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The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order, by Robert Latham
It is still too early to tell whether what has commonly been taken in the West to be a surge of commitment in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the organization of social and political life along liberal lines will hold. It is not clear how seriously this organization will penetrate societies in the region or whether it will sustain any deep popular support. Nonetheless, the shift in values in the former Soviet-bloc countries toward the Western liberal tradition on an historically unprecedented scale has received a great deal of attention from scholars and commentators. 1 This sense of great change was reinforced by the new forces of democratization and privatization that emerged in the 1980s in regions as diverse as Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia.
In general, these developments have been viewed through the lens of liberal democracy, a perspective that, according to Tony Smith, joins two longstanding traditions, liberalism and democracy. 2 Liberal democracy represents a cluster of principles and practices that organize a state and society. This cluster includes the holding of free, competitive, and broad-based elections; the restraint of state power vis-à-vis a relatively autonomous civil society; and the commitment to equality, tolerance, and the rights of groups and individuals. Within the field of international relations, the inquiry into the scarcity of war between liberal democracies has placed such states and societies at the center of what has become an increasingly popular research program. 3 Liberal democracy is certainly a useful concept for the analysis and comparison of distinct types of states and societies. But the concept in itself does not tell us much about the wider historical context of which it is a part, namely, liberal modernity. The task of this chapter is to probe the character and breadth of this historical context and its relationship to international order. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate that this historical setting is a productive starting point for thinking about twentieth-century liberal order in a global perspective.
To begin with, broad historical contexts have entered the study of international relations in roughly two forms. One is neo-Marxism. Analysts in the neo-Marxist tradition embed their analysis of international social and political life in the broad historical context of capitalism, which encompasses ideology, culture, and modes of social and material organization. Because it clearly sets analysis in a global perspective, the work of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has had significant resonance in the field of international relations. Wallerstein's notion of a "world capitalist system" places capitalism as a macro-historical fabric in a specific geopolitical setting. In that setting, differences between core areas, composed of leading states and societies, and the rest of the world, composed of weak peripheral regions and less weak semi-peripheral regions, generate large-scale global economic, political, and cultural dynamics. 4
Historical contexts have also entered the study of international relations in a form that has no ready label. It, nonetheless, can be distinguished by its focus on historical changes in the way societies and polities are organized. Although capitalism is recognized in this form as an important force, it is less central to analysis than it is in neo-Marxism. The institution of sovereignty is more central. For example, John Ruggie points to the transformation in Europe of polities from medieval to modern forms within which different modes of legitimating rule and authority have had important implications for the constitution of sovereignty as a practice and institution. 5 Stephen Krasner also explores the differences between the medieval and modern worlds in order to argue that the institutionalization of sovereignty followed transformations in political and economic practices. 6 And R. B. J. Walker places the entire tradition of international relations in the context of a modernity within which political community and identity are deeply invested in the bordered nation-state. 7
By distinguishing two forms of concern with large historical contexts I do not want to imply that analysts are forced to choose between exclusive perspectives. Robert Cox has probably gone farthest in synthesizing both forms of concern through his concept of "historical structures." In this construct, material capabilities, institutions, and ideas interact to create a "framework for action," which is a "context of habits, pressures, expectations and constraints within which action takes place." 8 Cox's synthesis of the two forms emerges from his interest in learning about capitalism and international relations rather than only the former.
More generally, both forms share a concern with the implications of the emergence and development of modernity. Neo-Marxists have focused on the study of a profound dimension of modern existence, capitalism, while the international relations theorists have tried to trace some of the forces determining the practice and understanding of modern world politics. As an especially broad-based and comprehensive historical context, modernity refers to a complex of collective practices, shared ideas, and forms of organizing social existence with unique historical consequences including nation-states, modern cities, industrial societies, and global markets. Few would dispute that Max Weber and Karl Marx captured important dimensions of modern existence, including its organization of social relations, based on rational design. Both theorists appreciated that modern life threw open nearly every aspect of social existence to reformulation and reorganization. They also were keenly aware that this openness was not necessarily a matter of liberation: for Weber there was the "iron cage" of mechanistic and spiritless rational organization and for Marx there was the development of class exploitation and alienation. 9
Modernity has so many dimensions and facets that it defies any single depiction and it certainly is not subject to definition. To try to so encapsulate it would be like trying to contain half a millennium of history on a notecard. There are two further complications. One is that it would be deceptive to think of modernity as the totality of post-medieval existence even in the West, although it certainly is an extremely predominant dimension. There are cultural forms and identities (e.g., fundamentalist religion) that are distinguishable as nonmodern, despite the obvious imbrications with modern existence.
The other complication is the sheer heterogeneity of modernity. If we consider the various forms that modern existence has taken in different contexts- in socialist and fascist societies, in the Third World, and in the West-it becomes obvious that modernity is variegated. That is, there are not only different historical periods to modernity, but also different ways of being modern. These different ways involve ideology and identity as well as modes of practice and organization. Where one author has recently identified what he calls "reactionary modernism" in Germany's Weimar Republic, another has discerned an approach to the relation between tradition and modern technology in India that is far different than in the West. 10 These forms are not deviations from some norm of Western modernity, but rather different registers of being modern. S. N. Eisenstadt points to "the uniqueness of the civilization of modernity and . . . the great variability of the symbolic, ideological, and institutional responses to it." 11 It is far from clear what all these variations share. But one common element is the recognition that an important dimension in the making and sustaining of modern social existence is the enduring possibility of the purposive organization and reorganization of forms of large-scale human agency associated with such phenomena as rational administration, mass movements, and scientific endeavor. This organization can be experienced as a Weberian "iron cage" of an over-rationalized existence; or as the flux and volatility, expressed in the writings of the poet Charles Baudelaire, of a world in which everything is subject to organized revision and remaking. 12
Within that variability lies liberal modernity. If we understand modernity to be a very broad and comprehensive macro-historical fabric, or what Eisenstadt calls-perhaps unfortunately-a "civilization," liberal modernity represents a mode of fashioning and sustaining aspects of social and political existence within that fabric. Thus, in any given geographic region, liberal modernity exists alongside of and intersects with other aspects of modernity, including capitalism, or capitalist modernity, and industrialism, or industrial modernity. 13 Indeed, besides its value in making clear that liberalism is not just a body of doctrine or a set of principles but a way of being modern, the term liberal modernity makes it possible to place liberalism and other organizational forms within the same macro-historical fabric. 14 Capitalist modernity, explored so thoroughly by Marx, is the broad body of social relations, such as those between workers and capitalists, structured by forms of political and economic organization such as the state. Liberal, as distinct from capitalist, modernity represents the particular shaping of the political and social entities or spaces in which one lives through practices, principles, and institutions associated with liberal governance, rights, markets, and self-determination. These two forms of modernity, despite their close historical proximity, have different ontologies. Whereas capitalist modernity refers to material and organizational forces such as those associated with the circulation of commodities and its manifestation in the social and political life of towns and cities (e.g., in the political domination of certain classes over others), liberal modernity refers to the patterning of that social and political life through a broad body of doctrines and practices. It therefore makes a great deal of sense in the case of capitalist modernity to apply the term "system" to describe the interaction of different actors and entities that emerge within the capitalist fabric. But it makes less sense to do so for liberal modernity (however, as we shall see, the term "order" is a different matter). 15 While liberal practices such as multilateral trade might shape the identity of the capitalist economic system, it is only in the sense of there being coherence among elements that we can speak of dimensions of liberalism forming a system in their own right.
We can also differentiate between a capitalist state and a liberal state. The former refers to a state operating in-and even for the development and protection of-capitalist relations, while the latter refers to a state that is organized and shaped by liberal doctrines and practices. 16 In the case of markets the contrast is equally evident. As Karl Polanyi made clear, markets in modernity are politically constituted economic spaces for trade and exchange within and across polities. 17 Whereas liberal doctrine and principles and liberals themselves have shaped how those markets are constituted (i.e, their character and status within a given polity, especially freedom of contract), capitalist relations comprise the wider economic framework within which markets operate regarding production, consumption, and the generation of economic agents. While both states and markets existed long before the advent of capitalism and liberalism, liberalism transformed states and markets in distinct and decisive ways. In some respects, the difference between the two might sound like the classic distinction between sub- and super-structures. But such a view misses one point: capitalist modernity has a political dimension that can-but need not-be liberal in character, and that-however deeply intertwined it is with capitalist modernity-the vast body of liberal doctrine and practices constitutes a distinct dimension of modern social existence. (There is little to be gained from debates about the relative autonomy of these social forms.)
The relationship between markets and liberal modernity illustrates why the latter is a far more comprehensive qualifier of modernity than the term liberal democratic. Liberal modernity refers not just to a type of polity, but also to the relations between polities and other social actors in the context of international trade and politics; the movement of people; and the exchange of ideas and identities (e.g., cosmopolitanism). Liberal modernity thus has a distinctly international dimension which is not captured by the construct, liberal democracy. 18 Moreover, liberal modernity also conveys the sense of there being a macro-historical space within which a way of organizing social existence-usually referred to as "Western"-has unfolded. Karl Deutsch was really writing about liberal modernity when he pointed to the "combination of incomes, welfare services, and individual liberties that makes up much of that 'Western' way of life which is so often felt and referred to but which seems so hard to define." 19 Recent advocates of Deutschian analysis call this type of phenomenon a transnational "social environment." 20 The point is that being liberal democratic situates an individual, group, state, or society in a complex but identifiable transnational historical context that is liberal modernity.
