Liberalism and War

Andrew Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136008061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

The author is an established and well-respected academic in the field. He has published several books on this topic and is the Editor of the journal Round Table. The author addresses how liberal societies have attempted not only to defeat but to transform their enemies, a topic which is very relevant to international relations today This book further develops ideas in John Ikenberry's After Victory which received a well-deserved reception in the US and the UK

1	The roots of liberalism and the first great liberal century

Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.

John Milton, 1643¹

I detest a man who knows what he knows.

Oliver Wendell Holmes²

Introduction: beginnings and ending of wars in thought and practice

The beginnings and endings of wars are totally linked, whatever paradigmatic approach you may take to war itself. War aims have no sense unless you have some idea about what you want the post-war situation to look like. Even in non-democratic societies there is usually some justification for war that is proposed before it is embarked upon. Adolf Hitler’s Germany manufactured a ‘border incident’ with Poland in 1939 that ‘insulted’ German pride and sovereignty. Saddam Hussein had the clear aim in 1990 of ‘restoring’ Iraqi sovereignty over its ‘19th Province’. Both were excused on the basis of the moral authority of the state. The possibility of the ‘amoral’ war therefore seems to be ruled out even by its most amoral instigators.

But in democratic societies a far greater moral case for war has to be made. Even in August 1939 Chamberlain had real problems persuading the British that the continuous affronts to freedom by the Nazis could not be tolerated after they took yet another people’s freedom. As the century wore on liberal democracies found it increasingly necessary to take public opinion with them, as the nature and timing of American involvement in two World Wars can be said to show or Tony Blair’s insistence on the ‘moral’ case for attacking Iraq in 2003. Sometimes this is a post-facto moral and public-pleasing formula, like the necessity of Prime Minster David Lloyd George to build a ‘land fit for heroes’ in 1918, or President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a ‘new world order’ in 1945. But increasingly the case has to be made that this will be part of a meliorist project explicitly linked to defending and/or developing liberal democratic practices and ideals. This chapter and the next aim to show how that liberal agenda has developed ad bellum and, by extension post bellum looking at the evolution of liberal thought and practice in the engaging of, or resistance to, war by liberal states.

A preliminary question for us has to be why we need to think about this at this particular moment? This has been explained by Chris Brown as follows: first, there has been much more concern about ‘Real World Events’ since the 1970s – and wars in particular. The proliferation of wars in the 1990s and since is added incentive. Second, the question has been re-posed as at whether wars can ever be justly fought, with Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars as one particular mile-stone in this questioning. Thirdly, there has been a restatement of key philosophical ideas (as in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, of 1971), including ‘the proposition that social arrangements are unjust unless the inequalities they inevitably involve can be rationally defended’ – the principle of ‘distributive justice’. There is now a widespread questioning of such questions as ‘what obligations do rich states/societies/people have towards poor states/societies/people?’³ Fourth, there has been a persistent split in liberal ranks between those who believe in what is usually termed a ‘communitarian’ view of rights, versus a ‘cosmopolitan’ view that everyone has rights and good liberals elsewhere should therefore defend them. This latter view has coloured recent reflection on the duties of liberal states to intervene or not to intervene if there is an inter-state or even a civil war that is causing widespread suffering to civilian populations. So is there now in the words of Michael Ignatieff, a ‘modern conscience’ that dictates intervention in the affairs of other states for humanitarian reasons as a norm, not an exception? If so, why is this?⁴

To this we might add that there has been an increasing conflation of the idea that the ‘international community’, meaning the ‘civilised’ and ‘liberal’ states, have a duty to dispense their justice to those who do not yet possess or understand it. This is a view that has arguably seen its greatest development in the thinking of the ‘English’ school of IR and Hedley Bull’s ‘Grotian’ conception of international community.⁵

But do policy makers think like that? Have they ever done so? The short answer is ‘yes’ and there is, as this chapter will hope to demonstrate, a long and distinguished tradition of political thought (or what we now call ‘normative’ thinking in IR), especially of the liberal variety, that has made an impact on policy makers. Policy makers themselves have had many such thoughts as they too are motivated by instincts other than national interest. To assume otherwise is to assume that policy makers are not moral beings, a curious position to take, or that national interest does not have a moral component. Even those most identified as ‘realists’ would never take such a bold position.

