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The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order, by Robert Latham
This study began and was completed during what is called the "post-Cold War period." Like many others, I entered this period with a sense of optimism about leaving behind the limitations on international political life associated with forty years of cold war. I soon found myself lapsing into bouts of pessimism about the renewed energy being dedicated to that perennial goal of international political life: international order. The basis for that pessimism was that policymakers-and even scholars-had little interest in confronting what forty years of order-making could actually teach them. Those lessons seem to have been displaced by the euphoric myth that 1989 was a new "year zero" for understanding and ordering the world, and that the end of the Cold War also meant the end of the old order and the necessity to think hard about it.
Although we are in a political environment very different from that of the 1940s, many of the Cold War's essential components endure, including NATO, the perpetuation of a global U.S. military network, massive arms exports from the West, and a Europe still hesitant about providing for its own security. More generally, the construction of most of the pillars of contemporary international life depended, to varying degrees, on the early postwar effort to fashion an international order. These include the UN, a human rights regime, international economic institutions, European integration, decolonization, a proliferation of states, democratization, and liberalization.
The eventful beginnings and unfolding of order-making in the middle of the twentieth century are therefore ignored at a cost. We would fail to understand, for example, why, in the postwar growth-if not revolution-of international institution-building, institutions would be limited in their political and social scope and engaged in reinforcing the status of the sovereign state as the primary form of political agency across the globe. 1 In the realism that dominated international thought in the U.S. during the Cold War this outcome would be viewed as a function of anarchy in the international system. However, postwar realism would fail to explain why, in the first place, so much institution-building occurred during the war-before the Soviet Union emerged as a threat and while the U.S. was only in the process of constructing its role as a hegemon. 2 More fundamentally, anarchy-which derives from a world of sovereign states and the absence of powerful and authoritative international institutions-is exactly what needs to be explained. In contrast, this book has shown how patterns of postwar institution-building and the reinforcement of state sovereignty flow from three interrelated dimensions of postwar liberal order-building. One is the way that states-strong or weak-were designated as central constituents of order in a political tradition, liberalism, that prized the state as the locus of effective and, more optimistically, just social relations. Another is the commitment in policymaking to constructing thin and temporary institutions that I have identified as part of an overall pattern of minimalization in the making of liberal order. Finally, there is the reliance on military power as the central currency of order-wide political relations rather than simply as a means to secure the liberal world against external and internal threats.
The U.S. commitment to maintaining a network of global military power of Cold War proportions is likely to continue well into the twenty-first century. Critics of current leadership in the West who are anxious to see a strong commitment to humanitarian intervention may disapprove of the scope of this network. But their calls for more rather than less intervention where it is deemed necessary are likely to be met, if at all, through the operation of this network. Only further study will show whether the very conditions and conflicts that call out for intervention become crises in part because of the lack of robust and effective international institutions that might become engaged early on politically and thereby obviate the need for military action at a later stage. There is, however, no simple trade-off here. As this study has shown, no matter what the original intentions, commitments to political-economic structures and institutions can shape and expand military-security commitments in decisive ways. In general, international political-economic relations and security outcomes are linked to a greater extent than our intellectual traditions might otherwise lead us to believe.
But these points still rest on an implicit sense that the international community under the leadership of a liberal core of states and societies can set the terms for international order in the twenty-first century. This assumption ignores one of first goals of this study: to establish that social fabrics like liberal modernity-formed across centuries rather than decades-are not simply constructed by cores or hegemons and are not simply subject to ordering from above, but rather are dependent on a wide range of historical forces and agents.
Policymaking and research today will need to become far more sensitive to these wider historical contexts in all their complexity and mutability, even if only further liberalization is seen to be at stake. However daunting the mid-century task of order-building, it had the advantage of being part of a wider liberal moment in history. The successful completion of the Second World War was itself a crucial condition of that moment, as it freed states and societies from wartime controls, opened the way to postwar reconstruction, and forced leaders to think seriously about what type of principles and institutions would populate a postwar world. Although liberal principles and institutions have gained a new vitality after the Cold War, it is far from clear that we comprehend even the basic character of our current moment and therefore what the limits and possibilities of political agency are.
