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As demonstrated above, conflict and violence have been central concerns in liberal IR. We will not elaborate any further here; suffice to say that, in distinctive ways, liberals have seen themselves as activists in advancing the cause of peace. This liberal desire to see an end to conflict and violence has manifested itself in liberal peace theory and liberal prescriptions for peace and security. Liberals also see institutions as playing a central role in mediating and resolving conflict. Liberalism is sometimes dismissed as hopelessly utopian because of this strong desire to realise a less violent, less conflictual world. However, to reiterate, liberals do not see this occurring quickly or without political will and human effort.

Summary

1. Liberal thought has a long intellectual tradition. Early liberal thinking on international politics and peace was particularly influenced by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

2. With regards to economics, liberal theories of the market are particularly associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes.

3. There have been a number of distinctive ways in which liberal thought has been applied to IR:

for example, liberal pluralism, world society, interdependence and neo-liberal institutionalism, as well as the related schools of functionalism and idealism.

4. Liberals are optimistic about human nature, because they believe that behaviour is largely the product of various interactions with our social environment.

5. Because of the above, liberals have faith in the possibilities of education, human progress and the establishment of fair and just institutions.

Do social and cultural differences invalidate the liberal claim that all human beings have basic, inalienable human rights?

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6. Liberals believe that the central characteristic of all human beings is rationality. This gives rise to notions of the intrinsic value of human life, the moral worth of the individual and the exist-ence of inalienable human rights.

7. Liberals believe that the role of government should be limited, although there is some disagree-ment about just how far and to what ends the state should intervene in civil society.

8. In the international realm, liberals have faith in the possibility of cooperation, and suggest that all states can achieve their aims if they abandon the notion of self-help.

9. Liberals believe that not only states, but also NGOs, multinational corporations and institutions are important ‘actors’ in IR.

Criticisms

One set of criticisms centres around a fundamental contradiction between economic and political liberty. This criticism is centred on liberal support for the free market and the institutions of private property, both of which appear to be central to the liberal conception of freedom and choice. Critics argue that the operation of free markets and the private ownership of property and resources lead to the progressive concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This inevitably leads to a concen-tration of power among the wealthy, which in turn impinges greatly upon the liberty and meaningful choices available to poorer groups. Left-liberals have taken this criticism on board, and support a limited form of state intervention and welfarism in the interests of redistributing wealth. On the other hand, liberals on the right, often referred to as neo-liberals or neo-classical liberals, argue that state intervention is always a threat to individual liberty and justify the continuing operation of the free market on the grounds that it increases the overall level of wealth in society which then ‘trickles down’ to the poor. It is worth noting that there is little empirical evidence to support this contention.

The liberal view can, then, be reasonably criticised as simply providing a justification of the way things are; the observation that the ‘liberal’ system is of benefit to a very narrow section of humanity.

For example, liberal pluralists generally provide a benevolent view of international institutions, MNCs and the whole liberal free-trade ethos which dominates today’s international political economy.

In recent years there have been numerous attacks on the notions of universalism found in liberal thought. We will return to these in the chapters on Critical Theory, Feminism and Postmodernism.

Briefly though, it has been argued that the characteristics held to be essentially ‘human’ are actually specific to a particular group of people at a particular period in history. So-called ‘universalism’ actu-ally expresses the particular experience of dominant groups in the West, so the argument goes.

Liberalism gives us a linear view of human progress and development. Again, this is because liberalism tends to universalise Western experience. In development theory, for example, liberals have suggested that poorer states are further ‘behind’ in the development process, but essentially on the same road and travelling in the same direction as richer, more developed countries. However, as we will see in chapter 3, it has been countered that much of the wealth of today’s rich Western nations has been based histori-cally on the exploitation of the natural resources and cheap labour of the global South. Green thinkers, who are discussed at greater length in chapter 8, also argue that liberal development strategies are resulting in environmental degradation, thus adding to the woes of already poor countries.

Universalism: the idea that politics can be guided by universally valid principles, rather than being conditioned by particular local conditions.

The pluralist view of international relations as a series of complex interactions between an enor-mous variety of actors is, at first sight, less contentious. However, it is disputed by realists, who, as we will see in the following chapter, argue for the continued primacy or dominance of the state in IR, and Marxists, who argue that a pluralist view misses the fundamental issue, which is inequality between various groups or classes at the international level.

In much the same way as most major perspectives in International Relations, liberalism can be said to be a Western paradigm. This is to say, the core assumptions of liberalism were formulated by early liberal scholars, such as those discussed above, who were exclusively from the West. While in con-temporary International Relations students and scholars from all over the world and with very diverse interests can be classed as liberals or use liberalism in some form, they are essentially using a per-spective which is founded on Western assumptions. Thus, liberalism has been criticised by some as being culturally specific as opposed to truly international.

Common misunderstandings

1. Liberals believe that people are naturally good. This is a somewhat simplified and rather old-fashioned view of liberalism. Certainly, liberals regard ‘human nature’ as malleable and are optimistic about the possibility of organising human life on a more just and harmonious basis. It is more accurate to say that liberals often believe human nature to be inherently good but not necessarily constant. Thus, human beings are potentially good.

2. States are insignificant. Certainly not. As we saw above, neo-liberal institutionalism is a state-centric approach to the study of institutions. Liberal pluralists have not sought to deny the state’s role in IR, but simply to highlight that other actors also have roles, big and small.