Liberal modernity is also more comprehensive because the doctrines, agents, and institutions traditionally emphasized in liberalism bear on a far greater range of social existence than simply political governance, which is the paramount focus of liberal democracy. Central to the making of liberal modernity are not only markets, but also civil societies, encompassing religious organizations, cultural institutions, intellectual endeavor, and the status of modern individuals vis-à-vis their autonomy and rights. 21
While it may be tempting to refer to this macro-historical fabric as Western-rather than liberal-modernity, to do so would be a mistake for two reasons that should already be obvious. One reason is that, although there is no disputing the centrality of the West in the formation of liberal modernity, it has not been the only region, understood in historical, geographical, or social terms, where it has emerged. The most potent examples are countries along the Pacific Rim whose liberalizing markets have recently received considerable attention. By identifying as westernized those states and societies in myriad regions that have liberal dimensions, one, in effect, makes claims that these regions have become like the West when they in fact have their own regional and historical identities.
The second reason why Western identity is problematic is that liberalism, as I have noted above, is not the West's only legacy. Fascism, right-wing authoritarianism, and state socialism are nonliberal, but clearly Western, forces. It is a one-sided but not infrequent error to associate the West exclusively with the liberal tradition, an error that ignores an important body of historical information that is beyond the scope of this study.
Just as any conception of the West-or for that matter, as we saw, modernity-cannot be reduced to a single mode of organizing social existence, liberal modernity itself has been subject to considerable variation. States and societies forming part of the fabric of liberal modernity organize their relations, construct their institutions, and articulate their doctrines differently. Further variation emerges on the historical plane in the ways that relevant practices, principles, and institutions change over time and at different speeds, depths, and degrees and appear in different combinations in the social spaces where liberal modernity has made itself felt. 22 Even within the geographical West, there was significant variation in the way that liberalism appeared on and off the European continent.
Despite the complexity and variation in liberal modernity, its formation has not been a completely unstructured process. It certainly would be disingenuous in the face of the variability of liberal modernity to posit any core themes, especially since each national tradition will have its own set of arguments about its sense of a core. 23 Short of identifying core themes, there is something that makes principles and practices such as public debate hang together in what can be understood to be a family resemblance, in the Wittgensteinian sense, as the elements of liberal modernity. 24 That "hanging together" happens because the social action that goes into the formation and transformation of liberal modernity-and the transnational social environment that is associated with it-historically has been organized around five distinct elements: open international economic exchange, domestic market relations, the liberal governance of the polity, individual and group rights, and the right of collective self-determination.
These are the predominant mediums through which liberal modernity and the macro-historical entities associated with it-states, civil societies, markets, and the liberal dimensions of international society-are shaped. While we may associate liberal modernity with all sorts of doctrines and practices, such as religious freedom and economic redistribution, these five elements are distinguishable as the building blocks of liberal social existence as it has unfolded in the international realm. They are not simply means to pursue liberal values (e.g., liberty and equality), although this is one way for actors to engage them. Each element as a medium is more than a channel or mechanism for the pursuit of liberal values. It is also a constitutive element itself in the formation of liberal social spaces. For example, the establishment of a body of individual rights under constitutional protection is an important dimension in the making of a liberal state.
A variegated body and history of practices, principles, and institutions began to form in the nineteenth century around each of these mediums, through the effort of countless agents in all sorts of national and historical settings. Regarding liberal governance, for instance, liberals in Europe struggled to establish constitutional government in various forms, inventing and borrowing different doctrines and practical blueprints from neighboring states and societies. 25 While each medium may take a particular form in a given state and society, it is possible to take an analytical step back to view the body of phenomena associated with a given medium that exists across the entire geographical and social reach of liberal modernity (e.g., one could look at the various ways that markets have emerged across different societies). Each body can be thought of as constituting a distinct domain of liberal modernity. Through this heuristic leap we learn how the great variation that marks liberal modernity is loosely structured. By viewing liberalism in global perspective this way, we gain an analytical window on the shifts, ruptures, and transnational migrations of doctrines and practices occurring across the historical and spatial fabric of liberal modernity. But most important of all, the domain analytic maps the broad social environment out of which international liberal order and its tensions are formed.
Domains are analytical constructs. They provide a basis for grasping the diverse and transformative elements of liberal modernity from a vantage point that is transnational and transhistorical. As a heuristic device the domain analytic rests on the assumption that at any given moment in time, we can look out across the geographical and social fabric of liberal modernity and discern the different ways in which a given medium, such as rights, takes form in specific societies. It is also assumed that the practices and discourses that emerge in different societies influence one another and share an intertwined history.
At first glance, domains might resemble issue areas. 26 Issue areas emerge around the perceptions and the directed action of agents regarding a given problem or policy area. The environment and nuclear nonproliferation are two examples. Like domains, issue areas can comprise practices, principles, and institutions centered about a given issue. Similarly, the policies and perceptions of actors shaping liberal modernity can play a part in determining the dimensions of a domain at any given point in time. But where issue areas and domains differ is in the nature of the object around which they form and the context in which they are embedded. For issue areas, the objects are specific areas of action in the context of the current international political and social life of a group of actors. Domains, as we have seen, emerge around mediums such as liberal governance that shape, to varying degrees, the form of existence for a given state and society. Each domain represents an area of human struggle and a constellation of goals regarding the character of human existence in and across states and societies bearing on human rights, democracy, market life, and the right to an independent political community. Despite their different character, issue areas and domains can be imbricated with one another in important ways.
One example is the intersection of the issue area of international human rights with the domain of liberal rights. At Helsinki in 1975 the Final Act helped set in motion civil challenges to the extremely weak record on human rights in Eastern Europe (e.g., Charter 77) and the Soviet Union. On the one hand, these challenges shifted the way policymakers understood the stakes in the Helsinki accords as an element in the issue area of human rights. On the other hand, the reach of the domain of liberal rights was expanded eastward, however superficially. In that expansion, a new set of actors emerged to forge new forms of struggle to establish rights associated with liberal modernity in societies that had hitherto been only marginal elements in that domain.
For others, the domain analytic might resemble Michael Walzer's attempt to view liberal society in terms of multiple spheres. He has argued that liberals in modern society have struggled to establish separations or walls between spheres of life, from the market to the political community. 27 In contrast to domains, Walzer's spheres operate within a single national community. Liberal domains exist within the context of a transnational social environment with a variety of national communities. Consistency, regularity, and coherence are much less likely to emerge in this context. Moreover, since domains operate within and across national spaces, there does not exist a central authority such as a state, which for Walzer serves as "the agent of separation and defender, as it were, of the social map." 28 Domains simply lack clearly identifiable borders and consistent principles of operation. 29 Thus, elements of each domain overlap in the complex web of liberal modernity (e.g., liberal rights are clearly embedded in liberal governance). This overlap is inherent in the nature of liberal modernity. 30
Finally, some readers will correctly see parallels between domains and the analyses Michel Foucault undertook of the "several fields" of "fundamental experience: madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality, and so forth." 31 His studies trace the ways that modern life is shaped by specific bodies of knowledge, discourse, and practices as well as relations of power that have emerged around these fields of experience. Such bodies, in effect, constitute domains. But Foucault purposely avoided making any connections between the domains he explored and the broader macro-historical entities such as modernity, the state, and civil society. 32 In contrast, the liberal domains described below are explicitly linked to the constitution of liberal modernity and order.
The substance of Foucault's domains were transformed as a result of ruptures, inventions, and shifts in discourse, knowledge, and practices. 33 Along these lines, I would argue the only way we have of determining if a domain exists is the ability to trace a distinct trajectory of transformation regarding the objects, actors, principles, discourses, and practices that form around a liberal medium across different time periods. One need only think of the transformation of international economic exchange from its nineteenth- to twentieth-century forms, as international institutions proliferated and the nature of regulation and multilateralism underwent considerable change. 34 The driving force behind transformation in all of the liberal domains is conflict between actors who are struggling to contest and define the dimensions of their political and social life.
It might be theoretically possible to write a history of all the practices, principles, and institutions that have to date formed the substance of a given domain as manifested in different national settings. Obviously, such a task can be conceived of only in the abstract. But the idea of such a history suggests an additional route I can take toward further clarifying what domains are: to provide a brief sketch of the content and history of the five liberal domains. 35
The Domains of Liberal Modernity
Liberal domains did not emerge until the nineteenth century, despite clear historical precedents. 36 Two factors mark this emergence: The first is the spread of liberal practices, principles, and institutions across different national spaces, which was reflected in a multiplication of the number and type of liberal actors, including corporations, national movements, and associations. Prior to the nineteenth century, only Britain and the U.S. had experienced this type of advance in any significant way (the revolutionary transformation of France notwithstanding). The second factor is the extent to which liberal practices, principles, and institutions became differentiated by area, each with its own identifiable set of actors, doctrinal history, and categories of social action and objects. Such a formation is signalled by the very ability of actors such as states or political movements to develop policies and doctrines about specific areas of liberal practice, such as free trade or constitutionalism, which simply did not exist in previous eras.
