CHAPTER 8
LIBERAL
APPROACHES
JOHN M. OWEN
A century ago, liberals wanted to overturn the existing global
order. Today, they want to retain and extend it. Liberalism’s
conservatism is a tribute to its hard-won success over the past
century. Visions once chimerical—of stable peace in Europe, a
world free of formal empires, high economic interdependence
among most states, low global military spending—were realized
over the course of the twentieth century and have come to seem
normal.
The global liberal order is built upon ideas that have come to be
put into practice as institutions, or established, broadly recognized
rules or ways of conducting social interaction. These ideas derived
from liberal theory and scholarship over the centuries, and indeed
an emphasis on institutions is what diverse liberal social-scientific
approaches to international security have in common. Some
liberal scholars stress domestic institutions, such as
constitutionalism, democracy, and capitalism.1 Others stress
international institutions that regulate economic transactions,
human rights, weapons proliferation, and other activities. The
broad liberal tradition in International Relations recognizes both
levels of analysis, and indeed is open to endogeneity between the
two—for example that democracies trade more with one another
and that the resulting higher national income reinforces
democracy (Russett and Oneal 2001).
Liberals generally see institutions as causes. They are not the
only causes of security outcomes, or even always the chief ones.
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Institutions do not erase material power or its effects. But they do
mediate between power and outcomes. Liberal approaches to
international security imply the counterfactual: add, remove, or
alter institutions, and states will be more or less secure, have
more or fewer wars, fight more or less destructively. Thus, when
liberals think about the future of international security, they think
not only of shifts in material power but also of change and
continuity in domestic and international institutions. The
remarkable material gains of China since the 1980s are bound to
be consequential, but for liberals China’s domestic institutions are
likewise crucial. What China does with its increasing power,
including how far it abides by or tries to change international
institutions, turns in part on whether it remains a Market-Leninist
state or becomes a multi-party democracy.
8.1 LIBERALISM AND SECURITY
In (IR) scholarship, liberalism often is thought to be uneasy with
security or high politics, more at home with political economy or
low politics. In fact, security always has been a central concern of
liberal political theory. The security that concerns liberalism,
however, is first that of the individual, particularly his or her person
and property. National and international security are instrumental
to individual security (Owen 2010b). Of course, liberalism is also
concerned with the individual’s liberty, but liberals argue that,
under the right institutions, liberty and security complement rather
than compete with one another. Liberals differ as to what those
institutions are, but one prominent account, seen in the late
eighteenth-century thinkers James Madison (2003: 319) and
Immanuel Kant (1983: 126), argues for institutions that balance
self-interested actors.
8.1.1 Institutions
Social scientists tell a number of stories about institutions.
Sociologists take a top-down or structural approach, in which
institutions open certain options for agents and close others
(Powell and DiMaggio 2012). Economists take a bottom-up
approach, in which agents construct and use institutions to lower
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transaction costs and make interaction more efficient (Coase
1960). Liberalism’s approach is closer to that of the economists.
Individuals build institutions to serve their preferences. Without
institutions, IR would be disordered and rife with inefficiencies
contradicting the interests of powerful and weak alike. In some
times and places institutions are imposed by the powerful upon
the weak, and produce fear and conflict; thus the Athenians’
aphorism in Thucydides’ famous Melian Dialogue: “the strong do
what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides
1998: 352). In other times and places institutions are freely agreed
upon by all and produce trust and cooperation. States themselves
are complexes of institutions, some nested in others, some
informal and evolving. Not the unitary rational actors envisaged by
realism, states are instead arenas of competition among societal
actors, each with different utility functions. Who wins the
competition affects the state’s foreign policy, and so domestic
institutions matter a great deal.2 States come in two ideal types.
Constitutional or liberal regimes are mutually agreed upon by
freely-choosing individuals and allowing those individuals’
preferences to influence foreign policy; they provide individual
security, liberty, prosperity. Despotic or authoritarian regimes are
imposed from above, block citizen influence on foreign policy, and
produce insecurity, servitude, and poverty.
An early division among liberal thinkers concerned whether
liberal institutions scale up to the international level—whether
sovereign liberal states can build rules and practices that
safeguard the security and liberty of each. Hobbes and Rousseau
say no, and are categorized as realists. Locke leaves room for
more international cooperation in the state of nature. Kant goes
further and argues that liberal international institutional
architecture is actually inevitable, but only among republics, that
is, states that separate the legislative from the executive power.