The above points also skirt the question of how well we understand the international political stakes in the commitment to build or maintain an order, particularly a liberal one. From the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, it might appear to many that the attempt to build an order that was global in scope in the aftermath of war was not just overly ambitious, but actually dangerous. As this book has argued, it was the West's project of international liberal order, not a Soviet socialist order, that was the overarching framework for the settlement of the Second World War. The initial attempt to incorporate the Soviet Union within the emerging order generated tensions that led to the confrontation that became the Cold War. Above all, the Soviet Union was in a unique position to challenge the task, led by the U.S., to define the relations and boundaries of liberal order. This effort at definition was formidable and precarious in itself, especially since it entailed the incorporation of a diverse range of states and societies with their own national agendas and sets of specific interests. Indeed, order-making produced tensions among the states and societies within liberal order, especially regarding the problem of reconciling order and autonomy. These tensions compelled U.S. policymakers to turn increasingly to military-strategic means in the exercise of U.S. leadership. Tensions also revolved around a reluctance within the U.S. itself about its emerging hegemony that made attractive to policymakers the recourse to a form of power (i.e., military) that seemed to require a minimum of lasting political engagements. Reinforcing this growing recourse to military power was the adoption of strategies or doctrines, such as containment, that, despite policymakers' initial efforts to avoid exactly this outcome, in the end entailed taking a predominantly military approach to order-making.
Must the pursuit of order be accompanied by the pain, waste, and inequity that have come to be associated with forty years of Cold War? Those looking at things from the long history of the formation of European states and a European state system-with its bloody wars and tyrannies-might be inclined to answer yes. They would be both right and wrong. Clearly, the processes of state-formation and international order-making share, for instance, a profound connection to war and its manifold repercussions. But state-formation and order-making are also very different. Internationally, relations are ordered among a plurality of political authorities. Domestically, the formation of a state means the establishment of order through a single authority. Drawing any equivalence between the two processes has to be done carefully.
State-formation and international order-making share something deeper than the repercussions of war. It was the pursuit of exclusive authority, the contests over its control, and the conflicts with other polities over the scope of their authority that contributed to the blood and waste of European history. What perhaps makes international order into something dangerous is the extent to which its builders attempt to construct a single, universal web of relations among and across a plurality of polities and societies. International order itself may not be the problem. Rather the problem may be the attempt to establish a predominant, exclusive order, of global dimensions, against other potential orders and those forces that might challenge the terms of that order.
To say that the creation of a postwar international liberal order was dangerous is not to concentrate blame for the Cold War on the West. Most readers will readily recognize that in the preceding pages the Soviet Union is depicted as an aggressive, if not expansionist, state. Its historic aggression can rightly be condemned morally, as can that of the West. But such condemnation must be distinguished from the question of attributing forty years of Cold War to one set of agents or another. 3 I have tried to show how complex the history of the rise of that confrontation is and how cautious we would have to be to affix blame to any party to it. The point has been to emphasize the importance of liberal order-building in shaping that confrontation, not to make any final, condemning judgment on its agents based on that importance.
If the debate about the meaning and lessons of the Cold War are circumscribed to the narrow pursuit of blame, then a significant intellectual resource will be squandered. From the perspective of this study, it is far more productive to conclude by drawing out some basic insights about contemporary U.S. foreign policy- and order-making.