In the sketches that follow I concentrate on the emergence of domains in western and central Europe in the nineteenth century and generally ignore the U.S. I do this because the multiplicity of states in the European region and their interconnections in that century provide a more illustrative basis for noting the international historical transformations in each domain. The U.S. simply was not a significant factor in the regional dynamics of Europe until the twentieth century. Even with this concentration on one, albeit crucial, region in the making of liberal modernity, I can do no more than skip across the surfaces of each domain.
Open International Economic Exchange
While international trade-conducted sometimes under relatively "free" conditions-has had a long and illustrious history, prior to the nineteenth century, the doctrines and practices associated with multilateral exchange and the relatively free movement of goods and capital across state boundaries would become a notable part of the life of states and societies only then. 37 No other domain is more closely associated with the international dimensions of liberal modernity than open international exchange. It is the one domain that most clearly ties states and civil societies into a complex network of international political-economic relations. Such a network expands the economic freedom of market actors and limits the restrictions to that freedom inherent in state-defined borders. Beyond this, an open international market constitutes a macrohistorical entity of enormous proportions that is deeply grounded in the liberal tradition.
The influence on liberal doctrine of English political economists such as Adam Smith was profound in the first industrial nation, Britain. 38 Smith's theory of free trade departed from its predecessor, that of mid-eighteenth century French physiocrats, by emphasizing the firm as the center of economic action. Smith's insights found further expression in the Manchester School which began to emerge in the 1820s. Elsewhere in Europe, liberal adherents to the doctrine of free trade and exchange were more slow in coming, despite the efforts of writers such as Say and Bastiat in France, and Karl Heinrich Rau and Prince Smith in Germany. 39
In practice, even the mercantilist era was marked by significant economic interdependence. 40 Numerous pre-nineteenth-century precedents to the free trade era can be identified, including the 1786 Eden Treaty which relaxed tariffs between Britain and France. Even after the Napoleonic Wars, free trade policies existed among the small states and free cities, including the northern provinces of the Netherlands, Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt-am-Main. States such as Switzerland, Rhineland-Westphalia, and Saxony on the whole held to liberal tariff policies. 41 After 1815 it was Prussia, not Britain, that had in many significant ways the most liberal tariff policy among the larger states in Europe. 42 Despite some moves toward liberalization in the 1820s, it would take among other things the political pressures of the Anti-Corn Law League to usher Britain into a truly free trade stance. Other such movements sprang up on the Continent. With the emergence of the free trade era marked by the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860, France would sign trade treaties with Belgium, the Zollverein, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and the Hanse towns, Spain, Austria, and Portugal. Although Britain had little to concede in a trade treaty after its unilateral liberalization of the 1840s, it managed to sign treaties with Belgium, Italy, the Zollverein, and Austria. Because of the emergence of the most-favored-nation clause these treaties laid the basis for multilateral trade, a central aspect of exchange in the twentieth century.
In the final three decades of the nineteenth century a multilateral payment system formed that was an important component of the multilateral trade system. Its features included the convertibility of currencies and a complex pattern of payment balancing including colonies and the United States. 43 Facilitating this exchange was the stability of Britain's sterling currency. Although sterling was backed by gold since the 1820s, in part explaining the currency's stability, it was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century that a monetary system based on the institution of the gold standard would come into full fruition, when all the major European states abandoned silver and adopted gold as their exclusive standard.
In mid-century, movement in a whole range of spheres opened up. Movement involving waterways, capital, labor, businessmen, and communications all became much easier. In addition, Britain as well as France and the Netherlands had opened up trade access to their colonies. Most of the international organizations in the period were dedicated to standardizing this new movement, regulating railroads, canals, telegraphs, the mails, and even fishing.
Although the 1870s saw a multilateral payments system emerge in full form, the decade has nevertheless been associated with the return to protectionism. While most European states moved toward protection in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Britain, the Netherlands, and Denmark are the exceptions), trade flows remained open. Even in the height of the free trade era there already were protective measures built into the system, and in the protectionist retrenchment many of the elements of free trade were not abandoned. 44 Indeed, the most-favored-nation principle remained more or less in effect. Thus, rather than signalling the closure of the domain of open international exchange, the move toward protection reflected a shift in its practices. Such a shift also included restrictions on the movement of labor and the return of colonial preferences.
Despite the numerous inroads of economic nationalism, occurring especially toward the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and the severe contraction of the interwar years, the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 invented institutions (i.e., the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) to facilitate exchange in novel ways. As a result, liberal multilateral exchange was placed on a new plane in the post-World War II period. 45
Domestic Market Relations
Liberals traditionally have taken the principles and institutions that organize material life in a given society (i.e., national economies) to be decisive for the pursuit of liberty. One reason is that so many dimensions of life are drawn up into the organization of economic relations. Markets, domestic as well as international, are not only a medium for the operation of the pluralized system of economic relations we know as capitalism, but are also expected to mold the organization and administration of material life into a form that expands the autonomy of individuals and groups. The end of mercantilist restrictions and the powerful potential of "economic man" were seen as opening up choices over movement, consumption, exchange, and work that were not dictated by custom or state power, but by interest and the logic of following one's own nature into the division of labor. 46
It is true that prior to the nineteenth century much of northern Europe had been organized into states whose territory contained an identifiable realm of economic activity that could be taken for a national economy. While these states and societies traded extensively with one another, part of the genius of The Wealth of Nations is the recognition that each national sphere would benefit by forming itself into a national market drawn up into an international market that is organized according to an international division of labor. The national market economy represents a social space, reproduced on an international basis across political territories, within which individuals and groups (namely, firms) can achieve freedoms in their economic activity. 47 With the market's ascendance in the first half of the nineteenth century "economic liberalism" became a significant aspect of the doctrine of every liberal movement in Europe, even though in countries on the Continent, such as Germany, liberals embraced market ideology uneasily. 48 Indeed, as Polanyi shows, by the end of the century economic liberals came to believe that markets were self-regulating entities that had taken on a life of their own vis-à-vis the societies and states within which they were embedded. 49
The emergence of domestic market relations was really a twofold process, involving the formation of a market on a national basis and the liberalization of economic activity more generally. Both aspects depended on state action to various degrees. Britain, as might be expected, led the way in the formation of national markets. Although it remained a pre-industrial market and still had neither efficient transport systems such as canals nor legal machinery for the freedom of contract, as early as 1750, Britain could be counted as having the beginnings of "a monetary and market economy on a national scale." 50 Markets in France, in contrast, remained fragmented and "scattered" well into the nineteenth century. Its financial system was limited on a national basis and did not begin to experience significant reform until 1848. Major financial reforms only came in the 1860s, which is when rail construction began to unify the market more generally. 51 Napoleon III reorganized the railroads and encouraged the creation of two banks as sources of credit for public and private enterprises.
Viewed retrospectively, from the standpoint of the national markets that emerged with unification, both Germany and Italy suffered from their long history of political fragmentation. Although Germany, prior to unification, did make a serious effort to build a national market through the Zollverein. The geopolitical situation of Italy, being under the thumb of Austria, precluded such efforts. But the accomplishments of the German states under Prussian state leadership should not be exaggerated. Despite the formation of the Zollverein in 1834, it was not until well into the 1850s that anything approaching market formation occurred. Indeed, it was only in 1857 that currencies were placed on a common basis. 52
The second aspect of national market formation, the process of liberalization, represented the effort of states and societies to shed their feudal restrictions in industry and agriculture. In the last decades of the eighteenth century both Britain and France attacked the power of the guilds which controlled a person's choice of occupation and freedom of movement. While in Germany guilds would be stripped of their powers by the 1840s, in Italy they were not finally abolished until the mid-1860s. Other forms of liberalization included the abolition of internal tolls and duties, the removal of restrictions on interest rates and, most notably, the legalization of the joint-stock company, which limited liability and opened up the possibility of firms freely incorporating without being wholly dependent on special authorization from the state. 53 Once again Britain led the way in this area in a process of legalization beginning in the second quarter of the century. Other countries legalized the joint-stock company between the 1860s and 1890s. 54 In the sphere of agriculture the most obvious set of reforms involved the abolition of serfdom. Also of importance was the abolition of restriction on land purchases, which in Prussia, for example, was limited to nobles until the reforms of the 1820s.
It is well known by now that the state's role vis-à-vis market relations has gone far beyond that of clearing the way for economic freedom and security. Adjusting and regulating market processes and outcomes so that the capabilities of the disadvantaged are facilitated has become a common practice of liberal states in the twentieth century. The progressive doctrine that helped articulate this role within the liberal tradition emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century among a new breed of liberals in Britain. One of their major spokesmen, L. T. Hobhouse made the claim that "the State is vested with a certain overlordship over property in general and a supervisory power over industry in general, and this principle of economic sovereignty may be set side by side with that of economic justice as a no less fundamental conception of economic Liberalism." 55 In Europe the development of this sovereign regulatory and planning state was driven in no small measure by the demands of the disadvantaged themselves, who had also helped propel the democratic organization of the state. 56
Liberal Governance of the Polity
As Hobhouse's statement makes clear, an increasing range of modern life became subject to the governance of states across western societies. Of course, the nature and scope of state power in the liberal tradition is a well-known and longstanding issue. A limited executive power, a robust assembly of representatives, and a well-defined set of political or civic rights all established on a constitutional basis has figured in most liberal versions of governance.
