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1 Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 1*
I
What difference do liberal principles and institutions make to the conduct of the foreign affairs of liberal states? A thicket of conflicting judgments suggests that the legacies of liberalism have not been clearly appreciated. For many citizens of liberal states, liberal principles and institutions have so fully absorbed domestic politics that their influence on foreign affairs tends to be either overlooked altogether or, when perceived, exaggerated. Liberalism becomes either unself-consciously patriotic or inherently “peaceloving.” For many scholars and diplomats, the relations among independent states appear to differ so significantly from domestic politics that influences of liberal principles and domestic liberal institutions are denied or denigrated. They judge that international relations are governed by perceptions of national security and the balance of power; liberal principles and institutions, when they do intrude, confuse and disrupt the pursuit of balance-of-power politics.
Although liberalism is misinterpreted from both these points of view, a crucial aspect of the liberal legacy is captured by each. Liberalism is a distinct ideology and set of institutions that has shaped the perceptions of and capacities for foreign relations of political societies that range from social welfare or social democratic to laissez faire. It defines much of the content of the liberal patriot’s nationalism. Liberalism does appear to disrupt the pursuit of balance-of-power politics. Thus its foreign relations cannot be adequately explained (or prescibed) by a sole reliance on the balance of power. But liberalism is not inherently “peace-loving”; nor is it consistently restrained or peaceful in intent. Furthermore, liberal practice may reduce the probability that states will successfully exercise the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions that a world peace may well require in the nuclear age. Yet the peaceful intent and restraint that liberalism does manifest in limited aspects of its foreign affairs announces the possibility of a world peace this side of the grave or of world conquest. It has strengthened the prospects for a world peace established by the steady expansion of a separate peace among liberal societies.
Putting together these apparently contradictory (but, in fact, compatible) pieces of the liberal legacy begins with a discussion of the range of liberal principle and practice. This article highlights the differences between liberal practice toward other liberal societies and liberal practice toward nonliberal societies. It argues that liberalism has achieved extraordinary success in the first and has contributed to exceptional confusion in the second. Appreciating these liberal legacies calls for another look at one of the greatest of liberal philosophers, Immanuel Kant, for he is a source of insight, policy, and hope.
II
Liberalism has been identified with an essential principle – the importance of the freedom of the individual. Above all, this is a belief in the importance of moral freedom, of the right to be treated and a duty to treat others as ethical subjects, and not as objects or means only. This principle has generated rights and institutions.
A commitment to a threefold set of rights forms the foundation of liberalism. Liberalism calls for freedom from arbitrary authority, often called “negative freedom,” which includes freedom of conscience, a free press and free speech, equality under the law, and the right to hold, and therefore to exchange, property without fear of arbitrary seizure. Liberalism also calls for those rights necessary to protect and promote the capacity and opportunity for freedom, the “positive freedoms.” Such social and economic rights as equality of opportunity in education and rights to health care and employment, necessary for effective self-expression and participation, are thus among liberal rights. A third liberal right, democratic participation or representation, is necessary to guarantee the other two. To ensure that morally autonomous individuals remain free in those areas of social action where public authority is needed, public legislation has to express the will of the citizens making laws for their own community.
These three sets of rights, taken together, seem to meet the challenge that Kant identified:
To organize a group of rational beings who demand general laws for their survival, but of whom each inclines toward exempting himself, and to establish their constitution in such a way that, in spite of the fact their private attitudes are opposed, these private attitudes mutually impede each other in such a manner that [their] public behavior is the same as if they did not have such evil attitudes.
But the dilemma within liberalism is how to reconcile the three sets of liberal rights. The right to private property, for example, can conflict with equality of opportunity and both rights can be violated by democratic legislation. During the 180 years since Kant wrote, the liberal tradition has evolved two high roads to individual freedom and social order; one is laissez-faire or “conservative” liberalism and the other is social welfare, or social democratic, or “liberal” liberalism. Both reconcile these conflicting rights (though in differing ways) by successfully organizing free individuals into a political order.
The political order of laissez-faire and social welfare liberals is marked by a shared commitment to four essential institutions. First, citizens possess juridical equality and other fundamental civic rights such as freedom of religion and the press. Second, the effective sovereigns of the state are representative legislatures deriving their authority from the consent of the electorate and exercising their authority free from all restraint apart from the requirement that basic civic rights be preserved. Most pertinently for the impact of liberalism on foreign affairs, the state is subject to neither the external authority of other states nor to the internal authority of special prerogatives held, for example, by monarchs or military castes over foreign policy. Third, the economy rests on a recognition of the rights of private property, including the ownership of means of production. Property is justified by individual acquisition (for example, by labor) or by social agreement or social utility. This excludes state socialism or state capitalism, but it need not exclude market socialism or various forms of the mixed economy. Fourth, economic decisions are predominantly shaped by the forces of supply and demand, domestically and internationally, and are free from strict control by bureaucracies.
