The good life: the liberal conversation on international relations
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More than anything else, liberals want to prevent war which they see as an irrational cause of action given the suffering and destruction it brings. Glory, honour and martial virtues are all illusory distractions from what the liberal cherishes namely, the humble, ordinary life — the good life. Right from the start I wish to state that liberalism is not based on the premise that human nature is inherently good. If that were true, there would be little point in liberalism at all. It exists precisely because human nature is prone to conflict and because international relations so often lead to war. But liberals do believe that progress is possible.
Immanuel Kant is often credited with laying the first tile in the mosaic of liberal international relations theory. However, his Perpetual Peace of 1795 was written 82 years after Abbé De Saint-Pierre published Project for Settling a Perpetual Peace in Europe. His Reverence lacked faith in balances of power and peace treatises arguing instead for a peaceful cooperative union of states which he referred to (possibly the first to do so) as a European Union. This project required each monarch to give up their imperial designs and submit to a congress that had the power to punish those who broke rank. Controversially, this power would extend to stifling unrest within states. As such, his work was not well received. In the eyes of Kings, he spat in the face of absolutism, and in the eyes of the common man, he wished for the King’s boot to be forever placed upon their necks.
What Kant did was to reconcile this project for inter-state peace with the equality of all people as he saw it. Having read a copy of Rousseau’s Emile, Kant saw that the reason of states was just as the reason of individuals. This led him to the idea that war can only be averted when all people have a say in matters of state; the republic must replace the monarchy. Kant’s thesis, known as democratic peace theory, has not yet been disproved as no democratic republic has ever gone to war with another. Following Kant, economic liberals such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Richard Cobden discussed the role of trade in securing economic ties between nations which, they said, would bring the good life to all. States should willingly seek to avert war to preserve these mutual gains. Jeremy Bentham went as far as to argue that “between the interests of nations there is nowhere any real conflict.”
Liberals have faced fierce battles throughout the twentieth century. In some they have stormed and taken key ground and in others they have fallen like toy soldiers. Indeed, the story of liberalism in the opening act of the century is as comical as it it is tragic and is best illustrated by the story of Sir Norman Angell. Angell was liberalism’s poster-boy. The one-time cowboy, Knight of the Garter, Labour MP and Nobel Peace Prize winner published The Great Illusion in 1910. The book sold millions of copies and was translated into 25 languages. At its core was that liberal idea that the political and economic closeness between European nations made war completely pointless. Four years later the world’s great powers were sending their men to kill one another in the fields of Flanders at a rate that quickly buried all the sales of The Great Illusion under a heap of lice, lugers and limbs.
Following the Great War, liberals wised up to the critique that peace was not a natural pre-condition of human relations and had to be organised instead through international bodies. Liberal thought had come full circle as this was much the same idea as was advocated by Abbé de Saint-Pierre. Thinkers such as Woodrow Wilson shared the Father’s distrust of policies and treatise which sought to balance power rather than contain it. But national interests barred liberalism from replicating its success in the academy in politics. The rejection of President Wilson’s League of Nations by the United States Senate in 1919 made this clear as did Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936.
The Second World War was bloodier than than the first. And the shock of the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb left little ground for liberal ideas to grow as they did with the poppies after the Great War. Nevertheless, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, worked tirelessly to establish the United Nations. This was a liberal victory followed by a triumphal procession of national interests. The compromises that made the UN possible deviated far from the liberal project. The veto power granted to the founding members, France, United States, Great Britain, Russia and China meant- and continues to mean- that motions put before the Security Council have been subject to, amongst other things, the whims of Moscow, the intransigence of the US and the calculations of Beijing. It is a fickle organisation, much like people are fickle; liberals are therefore right to assume that states act as people do.
The end of the Cold War enabled cooperation between the US and the former USSR giving renewed freedom to the UN and to the liberal project in general. Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the “end of history” in 1989; what an ending it has been up to now. Rather than prevailing above all other ideologies, liberalism’s legitimacy has been repeatedly questioned. The Syrian conflict has shown how hard it can be to get states to work as one to tackle issues such as the spread of terrorism, the use of banned weaponry, the safety of refugees and that familiar problem of war.
Questions come from without and within. All liberals seek to project values onto world politics, but that is not to say those values are the same or even compatible. Some liberals seek to end war whilst others seek only its regulation. Some hold that their project is best advanced by policies of toleration. This can and has extended to tolerating even those states which flout the rules, such as North Korea or Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq. Others promote interventionist policies backed by strong international institutions.
Looking at the entire liberal project- which includes many more thinkers than I have mentioned- the domestic analogy is clear. Each state has its own unique character just like and often in line with the people who comprise it. Some are aggressive like the United States, quiet like Lichtenstein, calculating like China, arrogant like Great Britain, and some always have a point to prove, like Russia. Liberals hold all states to have inalienable rights just as people do: each state has the right to self govern and the right to non-intervention in their domestic affairs. The project for liberals can therefore be described as the globalisation of the good life.
While liberals should be concerned about the present state of things, they should also be hopeful that the future will be better. Indeed, a liberal who is not hopeful about the possibility for progress is more of a realist. So by definition, liberals are always looking up. If I could give them a word of advice, it would be to keep the chin up but eyes forward because history tells us there is usually something lurking around in the polisphere that threatens to take away the good life.
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