Liberal Peace: Selected Essays

251 Pages·2011·1.861 MB·English

by  Michael W. Doyle

Liberal Peace
Comprising essays by Michael W. Doyle, Liberal Peace examines the special
signifi cance of liberalism for international relations. These essays shed light on
one of the leading debates in the fi eld: whether democracies should and do
maintain peace with each other.
T he volume begins by outlining the two legacies of liberalism in international
relations – how and why liberal states have maintained peace among themselves
while at the same time being prone to making war against non-liberal states. The
essays that follow both engage with international relations theory and explore the
policy implications of liberal internationalism. Engaging theory, the author high-
lights differences among liberal imperialism, liberal pacifi sm and Kant’s liberal
internationalism. He also orients liberal theory within the panoply of international
relations theory.
Exploring policy implications, the author focuses on the strategic value of the
inter-liberal democratic community and how it can be protected, preserved and
enlarged, and whether liberals can go beyond a separate peace to a more inte-
grated global democracy. Finally, the volume considers when force should and
should not be used to promote national security and human security across borders,
and argues against President George W. Bush’s policy of “transformative” inter-
ventions. The concluding essay engages with scholarly critics of the liberal
democratic peace.
This book will be of great interest to students of international relations, foreign
policy, political philosophy and security studies.
Michael W. Doyle is the Harold Brown Professor of International Affairs, Law,
and Political Science at Columbia University. He is author of many books,
including: E mpires (1986); Ways of War and Peace (1997); a nd Striking First:
Preemption and Prevention in International Confl ict (2008). He is a former
special adviser and assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and currently
chair of the Advisory Board of the UN Democracy Fund.
Liberal Peace
Selected essays
Michael W. Doyle
First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Michael W. Doyle
The right of Michael W. Doyle to be identifi ed as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Doyle, Michael W., 1948-
Liberal peace: selected essays/Michael W. Doyle.
p. cm.
1. International relations—Philosophy. 2. Liberalism.
3. Internationalism. 4. Peace (Philosophy) 5. National
security—Philosophy. 6. Security, International—Philosophy.
7. Kant Immanuel, 1724-1804—Political and social views. I. Title.
JZ1305.D69 2011
327.1'72—dc22 2011008330
ISBN: 978–0–415–78174–9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–415–78175–6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–80493–3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Contents
List of tables vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 1 13
2 Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 2 37
3 Liberalism and world politics 61
4 Politics and grand strategy 81
5 The voice of the people: political theorists on the international
implications of democracy 103
6 One world, many peoples: international justice in
John Rawls’s T he Law of Peoples 125
7 An international liberal community 145
8 A more perfect union?: the Liberal Peace and the
challenge of globalization 165
9 A few words on Mill, Walzer, and nonintervention 180
10 After the freedom agenda 199
Conclusions and reconsiderations 206
Select bibliography 232
Index 242
Tables
1.1 Liberal regimes and the pacifi c union (by date “liberal”) 15
1.2 International wars listed chronologically 19
2.1 The pacifi c union 54
3.1 Liberal regimes and the pacifi c union, 1700–1982 75
4.1 Socialism in 1914 92
4.2 The socialist decision matrix 93
5.1 Foreign relations of democratic states 115
6.1 Candidates for decent hierarchical societies 136
7.1 The liberal community (by date “liberal”) 147
9.1 Cases for intervention: Mill and Walzer 186
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for granting
permission to reproduce material in this work:
Chapter 1, “Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 1” and Chapter 2
“Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 2” fi rst appeared in P hilosophy
and Public Affairs (vol. 12, no. 3, Summer 1983 and vol. 12, no. 4, Fall 1983,
respectively) and are reproduced here by permission of Wiley-Blackwell.
C hapter 3, “Liberalism and world politics” fi rst appeared in A merican Political
Science Review (vol. 80, no. 4, 1986) and is reproduced here by permission of
Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 4, “Politics and grand strategy” fi rst appeared in Richard Rosecrance
and Arthur A. Stein (eds), T he Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Cornell, 1993)
and is reproduced here by permission of Cornell University Press.
C hapter 5, “The voice of the people: political theorists on the international implica-
tions of democracy” fi rst appeared in Geir Lundestad (ed.), T he Fall of Great Powers
(Oxford, 1994) and is reproduced here by permission of Oxford University Press.
