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The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order, by Robert Latham
Historical shifts and ruptures can shape political and social thought in powerful ways. During the Second World War such thinkers as John Maynard Keynes, Karl Polanyi, and Joseph Schumpeter looked out upon a world opened up to a new and profound range of possibilities-some heartening, others disturbing. At the same time, the Council on Foreign Relations organized a massive, multivolume study of potential postwar outcomes (The War and Peace Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1939-1945). Today, the effort to think through the possibilities of reshaping international life in the context of recent shifts and ruptures in Europe and elsewhere has been far more modest. It is unfair to compare the transformative dimensions of the end of the Cold War to those of World War II. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that the range of recent scholarly and public debates has been mostly limited to questions about liberal democracy and markets, issues that, while highly relevant, are narrow in comparison to the questions raised by Polanyi and Schumpeter in their own historical moment. What is even more remarkable, this has occurred when so many scholars have consciously tried to distance themselves from the widely circulated macro-analysis of "what might be"-Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, told as a story of liberalism's triumph. Although concerns with democracy and markets have been tempered with substantial research on nationalism and ethnicity, the latter has not generated any macrohistorical vision of what is at stake in the end of the Cold War that can compete with democracy and markets, despite the efforts of thinkers such as Samuel P. Huntington in his controversial essay, "The Clash of Civilizations?"
Thus, whichever way historians choose to look back on the nineties, few will be able to ignore how, in the span of just a few years, new life was breathed into the centuries-old liberal tradition. The impetus for this book is a deep sense of caution about this recourse to liberalism. Above all, outside of the way liberalism shapes practices, principles, institutions, and political and moral arguments in some states and societies, little seems to be known about how liberalism affects political and social life when viewed from a global perspective. I recognize that we may not know much more about other political forms such as state socialism, but these alternatives are no longer very high on peoples' agendas.
Like so many others, my caution is fueled by my experience as a young U.S. citizen growing up with the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the sixties, and a deeply racist society. I wondered how so many apparently illiberal and violent outcomes could be so deeply inscribed in the fabric of what seemed to be the most liberal of societies. My first instinct was to dismiss such suspicions-perhaps in a fit of cognitive dissonance-with the conclusion that there were illiberal forces in the world and liberal societies could not help but contend with them. But this conclusion left me unsatisfied. I knew that it rested on the assumption that there was some way to separate liberalism from supposedly illiberal forces. Indeed, if liberalism was a significant force in the world, it could not help but be involved in the emergence and shaping of important events and developments, however distant from the just intentions of liberalism they appeared to be. Partly, I had come under the influence of Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in which the Enlightenment was taken to task for producing and organizing rationalized violence of previously unseen dimensions. Although these authors considered liberalism to be a facet of the Enlightenment, their work could be only a point of departure since it ultimately directed readers to the connections between the Enlightenment and social forces and actors clearly antithetical to liberalism (i.e., fascism).
Given this background, it was easy for me to set my sights on the intersection of liberalism-its practices, doctrines, and institutions-with social and political forms associated with the organization of violence. Once there, I chose to focus on the international realm, which meant that the great machinery of organized violence, military power, would occupy my attention. This choice was especially driven by the observation that, in our contemporary recourse to liberalism discussed above, the international community has dedicated considerable energy to finding new ways to structure security relations after the Cold War along liberal lines. Of course, some readers may accuse me of stacking the deck against liberalism in that the international environment is so hostile and certainly nowhere near as thickly constituted-regarding identities, cultures, and relations-as a domestic society. But it is exactly in this type of environment that connections can be rendered more clear to the analytical eye, as long as the possibility of unfair attribution is kept keenly in mind.