3. Cooperation means no conflict. Far from it. Cooperation can be fostered by conflict. The liberal commitment to limited government is based on the belief that, left to themselves, people will act to further their own interests, which can create conflict. This necessitates a legal framework, but general spontaneity and freedom is the best way to create wealth and growth. Similarly, at the international level, if states’ interests coincided exactly (in other words if they were harmonious) they would have no need to cooperate. Cooperation takes place in order to try and resolve con-flicts (of interest). Cooperation is one way of resolving conflict.

4. ‘Greenpeace should be involved in IR’. Many students have the impression that acceptance of a liberal pluralist perspective automatically implies promoting the involvement in IR of non-state actors (such as Greenpeace). Liberal pluralists may argue that non-state actors are increasingly important in IR and even that this is a good thing, but theorists are concerned with how and why this is happening rather than (necessarily) directly sponsoring it.

5. Liberal means tolerant and wishy-washy in a political sense. Sometimes in common usage the term ‘liberal’ is used to mean progressive or left-leaning and is used in US politics particularly to contrast with ‘conservative’. Liberal tolerance is paradoxical given its inherent universalism, and certainly not all view liberalism as politically progressive.

Further reading

Claude, I. (1956), Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organisation, New York: Random House (an early liberal work that envisages a more peaceful, cooperative world).

Donnelly, J. (1993), International Human Rights, Boulder, CO: Westview Press (an excellent example of liberal thinking in IR on a core liberal concept).

Doyle, M. (1986), ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp.

1151–69 (sets out the relationship between liberalism, peace and international order).

Fukuyama, F. (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press (at the time of publication, a highly influential text that presented a liberal vision of the post-Cold War international order).

Keohane, R. (1984), After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press (regarded as a key work in the development of what would eventually be called

‘neo-liberal institutionalism’).

Ohmae, K. (1999), The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, New York: Collins Business (here Ohmae describes the nature and level of integration and interdependence in the modern global economy and how this is leading to the decline in relevance of the state and the rising importance of other types of actors).

Rosecrance, R. (1987), The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World, New York:

Basic Books (in this key text from the twilight of the Cold War era Rosecrance argues that traditional preoc-cupation with conflict and security in international relations were obsolete as cooperation and globalisation altered the fundamental nature of the international environment).

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Introduction

Realism is the most well-established theoretical perspective in International Relations. Indeed, it has been argued that realism has dominated International Relations to such a degree that students, and indeed scholars, have often lost sight of the fact that it is in fact one perspective amongst many. The result is that realism is often presented as if it were a ‘commonsense’ view of the world against which all other perspectives should be judged. We will return to this notion of realism as ‘common sense’

later in the book. At this juncture, it is enough to highlight that realism is one perspective in IR, not the perspective.

Realism is a complex and rich tradition of thought and you need to be aware of its nuances. Hans Bartelsen, for instance, has argued that realism is an area of debate rather than a single specific pos-ition. So, just as in a different context, ‘Christian’ implies a certain set of beliefs although there are variations within this belief system, so within realism we can identify classical and scientific ver-sions, some realists who call themselves neo-realists or structural realists and so on. Differences and nuances aside, however, a number of texts and authors in International Relations have been collec-tively labelled as ‘realist’, because they share common assumptions and key ideas. In line with our desire to simplify somewhat as a first stage in understanding, in this chapter we will present realism as a coherent position or perspective in International Relations and for the sake of simplicity and clarity we concentrate on two versions of realism; classical (or traditional) realism and neo-realism.

Realism claims to be realistic in comparison with the utopianism of idealism, discussed at some length in chapter 1. Realists also claim to present more accurate analyses of international relations than advocates of other perspectives. Some of realism’s major exponents have argued that their per-sonal moral concerns or despair at the way the world is does not mean it is possible to change it.

Some aspects of human behaviour are eternal through time and space. As we shall elaborate below, some realists argue that there are unchanging laws which regulate individual and state behaviour:

states, like men, are by ‘nature’ self-interested and aggressive and will pursue their interests to the detriment of others and without regard to the constraints of law or morality.

Realists have traditionally held that the major problem of international relations was one of anarchy. Anarchy prevailed because, in international relations, there was no sovereign authority that could enforce the rule of law and ensure that ‘wrongdoers’ were punished. The League of Nations was a poor substitute for a truly sovereign power possessing a system of law and a military under the control of a single, sovereign government. However, realists went on to argue that it was impossible Realism has been represented using the idea of a billiard table in which the balls represent sover-eign states (hence, the ‘billiard ball model’).

to set up a genuine world government, because states would not give up their sovereignty to an inter-national body. Accordingly, realists argued that war could not be avoided completely. It is necessary, therefore, to accept the inevitability of war and pursue the necessary preparations for conflict. Only in this way can war be properly deterred, or at least managed.

Anarchy: a condition in which there exists no centralised sovereign authority that enforces the rule of law. Realists are concerned with anarchy at the international level where there is no authority higher than the state.

After the Second World War realism emerged as accepted wisdom in International Relations because of the clear lessons that the conflict appeared to reiterate. Realists argued that the long history of world politics demonstrated that it was not an exercise in writing laws and treaties or in creating international organisations. Instead it was a struggle for power and security carried out under conditions of ‘every country for itself’. By way of reference, they called themselves ‘realists’ and labelled the previously dominant approach ‘idealism’. Realists argued that the focus of research in world politics should be on discovering the important forces that drive the relations between states.

Realists believed that the pursuit of power and national interest were the major forces driving world politics. Focusing on these important forces, they argued, revealed that leaders had far less freedom to organise the world, and solve its problems, than proponents of idealism had originally suggested.

Although realists accepted that laws and morality were a part of the workings of world politics, respect for law would only be achieved if it were backed by the threat of force. Realists also insisted that a state’s primary obligation was to its own citizens, not to a rather abstract ‘international com-munity’.

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