CIAO DATE: 04/2013
Volume: 50, Issue: 1
January 2013
The politics of liberal internationalism
Tim Dunne, Matt McDonald
How is it that internationalism has become the dominant form of statecraft pursued by liberal states and by international organisations, and yet it has received relatively scant attention in International Relations (IR) both historically and conceptually? It is time that the field addressed the paucity of writings on an institutionalised idea that has shaped order-building for more than two centuries. The article opens with a consideration of internationalism and its status in political theory and IR, arguing that a variety of different configurations have taken hold in different historical moments. We then consider the coexistence of internationalism and imperialism as an illustration of how the ambiguities and tensions in liberal statecraft can be manifested. The article closes with a consideration of the international normative order-building that has taken place after 1945 and the critical issue of the resilience of liberal internationalism given the ‘crisis' identified with it. For all its dangers and dilemmas, we make the case for engaging the politics of liberal internationalism as a site in which normative and practical concerns of global politics meet, and in which the calls to protect the interests of national communities are mediated by the imperative of ‘purposes beyond ourselves'.
The 'Good State' debate in international relations
Peter Lawler
The idea of the State as embodying moral virtue has a long, mostly inwardly focussed history. In international relations thought, sporadic Liberal explorations of the state as a ‘good international citizen' have been vulnerable to Realist scepticism or dismissal. The Cold War's end saw a revival of Liberal enthusiasm for the Good State, but the translation of this into the foreign policies of key Western states generated new lines of critique focussing on the underlying universalism. Drawing upon aspects of much less-discussed Scandinavian internationalist discourse, the possibility of a more modest, open and thus sustainable understanding of the Good State is explored.
Liberal internationalism, the practice of special responsibilities and evolving politics of the security council
Christian Reus-Smit, Ian Clark
Liberal internationalism represents a package of evolving and contending commitments, and this article traces the development within it of one practice with a longer history, namely the allocation of special responsibilities. Responsibilities are those things for which actors are held accountable and, internationally, these have negotiated between sovereign equality and material inequality, in search of a means of more effectively dealing with global problems. The definition of these responsibilities generates an intense politics and these are reviewed through the remit of the Security Council. The article considers the basis for the allocation of traditional special responsibilities for security to the Council and then tracks their extension in recent years to the issue of humanitarian protection. The vehicle for this has been the transformation of a practice about the use of the veto, towards one that calls for its non-use in humanitarian cases. This analysis of special responsibilities unsettles the separation between order and justice, and points to the challenges currently facing liberal internationalism.
The good state, from a cosmic point of view
Anthony Burke
This article considers the question of the good state - and its normative model of foreign policy, internationalism - from a cosmopolitan perspective. This cosmopolitan worldview pushes beyond anthropocentrism to anchor its account in the vulnerability of humanity both to the political dangers it poses to itself and to the cosmic arrangement of chance that enables complex life on earth. The essay first critiques both academic and policy defences of internationalism as a ‘middle-ground' between realism and cosmopolitanism by putting its statist ontology into question - that is, its fundamental account of human existence as bounded and determined by the nation-state. The perseverance of this underlying statist ontology creates tensions within academic defences of good international citizenship, which profess strongly cosmopolitan norms but whose moral philosophy, in accepting some practices of Realpolitik, is ethically insufficient. It then asserts an alternative ontology of (interdependent) human existence across borders and ecosystems, one that incorporates an ethically transformed state as a legal principle and an important means of cosmopolitan world order.
The wars on terror, duelling internationalisms and the clash of purposes in a post-unipolar world
Andrew Phillips
This article contrasts the parallel ‘wars on terror' that liberal and authoritarian states have prosecuted since 9/11 to determine their broader significance for the pursuit of ‘purposes beyond ourselves' in an increasingly multi-polar world. While acknowledging that states rallied to defend their monopoly on legitimate violence after 9/11, I maintain that the ensuing ‘wars on terror' have simultaneously exacerbated longstanding disagreements between liberal and authoritarian states over the fundamental principles of international society. Under American leadership, liberal states have sought to eradicate jihadism through the transplantation of liberal values and institutions to Muslim-majority societies, countenancing sweeping qualifications of weak states' sovereignty to advance this goal. Conversely, authoritarian states led by Russia and China have mounted a vigorous counter-offensive against both jihadism and liberal internationalist revisionism, harnessing counter-terrorism concerns to reassert illiberal internationalist conceptions of state sovereignty in response. Reflecting international division more than solidarity, the ‘wars on terror' have illuminated a deeper triangular struggle between revisionist liberal internationalism, jihadist anti-internationalism and illiberal authoritarian internationalism that will significantly complicate Western efforts to promote liberal values in coming decades.
Foreign policy internationalism and political possibility
Matt McDonald
While many of the contributions to this special issue focus on the content of internationalism and the dilemmas of ethical (state) action in world politics, this article focuses on the possibilities for internationalism to be meaningfully incorporated into state foreign policy. Here, my concern is with the extent to which a commitment to internationalism might be conceived as legitimate at the domestic level. In international relations, constructivists have come closest to directly addressing the domestic constraints and possibilities associated with foreign policy agenda. Theorists working in this tradition, however, have largely worked with binary logics (structure/agency, material/ideational, continuity/change) that emphasise one set of factors over another. Building on insights from the recent ‘practice turn' in international relations, this article employs the work of Pierre Bourdieu in an attempt to transcend these binaries and develop a more nuanced and sophisticated sociological account of political possibility. I suggest the utility of his conceptions of field, habitus, capital and symbolic power in coming to terms with both possibilities for and limits to internationalism as a foreign policy orientation. I illustrate the utility of this framework with the example of Australia's retreat from internationalism under the Rudd Government from 2007 to 2010.
'With the best will in the world …'?: Humanitarianism, non-state actors and the pursuit of 'purposes beyond ourselves'
Jacinta O'Hagan
Debates about liberal internationalism in general and ‘purposes beyond ourselves' in particular have focused largely on the role of states. Such a focus risks limiting our potential to achieve solidarist goals by tying us to the ontological and ethical concerns of the state. This article argues that a more expansive conception of agency, which includes non-state actors (NSAs), reflects more accurately the complexity of agency and interests within liberal internationalism. Using the example of humanitarianism, it argues that humanitarian NSAs demonstrate that important additional avenues exist for the pursuit of solidarism within the liberal international order. At the same time, these actors do not totally evade the dilemmas of solidarism faced by states, nor the tensions that permeate liberal internationalism and constrain the pursuit of purposes beyond ourselves. Humanitarian NSAs are embedded in complex relationships with states and are implicated in structures of power and interest within the liberal international order. These present them with their own dilemmas of solidarism and, despite their best intentions, can compromise their pursuit of ‘purposes beyond ourselves'.
From the good international citizen to the cosmopolitan political community: A constitutional path
Richard Shapcott
While advocates of liberal internationalism have traditionally identified the state as an agent of progressive transformation of the international realm, they have had less to say about the specific domestic mechanisms that might govern the foreign policies of ‘good' states. This article argues that domestic constitutions provide both a legal limit on the actions of governments and other actors, and also the means whereby citizens can pursue legal redress against the state. They therefore play a potentially constraining role that is different from that provided by the embedding of cosmopolitan law in transnational and international legal codes and norms. Transformed in this way, states become powerful agents for achieving cosmopolitan purposes and ultimately transforming world order.