My international focus was also driven by my perception that it has only really been since the Second World War that Western scholars have been able to write about "global liberalism" or "liberal world order" and expect a reasonable, if not automatic, understanding of what is meant by these terms. Such expressions were not generally used in the nineteenth century; a hundred years ago, they would likely have been met with puzzlement. In the nineteenth century, in some quarters of the West, terms such as "liberal state," "liberal society," "liberal trade," and even "liberal foreign policy" would readily elicit meaningful recognition. "Liberal order," if anything, would have been understood in the context of domestic society and not the international realm. Indeed, the predominance of the domestic face of liberalism, which continues even today, is evident in the many treatments of liberalism that have been written from the perspective of individual nations. 1
In part, the ability to talk about a liberal world order reflects the very development of the field of international relations, which has made international order a central concern. It also reflects the belief of state policymakers in the West that at the conclusion of large-scale twentieth-century wars a far wider range of issues had to be considered than were ever imaginable in the important peace settlements of the nineteenth century. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson understood that he was "present at the creation" of far more than new military-strategic relations among states. 2
This book is an attempt to probe the connections between those strategic relations and the practices, principles, and institutions associated with a liberal West that policymakers such as Acheson thought were at stake at the end of the Second World War. An underlying premise of the study is that for far too long international thought has not taken seriously enough the extent to which forms of social existence associated with the liberal tradition have been intertwined with the military-strategic dimensions of international political life. While there might be other ways to explore the plausibility, depth, and varying manifestations of this intertwinement, I focus on the outbreak of the Cold War. The Cold War represents a superb historical laboratory for drawing out lessons about the impact of Western liberalism on international political life and the possible connections between liberalism and military force. That is because, in the post-World War II period, Western liberalism experienced its most extensive reach at the same time that security became an especially acute feature of international relations. Moreover, it was especially in the immediate postwar years, roughly between 1945 and 1950, that decisive actions and events shaped the contours of international political life for decades to come. Studying this period has the advantage of directly confronting a crucial turning point in the history of the liberal tradition: the construction of a liberal order that was more comprehensive and international in scope than any previous attempt to bring liberal doctrines and principles to bear in the making of international political life. This effort, together with the powerful conjunction of historical forces engendered by the Second World War, created a unique liberal moment. I fixed my gaze on this period, in the hope that its formative events would help me to draw out insights about liberalism understood in a global perspective as well as to offer a new interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War.
A broad outline of the argument is as follows: Beginning with the Second World War, state policymakers in the West, under U.S. leadership, endeavored to build institutions and relations to order their postwar international realm. The social and ideational fabric upon which that construction effort was based was liberal modernity as it had emerged in the West. The boundaries of the order pursued cut across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, incorporating various states, liberal and nonliberal, initially including the Soviet Union. This effort to make an international liberal order would not only create conditions and forces leading to the emergence of the Cold War, but would also generate international political dynamics that shaped the militarization of the West. The aspects of militarization in which I am interested revolve around the process by which military-strategic issues, relations, and institutions come to constitute an increasingly predominant dimension of the overall international political life of a set of states and societies.
The outline just presented, however, is not meant to capture the many lines of analysis, theory, and interpretation developed in the ensuing chapters. As I see it, Western militarization-and the emergence of the Cold War-did not rest on any one factor, but rather on a constellation of forces, processes, and tensions formed by the unique relationship between strategy and liberal order-building. If there is any single common denominator to the different elements in this constellation, it is in the play between freedom, order, and military power. I argue that because military force is, as Michael Mann describes it, the most "concentrated-coercive" social form, 3 it can provide order at the international level through institutions and relations that minimally constrain the liberty of actors including states, democratic publics, corporations, groups, and individuals to set the terms of their own existence in liberal modernity. Order achieved through military-strategic relations will create a far less institutionalized legacy, require less public consent, and intervene in far fewer areas of liberal practice then broad-based political institutions of international governance that might otherwise emerge to sustain order. In other words, with military force constituting the predominant form of social control at the international level, more thickly institutionalized political relations of governance can be avoided, and a certain degree of relative autonomy for actors in the international system can be preserved. We might think of the way military force mediated between autonomy and governance in the context of international liberalism as a form of "embedded militarization." That is, militarization unfolded within and in response to the broader social and political fabric of an international liberal order. 4 Security structures and outcomes were not disembedded from the life of that order, but instead flowed from it.
It is not that states in liberal order are any more or less likely to rely on military relations than states in other contexts such as the socialist order that the Soviet state eventually built in Eastern Europe. I do not carry out a comparative study of the military dimensions of various orders. Nor is my goal to suggest that in the liberal order established in the mid-twentieth century military force protected or secured the relations and the states bounded within it-a point that would readily be accepted by any of the most liberal of thinkers. Rather, I explore the extent to which the forging of military relations and power grows out of and is an important element in the political dynamics internal to liberal order.