Kant’s influence endures, both for the comprehensiveness of his
vision and his prediction of the democratic peace, or the absence
of war among liberal democracies (Doyle 1983; Russett 1994;
Owen 1997; Cederman and Gleditsch 2004). Recently, Deudney
(2008) has pushed the logic further and argued that today’s
destructive technologies will drive humanity toward a global
federation.
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Institutional complexes, then, span the international and
domestic realms. Here is where we see most starkly that
institutions are inescapable but that not all institutions are the
same. Not every state is Bismarck’s Germany, nor are all
international systems like that of Europe in the late nineteenth
century. Some states are more like the Third Reich, some systems
more like the nightmare of Europe 1939–45. Some states are
more like today’s Federal Republic of Germany, some systems
like today’s European Union. The quality of interaction among
liberal states will be different from that among nonliberal states, or
that between liberal and nonliberal states. Liberal states build
among themselves what each has within its borders: institutions
that share information, reduce transaction costs, build trust, and
encourage agents to invest in relationships for mutual gain.
Nonliberal states have less inclination or ability to build and
remain in such relationships, because they are constitutionally
prone to arbitrariness (Gaubatz 1996; Martin 2000; Lipson 2013).
Liberal states show little sign of trying to counter-balance
America’s unprecedented global military dominance; nonliberal
states such as Russia and China have taken such steps, albeit
gingerly (Owen 2000/2001).
Skeptics argue that institutions are consequences, not causes:
states that want to cooperate for reasons of interest do so, and
institutions are simply the result of their cooperation (Mearsheimer
1994). Liberalism can grant a selection effect: it is liberal
democracies that tend to form, remain in, and comply with liberal
international institutions. But those same international institutions
feed back into their member states and strengthen their domestic
institutions and preferences. Were the particular rules of
international institutions inconsequential, non-democracies would
not be so wary of liberal institutions, nor would democracies spend
so many resources trying to influence them (Koremenos et al.
2001).
8.1.2 Liberalism and Its Alternatives
Liberalism’s differences with realism are straightforward. Realism
insists that the human race is trapped in a world where might
makes right and insecurity is pervasive and perpetual. The best
that can be achieved is a stable distribution of power (be it bipolar,
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multipolar, or unipolar), and attempts to break out of this system
will only make matters worse. Liberalism finds those claims
excessively pessimistic, and insists that some types of institutions
can and do mitigate the problems described by realism. Some
versions of liberalism contain an implicit teleology, in which the
human race is destined to pull itself out of the dangerous state of
nature, if only gradually. Other versions simply maintain that it is
possible for people to make the world more or less peaceful,
depending on who has power, what their preferences are, and
how capable they are of learning. What liberals agree on is that
institutions make the difference.
Liberalism and realism also differ as to the efficacy of liberal
democracy in international politics. When it comes to navigating
the perils of diplomacy, traditional realism regards liberal
democracies as deficient because they constrain executive action
by popular will and law (Kennan 1951; Lippmann 1997;
Tocqueville 2002: 217–18). Structural realists, by contrast,
abstract from domestic regime type, implying that liberal-
democratic institutions are inconsequential. Recent liberal
scholarship argues that liberal states enjoy security advantages in
the international system. They do not fight one another (see the
earlier reference to Kant), and tend to win the wars they do fight—
either because they fight better or because they are wiser about
which wars to fight (Lake 1992; Reiter and Stam 2002). Their
superior ability to reveal information about their capabilities and
preferences (Fearon 1994; Schultz 2001) allows them to focus on
fewer potential enemies. Public choice literature adds that the
right institutions give individuals incentives to innovate, invent new
technologies, increase productivity, and create opportunities for
others in their societies; those institutions are generally liberal-
democratic ones (Rosenberg and Birdzell 2008; Acemoglu and
Robinson 2012).
Liberalism stands in a different relation to constructivism. The
two paradigms have in common an emphasis on norms and ideas
and greater hope in long-term peace and cooperation than does
realism. But liberalism, like modern realism, is a rationalist theory.
