Sage Reference

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

For the most optimal reading experience we recommend using our website.
A free-to-view version of this content is available by clicking on this link, which
includes an easy-to-navigate-and-search-entry, and may also include videos,
embedded datasets, downloadable datasets, interactive questions, audio
content, and downloadable tables and resources.

Pub. Date: 2011

Product: Sage Reference
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994163
Keywords: liberalism in international relations, international relations
Disciplines: Politics & International Relations, Political Science, General Politics & International Relations,
Political Science (general), General Politics & International Relations
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Access Date: January 8, 2025

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Online ISBN: 9781412994163

© 2011 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 2 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

This entry presents an overview of recent trends and developments in liberal international relations theo-
ry—both empirical and normative. An effort is made to highlight the link between contemporary liberal schol-
arship on international relations and the thought of classical liberal figures such as John Locke, Adam Smith,
Immanuel Kant, Giuseppe Mazzini, and John Stuart Mill. The first part of the essay introduces key liberal
principles and ideas and identifies three different traditions of liberal thought on international relations. There-
after, we discuss classical and contemporary theories on the relationship between liberal democracy and in-
ternational peace, followed by an overview of related, recent scholarship on global governance and interna-
tional cooperation among democracies. The final part of the essay briefly discusses two alternative liberal
approaches to the ethics of military intervention and shows, in particular, how liberal theorists, while they all
share a fundamental attachment to representative governance and human rights, can fundamentally differ in
their support for coercive regime change.

Basic Liberal Principles and Institutions

Liberalism resembles a family portrait of principles and institutions, recognizable by certain characteris-
tics—such as individual freedom, political participation, private property, and equality of opportunity—that all
liberal democratic societies, by definition, share to some degree. Political theorists identify liberalism 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.

The ideal version of liberalism 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. Sec-
ond, the effective sovereigns of the state are representative legislatures deriving their authority from the con-
sent of the electorate and exercising their representative authority free from all restraint apart from the re-
quirement that basic civic rights be preserved. Most pertinent, for the impact of liberalism on foreign affairs,
the state is subject to neither the external authority of other states nor the internal authority of special prerog-
atives held, for example, by monarchs or military bureaucracies 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 (e.g., 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.

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 3 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Locke, Smith, and Kant: Three Pillars of Liberal Interna-

tionalism

Liberal internationalism consists, at its most fundamental level, in the attempt to promote the aforementioned
principles and institutions across national borders and apply variations thereof to international relations. The
classical realists from Thucydides onward described an international state of war that could be mitigated, but
not overcome, short of a world Leviathan. The classical liberals, with important variations, broke with this
skeptical tradition and announced the possibility of a state of peace among independent, sovereign states.

Contemporary scholarship on liberalism and international relations looks back at three distinct traditions of
liberalism, attributable to three groups of theorists: John Locke—the great founder of modern liberal individu-
alism, who claimed that states have themselves rights derived from individual rights to life and liberty (political
independence) and property (territorial integrity), thereby providing the liberal foundations of international law;
Adam Smith, Baron de Montesquieu, and Joseph Schumpeter—brilliant explicators of commercial liberalism
and what they saw as its natural result, liberal pacifism; and finally, Immanuel Kant and Giuseppe Mazzi-
ni—liberal republicans who theorized an internationalism that institutes peace among fellow liberal republics.
The liberal republican tradition, while incorporating to some degree both liberal individualism and commercial
liberalism, has exerted the greatest influence on contemporary liberal international relations theory. It argues
that liberal democracy leaves a coherent international legacy on foreign affairs: a separate peace. Liberal
states are peaceful with each other, but they are also prone to make war on nonliberal states.