So perhaps we make too much of the great divides of the recent past. Political (or ‘normative’) theory has not just been invented, it has been re-discovered in the context of the post-Cold War period. In the circumstances of a liberal ‘triumph’ after the end of the Cold War practitioners as much as theorists of IR have had to look to their laurels on how far they can claim that the actions of liberal states justify their dominance in the international system. When there was no option for the West other than to resist the attempted Soviet claim to global hegemony, there was no need to talk about ‘ethics’ in foreign policy or to justify the expansion of Western military and other forms of power. That was self-defence. Now there is a clear need to consolidate the victory of the West by claiming a clear moral high ground. Hence in the West and beyond both practitioners and theorists feel a need to demonstrate how they can justify their victory in terms of the international ‘good’ of all.

In a fundamental sense the West has always understood this. Wars have long been seen as the culmination of a protest about how a local issue of sovereignty or the moral basis of how a wider international society is organized. The wars of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s are examples of the former. Even that mainstay of ‘realist’ thought and practice, ‘sovereignty’, is not a neutral term, it holds within it a host of moral imperatives – the ‘right’ or otherwise to nation and state-hood, what Robert Jackson calls the ‘moral standing of states’. The World Wars of 1914–18, 1939–45 and the Soviet Bloc versus the West between 1947 and 1989 are the paradigmatic examples of the latter. Sometimes the two overlap, as in the war in the Former Yugoslavia, which pitted the rump Serbia-Montenegro against Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, where the global community felt a clear moral as well as strategic interest. In the circumstances of war it is clear that normative as much as empirical questions are in play here.

As a good empiricist I can accept the notion of ‘schools of thought’, or even ‘paradigms’ but with the proviso that we must avoid too strict a demarcation. Most, if not all ‘isms’ have been described by philosophers like W. B. Gallie and William Connolly as ‘essentially contested concepts’, especially liberalism. They are messy, open to multiple interpretations and often contradictory. They are also full of ‘blind spots’ about themselves. They are necessary to give the practitioners of any such theory the feeling that they are being consequential and coherent. To a critic they may not be so at all, and many of the ‘mistakes’ and ‘hypocrisies’ that liberals have been accused of are far more ones that can be seen as ‘dilemmas’. Problems can be solved, dilemmas by their very nature cannot.

Moreover, philosophers like Jacques Derrida assure us that no element of thought or action can be divorced from any other, that they are all part of an evolving ‘text’. In Terry Eagleton’s words ‘no system of meaning can ever be unshakably founded’ and ‘every coherent system is forced at certain key points to violate its own logic’.⁶ Constructivist and post-modern IR theorists of war and peace make the same links between what they say is the nexus ‘war – power – modernity’.⁷ The simplified insight of this school of thought is that ideas (like liberalism), political institutions (like the state) and the relationship of means of production and the Zeitgeist (as with modernity) mutually determine how ideas are implemented by soldiers and politicians.⁸

This is, of necessity, a summary survey and it relies on a certain number of basic inspirations, particularly the writings of W. B. Gallie, F. H. Hinsley and Michael Doyle, on whom I have drawn a good deal.⁹ It is also dogged by the problem of names being given to ideas. It could be argued that ‘conservatism’ might be a better way of describing what here passes for ‘realist’ thought. Jennifer Welsh for example points to Edmund Burke as the founder of a particular kind of notion of ‘international legitimacy.’ Conservatives assume the existence of a society of states with rules about how sovereignty can be conferred, legitimized and transferred.¹⁰ These ideas, which Burke developed looking at the American and French revolution, have had profound effects on not just ‘realist’ thought but also on liberal thought, as in the discussion about ‘humanitarian intervention’, very popular since the end of the Cold War.

So this chapter and the next will therefore attempt to trace out the main parameters of (at least some of) the different schools of thought on war and peace and ask what can be said to be ‘bedrock’ and what can be said to be part of a shared debate. However, the primary concern will be with liberal thought as this the overall concern of the volume. This chapter is intended to act as a backdrop to future chapters that will look at the practice of various kinds of statecraft by individual liberal states and by the liberally-inspired international community, as reflected by their signature of the United Nations Charter and other documents of the same ilk, at the end of wars or ‘after victory’ as Ikenberry puts it.¹¹

In general, an attempt will be made to assess the workability of the key ideas put forward, especially by liberals. For example, does democracy bring about peace? Is democracy necessarily a universal category? In particular it will be necessary to ask in this chapter and throughout the book whether the doctrine known as ‘liberal internationalism’ (LI) and whether LI in its various manifestations can be seen as an expression of ‘British–American’ liberal values (the French use the epithet ‘Anglo-Saxon’) and interests? In so doing the chapter will touch on some areas of the liberal canon that are familiar, such as the nineteenth-century liberals Immanuel Kant, Richard Cobden, John Bright and John Stuart Mill and others that can be identified as key liberal thinkers on war and peace. But the main thrust is to show the influence of ideas on policy makers, not just on the theorists themselves. This will mean that inevitably some thinkers and practitioners will be left out but hopefully not forgotten in other parts of the book and in the debate to which it will contribute.