The agents for liberalism are individuals rather than states, but
liberalism is methodologically individualist and takes actors’
preferences as exogenous. Social interaction reduces to
bargaining over goods. Institutions themselves are a product of
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bargaining. Constructivism, by contrast, is holistic, taking
preferences to be endogenous to or derived from social
interaction; institutions, for constructivists, structure preferences
and bargaining (Wendt 1992; Fearon and Wendt 2002). Although
liberal scholarship allows for states’ preferences to change
through interaction—how else to think about the change from the
Third Reich to the Federal Republic of Germany?—in its treatment
of individuals, liberalism is necessarily rationalist.
Furthermore, whereas constructivism sees norms as socially
constructed, liberalism sees at least norms concerning the good
life as given or natural. For liberals, human beings value individual
security and liberty more highly than other goods, such as fame,
religious devotion, art, or even power. When states do not achieve
international cooperation, liberalism regards it as a puzzle (and
looks to institutions for the solution). Constructivism, at least not
its radical form, denies human nature as such, positing instead
that identities and desires are plastic and contingent.
8.2 LIBERALISM, INSTITUTIONS, AND THE FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL
SECURITY
What do liberal approaches imply about the future of international
security? Liberalism directs our attention to change and continuity
in institutions both domestic and international. Change the
institutions, and the world may come to resemble the war of all
against all depicted by realism. Maintain, broaden, and deepen
extant liberal-democratic institutions, and the current order should
persist. Change and continuity matter at both the domestic and
international levels, because the two levels influence each other.
What changes institutions, then? Institutions are path-
dependent, inasmuch as they tend to pay increasing returns to
their members and the opportunity costs of defecting from them
tend to rise over time (Ikenberry 2001). So stability is built into any
institutional complex. Yet, institutions change. Some scholars
argue for gradual evolution: a set of interacting agents find that
some new problem is not adequately addressed by existing
institutions; agents formulate various ideas for addressing the
problem; they try out some of these ideas; the winning ideas—
those that appear to powerful actors best at addressing the
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problem, or most consistent with the existing matrix of institutions
and habits—become institutionalized (Hodgson 2002). Others
argue for abrupt change: a crisis emerges, disrupts normal
patterns of interaction, and presses or enables agents to build
new institutions (Legro 2005). For the sake of simplicity, I only
consider the latter source of change. International history
suggests two general types of crisis that can alter institutions:
1. Power shifts, e.g., triggered by major-power wars such as the Napoleonic Wars or
the World Wars of the twentieth century (Ikenberry 2001; Gunitsky 2014).
2. Sustained economic crises, such as in the 1870s (which wrecked the emergent
norm of free trade in Europe) and the 1930s (which did the same and also helped
fascism supplant liberal democracy) (Findlay and O’Rourke 2007).
One type of power shift I consider is “traditional,” a textbook case
of power transition: the rise of China and concomitant relative
decline of the United States. The second type is non-traditional:
transnational terrorism, or the continuing ability of non-state actors
to threaten the security of dozens of states. I also consider a type
of economic distress, one less dramatic than that of the 1930s but
possibly as consequential: the continuing stagnation of the native
working classes in most Western countries.
8.2.1 Global Power Shifts
Liberalism recognizes that in an anarchical international system,
differences in states’ power to hurt and conquer other states is
crucial. But the purposes to which states put their power matter as
well, and domestic and international institutions directly affect
those purposes. Hence the spectacular economic growth of China
since the 1980s is bound to be consequential for international
security not simply because Beijing can convert its new wealth to
military power, but because the country’s persistent Leninist
political system increases the probability that it will put its power to
purposes contrary to those of the United States. America remains
the world’s only military superpower and doubtless will do for
some time to come (Brooks and Wohlforth 2008), but by definition
it is declining in material terms relative to China.
Global power shifts advanced the liberal world order in the
twentieth century. The Second World War devolved power from
Western Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union; each
superpower built an international order that competed against that
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of the other (Lake 1996). In Western Europe and Japan, the
United States simultaneously promoted liberal democracy within
states (Owen 2010a) and spun a cobweb of international rules
regulating relations among states (Ikenberry 2012). US allies
relinquished their empires in exchange for American guarantees
of security and stable economic growth. The United States
protected not only the territorial integrity of these states but also
their liberal-democratic regimes. The US-sponsored order was far
more coercive in poor countries and regions; there, where the
Soviets were actively competing for elite and mass loyalty,
Washington did not trust democrats to be liberal and anti-Soviet,
and supported authoritarians who stayed out of the Soviet camp
and opened themselves to trade and investment (Poznansky
2015). As the USSR began to liberalize itself in the late 1980s,
more and more Third World elites began to sour on socialism and
anti-Americanism and to embrace the liberal international order
(Owen and Poznansky 2014). Thus the globalization of the 1990s.
