Liberal Theories of International Relations - Essay Example

Liberal Theories of International Relations The liberal tradition was arguably the first express paradigm in the international relations (IR) academy, championing collective security and open diplomacy, which were to form the backbone of the post-World War I international order. the optimistic nature of this school of thought, however, failed to take into account the role played by power and self-interest in an international society populated by selfish nation-states (Carr 1939). However, this initial stumble only served to rejuvenate liberal international theory, which has since found many variants, including the democratic peace theory and neo-liberalism. The purpose of this essay is to attempt an appraisal of the liberal tradition in IR and to ascertain its relevance when measured against the contemporary currents that shape world events today. At the onset, it should be noted that a lengthy historical investigation of the merits of liberal international theory is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, we focus on the developments since the end of the Cold War, since 1991 acts as a convenient point for the resurgence of liberalism in international thinking. (We shall, however, refer to past events by way of clarification or explanation as and when required.) Within this time frame, we find that two distinct perspectives emerge: firstly, a neo-Kantian vision of liberal internationalism and, secondly, the school of neo-liberal institutionalism. The consideration of each of these is critical in the final assessment of liberal theory in IR. In the liberal internationalist tradition, every individual is juridically equal and a bearer of certain basic rights (education, free press, due process, etc.). The governing authorities of states retain as much power as vested in them by their citizens, whose rights cannot be abused. Any individual can become a property owner, and economic exchanges best take place through voluntary interactions in a free market structure (Doyle 1997: 207). This framework is crucial to understanding how liberal internationalists formulate their views about IR and how they seek to explain or opine on world events. Indeed, “Liberal on a global scale embodies a domestic analogy operating at multiple levels….The historical project of Liberalism is the domestication of the international” (Dunne 2005: 187). One of the core ideas in Liberal thinking is that of the democratic peace thesis derived from the Kantian maxim claiming that republican (democratic) states do not fight one another (Kant 1991: 99-108). For Kant, the reasoning was simple: democratic states were internally more peaceful due to the pacific effects of international trade and the inability of democratic régimes to coercively draft citizens to participate in aggressive external ventures. The apparent peaceful behavior of democracies was only an extension of the domestic ideal into the international sphere. At the end of the Cold War, with the fall of communist Soviet Union (USSR), the ideological triumph of liberal democracy (and its implications for IR) was celebrated with much gusto, with some going so far as to claim that the event signified the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992). Liberal states were deemed to be internally more stable and externally most peaceful. Such a description, however, is not an accurate reflection of the true nature of democracies in the international sphere. As two seminal studies on the democratic-peace thesis note, democracies are equally aggressive as any other régime type in their relations with authoritarian states (Doyle 1995: 100) and young democracies tend to be more war prone than other states (Mansfield & Snyder 2005). In fact, even this explanation remains somewhat inadequate; take, for instance, the dyad of India and Pakistan, two countries with a long history of confrontations. The last armed conflict between the two states in 1999 occurred when a democratic government led either state. This shows that there may be contextual reasons for states go to into war, and their internal configurations may not matter in this regard. The optimism of liberal international theory at the end of the Cold War was buoyed to a large extent by the hopes attached with the resurgence of the United Nations (UN) and the collective security system. In fact, the success of the multilateral venture at Iraq in 1991 reinforced these hopes, while simultaneously expanding the scope of the UN’s involvement in international affairs and armed conflicts. However, as the experience since 1991 shows us, the collective security mechanism delivered little of what it promised. The lack of political will perpetuated conflicts throughout the 1990s – most notably in the Balkans and in Rwanda – and it does so still, in present day Darfur. While the international community hemmed and hawed over possible measures to counteract security threats, hundreds and thousands of innocent people were losing their lives to ethnic cleansing and genocide. In Rwanda, amidst much political turmoil, the Arusha Accords of 1993 were signed to engender peace between the Hutus and the Tutsis. The Accords, however, left extremist Hutus displeased, and after a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and the president of Burundi was shot down over Kigali airport in April 1994, violence erupted as Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred in a systematic genocide. At the end of the fateful week, more than 800,000 lives had been taken, while the UN-mandated Assistance Mission in Rwanda watched as bystanders. In Bosnia, after the Yugoslavian breakdown, the Serbs and Croats (encouraged by Serbia and Croatia, respectively) sought to create “ethnically homogeneous territories which would eventually become part of Serbia and Croatia, and to partition the ethnically mixed Bosnia-Herzegovina between a Serbian and a Croat part” (Kaldor 1999: 33), by using the rhetoric of self-determination. Their ultimate aim, however, was the ethnic cleansing of the country and the usurpation of power. From 1992 till 1995, 100,000 people had been killed: the worst case of ethnic cleansing came in July 1995, in the UN-declared safe haven of Srebrenica, before the international community finally decided to act. The Serbian forces entered, segregated the population, and killed more than 7000 men and boys, while many of the women were raped. Since 2003, the Sudanese government has armed Arab militiamen called the Janjaweed – while, all the time, denying such allegations – which have systematically killed the (traditionally African) farming communities in Darfur. More than two million people are believed to be living in camps in Darfur, while many have crossed over to neighboring Chad to live in similar camps. Conservative (and now somewhat dated) estimates show at least 200,000 dead, either slaughtered by the Janjaweed, or succumbing to starvation and disease (Hagan and Palloni 2006). While the Janjaweed continue to rape, the international community has so far refrained from labeling this crisis as genocide, because of the lack of adequate data and