse views held by many liberal internationalists of the interwar years.(f.6) The irony of Carr's place in IR theory is that he obscured and glossed over several important political divisions among internationalists in order to argue that they did the same. Whether intended or not, his characterization of internationalism became typical in the post-World War II construction of the discipline of IR.My argument is that the recent re-ascendence of liberal internationalist theory should not overshadow the important division and debate within the tradition. The deepest and most important division is ethical and is concerned with whether or not the sovereign state is compatible with the highest of liberal goals, individual freedom. It is useful to explore why this ethical question has been obscured in many accounts of the liberal theoretical tradition and to demonstrate why the ethics of state sovereignty and individual freedom are implicit in the much more salient issue of how to reform international politics. There are two important reasons why the contested ethical core of liberal internationalism is likely to receive more scholarly attention. First, changes within the historical evolution of liberal internationalism make it difficult to avoid ethical questions. Second, the development of 'critical' theory within the discipline of IR more generally has made such questions a legitimate and important activity.LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM AND THE MECHANICS OF REFORMAs Michael W. Doyle notes, '[t]here is no canonical description of liberalism.'(f.7) Nonetheless, most scholars place the ethical goal of individual 'freedom' at its centre.(f.8) Of course, conceptions of freedom have varied historically among liberals. …