The choice of the term "liberal governance" to describe this medium of liberal modernity is not without problems. First, there is the question of the status in liberal modernity of the republican tradition, which clearly has been a force in the making of constitutional government. Among the many dimensions of republicanism there is government divided sufficiently between forces and interests to effect checks and balances; popular sovereignty that ultimately provides the governed with leverage over the governors; and a commitment to the public good on the part of all citizens through which their own freedom is made more secure. 57
While republicanism represents a distinct doctrinal and political tradition, the practices and principles associated with it (e.g., relatively autonomous branches of government) have in the twentieth century melded into the liberal state-building process and liberal modernity more generally, although it was sometimes at odds with the nineteenth-century liberal tradition. Even doctrinally, as Quentin Skinner points out, "the ideals of classical republicanism had largely been swallowed up by the rising tide of contractarian political thought." 58 Nonetheless, it remains possible today to identify the republican dimensions of contemporary liberal modernity. 59
Second, there is the question of democracy. The term liberal governance is meant to avoid any connotation that democratic practice, associated with a wide franchise and competitive elections, was an inherent feature of the liberal state. 60 It is true that liberal states became increasingly democratic in this sense in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in twentieth century it is no longer possible to identify a liberal state that is not also democratic. However, to see liberal states on some inevitable march toward democratization is at best teleological. This is not to say that the liberalization of governance did not open pathways toward democratization in both political and cultural ways. 61 Rather it is to assert that there is no necessary linkage between the two and that governance can be liberal without an explicit trajectory of transformation toward democracy being present at a given historical time. 62 Britain was a liberal state prior to the 1832 reform act by virtue of its enforcement of individual rights and middle-class representation at that time and not by virtue of its status as a proto-democracy.
It has been widely recognized that liberal thinkers and movements resisted democratization and even republicanism. The chief fear expressed was that an unruly mass would violate the myriad rights of individuals which liberals had fought for in their struggle with absolutism. Moreover, the constitutional guarantees of liberties protected under the limited monarchies that liberals helped to construct in countries such as Britain and post-1830 France, were felt to be vulnerable to republican forms of governance. 63 Liberal political actors and the monarchial forces they cooperated with inherited or constructed a host of restrictions on the possibilities of mass democracy. Besides the most familiar franchise restrictions based on property, gender, or education, there was the empowerment of the upper legislative houses, the avoidance of the closed ballot, unpaid representatives, and voting weights biased toward privileged districts. 64
The emergence of liberal governance in Europe was generally uneven. It reflected the spread of the interrelated developments of constitutionalism, parliamentarism, and ultimately democracy. These first two developments were manifested in the efforts of liberals to limit monarchies, above all, through the power of legislative assemblies. 65
Outside of the unique political precedents set by the French and American revolutions, only Britain had managed to achieve such limits on monarchial authorities as early as the late eighteenth century. Although in the first half of the nineteenth century other pockets of constitutionalism and parliamentarism could be found in such places as the Netherlands and some of the German states, for the most part only Britain, Belgium, and post-1830 France stood out as liberal states prior to 1848. In the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, constitutions emerged in many continental states. However, the power of the lower chambers remained limited. Denmark was an exception and the Netherlands managed some expansion of parliamentary power in that wake. 66 After the reactionary period of the 1850s, many states underwent significant liberal reforms in the 1860s including Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden. In that decade even Louis Napoleon liberalized aspects of his regime.
It was in this period that the suffrage began to widen in many states and we can begin to speak of democratization in earnest. Although the U.S. had led the way by the 1840s, both France and Switzerland had achieved universal male suffrage by the 1850s; Prussia did so in 1867. In the 1870s Denmark would also move toward a relatively wide franchise. Britain, on the basis of its reform act of 1867 enfranchised only about 30 percent of its adult males. Belgium was also slow in this regard: in 1894 it raised suffrage to 37 percent of males. Other states also moved toward universal suffrage at the end of the century, achieving it by the time of World War I.
In general, the liberal states that emerged in Europe through the nineteenth century became important forces in the mapping out of all sorts of liberal relations. Although these relations existed mostly in the context of discrete territorial states, viewed from an aggregate international perspective, liberal modernity has little meaning without there being at least some such spaces inscribed in the international realm. Moreover, the possibility of the emergence of those liberal relations which are more easily associated as a part of international relations proper, such as international exchange, is made more remote without the agency of one or more liberal states.
Individual and Group Rights
In each domain described so far individual and group rights have been essential elements. Markets rest on rights to property, contract, and movement. And contemporary political theorists such as Robert Dahl take civil and political rights (e.g., to free expression and association) for granted in the operation of even imperfect forms of liberal democracy. 67 Indeed, rights are so omnipresent within the manifold dimensions of liberal life that their standing as a medium of liberal modernity is in need of little explication. Like markets and liberal governance, rights were not an invention of the nineteenth century. But with the rise of the constitutional state an institutionalization of rights occurred that marked a distinct shift in the relationship between the state and its citizenry. Although there are numerous ways to characterize liberal rights, Jürgen Habermas has done so in a manner that captures the impact of this domain on the political life of nineteenth-century liberal modernity:
A set of basic rights concerned the sphere of the public engaged in rational-critical debate (freedom of opinion and speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly and association, etc.) and the political function of private people in this public sphere (right of petition, equality of vote, etc.). A second set of basic rights concerned the individual's status as a free human being, grounded in the intimate sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family (personal freedom, inviolability of the home, etc.). The third set of basic rights concerned the transactions of the private owners of property in the sphere of civil society (equality before the law, protection of private property, etc.). The basic rights guaranteed: the spheres of the public realm and of the private (with the intimate sphere at its core); the institutions and instruments of the public sphere, on the one hand (press, parties), and the foundation of private autonomy (family and property), on the other; finally, the functions of the private people, both their political ones as citizens and their economic ones as owners of commodities (and, as "human beings," those of individual communication, e.g., through inviolability of letters). 68
Each country in Europe had its own trajectory of development regarding rights. Whereas Britain led the way by establishing a firm civil rights tradition in the first few decades of the century, 69 states on the Continent tended to achieve their rights in fits and starts. After 1830, Western European states at times not only caught up to, but sometimes surpassed, the British record on rights. With regard to the right to form unions and to strike, for instance, Britain experienced, as did other countries, a slow process of development. Although Britain had repealed its Anti-Combination Laws in 1824, it would not be until the middle of the 1870s that full system of recognition of labor's rights would emerge. While workers would have to wait until 1884 in France for the equivalent, Belgium and northern Germany offered significant forms of recognition in the 1860s.
This is a very domestic-centered story of a domain that actually spans the domestic and international realms, justified, perhaps, by the limited impact of the latter in the nineteenth century. In the international realm, what can be understood as the rights of groups and individuals took shape in a much more limited form. Among international legal scholars, it is generally believed that in the nineteenth century the broad array of rights denoted now by the term 'human rights'-which subsumes the nineteenth-century liberal rights discussed above and includes civil (e.g., personal and economic), political, cultural, and social rights-were not codified into international law in any serious fashion. 70 However, in the international realm there were important precedents. European states sought in a number of instances to protect the status of minorities, to ensure religious toleration, and to end the slave trade.
Treaties, often between a European and non-European state, announced commitments to ensure "safety, life, liberty, dignity and property of foreigners." 71 These rights helped define what a "civilized nation" was and set the terms of exchange and movement which were of concern to thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. 72 They can be viewed as the precursors to the broader category of international human rights associated with the post-World War II period. 73 The understanding of international human rights circulating today incorporates the body of rights that have traditionally been defined and enforced at the domestic level with a whole new range of rights bearing on culture, social identity, and security.
Right of Collective Self-Determination
It is because of its unique status as an important constituent in the normative and institutional framework of international society that the right of collective self-determination can be distinguished from the rights discussed above as a medium of liberal modernity. The practices, principles, and institutions associated with self-determination have traditionally formed around the legitimation of claims made in the name of collectivities to establish and maintain independent states for self-governance. It is the only area of social action in the international realm where there has been the type of struggle against authority and power that has marked the course of many liberal movements in the domestic sphere. This became apparent in the first half of the nineteenth century when self-determination was manifested as a national struggle against empires such as the Ottoman one.
The linkage between liberalism and self-determination is not just predicated upon the politics of struggle. There is a much deeper doctrinal tie emerging out of the near universal association of the nation with self-determination. Liberals, most notably John Stuart Mill, saw nations as the most viable vessels of human progress. Nations were viewed as a social space within which to perfect each society and hence the entire fabric of European civilization. Mill claimed in Representative Government that in the context of a state made of multiple nationalities "[f]ree institutions are next to impossible." 74 Self-determination was therefore justified as the most desirable means toward the end of a free state, in that the very struggle for independence was one of freedom against tyranny. 75
In practice, the link between free institutions, the nation, and self-determination was not inevitable. The only international practice associated with self-determination to emerge in the nineteenth century was the plebiscite. Its first application-under the auspices of the French revolutionary state in the papal enclaves of Avigon and Venaissin, as well as in Nice and Savoy-served to justify annexation on the supposed basis of popular sovereignty and did not yet involve national aspirations. Other plebiscites in the century included the one held in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1857. That plebiscite was "the first time in history that an international congress of great powers postponed their action until they could ascertain the desire of the inhabitants themselves," although the results were not honored by those powers. 76
Although there were some instances of struggles for independence prior to the end of the Napoleonic Wars that had a national character, among them the Serbian revolt in 1804, the Vienna Settlement of 1815 generally ignored the question of national claims to statehood. 77 What we now call Belgium, for instance, was annexed to the Netherlands after the Napoleonic wars with little concern for the sentiments of the population. The Greek War of Independence in the 1820s was perhaps the most notable early instance of a struggle for national self-determination. It was taken up as a cause by liberal movements across Europe, leading to such organizations as the London Greek Committee. In the period between the independence of Belgium in 1831 and the creation of the German Empire in 1871, national self-determination became for the first time a factor helping to shape political outcomes in Europe.