While I will discuss in greater detail the method, design, and approach that underlies this study, some initial clarification is in order. I do not uncover any new substantive information about what happened in the early Cold War period. Nor do I establish a set of theoretical propositions and then informally test them by marshalling historical data. Instead, I build an interpretation of Cold War history, viewed through the lens of U.S. foreign policy. The use of the term "interpretation" cannot be taken for granted. Its use implies a mode of analysis that is distinguishable from the causal explanation that is so often considered synonymous with a positivist approach. Since analysis in the field of international relations has generally taken a positivist attitude in the postwar period, any departure from that attitude cannot be innocent. 5 At the same time, the hermeneutical or interpretive turn in the social sciences has a considerable history which cannot rightfully be ignored. This is not the place to retell the history of hermeneutics, nor to rehearse the debate between the interpretive and scientific approaches to social knowledge, but I will make clear what type of interpretation I am doing and at the same time confront the issues raised by the scientific tradition by briefly considering Max Weber's concept of "explanatory understanding." Hermeneutics, as the "art of understanding texts," was increasingly systematized in the nineteenth century and applied in sociological, historiographical, and psychoanalytical contexts. 6 Social action, historical periods, and life histories came to be viewed as texts subject to interpretation. 7 Weber was quite aware of the hermeneutical tradition that was especially strong in his own Germany. He sought to show how an understanding (Verstehen) of the meaning or significance of action for agents could yield knowledge about the motives generating such action. Such knowledge would, thus, provide a causal explanation of that action. 8 This explanation could then be subject to verification along scientific lines, either in statistical terms, as instances of a general hypothesis or law, or in logical terms, as part of a theory subject to logical proof. Until that testing takes place, the interpretation that gives us an understanding of action "must remain only a particularly plausible hypothesis." 9 In this way, Weber sought in principle to join science and interpretation.
In practice, however, Weber mostly worked in the realm of building meaningful contexts for social action, such as the rise of capitalism. Placing his stated concerns with scientistic verification aside, can his corpus be understood as being guided not only by the pursuit of interpretations that explain, but also by explanations that interpret? In an "interpretive explanation" (in contrast to Weber's "explanatory understanding") an analyst makes an argument about the logic of forces bearing on social or historical outcomes and developments. This logic gives meaning and significance to these outcomes and developments. What we are doing in interpretive explanation is employing explanatory schemes that show why things have become what they are, which thereby sets up frameworks of meaning for a given historical period or complex of social action. That is, identifying forces and illuminating how they are linked and impinge on one another creates particular types of what Clifford Geertz calls "intelligible frames" and, thus, assigns significance to certain relations and phenomena. To a great extent this is what many historians do, and it is what Weber did in his exploration of the impact of religion on the rise of capitalism.
This way of framing the relationship between interpretation and explanation does unhinge causality from the type of scientific verification Weber was after. But this does not mean that we can forego the question of the validation of interpretations. Looking to the hermeneutical tradition, thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur have emphasized that arguments and judgments about the plausibility of competing interpretations constitute a process of validation that is never complete. 10 An interpretation can be judged to be sensible or plausible because of the way it puts together historical elements and facts, tells a story about the unfolding of events, or sheds new light on the configuration of social and political relations. 11 An interpretation may be judged to be implausible because it gets the story wrong, especially by missing things. Thus, the comprehensiveness of an interpretation matters.
Two related goals of this study justify this interpretive approach. One goal is to identify and explore the connections that emerge in a broad spectrum of processes and outcomes relating to the rise of the Cold War and to flesh out the intersection of liberalism and military force within which the U.S. state played a crucial role. The second goal is to gain some insight into the tensions that have shaped postwar history, which might tell us something about the international face of liberalism more generally. I have tried to render my interpretation plausible by engaging and evaluating the specific history of the early postwar period. I appraise other interpretations of the Cold War and the relation between liberalism and military force. If I were to make any single comparative claim, especially against the approach that has dominated U.S. international relations-realism-it is that the interpretation offered here is more comprehensive. Thus, I hope the reader will judge the merit of this study on the basis of its ability to raise questions about important dimensions of international political life and its history that have received little attention in the past and that have not been tied together before in the ways they are here.
In chapter 1, I specify what is meant by the terms liberal modernity and liberal order. I suggest how these social forms can be placed in an international perspective and lay out the advantages of viewing modernity through the lens of liberalism rather than capitalism or some other historical context. Although this will take the argument in an initially abstract direction, the establishment of a clear understanding of both liberalism and order is necessary before the analysis can move forward. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how liberalism constitutes a historical context that has shaped the contours of modern international life along five dimensions: open economic exchange, domestic market relations, the liberal governance of the polity, individual and group rights, and the right of collective self-determination.
In chapter 2, I probe the initial phases of what I call the "liberal moment," arising above all out of the Second World War. I develop the basic elements of a conceptual infrastructure for interpreting the change surrounding this period. Especially important is a consideration of the specific conditions associated with U.S. liberal hegemonic agency. What forces drew the U.S. into its hegemonic role? How was the character of the U.S. presence in the international realm shaped by its identity as a liberal state? How was the course of action open to the U.S. limited by the complex web of actors and interests inside and outside the U.S. state? Much relevant political debate in the U.S. revolved around the question of how extensive the U.S. international commitment would be in political, economic, and military terms in the postwar period. This chapter also situates the argument in the context of other interpretations of the period in the fields of international relations and diplomatic history.