China accepted many of the economic aspects of the liberal
institutional order, and grew at a spectacular rate after the 1970s.
Measured in constant US dollars, the Chinese economy is on
track to surpass the American economy sometime in the next two
decades (World Bank 2016). In both international trade and
finance, China already is a global player: it is the world’s biggest
exporter (World Trade Organization 2016), and in 2015 launched
the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as an alternative
to older US- and Europe-dominated international financial
institutions. China’s military spending in 2014 was 1.9 percent of
its GDP, compared to 3.5 percent of GDP for the United States.
China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP) does not seem interested
in building the country into a global military superpower. Instead, it
appears most concerned to secure the country’s access to raw
materials, assert what it sees as China’s rights in the East and
South China seas, and challenge long-standing US military and
political predominance there.
China is no liberal democracy. The CCP clearly is determined to
maintain its monopoly on political power, and under Chairman
(and Chinese President) Xi Jinping has identified liberal
democracy as a serious ideological threat emanating from the
West.
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The rise of Market-Leninist China is important for several
reasons. First, the CCP could try to alter, directly or indirectly,
some of the liberal characteristics of the global complex of
institutions that the West has underwritten for decades. China has
prospered under the current complex, and one could ask why the
CCP would seek to change a system under which it is winning.
But it is clear that the Chinese leadership believe international
institutions to be biased in a liberal direction and suspect that the
West uses them to contain China. Human rights institutions are
the most obvious case. China’s representatives on the UN Human
Rights Council have promoted “universality,” or the avoidance of
singling out individual countries, and also rules giving heavy
agenda influence to the state under review (Nathan 2015: 164–7).
The China-sponsored AIIB attaches fewer conditions to loans than
the Western-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
World Bank.
Second, China’s ongoing success as an authoritarian capitalist
state could lead elites in other states in Asia and beyond to
conclude that the “China Model” is viable or even superior to
liberal democracy (Halper 2010). A number of studies find that the
intermittent but significant growth in the number of democracies
over the past centuries is partly a result of international diffusion
(Brinks and Coppedge 2006). Authoritarianism spreads as well
(Ambrosio 2010; Gunitsky 2017). The rise of China could roll back
liberal democracy in East Asia and elsewhere. State elites could
conclude that the China Model offers the quickest and best route
to economic growth. They also could be attracted to the China
Model simply because of China’s prestige.
Thus two vital questions liberalism will ask about international
security in the coming years are: Will China continue to rise? And,
will it liberalize by allowing opposition parties and meaningful
political competition on the state and national level?
8.2.2 Terrorism
The rise of transnational terrorism since 2001 constitutes a
different kind of global power shift. The so-called Islamic State, al-
Qaeda, and other jihadist entities are not states, and certainly
have far less power than the United States, France, India, and
others. But they do have what Thomas Schelling called the “power
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to hurt,” that is, to damage countries’ populations and property
without defeating them on the battlefield (Schelling 1966). Hence
these networks have the power to terrorize populations and topple
governments. An al-Qaeda attack in Madrid in 2004 almost
certainly helped doom the Spanish government of José María
Aznar. Each government understands that if it is judged by its
constituents to have failed to stop a terrorist attack, it may be
voted out of office. Hence the expensive security measures in so
many countries today, from heightened airport security to greater
monitoring of private communication to violations of civil liberties;
and thus two long wars led by the United States (Afghanistan and
Iraq). Transnational terrorists can and do impose enormous costs
on rich, powerful states.3
Discontent with Western domination has existed as long as
Western countries have had empires. Only recently has that
discontent been mobilized and channeled into terrorist networks
that penetrate the Western countries themselves. This power shift
is heavily driven by technological change: cheap communication
and international travel make it possible for militant leaders to
disseminate their messages widely, recruit and train, and plant
cells virtually anywhere. Jihadist terrorism is also not likely to
disappear any time soon, because its causes are robust. The
deep cause is a prolonged legitimacy crisis in many Muslim-
majority countries, particularly in North Africa, the Middle East,
and Central and South Asia over the right way to order society. On
one level, there are two sides, Islamists and secularists. Within the
Islamist camp are a number of competitors—Sunni versus Shia,
pro- versus anti-Western—who show no sign of giving up (Owen
2015).