C hapter 6, “One world, many peoples: international justice in John Rawls’s The
Law of Peoples” fi rst appeared in Perspectives on Politics (vol. 4, no. 1, Cambridge,
2006) and is reproduced here by permission of Cambridge University Press.
C hapter 7, “An international liberal community” fi rst appeared in Graham
Allison and Gregory F. Treverton (eds), R ethinking America’s Security (vol. 1,
Norton, 2009) and is reproduced here by permission of W. W. Norton, New York.
Chapter 8, “A more perfect union?: the Liberal Peace and the challenge of
globalization” fi rst appeared in R eview of International Studies (vol. 26, 2000)
and is reproduced here by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 9, “A few words on Mill, Walzer, and nonintervention” fi rst appeared
Ethics and International Affairs (vol. 83, no. 4, 2009) and is reproduced here by
permission of John Wiley & Sons.
Chapter 10, “After the freedom agenda” fi rst appeared in D issent (vol. 56, no. 3,
2009) and is reproduced here by permission of University of Pennsylvania Press.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to
reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any
copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any
errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
Introduction
Liberal peace is defi nitely part of the rhetoric of foreign policy. Indeed, we have
often been told that promoting freedom produces peace. At the US Republican
Convention in 2004, President George W. Bush told “young men and women” in
the Middle East and “. . . reformers and political prisoners and exiles” everywhere
“. . . that their dream of freedom cannot be denied forever. . . . As freedom
advances, heart by heart, and nation by nation, America will be more secure and
the world more peaceful.” He was not the fi rst Republican to make these grandilo-
quent claims. In a speech before the British parliament in June of 1982, President
Reagan proclaimed that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty
exercise “restraint” and “peaceful intentions” in their foreign policy. He then
(perhaps ironically) announced a “crusade for freedom” and a “campaign for
democratic development.” And not just Republicans. President Clinton made
“Democratic Enlargement” the doctrinal centerpiece of his administration’s foreign
policy in the 1990s. And, of course, these ideas were the hallmark of Woodrow
Wilson’s foreign policy and of the foreign policies of many other liberals.
The debate between liberals and their critics, skeptical of the effects of liberal
principles and institutions (often called Realists), has been played out again and
again. In Europe it shaped the exchanges between British prime ministers
Gladstone and Disraeli in the nineteenth century. In the US, it goes back to the
fi rst US presidential administration. During the Washington Administration,
Alexander Hamilton at the Treasury and James Madison, a leader of the Congress
and adviser to Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, disagreed in pretty much
the same ways as Realists and liberals do today. 1 Hamilton won the fi rst debate
mostly because there were no credible liberal republics around. The US embodied
at best the hope of becoming one (half slave, it was not the reality). The world is
different today.
L iberalism is not just part of the rhetoric of foreign relations; it also has a real
effect on them. Some political scientists, including many of the Realist critics
noted above, argue that states are all pretty much the same. They pursue interests,
such as security, oil and military bases, and seek hegemony and settle for the
balance of power against power. Democratic and Liberal ideologies are banners
waved in front of these interests, not their true sources. But, in my view, these
scholars are too skeptical.
2 Introduction
L iberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful – among themselves. But
they are also prone to make war – against nonliberal states. Modern liberalism
carries with it two legacies, peace and war. They affect liberal states, not separately,
but simultaneously.
The fi rst of these legacies is the pacifi cation of foreign relations among fellow
liberal states. During the nineteenth century, the United States and Great Britain
engaged in nearly continual strife. But after the Reform Act 1832 defi ned actual
representation as the formal source of the sovereignty of the British parliament,
Britain and the United States negotiated their disputes despite, for example,
British grievances against the Northern Civil War blockade of the South, with
which Britain had close economic ties. Despite severe Anglo-French colonial
rivalry, liberal France and liberal Britain formed an entente against illiberal
Germany before World War I. And despite generations of Anglo-American
tension, despite the rise of the US to world power based on its population and
industrial might, Britain leaned toward the US, rather than balanced against it, and
the US reciprocated; thus liberal Britain, France and the US fought World War I
together against illiberal Germany.
