ABSTRACT
Liberalism is an expansive concept that carries a variety of meanings for students of politics. For Doyle (1997: 206), ‘liberalism resembles a family portrait of principles and institutions, recognizable by certain characteristics – for example, individual freedom, political participation, private property, and equality of opportunity’. In the realm of International Relations (IR), students look to liberalism to explain how human reason, progress, individual rights and freedoms can give rise to more peaceful interstate relations. Liberals predict that stable democracies and economically interdependent states will behave differently in several respects. First and most importantly, democratic states are less likely to initiate and escalate conflicts with other states (also known as the ‘democratic peace theory’). Second, democratic states are more likely to engage in international trade and investment, and the resultant interdependence will contribute to peace. Third, democratic states are more likely to seek cooperative solutions through international institutions. While there are significant differences between individual liberal thinkers, all have a general faith in the pacifying effects of political liberty, economic freedom, interdependence and international association. Before proceeding, it is important to dispel one persistent myth that has clouded
understandings of liberalism: the association between early forms of liberal internationalism and normative-laden versions of idealism. For example, Howard (1978: 11) defined ‘liberals’ as ‘all those thinkers who believe the world to be profoundly other than it should be, and who have faith in the power of human reason and human action so to change it’. But liberal theory provides much more than imagining a world as it should be. Like realist theory, liberalism provides a relatively coherent set of principles and propositions that explain or predict interstate relations. By one recent account, quantitative studies testing liberal hypotheses in IR have come to outnumber realist studies (Walker and Morton 2005). Given the prevalence of empirically based liberal studies, liberalism cannot be characterized as a utopian project. Indeed, the worldwide spread of liberalism has been considered ‘the defining feature of the late twentieth century’ (Simmons et al. 2006: 781). We begin this chapter by tracing the emergence of liberalism in IR to two leading
thinkers of the Enlightenment: Thomas Paine and Immanuel Kant. The works of Paine
and Kant highlight all the core principles of liberalism and illustrate the variation (and tensions) within the liberal tradition. After our discussion of these two strands of classical liberalism, we turn to an assessment of recent empirical research that probes the claims articulated by Paine and Kant. Does history support the liberal claims that democratic institutions, economic interdependence and international institutions facilitate peace?