A Separate Peace Among Liberal Democracies

The claim that liberal constitutional states behave differently in their foreign relations goes back at least as
far as Immanuel Kant and Thomas Paine, but attempts to demonstrate it empirically are more recent. In the
20th century, Clarence Streit (1938) first pointed out the tendency of modern liberal democracies to maintain
peace among themselves, and Dean V. Babst (1972) was the first to find statistical support for the hypothe-
sis. Over the past 3 decades, scholars have found strong empirical evidence for the existence of a separate
peace among liberal democracies but not between democracies and nondemocracies. Critiques of the sep-
arate-peace proposition have focused largely on the underlying causal argument, suggesting that the inter-
democratic peace might be simply a byproduct of bipolarity and related strategic alliance patterns during the
Cold War (see, e.g., Henry Farber & Joanne Gowa, 1997).

Michael Doyle, in his 1997 book Ways of War and Peace, argues that two centuries of separate peace

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 4 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

among liberal democracies cannot be dismissed as an epiphenomenon, or by-product, of strategic alliances;

in fact, stable international alliance patterns among liberal democracies appear to be largely a consequence
of shared liberal values and domestic institutions. Doyle develops an original explanation of the separate
peace among liberal democracies based on Kant's essay “Perpetual Peace.” In Doyle's interpretation, Kant's
hypothetical peace treaty shows how liberal republics lead to a dichotomous international politics: peaceful
relations—a pacific union—among similarly liberal states and a state of war between liberals and nonliberals.

First, Kant viewed the republic, based on constitutionalism and popular representation, as the ideal form of
government; he understood that republican governments would introduce various institutional restraints on
foreign policy and ingrain the habit of respect for individual rights. Of course, we know today that domestic
republican restraints do not automatically end war. (If they did, liberal states would not be warlike, which is far
from the case.) Kant seems to have been well aware of this: He pointed out that institutional restraints merely
introduce republican caution, or hesitation, in place of monarchical caprice. In line with this intuition, modern
democratic liberalism does not need to assume either that public opinion directly rules foreign policy or that
the entire governmental elite is liberal. It can instead assume that the elite typically manages public affairs but
that potentially nonliberal members of the elite have reason to doubt that illiberal policies would be electorally
sustained and endorsed by the majority of the democratic public. In other words, liberal states fight only for
popular, ostensibly liberal purposes since elites need to be constantly concerned about domestic support for
the war effort.

Second, Kant foresaw that liberal republics would progressively establish peace among themselves by means
of the pacific union described in his Second Definitive Article of Perpetual Peace. Kant probably had in mind a
mutual nonaggression pact or perhaps a collective security agreement with a rudimentary court of arbitration.
Complementing the constitutional guarantee of caution, international law adds a second source—a pledge
of peaceful respect. As republics emerge (the first source) and as culture progresses, an understanding of
the legitimate rights of all citizens and of all republics comes into play; and this, now that caution character-
izes policy, sets up the moral foundations for the liberal peace. Correspondingly, international law highlights
the importance of Kantian publicity. Domestically, publicity helps ensure that the officials of republics act ac-
cording to the principles they profess to hold just and the interests of the citizens they claim to represent.
Internationally, free speech and the effective communication of accurate conceptions of the political life of for-
eign peoples are essential to establish and preserve the understanding on which the guarantee of respect
depends.

Kant's categorical imperative of course requires that all statesmen and liberal republics reject imperialism and
international aggression on moral grounds. But liberal republics cannot simply assume reciprocal peace with
all other states; instead, they understand that states subject to international anarchy are potentially aggres-
sive. Only republics tend to be consensual and constrained, and they are therefore presumed capable by oth-

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 5 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

er republics of reliable mutual accommodation. The experience of cooperation among republics helps engen-
der further cooperative behavior when the consequences of state policy are unclear but (potentially) mutually
beneficial. In short, fellow liberals benefit from a presumption of amity; nonliberals suffer from a presumption
of enmity. Both presumptions may be accurate. Each, however, may in particular cases also be self-fulfilling.