Beginning in the eighteenth century and slowly growing since then, a zone of
peace, which the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant called
the “pacifi c federation” or “pacifi c union,” began to be established among liberal
societies. More than 70 liberal states currently make up the union. Today, most
liberal states are in Europe and North America, but they can be found on every
continent.
Of course, the outbreak of war, in any given year, between any two given states, is
a low probability event. But the occurrence of a war between any two adjacent states,
considered over a long period of time, would be more probable. The apparent absence
of war between liberal states, whether adjacent or not, for almost two hundred years
seems therefore to have signifi cance. Western Europe was once the most war prone
region; with the spread of liberal republics it has become a zone of peace.
The toughest empirical critics of the proposition fi nd that the democratic peace is
statistically signifi cant over the past couple of centuries. The disagreement is over
how to explain it. Signifi cantly, similar claims cannot be made for feudal, monar-
chical, communist, authoritarian or totalitarian forms of rule; nor for pluralistic, or
merely similar societies. The balance of power shifts, great powers rise and fall, and
yet this liberal peace holds.
The liberal or democratic peace was not just an artifact of Cold War bipolarity.
Bipolarity correlated with peace in the liberal democratic West, not in the Warsaw
Pact where the USSR invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and not in the
nonliberal Third World where both the US and the USSR intervened repeatedly to
prop up Cold War allies or undermine the allies of rivals. The World War II alli-
ance with the USSR against Nazi Germany collapsed as soon as Nazi Germany
did. The liberal alliance in NATO survived the Cold War despite the collapse of
the Soviet Union.
W hen states are forced to decide on which side of an impending world war they
will fi ght, liberal states sometimes align with authoritarian, or even totalitarian,
Introduction 3
states to balance even more threatening authoritarian states. Thus, in World War I
the liberal allies joined with Czarist Russia and in World War II with Stalinist
Russia. Nonetheless, the liberals tend to wind up all on the same side, despite the
complexity of the paths that take them there.
H ere, the predictions of liberal pacifi sts are borne out: liberal states do exercise
peaceful restraint and a separate peace exists among them. This separate peace
provides a political foundation for the United States’ crucial alliances with the
liberal powers (NATO, the alliances with Japan, Australia and New Zealand). This
foundation appears to be impervious to the economic competition and personal
quarrels that regularly take place with liberal allies. It also offers the promise
of a continuing peace among liberal states. And, as the number of liberal states
increases, it announces the possibility of global peace this side of the grave or
world conquest.
T hese characteristics do not prove that the peace among liberals is perfect or
inevitable, nor that liberalism is the sole valid explanation for the peace. But they
do suggest that we consider the possibility that liberals have indeed established a
separate peace – but only among themselves.
F or liberalism also carries with it a second legacy – international “imprudence.”
Peaceful restraint only seems to work in the liberals’ relations with other liberals.
Liberal states have fought numerous wars with nonliberal states.
Many of these wars have been defensive, and thus prudent by necessity. Liberal
states have been attacked and threatened by nonliberal states that do not exercise
any special restraint in their dealings with liberal states. Authoritarian rulers both
stimulate and respond to an international political environment in which confl icts
of prestige, of interest, and of pure fear of what other states might do, all lead
toward war. War and conquest have thus characterized the careers of many
authoritarian rulers and ruling parties – from Louis XIV and Napoleon to
Mussolini’s fascists, Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s communists.
B ut we cannot simply blame warfare on the authoritarians or totalitarians, as
many of our more enthusiastic politicians would have us do. Most wars arise out
of calculations and miscalculations of interest, misunderstandings and mutual
suspicions, such as those that characterized the origins of World War I. However,
aggression by the liberal state has also characterized a large number of wars. Both
France and Britain fought expansionist colonial wars throughout the nineteenth
century. The United States fought a similar war with Mexico between 1846 and
1848, waged a war of annihilation against the American Indians, and intervened
militarily against sovereign states many times before and after World War II. Liberal
states invade weak nonliberal states and display striking distrust in dealings with
powerful nonliberal states. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is only the latest instance
of this.
The essays in this book, collected since I fi rst published “Liberal legacies” in
two parts in 1983, explore both these legacies. But before I outline the contents of
this volume and explain why I chose them, let me remind readers what I mean by
liberal states and how liberalism and its major modern alternative, realism, do and
do not differ from each other.