However, as Eric Hobsbawm points out, liberal support for the principle of nationality was never universal in the first place: it was meant to apply to those collectivities judged to be viable nation-states on cultural and economic terms. 78 The continued existence, legitimated through the Concert order, of the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman multinational empires placed a check on the possible success of national movements, which multiplied in the second half of the century. The British state refused to aid Hungary's bid for independence from the Austrian Empire. In Germany the newly established liberal Frankfurt Assembly in 1848 expressly failed to make any moves toward ending the partition of Poland. The fate of Schleswig and Holstein in the 1860s clearly was set without regard to national self-determination. 79 By the time Europe entered the post-German unification period there were few changes in the map of Europe, except in the case of Norway and the Balkans. Concurrent with the waning salience of self-determination as a force in international politics in the last decades of the century, there was a shift in the character of nationalism toward the right, signaled by a greater emphasis on cultural difference and exclusion. In such a shift a wide basis of transnational support for national movements, except for one's own, was unlikely to emerge.
A new set of forces capable of setting self-determination on a different course in the twentieth century would emerge only with the first World War and the subsequent need to articulate a legitimate war settlement that could deal with the collapsing empires in the region. It is well known that national self-determination received more universalistic expression and application in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference than it ever did any time in the nineteenth century. In this period self-determination was still associated with the claims of national collectivities. But by the middle of the twentieth century, self-determination became the central principle in the anti-colonial struggles against European empires. These struggles were waged on the basis of race and they changed the character of the international realm, as new sovereign states were established throughout the former colonial world. 80
Although state sovereignty per se is not a constitutive medium of liberal modernity, the operation of markets, international exchange, liberal governance, and rights has depended on it in obvious ways. 81 In the domain of collective self-determination, however, the role of state sovereignty has been far more intricate. Indeed, the right to form a sovereign state has remained central to the principles, practices, and institutions associated with collective self-determination even as the domain transformed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the U.N. Charter the reference to 'peoples' rather than 'nations' as the subject of self-determination facilitated the claims of states on behalf of the collectivities they contain more than it reinforced the claims of collectivities themselves struggling against oppression. Self-determination had in many ways become in practice a legitimation of the borders and integrity of extant states. 82 This carried over into the process of decolonization where, once a sovereign state was established, "[r]acial sovereignty and ex-colonial boundaries in many cases" had "effectively transformed self-determination into a right of sovereigns." 83 Liberal doctrine had never really come to terms with the status of state sovereignty in the international realm. In general, liberal discourse on state sovereignty has been absorbed most with the question of nonintervention. Kant, Mill, Cobden, and Mazzini offered various parameters, qualifications, and critiques of the principle of nonintervention. 84 Their concerns were not focused on the sovereign status of the state, but rather on the question of whether intervention and nonintervention lead to what they saw as liberal political outcomes.
Liberal Modernity and International Relations
In conceiving of liberalism as a constellation of domains and as a dimension of modernity I have departed from the traditional treatments of international liberalism in the field of international relations. Most frequently international liberalism is understood to be a type of ideology or doctrine for organizing social action in the international realm, specifically, the foreign policy of states. 85 Understood as such, international liberalism identifies social and political goals for foreign policy that are consistent with the liberal tradition (e.g., equality and freedom). In addition, liberal doctrine can serve as a guide in the construction and maintenance at home and abroad of institutions typically associated with liberal democratic political life (e.g., democratic governance and civil rights). 86 These institutions and the norms associated with them have been central to the recently popular democratic peace approach, which explores the dimensions and causes of the apparent absence of war between liberal democracies.
A second way that international liberalism has been understood in the field of international relations is as a type of political economic system marked by the open movement of goods and capital between a plurality of states and societies. Generally, such a system emerges under the leadership of a liberal hegemon, which can shape the institutions and influence the policies of states in a fashion that creates and maintains openness. 87 In this understanding-typically associated with the study of international political economy-international liberalism represents not only doctrines and institutions, but also a set of relations which constitute a political economic system operating across a wide geographical expanse.
Finally, international liberalism can be understood to represent a distinct approach to understanding and explaining political outcomes in the international realm. As such, liberalism is held up as an alternative to neorealism and Marxism. This understanding stresses a logic of cooperation and interdependence based on a distribution of benefits to states and societies through participation in markets, collective security, or any number of institutions affecting outcomes in issue-areas across the international arena. 88
Each of these treatments deals with specific aspects of liberal modernity. But they all fail to explore the question of the historic status of liberalism as a way to organize social life. The treatments generally take as given the very existence of liberal modernity as a force in international history, either in the form of a repertoire of practices and principles that states can rely on to build institutions and fashion policies; or as a set of logics and doctrines that make sense of aspects of contemporary social existence and world politics. In contrast, I have emphasized liberal modernity's historicity, contingency, and mutability across time and space. I will argue in the next section that liberal order should be understood not simply as the application of liberal principles to organize international relations, but rather as the ordering of this mutable and variegated liberal modernity itself.
Ever since Woodrow Wilson attempted to use the settlement of World War I to found an international order based on national self-determination, liberal governance, and international economic exchange, liberalism has been associated with order in the field of international relations. Among the traditional treatments discussed above, the association is most explicit in conceptions of liberal international economic systems (or "orders"). But the link is also apparent in the treatment of liberalism as a mode of analysis, especially when the object of analysis is some dimension of order among Western states, such as the rules and norms associated with international regimes that govern economic relations. 89 Similarly, international order has often been identified as a goal in the foreign policy of the most powerful liberal state in the twentieth century, the United States. 90
There are two general senses of order evoked in these treatments. By exploring them, I can convey how order and liberal modernity intersect. In the first sense, there is an emphasis on the active "ordering" of relations through sets of mechanisms and institutions that organize international relations and transactions according to principles such as multilateralism. The ordering that is associated with economic systems and the foreign policy goals of powerful states gravitates toward this aspect. Agency, in the form of purposive pursuit and maintenance of order by states, is a key feature here. 91
The other sense of order is less focused on agency. It is a depictive sense in which patterns of international political life are described. An order can be characterized according to any number of attributes that have been of concern to international relations scholars and policymakers. It can be peaceful, mercantilist, or even just. 92
Of course, in any given concept of order, both the purposive and depictive senses are likely to be present in varying degrees. Hedley Bull captured this duality in his concept of international order as "a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society." 93 The purposive will of states establishes and maintains the "pattern of activity," the depiction of which conveys specific characteristics and goals of an order. 94
Working with either the depictive and purposive senses of international order begs a crucial question: what is the context out of which the meaning and significance of depictions and purposes are drawn? In Bull's conception, the context for the emergence of order is the common rules and institutions of international society. Order, for Bull, facilitates the existence of that society. In other words, there exists a fabric of social relations within which order emerges. This same sense of ordering and facilitating is employed in Robert Cox's concept of liberal world order. Order exists when states and the system in which they operate in sustain conditions for an "open world economy while refraining from interfering with the operations of . . . economic agents." 95 For Cox, capitalism is the macro-historical context for liberal order, which mechanisms such as an open world economy facilitate. Alternatively, we might imagine that order in itself can form a context. This is actually typical of how global order is now conceived in the field of international relations. James Rosenau tells us that global order "consists of those routinized arrangements through which world politics gets from one moment to the next." 96 Such arrangements include hierarchies of power and rules of interaction. Order understood in this way is itself the fabric of relations that constitute the global realm. It encompasses "every region, country, international relationship, social movement, and private organization that engages in activities across national boundaries." 97
We need not be so all-encompassing to posit order as a context in itself. Stephen Krasner analyzes North-South relations against the background of "a liberal global order characterized by multilateralism, nondiscrimination, the minimalization of impediments to the movement of goods and factors (with the exception of labor) and the control of such movements by privately owned rather than publicly owned entities." 98 The principles and mechanisms of this order effectively form a context in themselves, based on the power, agency, and the liberal character of the U.S. state and society.
These different perspectives on order and context suggest that, in conceptualizing order, the term "liberal' can be used either to characterize an order that has liberal qualities, or it can denote that international liberal relations have been ordered. In the first instance, mechanisms and patterns of activity such as treaties that order international relations and transactions are identified as liberal. Despite the differences between Cox and Krasner, both hold that mechanisms and principles that can be identified as liberal, such as open exchange, make an order liberal.
I find the second instance a more appropriate understanding of liberal order. To posit liberalism as mechanisms of order, as is done in the first instance, once again treats liberal principles and doctrines as simply a repertoire for states and other actors to draw on at certain historical junctures. It assumes a coherence and consistency-i.e., a readiness to be applied in the shaping of international relations-that is unrealistic. The brief sketches of liberal domains offered above show that this readiness is far from the case. Principles, practices, and institutions such as democracy or multilateral exchange take multiple and contested forms across time and space. If mechanisms and patterns of activity associated with liberalism are to be established on an international basis, then it is the very disparate doctrines and practices of liberal modernity that need to be ordered. An especially acute example of this is found in John Ruggie's concept of embedded liberalism. 99 States in Western Europe, which sought to achieve their own social welfare agendas after World War II, altered the terms of international economic exchange so this could be achieved within emerging liberal trade and finance regimes. As a result, the very character of international exchange had been transformed. What was ordered was international exchange itself, and in the process new principles, practices, and institutions were formed. In this case, the mechanism and pattern of activity that did the ordering was a regime, the "principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures" regarding a given area, 100 an entity which in itself is not intrinsically liberal.