Finally, Kant's cosmopolitan law, discussed in his “Third Definitive Article of Perpetual Peace,” adds material
incentives to moral commitments. The cosmopolitan law and the related right to hospitality permit the spirit of
commerce to take hold of every nation sooner or later, thus creating incentives for states to promote peace
and try to avert war. Building on this classical liberal intuition, modern economic theory holds that under a
cooperative international division of labor and free trade according to comparative advantage, each national
economy is better off than it would have been under autarchy—hence, each participant acquires an incen-
tive to solve disputes peacefully and avoid policies that would lead others to break mutually advantageous
economic ties. Furthermore, the international market removes difficult decisions of production and distribution
from the direct sphere of state policy. As a result, a foreign state does not appear to be directly responsible
for unfavorable economic outcomes—states can stand aside from, and to some degree above, contentious
market rivalries and be ready to step in to resolve crises. Finally, the interdependence of commerce and the
related international contacts of state officials help create crosscutting transnational ties that serve as lobbies
for mutual accommodation. The variety of ties among liberal states across numerous issue areas also en-
sures that no single conflict sours an entire relationship by setting off a spiral of reciprocated retaliation.

In recent years, some scholars, such as Georg Cavallar and John MacMillan, have taken issue with Doyle's
interpretation of Kant as the father of modern democratic peace theory. According to these critics, Kant's pa-
cific union, the foedus pacificum outlined in his second definitive article, was probably intended to include
all states and not just liberal republics. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (2009) go one step further and
suggest that the first to explicitly anticipate the emergence of a separate peace among constitutional democ-
racies, based on a defensive pact of alliance against despotic states, was not Kant but Giuseppe Mazzini, the
19th-century revolutionary thinker and democratic political activist.

Against these views, Doyle holds that there are good reasons to view Kant as the founding figure of modern
democratic peace theory, and he interprets Kant as requiring that peace must be established by a rightful
constitution involving all three definitive articles. Most current scholarship on the democratic peace focuses
either exclusively on the role of liberal-democratic institutions, liberal norms, or economic interdependence.
But Kantian liberal peace theory, as developed by Doyle, is neither solely institutional, nor solely ideologi-
cal, nor solely economic: It is only together that the three specific strands of liberal institutions, liberal ideas,
and the transnational ties that follow from them plausibly connect the characteristics of liberal polities and
economies with sustained liberal peace among states that meet the three criteria embedded in the three de-
finitive articles. Statistical data sets on the liberal peace do not adequately code for these three factors togeth-

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 6 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

er. As noted by Bruce Russett and John Oneal, the most thorough recent empirical test of the liberal peace
hypothesis confirms the separate positive effects of democratic institutions and international trade (as well
as membership in international organizations), but it does not separately code for liberal norms and related
interdemocratic trust, which may indeed be difficult to measure through quantitative analysis.

Global Governance and Cooperation Among Democracies

Classical liberals such as Bentham, Kant, and Mazzini anticipated that international institutions (especially
arbitration courts but also more advanced international federations with their own parliamentary assemblies)
would reduce uncertainty and improve mutual trust among states, thereby attenuating the security dilemma
and actively promoting international cooperation and world peace. In recent decades, international relations
theorists have systematically developed and corroborated this intuition.

Relying on new insights from game theory, scholars during the 1980s and 1990s emphasized that so-called
international regimes, consisting of agreed-on international norms, rules, and decision-making procedures,
can help states effectively coordinate their policies and collaborate in the production of international public
goods, such as free trade, arms control, and environmental protection. Especially, if embedded in formal mul-
tilateral institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), regimes crucially improve the availability of information among states in a given issue area, there-
by promoting reciprocity and enhancing the reputational costs of noncompliance. As noted by Robert Keo-
hane, institutionalized multilateralism also reduces strategic competition over relative gains and thus further
advances international cooperation.

Most international regime theorists accepted Kenneth Waltz's (1979) neorealist assumption of states as black
boxes—that is, unitary and rational actors with given interests. Little or no attention was paid to the impact on
international cooperation of domestic political processes and dynamics. Likewise, regime scholarship largely
disregarded the arguably crucial question of whether prolonged interaction in an institutionalized international
setting can fundamentally change states’ interests or preferences over outcomes (as opposed to preferences
over strategies), thus engendering positive feedback loops of increased overall cooperation. For these rea-
sons, international regime theory is not, properly speaking, liberal, and the term neoliberal institutionalism
frequently used to identify it is somewhat misleading.