Sharia is not going to become the law of the land in Western
countries. Rather, the threat to liberal institutions from ongoing
jihadist terrorism comes from efforts by threatened liberal
democracies to defend themselves. Terrorists’ use of cyberspace
to communicate, recruit, spy, and move money has provoked
already capable Western intelligence agencies to develop new
capabilities and norms. In the United States since September
2001 the federal government has assumed new powers, including
to gather meta-data on all telephone calls; to torture terrorism
suspects; to kill US citizens suspected of terrorism without due
process; and to compile, by opaque procedures and without
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appeal, lists of Americans who are prohibited from flying. Some of
these powers have been rescinded or modified. But a trade-off
familiar to liberal democracies remains real: in times of threat, a
liberal-democratic government is under great pressure to shed the
institutional constraints that make it what it is—transparent,
predictable, accountable, and legitimate. Some officials or
departments in the government will be tempted to exploit the
insecurity to grab more power than is warranted (Eddington 2015).
Indeed, for liberal IR theory, long-term national and international
security depend on liberal-democratic institutions within states. An
additional trade-off appears, then, between short-term security
(served by increasing monitoring and intrusiveness by police and
intelligence) and long-term security (served by decentralizing
power). If the jihadist threat is not ended or contained, the
international liberal order could weaken.
8.2.3 Sustained Economic Stagnation in the West
The third potential threat to liberal institutions, not entirely
separable from the first two, emanates from within liberal
democracies themselves. It is a loss of confidence among large
segments of their publics in the liberal international order.
Majorities continue to support liberal democracy within their
countries, although populist-nationalist political parties and
candidates have been rising and attracting anti-democratic
extremists. The chief threat is to the international side of
liberalism: the long-standing aspiration to free movement of
goods, capital, and labor.
As discussed in Section 8.2.1, globalization is a liberal project. It
accelerates technological and managerial innovation and raises
aggregate wealth. It may undermine itself, however, inasmuch as
economic openness always creates losers as well as winners.
Workers in economic sectors in which their country is at a
comparative disadvantage lose their jobs and find their lives
disrupted. Losers from globalization will naturally try to reverse it;
thus economists’ theory of endogenous protectionism, in which
international trade is self-undermining (Treffler 1993). Insofar as
their governments do not adequately address their grievances,
globalization’s losers will provide opportunities for new political
movements and parties. In the second decade of the twenty-first
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century, to the surprise of many political analysts, the international
liberal order appears weak in its heartlands of Europe and North
America. In the United States in 2016, one of the two major
parties nominated a populist who seemed determined to end
America’s role as underwriter of the global liberal order. In Europe,
a majority of voters in the United Kingdom voted to withdraw their
country from the EU, while populist parties showed greater
strength in Continental Europe than at any time since the 1930s.
Some analysts attribute the rise of populist nationalism to the
distribution of gains and losses from globalization. The losers are
working-class natives with falling prospects for higher paying jobs
and stable careers for themselves and their offspring. In the
United States, supporters of Donald Trump in the Republican state
primary elections tended to be white and to lack a university
education. Between 1990 and 2013 the employment rate of this
population group fell from 76 percent to 68 percent. These also
are the people who believe that neither political party pays them
any attention (Thompson 2016).4 Economist Branko Milanovic
finds that the global “upper middle class”—corresponding to the
working and middle classes in rich countries—is the only segment
of society that has lost from the freer movement of goods, labor,
and capital since the 1980s. Globalization has lifted millions of
people out of poverty, but those between the 70th and 95th
percentiles of wealth in Figure 8.1 (reproduced from Milanovic
n.d.) might be less inclined than those above the 95th percentile to
celebrate.
Automation, resulting from liberalism’s attachment to
technological innovation, also bears some blame for the shape of
this curve (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011). Yet it is a mistake to
reduce the political turmoil of the 2010s to economics. Liberal
internationalism is also a cultural phenomenon (Hunter and Yates
2002): it presses a kind of rootlessness upon people and
societies; it either erases or denigrates and trivializes local
differences and traditions, reducing them to tastes in food, music,
and art that are then mashed together and recombined. The
culture of globalization is well-suited to cosmopolitan elites—
professionals in banking, business, law, academia, foundations,
and so on—but not to those who, by necessity or choice, stay in
one place. The latter know well enough that globalizers tend to
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assume a moral authority and to look down on their more rooted
counterparts as quaint at best and barriers to progress at worst.