By positing liberal modernity as the context of liberal order-i.e., the thing that is ordered in a purposive fashion-I do not mean simply to displace capitalism or, for that matter, other dimensions of modernity as contexts. Capitalist modernity is associated with forces such as class differentiation or patterns of capital accumulation which, as I have argued above, are deeply intertwined-and can shape and be shaped by-liberal modernity itself. Indeed, the expansion of a bourgeois class in the nineteenth century and the massing of pools of wage labor in major Western cities are two of many forces that precipitated important transformations in liberal domains (e.g., support for republican and, ultimately, democratic institutions). A history of liberal modernity, which is beyond the scope of this book, would need to trace the historical forces at play in these transformations. 101
Alternatively, the codification by states of liberal economic rights was decisive for the transformation of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Besides making claims that a liberal order-i.e., an ordering of liberal relations-can have important implications for capitalist relations (e.g., creating conditions for the operation of a market), or vise versa, it is far from clear that something that is a liberal order could actually order capitalist modernity. This would mean that the very existence of wage workers and the commodities they produce-crucial dimensions of capitalist modernity-would have to be drawn up into the machinery of order. 102
One type of order that does clearly order capitalism in the purposive sense I am talking about-which has to date really appeared only at the level of the state-is a socialist order. 103 In such an order, the system of relations of production is transformed in decisive ways. Of course, short of socialist transformation, mechanisms and patterns of activity traditionally associated with a liberal order-including the actions of the liberal state-can also allow for relations and issues associated with capitalist modernity (e.g., working hours, industrial relations, and financial regulation) to be dealt with by actors in decisive ways. 104 But the key difference is that in a liberal order it is liberal relations themselves that are ordered, whatever the implications for capitalism. Thus, there is a distinction between facilitating capitalism in a functional sense, or even shaping its relations and practices, and actually bringing it into a distinct pattern or arrangement (i.e., ordering) on an international basis. To claim that a specifically international liberal order could do so regarding capitalist modernity, one would have to bracket out the very process of bringing liberal relations themselves into some kind of alignment. 105 The alternative is to make the dubious claim that liberal relations can be both forces of order and subject to being ordered themselves.
The concept of liberal order that is emerging here is purposive and contextual. (It is, therefore, thoroughly modern, in the way I have described it above.) It is one in which dimensions of a heterogeneous liberal modernity are ordered through mechanisms and patterns of activity. There are two ways in which such an ordering can be understood. One is as orchestration, where policies and practices of states and societies in liberal modernity are arranged in a manner that allows for cooperation and coordination and yet preserves heterogeneity. An example of a body of such arrangements has emerged in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). It is a forum through which the advanced industrial states attempt to coordinate their economic activities and policies. Despite limited impact, the OECD has produced various codes of conduct and attempts at coordinating domestic and foreign policies. These efforts have mostly been about bringing policies into a mutually reinforcing alignment rather than producing a homogeneous model of liberal state practice.
Another way of ordering liberal modernity is the outright construction of practices, principles, and institutions, which can operate across a set of states and societies and which can help constitute the very character of liberal modernity in a given period. The point is that rather than simply orchestrating relations and policies, construction requires the establishment or even invention of new principles, practices, and institutions that shape international and domestic life. Construction is therefore a far more intrusive form of ordering than orchestration. But it need not necessarily imply a diminution of heterogeneity. As the phenomenon of embedded liberalism described above makes clear, it is possible to construct principles and practices that facilitate heterogeneous forms of state and society.
Like many of the concepts introduced above, orchestration and construction are heuristic polarities. In practice, every orchestration involves a construction in the building of the institutional means of coordination. And every common construction involves coordination in that the establishment of common principles and practices will take place in a context of heterogeneity.
In themselves, however, orchestration and construction specify only what is done in ordering liberal modernity. In order to understand how such modalities are realized through the international political relations that form the mechanisms and patterns of activity of order, a second distinction must be introduced. First, there are political relations that constitute arenas for cooperation among actors. Examples of this type of arena include councils of foreign ministers, congresses, and regional organizations (e.g., the Organization of American States). Second, there are political relations that constitute concentrations of agency that can organize and impel actors. Although other examples, among them the UN Security Council, exist, the most significant manifestation of this concentration of agency is U.S. hegemonic leadership, which is a central focus of this study. Again, this is a heuristic distinction: no single institution or macro-historical form can be identified exclusively with either mode of political relations. Cooperative dimensions are associated with both U.S. hegemony and the Security Council. 106
Compared to some of the other concepts of order discussed above, the one I offer is highly circumscribed. Its scope is international (i.e., between states and societies) rather than global (i.e., the totality of interactions and processes on the planet). And although its context, liberal modernity, encompasses a far deeper range of domestic and international factors than the rules and common institutions between states in Bull's international society, liberal order is not a world order. It does not refer to a single fabric of order applicable to humankind in total. Bull characterized world order, in contrast to his notion of international order discussed above, as "those patterns or dispositions of human activity that sustain the elementary or primary goals of social life among mankind as a whole." 107 And similarly, Richard Falk has been concerned with order that is associated with "a given past, present, or future arrangement of power and authority," that is "able to realize a set of human goals that are affirmed as beneficial for all people and apply to the whole world." 108 On the one hand, the recognition that there are different forms of modernity makes problematic the application of the concept of order to humankind in general, except in the trivial and purely depictive sense of order as the way things are for humankind. On the other hand, the heterogeneity of liberal modernity itself precludes any specification of universal primary or beneficial goals. Of course, any purposive order will be pervaded by goals. In international liberal order, examples include the expansion of international trade or the protection of rights. But these goals are those of agents within the order. They are not universally discernible through the deductions of the analyst of order.
Far more relevant are those conceptions of order that recognize a plurality of coexisting orders in the world. In a conference on conditions of world order held in 1965, it was suggested that there may not be a single world order, but "a set of world order systems." 109 More recently, Hayward Alker, Jr. has mapped out the different configurations and concepts of world order that can both compete with and penetrate one another. 110 Liberal order can be understood to be a zone of order in the global realm, distinct from other orders such as a socialist one. Interpenetration can occur in the areas of trade, communications, and contention over the boundaries of order.
The notion of orders having boundaries (to be discussed further below) raises the issue of how states and societies are actually included in a liberal order. By the post-World War II period, the domains of liberal modernity came to define a substantial portion of the domestic and international relations of the liberal democracies in the Atlantic community. But they also shaped the relations and practices of many states and societies outside of the region, which had become entwined, willingly and unwillingly, with various dimensions of liberal modernity, and as a result were drawn up into the post-World War II liberal order. For instance, for much of the postwar era, Latin American states governed by authoritarian regimes have had market economies and have participated in international exchange. And certainly, as Robert Jackson has pointed out, the assertion of sovereignty claims based on principles of self-determination-which he shows are squarely situated in the liberal tradition-have become particularly important for all sorts of states that are not typically associated with liberal modernity. 111
Indeed, there is a certain inverse, yet complementary, duality, that marks liberal modernity and the relations that order it. That is, they are partial in both senses of the term. 112 On the one hand, liberal modernity can emerge as a presence in states and societies in circumscribed and bounded arenas, such as among the bourgeois classes in leading cities of the Third World. Not only might there be a limited range of liberal practices inscribed in a given state and society, but also whole regions of social existence within that society can be excluded from participation in liberal domains (although the effects of the operation of liberal domains are far more difficult to bound). This was the unfortunate fate of African-Americans for centuries even in so liberal a society as the U.S. On the other hand, those states and societies that have all five liberal domains inscribed in their social fabric are-as we shall see below-constituents of a liberal core. This core, during and after waging global war, took it upon itself to set boundaries, define relations, construct institutions, designate identities, and generally organize and order a constellation of practices and principles located in liberal modernity.
I have asked readers to take seriously the notion that a certain way of being modern is at stake in the organization of states, societies, and international life around the liberal tradition. I have also asked readers to consider how states and societies shaped by liberal modernity might be included in a liberal order that is international in scope. Despite their obvious convergence, liberal modernity and liberal order exist in two different dimensions of historical time. Fernand Braudel has distinguished between the longue durŽe, which he usually associated with those longstanding-especially geographical-structures that constitute part of the permanent historical landscape, and the conjuncture, which he understood to be the cyclical patterns and social formations emerging across regions, states, and societies in a given span of time. 113 A similar distinction between the long and medium terms of historical time applies to liberal modernity and liberal order. Liberal modernity resembles a longue durŽe, although it is a far more changeable and socially determined version. It is constituted by the broad trajectory of liberal domains unfolding across the centuries subject to shifts in social forces, ruptures in discourse, and inventions in practices and institutions. Liberal order, in contrast, represents a particular historical conjuncture of power, agency, and systemic relations formed around the principles, practices, and institutions of liberal modernity. Its time horizon is not centuries, but decades.