It is only over the past decade or so that liberal international relations theorists have begun to systematically
study the relationship between domestic politics and institutionalized international cooperation or global gov-
ernance. This new scholarship seeks to explain in particular the close international cooperation among liber-
al democracies as well as higher-than-average levels of delegation by democracies to complex multilateral

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 7 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

bodies, such as the European Union (EU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), NAFTA, and the WTO
(see, e.g., John Ikenberry, 2001; Helen Milner & Andrew Moravcsik, 2009). The reasons that make liberal
democracies particularly enthusiastic about international cooperation are manifold: First, transnational actors
such as nongovernmental organizations and private corporations thrive in liberal democracies, and they fre-
quently advocate increased international cooperation; second, elected democratic officials rely on delegation
to multilateral bodies such as the WTO or the EU to commit to a stable policy line and to internationally lock in
fragile domestic policies and constitutional arrangements; and finally, powerful liberal democracies, such as
the United States and its allies, voluntarily bind themselves into complex global governance arrangements to
demonstrate strategic restraint and create incentives for other states to cooperate, thereby reducing the costs
for maintaining international order.

Recent scholarship, such as that of Charles Boehmer and colleagues, has also confirmed the classical liberal
intuition that formal international institutions, such as the United Nations (UN) or NATO, independently con-
tribute to peace, especially when they are endowed with sophisticated administrative structures and informa-
tion-gathering capacities. In short, research on global governance and especially on the relationship between
democracy and international cooperation is thriving, and it usefully complements liberal scholarship on the
democratic peace.

The Ethics of Military Intervention: Should Liberal Democ-

racy be Imposed?

Liberal thinkers on international relations have always displayed a keen interest in the ethical dimension of
foreign policy, based on the assumption that ideas, as well as material interests, ultimately determine state
behavior. Thus, questions about the admissibility and desirability of military intervention to spread or uphold
liberal values abroad were central to the political thought of seminal figures, such as Kant, Mazzini, and Mill.
The classical realists, for their part, did not necessarily dismiss normative concerns entirely (unlike their con-
temporary followers); yet they were skeptical about the possibility for moral behavior in an anarchical environ-
ment where state survival was assumed to be constantly at stake.

Contemporary liberal theory on military intervention consciously builds on the classics. At the risk of oversim-
plification, one can identify two groups of liberal scholars in the ongoing normative debate on military inter-
vention and regime change: cosmopolitan interventionists, on the one hand, and liberal internationalists, on
the other.

Cosmopolitan interventionists typically build on Kant's moral theory, but they only loosely follow his political

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 8 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

thought. They assert that everyone who has the ability to intervene militarily in the face of systematic human
rights violations also has a moral duty to do so, subject to criteria of effectiveness and/or proportionality. For
cosmopolitans, if a state is tyrannical and systematically oppresses its own population, it “forfeits any respect
for its independence.” As noted by Brian Barry (1998), by implication, “international [military] intervention to
displace the government and, if necessary, place the country under international trusteeship” (p. 160) is al-
ways prima facie morally justified and indeed required, although prudential considerations might ultimately
counsel against the use of force. (See also David Luban, 1980.)

Liberal internationalists, on the other hand, have tended to place greater value on state sovereignty and the
attendant international duty of nonintervention. Kant favored absolute nonintervention as a matter of principle:
He thought it necessary to stabilize international relations and to ensure that each political community could
freely determine its own way of life. Mazzini and Mill were not categorically opposed to military intervention
(e.g., they justified it to end protracted civil wars and to save helpless populations from outright slaughter); yet
they vigorously opposed the use of force for the purpose of promoting liberty and democracy more generally.
They sensed that unless tyranny was defeated domestically, with economic and diplomatic assistance from
the outside but crucially without foreign military intervention, any liberty achieved would remain exceedingly
fragile and could be hardly sustained in the long run.