conclusive evidence. Humanitarian agencies and aid workers warn, however, that this indecision could prove fatal for the hundreds of thousands of displaced African civilians. As the above instances show, a lack of political will can threaten the lives of innocents and embolden aggressors. However, as the experience of multilateralism in the 1990s indicates, consensus in the international sphere is hard to reach and the powers of the UN to prevent international conflict or disruptions in international peace and security are few. In fact, it has also been a lack of understanding of new types of conflicts than anything else, which has proved to be the undoing of international commitments to maintain peace and security. For instance, in Bosnia, “…the international community fell into the [old] nationalist trap by taking on board and legitimizing the perception of the conflict that the nationalists wished to propagate” (Kaldor 1999: 58). The confidence of the liberal project, thus, has been undermined by the events of the post-Cold War era. However, the breadth of liberal international theory is much broader in scope, and no contemporary appraisal of the paradigm can be complete without a survey of the responses to the challenges posed by globalization. The liberal position, here, has come to be defined as what some call “institutional conservatism” (Dunne 2005: 196). This argument is underpinned by the logic that the United States’ (US) hegemony in the international political and economic order post-1945 has been essentially liberal in nature. The US took the opportunity to embed certain liberal principles in the international system: liberal democratic principles, a global free-trade régime, restraint and reluctance on the part of the US to act as the hegemon, and the creation of a number of international institutions which constrained its powers (Ikenberry 1999). This conservative position is challenged by a number of radical liberals, who reject the primacy of hegemony as the cornerstone of progress in a globalizing world. They clamor for a more just and equitable society of states, where the democracy deficit is addressed globally and there is no relation of domination and subservience among richer and poorer nations. In this perspective, global civil society plays an important role in developing awareness and consensus on issues of democratization, human rights, and environmental protection. Radical liberalism, thus, is fundamentally revisionist with a somewhat implausible ultimate aim of reforming global capitalism (Dunne 2005: 199). Perhaps the most dominant, if not most important, liberal perspective is that of neo-liberal institutionalism; its rationalist foundations provide an analytical clarity, while its theoretical parsimony offers methodological rigor. Neo-liberal institutionalism has its roots in the functional and regional integration literature of the 1940s through to the 1960s, and it understands the international system as a web of complex interdependence, with four essential characteristics (Lamy 2005: 213-214): 1. States are key actors in the international system, but not the only (or most important) actors. States are rational, seeking to maximize their interests in every domain. 2. The international system is anarchical and states seek to maximize their absolute gains through cooperative ventures. 3. Cheating or free riding is biggest obstacle to international cooperation. 4. States exude loyalty to such institutions that are beneficial to them either politically or economically and those that increase their security. Neo-liberals emphasize the growing linkages between states and non-state actors, consideration of international issues without distinction between survival and other motives, a multitude of channels and levels of interaction among nation-states and across international borders, and, the gradual decline of the efficacy of the military as a tool of statecraft. They retain a more hopeful perspective on the possibility of international cooperation by putting their faith in institutions, which are for all intents and purposes functional structures, to achieve the goal of international cooperation even in an anarchic system. Consequently, they hold out hope for successful global governance, which would harness and distribute the gains from the process of globalization. Kenneth Oye, however, cautions that “[d]espite the absence of any ultimate international authority, governments often bind themselves to mutually advantageous courses of action…[where] states can realize common interests through tacit cooperation” (2006: 69). Robert Keohane makes a succinct point about the viability of institutions in fostering international cooperation. He argues that given the anarchical nature of the international system, it is increasingly difficult for governments to either form international agreements or to persuade its potential partners that it shall be willing and capable to implement the same over a sustained period of time: “Successful international negotiations may therefore require changes in domestic institutions….[And] rather than imposing themselves on states, international institutions should respond to the demand by states for cooperative ways to fulfill their own purposes” (Keohane 2006: 121). This remains a compelling perspective with which the complex realities of contemporary IR can be unraveled. In the strength of institutions, there is a ready remedy against not only inter-state and intra-state conflict, but also the menace of catastrophic international terrorism, since institutions across various levels can be used for intelligence, tracking and obstructing terrorism finance, and for regulating the flow of arms into regions where terrorists are suspected to be hiding. In the final analysis, therefore, we can conclude that the liberal tradition in IR is an important and vibrant perspective. In terms of an explanation of international security and conflict, the neo-liberal institutionalists offer a sound theoretical elucidation, and for the greater normative questions of how the world ought to be, both conservative and critical dimensions of liberal internationalism offer various clarifications. As we have seen, however, the liberal perspective is not without its problems and theoretical difficulties, which hinder a comprehensive understanding of the web of world events that the paradigm purports to explicate. On the balance, the liberal tradition maintains a continued relevance as a robust perspective on IR. List of References Kaldor, M. (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dunne, T. (2005) ‘Liberalism.’ In The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations. Ed. by J. Baylis & S. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 185-203. Lamy, S. L. (2005) ‘Contemporary Mainstream Approaches: Neo-Realism and Neo-Liberalism.’ In The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations. Ed. by J. Baylis & S. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 205-224. Hagan, J. & Palloni, A. (2006) ‘Policy Forum: Social Science: Death in Darfur.’ Science, 313, 5793: 1578-1579. 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