In chapter 3, I push the substantive exploration of the postwar period further. I start by asking how international, as opposed to domestic, order is actually created, and look into the relevance and possibilities of international community that existed at the time. I go on to consider the formidable task of defining and constructing liberal relations under U.S. leadership. I also analyze how the Soviet Union shaped the liberal order-building process and the ways that a central tension in that process emerged out of the endeavor to incorporate the Soviet Union into the international liberal order. I identify the tensions among liberal states that contributed to the growing Cold War confrontation and probe the dynamics of relations between the U.S., Europe, and the non-Western world. I examine the deepening of the Cold War into spheres of influence as well as the feasibility of alternatives to this outcome. Finally, I argue that it is only against the backdrop of a liberal order-building project that we can understand the perception of U.S. policymakers-and later commentators-that increasing international political tensions and intervention in Europe were a response to a cascade of failed policies and institutions operating in the first couple of postwar years.
The adoption of specific strategies for building a liberal order were organized under the general rubric of containment, which reflected, as I argue in chapter 4, both the dynamics of liberal relations and the liberal contours of U.S. agency. That is, the strategic doctrine of containment can be understood as a specifically liberal political form. There was a decidedly economic emphasis to containment early on and the question is: how did it so rapidly become militarized? What was the significance of the strategic system of military bases being constructed at the time? How did economic commitments engender military ones? In chapter 4, I also explore the political and strategic impact of incorporating nonliberal states and societies within liberal order. I move on to focus on how the limits placed on the formation of U.S. hegemonic agency contributed to militarization. Was the commitment, under the containment doctrine, to economic over military security in part undermined by the minimal institutional forms constructed as the means for the exercise of U.S. agency and the facilitation of liberal relations? The relationship between political and economic integration, the formation of NATO, and a search for a workable framework for cooperation is also considered. I ask as well whether there is something unique about how threat and fear is manifested in liberal order. And finally, I address the question of whether there is something in the character of military force that makes it well-suited to the construction of liberal order.
I draw out some of the lessons about liberal order and U.S. foreign policy in the fifth and concluding chapter. To do so, I recall basic dilemmas and paradoxes of international agency in the context of liberal modernity. Especially important is the tension between forces that pull liberal states toward inaction and those that push them toward overreaction. Finding a middle ground between these two extremes will be difficult for a U.S. state that will likely remain an international leader into the twenty-first century. But that ground may provide the basis for a more effective, if not more just, foreign policy.
This book has been written from a perspective that embraces many of the values and practices associated with the liberal tradition including: equality, democratic decisionmaking, peaceful conflict resolution, and political and social rights. Yet the study implies that post-World War II international liberal order as it has been realized so far may not be the best form for pursuing these values and practices. Like many scholars who are critical of how political and social life is currently constituted on a global scale, I am uncomfortable advocating neo-Marxist social visions as an alternative, and I am deeply ambivalent about looking only to the liberal state as the form of polity through which just political outcomes can be pursued. This study has convinced me that the field of international relations needs, above all, to reflect on what are taken to be the starting points for thinking through the terms of international political life at the end of the twentieth century, and at least to question whether that life should include a commitment to liberal order or not. It is hoped that in some way the analysis that follows can contribute to these efforts.
Notes:
Note 1: A recent example is Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society. Back.
Note 2: Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. Back.
Note 3: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, p. 26. On the efficiency of military organization see Finer, The Man on Horseback, pp. 6-20; and Perlmutter, The Military and Politics in Modern Times. See the discussion of their views in Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, pp. 249-50. Back.
Note 4: This phrase is obviously a play of the phrase, "embedded liberalism," coined by John Gerard Ruggie, in "Embedded Liberalism." Ruggie took his cue from the argument of Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, p. 56, that a social order, such as an economy, can either operate according to the terms that are set by a broader context of social relations and thereby be embedded in that context; or can become separated from that context and begin to set the terms for social relations more broadly, becoming thereby disembedded. Ruggie argued that international liberal economic practices and principles-that in a nineteenth-century context were disembedded-could be embedded in the twentieth century in broader concerns with the domestic stability and well-being of societies affected by them. Back.
Note 5: The play between the two modes is explored with a focus on foreign policymaking in Hollis and Smith, Explaining and Understanding. See also Puchula, "The Pragmatics of International History." Back.
Note 6: Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 146. Back.
Note 7: Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text." Back.
Note 8: Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, pp. 95-98. Back.
Note 9: Ibid., pp. 96-97. Back.
Note 10: Habermas, The Logic of the Social Sciences, p. 67; Taylor, "Interpretation of the Sciences of Man;" and Ricoeur "The Model of the Text." Back.
Note 11: For a similar sense of interpretation see Heikki Patomaki, "How to Tell Better Stories About World Politics." Back.
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