A historical convergence of liberalism, modernity, and international order occurred in the wake of World War II. This convergence comprised specific historical developments, constructions of agency, and configurations of what has so often been of central concern in international relations: violence and military power. The main task of the chapters that follow will be to untangle the complex web of relations and outcomes that emerged in and through this fateful convergence or liberal moment. That untangling will depend on the construction of an interpretive explanation (described in the introduction) for which the domains of liberal modernity represent a crucial starting point. Together with the dynamics of the liberal moment, they constitute the broad context against which the politics and tensions of liberal order-making can be understood.
Notes
Note 1: A controversial recognition of this shift is Fukuyama, "The End of History?" pp. 3-18. See also Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War, ch. 9; Deudney and Ikenberry, "The International Sources of Soviet Change," pp. 73-118; Kegley, "The New Global Order," pp. 21-40; and Hoffmann, "What Should We Do in the World," pp. 719-32. The struggle of Eastern Europe with the transition to liberalization is considered in Bunce, "Rising Above the Past," pp. 395-430. Back.
Note 2: See the discussion in Tony Smith, America's Mission, pp. 13-19. Back.
Note 3: See the extensive theoretical exploration of this question by Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," pp. 205-35, 323-53; and idem, "Liberalism and World Politics," pp. 1151-69. See also Russett, Controlling the Sword, ch. 5; idem, Grasping the Democratic Peace; and Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, War and Reason. Empirical investigations include Small and Singer, "The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965"; Chan, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall . ."; Weede, "Democracy and War Involvement"; Maoz and Abdolali, "Regime Type and International Conflict, 1816-1976." See also Levy, "The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence," p. 270. Back.
Note 4: The book that still remains his most influential is Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. On ideational and cultural developments see idem, The Capitalist World-Economy. Back.
Note 5: Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation," pp. 131-59. Back.
Note 6: Krasner, "Westphalia and All That." Back.
Note 7: Walker, Inside/Outside. Back.
Note 8: Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, pp. 217-18. Back.
Note 9: Berman, All That is Solid, ch. 1, captures the play between despair and hope for Marx, Weber, and other relevant writers. Back.
Note 10: Herf, Reactionary Modernism; and Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias. Back.
Note 11: Eisenstadt, "A Reappraisal of Theories of Social Change and Modernization," in Social Change and Modernity, p. 423. Back.
Note 12: The Weberian and Baudelaireian experience of modernity are contrasted in Lash and Friedman, "Introduction: Subjectivity and Modernity's Other." Marx was also very aware of this flux which he saw as the result of capitalism's constant making and remaking of the world. See Berman, All That Is Solid. Back.
Note 13: The possibility of a post-Fordist, high technology, late-twentieth-century capitalism underscores the unique dimensions of industrialism as a mode of modernity. See Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity. Back.
Note 14: In contrast, philosopher Alastair MacIntyre in After Virtue uses the term liberal modernity to denote that modernity is liberal, the exact opposite of my use. Back.
Note 15: Though, of course, this is done sometimes. One example is Ruggerio, European Liberalism, p. 51, who conceives of liberties forming a system. Back.
Note 16: The term "liberal-capitalist state" is best understood as conveying the close intersection and historical proximity of the two forms, rather than their indistinguishableness. Back.
Note 17: Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 56-76. Back.
Note 18: When Smith, America's Mission, p. 7, refers to this international dimension it is as a world view on the part of (U.S.) liberal democratic actors which he calls "liberal democratic internationalism." It is not a view that is inherent in being a liberal democrat. Otherwise, all liberal democrats and liberal democratic states the world over would be liberal democratic internationalists. Back.
Note19: Deutsch, Political Community, p. 134. Back.
Note 20: Adler and Barnett, "Governing Anarchy," p. 76. Back.
Note 21: For discussion of the play between liberal and illiberal ways of making social existence see Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. Back.
Note 22: In the work of John Gray, who has become a sharp critic of American liberal theory, there was a distinct transformation from a view that argued in his Liberalism, for the recognition of a fundamental liberal identity based on four elements (individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and meliorism); to one that finds no continuous liberal tradition but only liberal civil societies, in his Liberalism: Essays in Political Philosophy; and on to one that asks in Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought that we drop the qualifier "liberal" and focus instead on civil societies per se which may take place in illiberal contexts. I will argue that civil society and practices and principles associated with a diverse liberal tradition can occur in social spaces that may or may not be liberal. Thus, I find points of agreement in Gray's two latter texts. But Gray is directing his attention to political theory and our purposes are different, however much we share a concern with overcoming a sense of singularity in the liberal tradition. The sense of diversity is also noted in Smith, "Unfinished Liberalism," who is actually defending liberal theory in the U.S. from Gray's attacks. Back.
Note 23: A core, of course, can be identified within the context of a single liberal political theory. One articulation of a core in what is claimed to be a specifically American version of liberalism is in Dworkin, "Foundations of Liberal Equality." Back.
Note 24: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 31-36. Back.
Note 25: On the way that forms of organization can circulate globally see Meyer and Scott, Organizational Environments. Back.
Note 26: These were originally applied to the analysis of international relations by James Rosenau, who noted its widespread use in the study of U.S. politics. Rosenau, "Pre-theories and Theories." See also Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence, pp. 64-65; Mansbach and Vasquez, In Search of Theory, ch. 2; Vasquez, The Power of Power Politics, pp. 59-61; and Keohane, International Institutions, pp. 57-58. While Rosenau thought that issue areas were determined by state and nonstate actors-a view adopted by Mansbach and Vasquez-Keohane and Nye have argued that issue areas ultimately depend on state policies and perceptions for their emergence and substantiation. Back.
Note 27: Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 17-20, 316-18; and idem, "Liberalism and the Art of Separation." Such 'spheres of operation' carry with them unique distributive principles and contexts of 'social meanings.' In a complex modern society, it is possible to restrain power by preventing its accumulation and spillover across spheres. Back.
Note 28: Walzer, "Liberalism and the Art of Separation," p. 327. Nonetheless, the borders and content of Walzer's spheres are very much open to contest. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, ch. 13. Back.
Note 29: Indeed, the term 'sphere' implies the existence of a demarcated space, rising out of its association with globes. The term 'domain' is more properly associated with a region or range of elements that emerge as a result of a function or activity such as rulership. The distinction between domains and spheres is parallel to the distinction made by Perry Anderson between respectively the overlapping and "parcellized sovereignty" of disparate political units in the medieval world and the firm boundaries of absolutist states in the early modern period. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 16. See also Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation." Back.
Note 30: Although Walzer recognizes that there can be considerable interaction and spillover across spheres, he ultimately associates a liberal modern society with the very capacity to establish separations or walls. Back.
Note 31: Foucault, "The Subject and Power," p. 210. Back.
Note 32: . See Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 122-123; and idem, "Questions of Method," pp. 100-117. Back.
Note 33: For example, Foucault shows in his The History of Sexuality how the engagement of the medical field with the "problem" of sex in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries molded the emerging domain of sexuality in decisive ways. He called his method, in which he traced the effects of these ruptures, 'geneology.' Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 30. Back.
Note 34: See for instance Kenwood and Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy, 1820-1980; McKinlay and Little, Global Problems, ch. 5; and Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change. Back.
Note 35: These sketches will be incomplete and unlikely to satisfy the political theorist, jurist, or economic historian who makes an intellectual home among the topics >covered. I am willing to risk disapproval in the hope that the specialist reader will understand that I seek only to supplement a hitherto abstract discussion and to help justify why I have identified these five elements as the predominant mediums of liberal modernity. Back.
Note 36: A seminal approach to that history is Ruggiero, European Liberalism. Back.
Note 37: English foreign trade, for example, doubled in the first half of the eighteenth century. See Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959, p. 48. Although foreign trade is generally seen as occurring within the context of mercantilist policies, it is fairly clear that the Dutch in the seventeenth century practiced what could be understood as free trade policies. See Wallerstein, The Modern World System II, p. 61. For some of the ways that an international market economy differs from a mercantile one see Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence," pp. 19-66. Back.
Note 38: . See Ruggiero, European Liberalism, p. 49. Back.
Note 39: On France see ibid., pp. 171-72, 187. On Germany see Rohr, Social Liberalism in Germany, pp. 82, 91. Back.
Note 40: . Some of the dimensions of this interdependence are sketched in Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence," pp. 19-66. Back.
Note 41: Pollard, The Integration, pp. 25-26. Back.
Note 42: . Henderson, The Zollverein, pp. 40-44. Back.
Note 43: See for example Hilgerdt, "The Case for Multilateral Trade," pp. 393-407. Back.
Note 44: Stein, "The Hegemon's Dilemma," p. 368. Back.
Note 45: In the relatively recent past "liberal protectionism" has emerged as a new way to protect individual industries. See Aggarwal, Liberal Protectionism. Back.
Note 46: Although, as noted by Albert Hirschman, The Passions, p. 121, the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson thought that a strong preference for the orderly administration of economic life could lead to a willingness to compromise liberty. Back.
Note 47: See Polanyi, The Great Transformation; and Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence," pp. 27-39, for a comparison between the mercantile and the liberal economic systems. Back.
Note 48: On German liberal reluctance see James Sheehan, German Liberalism, p. 30. Back.
Note 49: Polanyi, The Great Transformation, ch. 12. Back.