Liberal thought: some generalities

Core beliefs and core dilemmas

What does it mean to be a liberal? John Gray has put it thus:

Liberalism is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any other social collectivity; egalitarian inasmuch as it confers on all humans the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according secondary importance to specific historical associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements.¹²

In practice this often means that liberals have strong views about morality as a guiding principle in both domestic and international life. As Richard Bellamy puts it, the strand that most people associate with liberalism is what he calls ‘ethical liberalism’ within which most prominent British liberals can be included (Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill) as well as many continental philosophers like Kant, Hegel and (most of) their respective followers. Their ‘philosophical core’ is the notion of ‘liberty’ and the belief that it was possible for all members of any society to benefit from this as individuals. Linked to this is a belief in ‘progress’, which as Bellamy points out, has ‘theological foundations’.¹³ The word ‘theological’ is important because it has often been said that it was the shift from the pursuit of religious unity (by definition across Christendom) to the search for political unity within states or across states in some form of cosmopolis that marks the beginning of the modern liberal era of ‘civil societies’.¹⁴

Linked to notions of reason and morality, a bedrock of liberal belief emerged by the end of the nineteenth century that was clear and which differentiated itself from conservative and socialist thought and practice. Liberals have always looked to the carving out of new cultural spaces, to the creation of new senses of possibility. So in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science was seen as providing possibility for endless improvement, reflected in the great novelists of the nineteenth century in particular. But, as many have pointed out, this clear normative and practical framework came up against the hard bounds of reality as the market has proved incapable of delivering the kind of liberty, or even progress, that liberals wished to see. Science has proved a huge disappointment, creating as much despair as progress. Equally capitalism, the handmaiden in many liberal eyes of democracy, has of course come in for huge criticism. Take just one example, a comment by American social historian John Dos Passos in 1938 on J. P. Morgan the great American banker:

Wars and panics on the stock exchange, machine gun fire and arson, bankruptcies, war loans, starvation, lice, cholera and typhus: good growing weather for the House of Morgan.¹⁵

The seeming defeat of an emerging European liberal consensus in the nineteenth century, for Bellamy ‘the era of liberalism’,¹⁶ by the events of the First World War highlighted many of its key drawbacks and contradictions, not least the assumption that capitalism would reduce the danger of war between industrial states. Liberalism was forced to review its basic tenets in a very painful way in the inter-war period. An appreciation of this interiorization of the lessons of war is vital for understanding how both ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and continental European thought, not to mention extra-Western thought, has been in a quandary about the very basis of liberalism’s claims to be the philosophy and praxis of equality, universality and amelioration. Hence, ever since its emergence as a coherent philosophical and practical position, liberalism has gone through a bewildering number of debates and broadly speaking polarized into what has come to be known as (for example) the ‘liberal–communitarian’ debate, one which pits a disparate group of thinkers in what has been deemed an ‘ontological’ debate about what liberalism means in practice.¹⁷

However, generalizations about liberalism can be both illuminating and misleading. Louis Menand was able to claim with much truth that ‘in the nineteenth century liberalism meant a commitment to free markets: in the twentieth century it meant a commitment to individual liberties’. But when he goes on to examine a number of key nineteenth and twentieth century American Liberals – John Dewey (1859–1952) is one such – he finds that such generalizations are also dangerous. Dewey, whom we think of as ‘a representative American liberal’, neither believed in unfettered free markets or in excessive individualism. Most of his life was spent in the pursuit of getting people to organize for liberal aims – ‘he rated solidarity higher than independence’. But where he was an archetypal liberal, says Menand, was in his ‘opposition to the reproduction of hierarchies – political, social, cultural and even conceptual’ and in that sense ‘he was probably as liberal a thinker as the United States has produc...