Liberal Identities, Liberal Dilemmas
Two very different liberal identities have been at work in this study. One is the masterful, active agent, reaching out globally, taking responsibility for the shaping of international life. The other is the more fearful, relatively inactive agent, obsessed with its own domestic life, interests, and quarrels. One is the innovative producer, the other is the passive consumer. One is the deliberate and purposeful campaigner, the other the drifting and uncertain reactor. These two identities have repeatedly surfaced in commentary on liberal modernity across two centuries, from Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that democracies wage war well but make foreign policy badly, to Carl Schmitt's disillusionment with endless deliberations of liberal parliaments, and to John Dewey's hopes for robust democratic experimentation, both domestic and international. Today, we have commentators who are frustrated by an apparent failure of Western leadership and resolve, in contrast to those who fear the costs of continued U.S. leadership. Others, such as Tony Smith, remind us of the great liberalizing mission that has organized heroic U.S. activism across a century.
Rather than being absolute, the two identities are likely to coexist in splendid dialectic in a liberal state, society, or international order. In this sense, the portrait of the post-World War II period as a triumph of internationalism over isolation in the U.S.-recast most recently, both forcefully and thoughtfully, by the late Eric Nordlinger 4 -is misrepresentative. Postwar U.S. foreign policy was a combination of the two. This mixture was in place from the beginning of the period. Recall the wartime faith of policymakers that a system of liberal economic exchange would lead to a relatively self-regulating war settlement, within which a UN capable of channeling international politics into peaceful dialogue would be backed up by the regional power of the U.S., Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. Underlying the system would be the return of stability and political strength, especially in Europe, that would make U.S. intervention superfluous and the pursuit of an "isolationist internationalism" possible. It was a system, it turned out, that could not produce the order promised by its own discourse of security, rights, democracy, and markets. Although the faith was abandoned, the notion that order and strength could be constructed while keeping limits on U.S. involvement was not.
The pursuit of limits in the context of activism is perilous. Options for action in international institutional and diplomatic arenas are narrowed. This undercuts efforts to deal with problems of order already on the table and those that might arise in the near future. We saw this unfold in the case of economic security. The pursuit of economic security created commitments with which the circumscribed mechanisms and institutions of economic security could not contend. We, therefore, should be suspicious of calls for a return to an economic-security focus after the Cold War. Such efforts, coupled with a generally widespread current belief that the U.S. needs to exercise restraint, could be a redux to watch out for. The same goes for the much heralded foreign policy doctrine centered on the expansion of markets and democracy. What commitments does this expansion entail? How will tensions, conflict, and reversals in democratization be responded to?
But then, think of the dilemmas U.S. policymakers faced in struggling to build international order. On the one hand, political institutions in which agents have access and influence over outcomes (especially through representation) are quintessentially liberal. On the other hand, such access and influence can threaten order by preventing decisive action as agents deliberate over and contest policies. The authors of NSC-68, one recalls, understood this. There is also the complicating dilemma that the construction of effective international institutions to provide for global forms of governance, important to life within states and societies, can also limit the capacity of states to set the terms of their own social existence. Such construction is, therefore, likely to be resisted by some. Add to this the dilemma that the constraint of the precious few institutional possibilities for governance because of this resistance or for the sake of decisive action can, in the end, limit agency, particularly in the case where such institutions would be essential for achieving a desired outcome. One can perhaps understand how attractive the recourse to military power could be in the making of order, 5 especially when it seemed to policymakers such as Averell Harriman to be uniquely capable of contending with some of the dilemmas of order-making, while opening up space for states and societies struggling to set the terms of their own social existences. We might wonder, as institutions such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) appear to languish, whether the recent efforts to expand NATO and build a "Partnership for Peace" will succumb to the same recourse to military power for the states and societies of Eastern Europe. During the early Cold War, the very creation of space for liberalization and even integration through military umbrellas seemed to limit the construction of institutions at the global level. We do not know if this so more generally, but the issue deserves further thought and research.
The building of liberal order, then, is plagued with dilemmas. Although we can imagine that many of these dilemmas are not unique to what I have labeled a liberal order, the dilemmas are likely to be experienced in a liberal order far more intensely. Just think of the dilemma associated with the building of strength and stability through liberalization. You facilitate the democratic claims and contestations of agents within a given society. This can help legitimate your order-making efforts. But it can also promote voices within the democratic process that can challenge the terms of international order. 6 Or consider the dilemma, wherein the very attempt to nurture independent sources of strength creates dependencies on aid and leadership that undermine the prospects for such sources to emerge as independent. Moreover, such independent strength could also create fear that solidarity in the liberal order would be compromised, along with the leadership supposedly working toward independent sources of strength in the first place.