Note 50: Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, pp. 27-28. On the emergence of the freedom of contract in Britain see Atiyah, Freedom of Contract. Back.
Note 51: Trebilcock, Industrialization, pp. 142-52, 185. Back.
Note 52: See Pollard, The Integration, p. 29. The best history of the formation of the Zollverein remains, Henderson, The Zollverein. Back.
Note 53: Many of these changes are charted in Hamerow, New Europe, pp. 274-75. Back.
Note 54: On Britain see Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, pp. 37-38, 350-53. On France see Cameron, France and Economic Development, p. 35. Back.
Note 55: Hobhouse, Liberalism, p. 108. Back.
Note 56: That story is told extremely well by Polanyi, The Great Transformation. A more recent exploration of the link between democracy and markets is Lindblom, Politics and Markets. Back.
Note 57: The locus classicus of republicanism in its classical form is Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses. This tradition is explored comprehensively in Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. See also Skinner, "Political Liberty," pp. 225-50; Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," pp. 1151-69; and Habermas, "Three Normative Models of Democracy." Back.
Note 58: Skinner, "Political Liberty," p. 238. Back.
Note 59: This is done by Everdell, The End of Kings, pp. 3-13; and Deudney, "Dividing Realism," p. 50, p. 36. Back.
Note 60: How wide this franchise and what other conditions go along with any definition of democracy vary widely. Huntington, The Third Wave, p. 16, turns to the criteria relevant to the nineteenth century offered by Jonathan Sunshine, "Economic Causes and Consequences of Democracy," pp. 48-58. These are: 1) voting eligibility of fifty percent of adult males; and 2) an executive power based either on a parliamentary majority or regular popular elections. Back.
Note 61: Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, p. 107, for example, argues that industrialization made it inevitable that the masses would have to be politically enfranchised, an outcome liberals were not prepared to resist. Back.
Note 62: The relationship between liberalization and democratization is explored in Huntington, Third Wave, pp. 121-29. Back.
Note 63: Collins, The Age of Progress, pp. 10-11. Back.
Note 64: Hamerow, New Europe, pp. 292-300. Back.
Note 65: See for example Watson, "British Parliamentary System," p. 104. Back.
Note 66: Ibid., pp. 107-8, 118-19. Back.
Note 67: Dahl, Polyarchy, pp. 1-14. Back.
Note 68: Habermas, The Structural Transformation, p. 83. Back.
Note 69: A brief analysis of the emergence of rights in Britain is in Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development, pp. 78-105, especially p. 81. A more general portrait is offered in Anderson and Anderson, Political Institutions. pp. 238-41, 274-85. Back.
Note 70: See Brownlie, "The Expansion of International Society," p. 360; and Iwe, The History and Contents of Human Rights, p. 117. Back.
Note 71: Schwarzenberger, A Manual of International Law, p. 13. Back.
Note 72: Kant, "Perpetual Peace," pp. 284-86. Back.
Note 73: Gong, Standard of 'Civilization', p. 91. Back.
Note 74: . Mill, Utilitarianism, pp. 486-87. The link between the nationalism and progress in liberal doctrine is explored by Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, ch. 1; and Mayall, Nationalism, pp. 42-43. Back.
Note 75: Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, ch. 3, distinguishes between this liberal democratic strain in self-determination-which she labels as self-rule-and the more cultural dimensions within which members of a nation seeks "to preserve their distinct existence, and to manage communal life in accordance with their particular way of life (p. 69)." I continue to focus on the former sense because, as Tamir herself makes clear (p. 57), it is the most prevalent one. Whether her effort and those of sympathetic others are articulating a shift in the domain remains to be seen. Back.
Note 76: Johnson, Self-Determination, p. 77. Johnson, ibid., p. 94, distinguishes the early form of self-determination based on popular sovereignty from its later form based on the nation. Cobban, The Nation State, p. 44, exhorts us to avoid assuming that the link between free or even democratic institutions is based on any "innate interdependence." In 1862, Lord Acton saw a clash between the nation and the rights of individuals. See Manning, Liberalism, p. 94. This same theme has been addressed by Cobban, National Self-Determination, p. 106; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 230-31; and Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, p. 75. Back.
Note 77: See Macartney, National Minorities, p. 109. On the Serbian revolt see Collins, Age of Progress, p. 296. Back.
Note 78: . Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 32. Back.
Note 79: Cobban, National Self-Determination, pp. 47-48, traces what he sees as a "temporary eclipse" for the principle of nationality in this period. Back.
Note 80: This change is traced by Jackson, Quasi-States, pp. 41, 75-78; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 26, 40, 101, 170-71. Back.
Note 81: Arguing that sovereignty predates liberalism and is, therefore, a nonliberal element of international life, is as nonsensical as arguing that markets, because their existence predates liberalism, are also nonliberal. Moreover, by the time the reader comes to the conclusion of this book, it should be fairly clear that the making of liberal order has been a potent force underwriting the centrality of the sovereign state. The possibility of an alternative outcome is indicated by the fate of states and their sovereignty in postwar Eastern Europe. Back.
Note 82: This transformation is discussed in Barkin and Cronin, "The State and the Nation," pp. 123-24. Back.
Note 83: Jackson, Quasi-States, p. 152. Back.
Note 84: The thought of these four authors constitutes the substance of the theoretical discussion in Vincent, Nonintervention, ch. 3. Back.
Note 85: See, for example, Cohen, "Toward a Liberal Foreign Policy," pp. 67-86. Back.
Note 86: In Michael Doyle's work the play between doctrine and institutions is very strong. See his "Liberal Legacies." Back.
Note 87: One particularly strong version of this understanding is Gilpin, U.S. Power. Back.
Note 88: The contrast of liberalism, Marxism, and Neorealism is frequently employed in international relations textbooks and across a wide array of works. One prominent example of such a contrast is Gilpin, The Political Economy. See also McKinlay and Little, World Order. Back.
Note 89: This is most clearly discussed in McKinlay and Little, World Order. In addition, while most students of the apparent peace among liberal democracies have not directly addressed the issue of international order, scholars such as Ernst-Otto Czempiel, "Governance and Democratization," have explored some of the relevant implications, especially the notion that the potential proliferation of liberal democratic states can open the way for a more peaceful international order. Back.
Note 90: A good example of this is Hoffmann, Primacy or World Order. Back.
Note 91: . Recently, this purposiveness has increasingly been articulated as instances of international or global governance where "[g]overnance is essentially purposive and should be distinguished from order which does not require conscious purpose or intention." Biersteker, "The 'Triumph' of Neoclassical Economics," p. 102. Back.
Note 92: The possibility of having a descriptive sense of order is discussed in Hoffmann, "Report of the Conference." Back.
Note 93: Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 8. See Biersteker, "Neoclassical Economics" for further elaboration on the two senses of order. Back.
Note 94: Bull identified these goals as the maintenance of 1) the system and society of states, 2) the independence of the units in that system, and 3) a general condition of peace among them where feasible. Although these might appear to be very general goals, they describe an order of externally sovereign states with sufficient common interest in the maintenance of a generally peaceful international society. A change in any of these goals would surely alter the character of the order. Back.
Note 95: Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, p. 127. It should be pointed out that Cox uses order in a number of other senses (e.g., world order and social order) as well. Back.
Note 96: Rosenau, "Governance, Order, and Change," p. 5. Back.
Note 98: Krasner, Structural Conflict, p. 61. Back.
Note 99: Ruggie, "Embedded Liberalism," pp. 195-231. Back.
Note 100: This is part of the seminal definition offered by Krasner, ed., International Regimes, p. 2. Back.
Note 101: This is one way to read the monumental work by Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Back.
Note 102: Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity, p. 24, identifies these two forms as the "key elements of "modern capitalism." Back.
Note 103: It, of course, is possible to speak of a capitalist order in the depictive sense in the same way we may speak of a capitalist system. One example of this is Wallerstein's world capitalist system, which is viewed depictively as well as purposively. Back.
Note 104: See Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, ch. 5. Back.
Note 105: While Cox, ibid., pp. 134-43, offers a trenchant analysis of the political struggle to make liberal states in Europe in the nineteenth century, he seems to imply that what he calls a liberal world order flows comparatively easily, especially from the interests of the hegemonic British state. Back.
Note 106: In the face of declining U.S. hegemony the tensions between these two forms became an important dimension of international relations scholarship over the last decade. Robert Keohane's seminal work, After Hegemony, directly addressed the question of how states, in the absence of the concentrated agency associated with hegemony, could cooperate through mutual adjustment of interests in the context of cooperative arenas such as international regimes. Back.
Note 107: Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 20. Back.
Note 108: Falk, "Contending Approaches." Back.
Note 109: Hoffmann, "Conditions of World Order," p. 456. Back.
Note 110: Alker, "Dialectical Foundations," 69-98. Biersteker, "Neoclassical Economics," p. 111, points out that "different world orders simultaneously coexist and overlap with one another with varying degrees of accommodation and contradiction." Alker is collaborating with Biersteker, Tahir Amin, and Takashi Inoguchi on a project titled, "The Dialectics of World Order." Back.
Note 111: Jackson, Quasi-States, pp. 10, 36, 40. Back.
Note 112: A similar use of the term "partial" in both its senses is found in Sunstein, The Partial Constitution. Note that the notion of partiality runs counter to the ways that liberalism is typically associated with neutrality. Back.
Note 113: See Braudel, On History, pp. 74-76, 92-97. Back.
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