FIGURE 8.1 Change in real income between 1988 and 2008 at various percentiles of
global income distribution (calculated in 2005 international dollars)
Note: The vertical axis shows the percentage change in real income,
measured in constant international dollars. The horizontal axis shows the
percentile position in the global income distribution. The percentile positions
run from 5 to 95, in increments of five, while the top 5% are divide into two
groups: the top 1% and those between the 95th and 99th percentiles.
International liberalism always has brought these stresses, but
some analysts believe the wealthy liberal countries are near a
collective tipping point. Perhaps one immediate cause is the
waves of immigration that hit the United States (from Latin
America) and Western Europe (from the Southwest Asia, North
Africa, and Eastern Europe) in recent years. The populist-
nationalists are in full-throated opposition to this immigration and
appeal to a more ethnically homogeneous past. Another
immediate cause, perhaps, was the renewal of jihadist terrorism in
2015–16, with murderous attacks in Paris, Brussels, California,
and Florida. Those attacks, coupled with accelerated immigration
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from the Middle East, aggravated the sense many had of feckless
and unaccountable governing elites
In any case, rising political opposition to globalization in its
countries of origin bears watching. No doubt remedies are
available, and the rejiggering of political coalitions may yield
creativity. Still, liberal theory itself says that democracy is a social
contract; if enough individuals believe the contract has been
violated, they may revoke it and seek a new one. If a return to
Hitler’s Europe is highly unlikely, a return to Bismarck’s—with
more nationalism and attention to relative gains—is more
imaginable than it was in the 1990s.
8.3 THE FUTURE OF LIBERAL APPROACHES
What of the future of liberal scholarship about security? Liberalism
has made enormous contributions to the study of security by
treating institutions not as a mere consequence of cooperation,
but as causes of it. The literatures on democratic peace, economic
interdependence, and international institutions and cooperation fall
squarely in the liberal tradition: all argue that institutions are
consequential and imply that people and governments have real
choices.
The liberal paradigm has weaknesses. Like any rationalist
tradition, it has difficulty dealing with downward causation from
institutions; it cannot adopt constructivism’s holism. This means
that liberalism’s version of hegemony must be limited to such
phenomena as direct coercion and paying for international public
goods (such as keeping open global commons such as sea and
air routes and the Internet); liberalism shies away from what
Steven Lukes calls the second and third faces of power (the
power to set agendas and to mold others’ preferences) (Lukes
1974). It is prone to dismiss critiques of liberal hegemony from the
left and the right (Schmitt 2008).
Within its limits, however, liberal IR scholarship has much to
contribute over the coming years to the academic study of
security. An ongoing trend to complicate Kant’s simple dichotomy
by explicating distinctions among both liberal and nonliberal
institutions should continue. A descent from high theory reveals a
staggering variety of institutional complexes around the world.
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Some countries that formally qualify as liberal-democratic could
come up short in various ways, and others that might not qualify
as liberal-democratic could nonetheless exhibit some of the
properties associated with liberalism. Elman (2000) argues that
presidential and parliamentary democracies are different. Potter
and Baum (2015) argue that democracies with more opposition
parties tend to be more restrained from using force. Dafoe and
Weiss (2015) argue that non-democratic governments also incur
audience costs when they make threats; if so, then one putative
advantage of liberal democracies partly disappears. Narang and
Talmadge (2017) argue that civil–military relations differ across
both democracies and non-democracies, with consequences for
international security.
More important still, liberal approaches to security also ought to
focus more on explaining changes in institutions—domestic,
international, or both. First, liberal scholars should try to
endogenize the various types of event that can trigger institutional
change. Liberal internationalism is bound to create losers, and
those losers are bound to try to repay internationalism by ending
it. We can extend the endogeneity question to the tectonic global
power shift to China. After all, the CCP implemented its semi-
liberalizing reforms to make China a wealthy and secure country,
and succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Had China
remained mired in Maoism, it would be difficult to see the power
shift we are seeing and the resulting challenge to liberal
internationalism. Harrison and Mitchell (2013) argue that the
predominance of the West is under threat, but not liberal
internationalism itself; rather, rising powers will carry on the
system under which they rose.