By pointing to the many dilemmas and contradictions that populate international liberal order, I do not wish to imply that the alternative to militarization and even Cold War is a straightfoward attempt to confront the tensions of order-making head on and seek some form of resolution on some higher political-institutional plane. That alternative would require that the dilemmas of liberal order, especially those bearing on the autonomy of agents to set the terms of their own social existence, could be overcome or mediated somehow prior to the establishment of working institutions. For example, a community of common interest would need to exist that was robust enough to bring agents into a consistent constellation. Or we would have to assume that every institution would permit the kind of adaption between autonomy and governance that the embedded militarization described in this book allowed. 7 It may be far better to recognize that dilemmas are not subject to resolution and that the attempt to overcome them-minimally, to find a workable way to manage them-is not a wise course.
But it is not easy to give up on the attempt to overcome dilemmas in the context of order-making. The whole point of making a systemwide order is to bring the elements subject to order into some kind of workable relationship to one another. This is what marks liberal order-making as modern. It is a large-scale organization of agency. Such an organization is meant to facilitate agency and to prevent such agency from being stymied by dilemmas thrown in its way. 8 What then could it mean to call for a moratorium on the overcoming of dilemmas? Would this moratorium merely result in inaction and drift? (In the Bosnian civil war, the West has had its face rubbed in dilemmas and the impediments they create for agency.) There is no easy answer to these questions. I can here only suggest some possible starting points for thinking about them.
Central to the postwar fears described in this book was the fear that states and societies in the liberal order could not handle the tensions, dilemmas, and contradictions inherent in the making of order. This was self-fear. Courage for some, in this context, could mean facing and overcoming the dilemmas by building strength, solidarity, and-yes-a degree of hardnosed realism that would make the wide-scale production and use of violence feasible. But is this really courage when it is based upon the fear of a liberal order about its own potential impotence and ineffectiveness? The alternative is courage based on resistance to such fears in the first place. Consider the words of political philosopher Judith Shklar:
Tolerance consistently applied is more difficult and morally more demanding than repression. . . . Courage is to be prized, since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats, both physical and moral. This is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. . . . The alternative then set, and still before us, is . . . between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining, far too much so for those who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom. 9
Shklar points to a courage that is cognizant of the power of fear, even self-fear. Instead of reacting to that power and even, as I argued in chapter 4, fearing that states and societies will not fear enough, the courageous would endeavor to remove as much as possible the reasons for fear in the first place, and ensure proper mechanisms of protection against abuse by concentrations-or what I have called nodal points-of power. In the end, making an order means defining limits. The difference between one liberal order and another, a better and a worse one, could depend on how much tolerance is allowed within such boundaries. This would mean that risks would be taken by order-makers and that the existence of dilemmas would be treated as part of what a more tolerant, constrained, and less militarized liberal order is about. Order-makers would risk a robust democratic commitment to facilitating the unimpeded access of diverse actors to state power and international institutions in the hope that the payoff of legitimation would offer the strength necessary to resist anti-democratic forces. Such a commitment would not, "unrealistically," have required abandoning the defense of Europe or a-more modest-military machine to do so.
Shklar's words also suggest a very different approach to order that bears directly on the question of a moratorium on the slaying of dilemmas. An order that allows for "contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom" is one in which practices, processes, and outcomes are recognized as always contestable and subject to revision. In contrast, in the order-making described in this book, there was an attempt to bring actors and their relations-despite their complex diversity-into an organized constellation with relatively clear identities and definitions of acceptable practices. This suggests that there are two basic ways to respond to complexity. One is to look for paths of closure that set boundaries as best possible to issues of who should do what, where, and with whom. The other way to respond to complexity is to simply accept it and find mechanisms, options, and even strategies for pursuing one's interests, if not also order, within it. This approach is the far more difficult and courageous one.