Contemporary liberal internationalists such as Michael Walzer (1977) and John Rawls (1999) typically justify
(but contrary to the cosmopolitan interventionists do not require) humanitarian military intervention as a last
resort in the face of the worst human rights violations, such as state-sponsored slaughter or genocide, sug-
gesting that sovereignty can be disregarded under similar circumstances. But they crucially insist that mili-
tary intervention ought to be multilaterally authorized and overseen, ideally by the UN Security Council, if it
is to be legitimate. The underlying assumption is that collective authorization and oversight reduce the risk of
usurpation by powerful states (Doyle, 2006). Most contemporary liberal internationalists follow their classical
forebears and reject policies of forcible democratization on both principled and consequentialist grounds. De-
mocratic transformation is best fostered peacefully and indirectly through trade, investment, and foreign aid.
These can help diversify societies, and diversified, growing societies tend to demand responsive governance
in the long run.

Finally, most contemporary liberals agree that becoming a democracy is hardly a cure-all. Research suggests
that overall and on average, the diffusion and consolidation of liberal democracy within countries reduces the
chances of both international and civil war. However, there is also evidence that transitions to democracy
often produce political turmoil at the domestic level, unless they are carefully managed. Where the rule of
law and public institutions are weak, political elites will be tempted to use nationalist rhetoric and violence to
achieve and hold office, which may result in international or civil war. Furthermore, as Doyle (1983) pointed
out, the very respect for individual rights and shared commercial interests that establish grounds for peace

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 9 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

among liberal democracies may establish grounds for additional conflict in relations between liberal and non-
liberal societies. Evidence of this can be found today in relations between the United States and its liberal
allies, on the one hand, and a resurgent Russia, emerging China, or defiant Iran, on the other. In short, liberal
internationalism is no recipe: It merely offers a set of normative guidelines and empirical hypotheses—some
of which are indeed supported by solid evidence—and it needs constant, prudent vigilance to avoid crusades
and misguided interventions.

• liberalism in international relations

• international relations

MichaelDoyleStefanoRecchiaColumbia University New York City, New York, United States

Further Readings

Babst, D. V. (1972). A force for peace. Industrial Research, 14, 55–58.

Barry, B. (1998). International society from a cosmopolitan perspective. In D. R.Mapel & T.Nardin (eds.), In-
ternational society: Diverse ethical perspectives (pp. 144–163). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Boehmer, C.Gartzke, E.Nordstrom, T. (2004). Do IGOs promote peace?World Politics, 57(1), 1–38.

Cavallar, G. (1999). Kant and the theory and practice of international right. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Doyle, M. (1983). Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs: Part II. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12(4),
323–353.

Doyle, M. (1997). Ways of war and peace. New York: W. W. Norton.

Doyle, M. (2006). The ethics of multilateral intervention. Theoria, 53, 28–48.

Farber, H. S.Gowa, J. (1997). Common interests or common politics? Reinterpreting the democratic peace.
Journal of Politics, 59(2), 393–417.

Ikenberry, G. J. (2001). After victory: Institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of order after major
wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Keohane, R. O. (1984). After hegemony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 10 of 11
Sage Sage Reference
© 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Luban, D. (1980). Just war and human rights. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 9(2), 160–181.

MacMillan, J. (2006). Immanuel Kant and the democratic peace. In B.Jahn (ed.), Classical theory in interna-
tional relations (chap. 3). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Milner, H., & Moravcsik, A. (eds.). (2009). Power, interdependence, and nonstate actors in world politics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rawls, J. (1999). The law of peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Recchia, S., & Urbinati, N. (2009). Giuseppe Mazzini's international political thought. In S.Recchia &
N.Urbinati (eds.), A cosmopolitanism of nations: Giuseppe Mazzini's writings on democracy, nation building,
and international relations (pp. 1–30). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Russett, B., & Oneal, J. (2001). Triangulating peace. New York: W. W. Norton.

Streit, C. (1938). Union now: A proposal for a federal union of the leading democracies. New York: Harper.

Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Walzer, M. (1977). Just and unjust wars: A moral argument with historical illustrations. New York: Basic
Books.

https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994163

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

Page 11 of 11