Second, although most liberal scholars would recognize a
partial congruence between domestic and international institutions
—liberal democracies participate in more liberal international
institutions—we know too little about this congruence. What is it
about liberal states that render them a better fit for liberal
internationalism? By what mechanisms do liberal international
institutions strengthen democracy within countries? How do these
mechanisms break down? Although some institutional complexes,
such as the EU (European Union) and NATO (the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization), require that new members be liberal
democracies, the same clearly is not true of many other liberal
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international institutions. Most countries, including some
prominent non-democratic ones such as China, Russia, and Saudi
Arabia, are members of the WTO (World Trade Organization).
Greece and Turkey were members of NATO while going through
authoritarian periods during the Cold War (and in the 2010s
Turkey descended again into authoritarianism). Will the liberal
international complex of institutions pull China into political
reform? That has been the long-term hope of liberals, and South
Korea, Taiwan, and Chile were all authoritarian countries that
liberalized as they participated in the global economy. On the
other hand, will the CCP hang on to power and pull international
institutions in its direction?
Third, and related, liberal scholarship should explore more fully
and rigorously evolutionary logic to explain change and continuity.
Evolution lurks in the shadows of much work on institutions.
Although some liberal scholarship may tell a stylized story of
rational agents designing institutions to solve collective problems,
most scholarship in fact points to such mechanisms as
competition, learning, and copying. In other words, institutions
emerge and spread by an evolutionary process, in which the fittest
institutions survive and unfit ones die away. Agents scour the
world for information about which policies and institutions work
best and either copy those that do or, if they find “best practices”
threatening, build defenses against them. Some studies of
institutional and normative change are explicitly evolutionary
(Kahler 1995; Florini 1996). Tang (2013) argues that the world has
evolved from an offensive-realist to a defensive-realist one.
Evolutionary logic is more realistic than standard rationalism,
inasmuch as it assumes that agents’ rationality is bounded (Simon
1982). Agents have limited resources, including information,
cognitive ability, and time. Bounded rationality means that
institutions may be imperfectly copied, sub-optimal, and produce
unintended consequences. Thus evolution need not imply any
teleology or progress. Evolution also presumes political
competition within and among states, and hence eludes a
perennial realist charge of utopianism. It is the elites’ need for
security that drives them to look for information about which
institutions work best and to imitate success. Nor need
evolutionary logic imply that states are selected out of the
163
international system. States do die (Fazal 2011), but much more
typically they adapt; it is policies and institutions that die.
Finally, evolution does not necessarily exclude differences in
power and interest. In biology, evolutionary theory has come to
recognize the ability of agents to shape their environments and
thereby alter which phenotypes (traits) are selected for. Beavers
build dams to solve local problems (to increase food supply and
protect themselves from predators), but dams in turn select for
beavers who know how to build them. Organisms and
environment co-evolve (Lewontin 2001; Odling-Smee et al. 2003).
Just so, leaders of powerful states may shape their social and
material environments in ways that select for and against
particular institutions. The United States has co-evolved with the
international system by building liberal internationalism; China and
other rising powers may attempt to do the same.
An explicit and rigorous evolutionary approach would focus
scholars’ attention on mechanisms of change and help advance
our ability to address questions such as the effects of the rise of
China on liberal internationalism and vice versa; the sources and
regional consequences of Russia’s descent back into
authoritarianism; the effects of US relative decline on democracy
and liberal internationalism; and the persistence of
authoritarianism in the Middle East and its consequences for
security in the region. For liberals, these questions about the links
between domestic and international institutions are questions
about security—the security of the international community,
nations, and the individuals that compose them. Domestic and
international institutions clearly have evolved and will continue to
do so. So should liberal approaches to international security.
164
NOTES
1. One highly prominent account reduces liberal IR theory to the analytical priority of
domestically generated preferences over international structures and interaction
(Moravcsik 1997). Clearly such preferences are important to liberalism, but the
broad liberal tradition, traceable at least to Kant, stresses the centrality of
institutions within and among states.
2. The interwar debate between the realist Carl Schmitt and the liberal Harold Laski
continues to reward today’s reader. See Schmitt (2008).
3. Neta Crawford (2014) estimates that, as of 2014, the War on Terror cost the United
States $4.4 trillion (including wars and homeland security). Notwithstanding that
Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, those attacks clearly made the war
more likely; see e.g. Woodward (2004); Packer (2005).
4. For deeper treatments of this group see Murray (2012); Putnam (2015).
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