However, the notion that there is actually a choice to be made after the Cold War between these starting points for U.S. policymaking is somewhat disingenuous, if the premises of this study are taken seriously. The possibility of minimizing complexity-or, more importantly, its perception-even by attempting to reduce diversity and contradiction in order-making, may have been unique to the moment of the 1940s. Then, the war had laid open opportunities to define relations and set boundaries. Especially important was the way that the war signaled to many at the time that the project of building international order along liberal lines was the common project of the leading powers. The Soviet challenge to that project, if anything, reinforced its palpability. This same type of relatively coherent experience of history and legitimation of agency on a global scale does not exist today. If the 1940s was a sort of concentrated "big bang" of international order, then U.S. policymakers are now experiencing the uncertainties of far more diffuse and differentiated constellations of actors, interests, identities, and problems. It is not simply that there no longer is a Soviet threat to concentrate interests and identities. Years before that threat disappeared, the order as it had been built in the 1940s was growing increasingly diffuse. An acute example of this is the U.S. departure in the early 1970s from the original Bretton Woods agreements. We can even ask if a liberal order, as it has been discussed in this book, still exists. This is a question that has no easy answer. But the very fact that I can feel justified in asking it is one sign of just how ambiguous things are. Despite the growing salience of the single term, globalization, to characterize much of our current "post-Cold War moment," the term refers to seemingly contrary processes, including integration and fragmentation; diffusion and concentration; and localization and transnationalization.
I would not want to imply that our current post-Cold War moment is so diffuse and thick with a diversity of processes, agents, their interests, and problems (e.g., environmental degradation and collapsing states) that it is less open compared to the start of the post-World War II moment, when international life was likely experienced by policymakers as more susceptible to order-making. (If anything, there certainly were fewer states around for policymakers to worry about.) The current relative thickness and diffuseness may indicate that it makes a lot less sense to talk now about any overarching international order. Instead, the possibility that a variety of orders are operating in different domains, regions, or even locales should be recognized. Against this prospect, the declaring of a "New World Order" indeed seems foolish. We would need a decidedly decentralized understanding of order, which would reject the notion that the international realm could be ordered on truly large-scale, momentous-and, therefore, modern-lines. It would mean that U.S. policymakers would have to recognize that international life is not "project-ready" the way some might nostalgically believe it was in the 1940s. The dust of change is unlikely to settle down into a discernible and manageable pattern. Those patterns have historically depended on limits to the number and type of actors as well as the range of issues drawn into order-making, as was the case in the 1940s. I do not believe these limits can be set or sustained at the end of the twentieth century. While the task of reorganizing or even inventing forms of agency and authority in our current historical moment still lies before us, we should not expect the arrival of a new Kennan to put it all into a single, coherent perspective or doctrine such as containment. Yet the habit of waiting for a coherent story to be told is not easily shaken. Such a habit is yet one more hangover from the Cold War. Getting past it is at least one way that a moratorium on overcoming the dilemmas of grand order-making might commence.
But what would a foreign policy that began with these assumptions about complexity and a plurality of orders look like, how would it be executed, and what reasons would one have for thinking it could be politically feasible? It may make sense to take seriously the notion that U.S. policymakers would be best off not pursuing a single set of foreign policy principles or doctrines. Instead, they could allow themselves to build foreign policies around the specific conditions and dynamics of each situation, problem, or even opportunity that they, U.S. civil society, or even the international community identifies as relevant to U.S. interests and security. (Of course, a crucial question will be how these are identified.) This type of specificity would allow for the application of a plurality of foreign policy mechanisms-including diplomacy, military coercion, aid, and institution-building-in the context of a plurality of foreign policy approaches-including isolationist, regionalist, multilateralist, and internationalist. After a century of foreign policy-making, the U.S. state has built up a considerable repertoire of approaches and mechanisms-both good and bad-that can be exploited selectively in an environment that is as diverse as it is unstable. We might call this a foreign policy of the local.