In order to protect the opportunity of the citizen to exercise freedom, laissez-faire liberalism has leaned toward a highly constrained role for the state and a much wider role for private property and the market. In order to promote the opportunity of the citizen to exercise freedom, welfare liberalism has expanded the role of the state and constricted the role of the market. Both, nevertheless, accept these four institutional requirements and contrast markedly with the colonies, monarchical regimes, military dictatorships, and communist party dictatorships with which they have shared the political governance of the modern world.
The domestic successes of liberalism have never been more apparent. Never have so many people been included in, and accepted the domestic hegemony of, the liberal order; never have so many of the world’s leading states been liberal,
Table 1.1 Liberal regimes and the pacific union (by date “liberal”)
Period | Liberal regimes and the pacific union (by date “liberal”)a | Total number |
18th century | Swiss Cantonsb | 3 |
| | French Republic 1790–1795 | |
| | United Statesb 1776– | |
1800–1850 | Swiss Confederation, United States | 8 |
| | France 1830–1849 | |
| | Belgium 1830– | |
| | Great Britain 1832– | |
| | Netherlands 1848– | |
| | Piedmont 1848– | |
| | Denmark 1849– | |
1850–1900 | Switzerland, United States, Belgium, Great Britain, Netherlands | 13 |
| | Piedmont –1861, Italy 1861– | |
| | Denmark –1866 | |
| | Sweden 1864– | |
| | Greece 1864– | |
| | Canada 1867– | |
| | France 1871– | |
| | Argentina 1880– | |
| | Chile 1891– | |
1900–1945 | Switzerland, the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, Canada | 29 |
| | Greece –1911, 1928–1936 | |
| | Italy –1922 | |
| | Belgium –1940 | |
| | Netherlands –1940 | |
| | Argentina –1943 | |
| | France –1940 | |
| | Chile –1924, 1932 | |
| | Australia 1901– | |
| | Norway 1905–1940 | |
| | New Zealand 1907– | |
| | Colombia 1910–1949 | |
| | Denmark 1914–1940 | |
| | Poland 1917–1935 | |
| | Latvia 1922–1934 | |
| | Germany 1918–1932 | |
| | Austria 1918–1934 | |
| | Estonia 1919–1934 | |
| | Finland 1919– | |
| | Uruguay 1919– | |
| | Costa Rica 1919– | |
| | Czechoslovakia 1920–1939 | |
| | Ireland 1920– | |
| | Mexico 1928– | |
| | Lebanon 1944– | |
1945c− | Switzerland, the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Ireland, Mexico | 49 |
| | Uruguay –1973 | |
| | Chile –1973 | |
| | Lebanon –1975 | |
| | Costa Rica –1948, 1953– | |
| | Iceland 1944– | |
| | France 1945– | |
| | Denmark 1945– | |
| | Norway 1945– | |
| | Austria 1945– | |
| | Brazil 1945–1954, 1955–1964 | |
| | Belgium 1946– | |
| | Luxemburg 1946– | |
| | Netherlands 1946– | |
| | Italy 1946– | |
| | Philippines 1946–1972 | |
| | India 1947–1975, 1977– | |
| | Sri Lanka 1948–1961, 1963–1977, 1978– | |
| | Ecuador 1948–1963, 1979– | |
| | Israel 1949– |
| | West Germany 1949– |
| | Peru 1950–1962, 1963–1968, 1980– |
| | El Salvador 1950–1961 | |
| | Turkey 1950–1960, 1966–1971 | |
| | Japan 1951– | |
| | Bolivia 1956–1969 | |
| | Colombia 1958– | |
| | Venezuela 1959– | |
| | Nigeria 1961–1964, 1979– | |
| | Jamaica 1962– | |
| | Trinidad 1962– | |
| | Senegal 1963– | |
| | Malaysia 1963– | |
| | South Korea 1963–1972 | |
| | Botswana 1966– | |
| | Singapore 1965– | |
| | Greece 1975– | |
| | Portugal 1976– | |
| | Spain 1978– | |
| | Dominican Republic 1978– | |
Sources: Arthur Banks and W. Overstreet, eds., The ...