In the 1940s Kennan drew a distinction between two trends in U.S. foreign policy. 10 One was the universalizing attempt to establish an international order shaped by law and norms of peaceful coexistence within an international society of states. The other trend was based on the recognition that what counts is the play of national interests and power dynamics within a given situation and geographical locale. This is nothing but the classic distinction between idealism (or liberalism) and realism. It fails to note two things I have stressed in this book: the important role of norms in local situations and the play of power dynamics in the making of international order. Kennan's universal-particular distinction also overlooked how a doctrine for exercising power, such as containment, could itself take on universal dimensions that could open the way for all sorts of particular or local power solutions with disastrous consequences, which Kennan himself later bemoaned. What happened, one should recall, was that specific situations were not really considered in their specificity, but rather in regard to how local sources of power and authority could serve the general doctrine of containment. The flexibility associated with containment was not applied to the question of whether or not containment should guide policy, but only to the question of which agent or source of strength would best carry it out (authoritarian or not). A foreign policy of the local, in contrast, would insist that principles could be local as well as global, depending not simply on the power dynamics of a situation, but also on how U.S. policymakers and the public see themselves in relation to a region, locale, specific issue, or global threat.
For some commentators and policymakers this would be tantamount to legitimizing drift, indecision, and inaction. For other commentators and policymakers a foreign policy of the local would be seen as potentially opening the way to all sorts of unwarranted and costly interventions and engagements. But a sense of drift emerges only as a function of the desire for a coherent global policy. Once this is recognized as no longer appropriate, much of the sting of the charge of drift fades. Moreover, concerns with both inaction and overreaction miss the point that each potential engagement would have to be judged as to its compellingness and feasibility in the context of resources and potential effectiveness. We would have to give up our quest for an overarching principle or doctrine that automatically rules on a situation as deserving engagement or not.
I realize that what has traditionally made a problem, issue, or region a compelling site for U.S. involvement has been a general definition of U.S. interests and identity. But what a foreign policy of the local would depend on is asking questions about U.S. interests and identity with regard to each situation, problem, or opportunity. In this sense, we would build a specific (or local) U.S. identity around each specific situation and order. (For example, the U.S. might have an identity of open borders regarding immigration, but one of closed borders regarding drug smuggling.) We would stop trying to define a single, overarching identity that would undergird the U.S. perception of the world and define the place of a U.S. state and society within it. Both that state and society and that world are far too complex and changeable for any one definition to cover. Such complexity defies the simple question of whether the U.S. should be an isolationist or internationalist power. In the end, however, there is no denying that such an approach is riskier regarding both the possibility of too much involvement and too little. There are grounds for self-fear. But rather than dwell on the risks we might summon the courage to take them in the way that Shklar argues liberalism calls for.
A foreign policy of the local would require that the U.S. state give up any dreams of a global liberal order of the sort described in this book. 11 But it need not abandon its liberalism. If the U.S. is serious about its liberalism, then it could redirect it toward the individuals, families, collectives, and neighborhoods struggling to make themselves freer and more secure. Human rights-not just civic and political, but also social, economic, and cultural ones-would be central. The postwar liberal order was directed mostly at states and the strength-and, where feasible, the freedom and security-they could provide. A new challenge for those committed to international liberalism would be to place the problem of the distribution of opportunities and resources at the local level in a far more central position. Along these lines the World Bank has already adopted a policy of micro-financing, emphasizing loans to small enterprises including family ones. At the same time, a foreign policy of the local would look to build up the strength of non-state actors (from neighborhood and market associations to NGOs and IGOs), helping along a decentralization of power in the international system. But such decentralization need not be viewed in zero-sum terms relative to states. Non-state and state actors could form fruitful partnerships in dealing with problems and opportunities for developing more equitable and secure lives throughout the world. Many NGOs, for instance, emerge out of U.S. civil society, so that a foreign policy of the local would, by avoiding predetermined policy, open space for them to shape U.S. foreign policy on the basis of their extensive knowledge and practical engagement in specific situations.
To a great extent the foreign policy of the local is already in operation in the specific U.S. policies generated toward countries and regions and in the growing importance of NGOs, for instance, in humanitarian aid. Moreover, at least the value of avoiding grand order-making is already recognized by the U.S. administration. In a recent speech to Freedom House, President Clinton declared:
[T]here seems to be no mainframe explanation for the PC [personal computer] world in which we're living. We have to drop the abstractions and dogma, and pursue, based on trial and error and persistent experimentation, a policy that advances our values of freedom and democracy, peace and security. 12
Accomplishing this will not be easy in that grand principles have been rhetorically useful justifications for action and inaction on the part of policymakers. But in a political environment no longer very trusting of the grand schemes and abstractions of states, there may be more than a little political sense in emphasizing a foreign policy approach that highlights decentralization, efficacy, experimentation, local entrepreneurial effort, and caution regarding commitments. A foreign policy of the local does require greater and more in-depth thought and analysis, if not more sensitivity to local situations. It will require that we go back each time to rethink our identity and relationship to a situation, locale, or region. But if we take what former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara says seriously about the lessons of Vietnam, then this analysis of and sensitivity to the local could be crucial in avoiding new debacles. 13
With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was left with what I have called an external state-organs deployed to administer and order relations in the international realm-built up in the pursuit of international order and the waging of Cold War. On one level, recent debate over U.S. foreign policy and international involvement has been about the question of what the nature of that external state should be or even whether the U.S. should still have one. Before organs such as the U.S. Agency for International Development are closed down the broader question of what type of foreign policy approach the U.S., as a liberal state and society, wants to take should be considered. If the pursuit of a grand, globalizing order no longer makes sense, the U.S. needs to ask on what terms as a state and society it wants to exist in the world; for surely, whatever it does, the U.S. has no choice but to be there.
Notes
Note 1: The European Union might be taken as an exception to this outcome. However, this would overlook a chief observation of chapter 4: the limited scope of institutions at the international level allowed Western European states to pursue this exception at the regional level. Back.
Note 2: Realists could look to other theoretical approaches to address this anomaly, such as liberal interdependence theory. But that move would only reinforce the limits of the realist approach itself as it has been historically articulated. Those limits are discussed in Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism. To what extent a constructivist or historicist realism can emerge-with which the analysis of this book would be a part-remains to be seen. See Buzan, Jones, and Little, The Logic of Anarchy. Back.
Note 3: There seems to be a revival of this activity since the end of the Cold War. Some recent discussions of this issue include Leffler, "Inside Enemy Archives;" Macdonald, "Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War;" and Miner, "Revelations, Secrets, Gossip and Lies." Back.
Note 4: Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured. Back.
Note 5: That recourse regarding the Gulf War is explored in Tucker and Hendrickson, Imperial Temptation. Back.
Note 6: Those, such as Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, who see only weakness in liberalism along these lines fail to note the legitimizing strength liberalization can create. It is the two sides that create the paradox. Back.
Note 7: The term embedded militarization, as defined in the introduction to this book, is meant to convey that militarization developed within the context of the liberal order-building process. Back.
Note 8: The relationship between dilemmas, or aporias, and modern agency is explored in Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, esp. pp. 8, 11. Back.
Note 9: Shklar, Ordinary Vices, pp. 4-5. Back.
Note 10: See George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, pp. 83-89; and PPS-23, reprinted in Etzold and Gaddis, eds., Containment, pp. 97-100. Back.
Note 11: The contemporary problem with continuing with business as usual along these lines is discussed in Hoffmann, "Crisis of Liberal Internationalism." Back.
Note 12: Remarks by the President, Freedom House Speech, October 6, 1995, Washington, D.C. Back.
Note 13: McNamara, In Retrospect. Back.
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