College of Law and Governance

School of Governance and Development Studies

Liberalism

BY: Endale Tsegaye

Dec. 2021
 Presentation Outlines

 Introduction

 Liberalism and International Relations

 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR

 Liberalism in IR after the Cold War

 War, democracy and free trade

 Prospects for peace

 Liberalism and globalization

 Conclusion

 
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 Introduction
 Liberalism is philosophical products of the European
Enlightenment
 Enlightenment

 is the great 'Age of Reason‘

 is the period of rigorous scientific, political and philosophical

discourse
 Enlightenment characterized European society from the late 17th
century to the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815

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 Liberalism has had a profound impact on the shape of all modern
industrial societies.
 Basic Liberal Values
 limited government

 scientific rationality

 believing individuals should be free from arbitrary state power,

persecution and superstition

 advocate political freedom, democracy and constitutionally

guaranteed rights
 liberty of the individual and equality before the law
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 Basic Liberal Values
 All individuals are juridically equal and posses basic rights to

education, access to a free press, and religious toleration.

 State posseses only the authority given by the people

 All individuals have the right to own property

 Most effective economic exchange system is market economy.

 Human nature is essentially "good”

 The fundamental human concern for others' welfare makes progress possible

 Sinful or wicked human behavior such as violence is not the product of

human nature but of evil institutions

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 Liberalism and International Relations
 From a liberal perspective, international relations

 is not only about state-state relations

 it is about transnational relations that means relations between people,

groups and organizations from different countries

 Liberals focus on

 norms, regimes, economic interdependence

 international organisations

 For realist IR is about politics between states

 Realists often define themselves as students of international politics/

interstate politics, not international relations.

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 Liberalism and International Relations

 Liberals make no distinction between

 ‘high’ politics (high-level relations between states) and

 ‘low’ politics (internal economic, cultural or social issues)

 According to liberals, issues of

 terrorism

 drug trafficking

 human rights

 environment, technology and financece are as important as security

issues

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 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR
 For realist: States are the most important actors in international politics

First Assumption
 States are not the only important actors in world politics

 Non-state actors are important entities in IR that cannot be ignored.

 International Organizations (IOs) can be independent actors in their own right.

 The organization’s decision makers and bureaucrats have considerable

influence in agenda setting, namely determining which issues are most
important politically.
 Multinational Corporations like General Motors, Microsoft, Toyota Motor, Ford

Motor or Phillips cannot be ignored in a highly interdependent world economy.

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 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR
Second Assumption
 For liberals, the state is not a unitary actor

 State is composed of individual bureaucracies, interest groups, and

individuals that attempt to influence foreign policy.
 Liberals break the state into various components and they reject the notion
of the state as an integrated entity.
 domestic actors influence how states define their foreign policy interests

 For liberals such an interaction not only happens within the state but
across national borders, so it has a transnational dimension.

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 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR
Third Assumption
 states may not be rational actors

 A particular policy may be suggested just because it serves bureaucratic

power or prestige of certain groups.
 Moreover, misperception of decision makers as a result of incomplete
information, bias, and uncertainty is also a key focus of attention for
liberal scholars.

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 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR
 For realist: International politics is a competitive struggle for power

Fourth Assumption
 Liberals reject the idea that the agenda of international politics is
dominated primarily by military-security issues.
 For liberals the agenda of international politics is extensive and diversified
and economic and social issues are often at the forefront of foreign policy
debates.
 For liberals, the problems of energy, natural resources, environment,
pollution are as important as questions of security and territorial
competition.

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 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR
According to realists several features which are present in a domestic political

order are absent from international politics. For example:

 there is no world government and no international police force

realists believe that international organizations such as the UN are not effective

and international law is weak.

 This is because existing international law reflects the interests of the most

powerful states in the system. Also, if a state is powerful, it can simply ignore

international law if it chooses to do so.

Thus, for realists, the world is an anarchy.

Anarchy is a Greek word which means ‘absence of government’, or ‘absence of

authority’. (It does not mean chaos).
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 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR

Realist assume that states have effective police forces and legal systems.

domestic
 politics, is a domain of peace, order, and safety.


Thus, for realist domestic politics are different from international politics.

Fifth Assumption


For liberals there are important linkages between domestic structures and processes

and international politics.

Liberalism
 is inside looking out theory


The international system is not completely anarchic


Some domains of international relations are characterized by “international regimes”.
So, cooperation
 between states can be achieved.

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 Liberalism: Key Assumptions in IR

 According to liberals, application of reason and universal ethics to

international relations
 can lead to a more orderly, just, and cooperative world, and that
international anarchy and war can be policed by institutional
reforms that empower international organizations and laws

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 Liberalism in IR after the Cold War
 The fall of Soviet Communism at the beginning of the 1990s enhanced
the influence of liberal theories of international relations.
 Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political
scientist, political economist, and writer
 He wrote book of political philosophy “The End of History and the Last
Man” is a 1992

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 Liberalism in IR after the Cold War

 Fukuyama built his theory based the philosophies and ideologies of

Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear
progression, from one socioeconomic period to another.

 primitive community → slave-based society → feudal society →

capitalist society → communist society

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 Liberalism in IR after the Cold War
 For Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War represented

 the success of ‘liberal capitalism’, which ‘cannot be further

improved’
 and there can be ‘no further progress in the development of

underlying principles and institutions’

 According to Fukuyama

 the end of the East–West conflict confirmed that liberal capitalism

was unchallenged as a model of political economy

 liberal capitalism is the endpoint for, humankind’s political and

economic development.

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 Liberalism in IR after the Cold War

 Fukuyama sees history as progressive, linear and ‘directional’, and is

 Fukuyama says ‘there is a fundamental process at work that dictates a

common evolutionary pattern for all human societies – in short,
something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of
liberal democracy’
 liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations

 Fukuyama’s argument has been strengthened by recent transitions to

democracy in Africa, East Asia and Latin America.

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 Liberalism in IR after the Cold War
 Fukuyama believes that progress in human history can be measured by

 the elimination of global conflict and the adoption of principles of

legitimacy that have evolved over time in domestic political orders.

 Fukuyama believes’ constitutes an ‘inside-out’ approach to international
relations
 the behavior of states can be explained by examining their endogenous

arrangements
 liberal-democratic principles provide the best prospect for a peaceful world
order because
 ‘a world made up of liberal democracies … should have much less

incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one
another’s legitimacy’ 19
 War, democracy and free trade
 Liberals proposes preconditions for a peaceful world order
 Preconditions
 the prospects for the elimination of war is much related with a
preference for democracy over aristocracy and free trade over autarky
 autarky, an economic system of self-sufficiency and limited trade

Prospects for peace

 For liberals, peace is the normal state of affairs: in Kant’s words, peace can
be perpetual.
 The laws of nature dictated harmony and cooperation between peoples.

 War is therefore both unnatural and irrational, an artificial set-up and not a
product of some peculiarity of human nature.

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 Prospects for peace

 Liberals have a belief in progress and the perfectibility of the human

condition.
 Based on their faith in the power of human reason and the capacity of
human beings to realize their inner potential, liberals remain confident that
the mark of war can be removed from human experience
 Writing from Rousseau, Kant to Schumpeter reveals that wars were
created by militaristic and undemocratic governments for their own vested
interests.
 Wars were engineered by a ‘warrior class’ bent on extending their power
and wealth through territorial conquest

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 Prospects for peace

 According to Paine in The Rights of Man, the ‘war system’ was created to
preserve the power and the employment of princes, statesmen, soldiers,
diplomats and armaments manufacturers, and to bind their tyranny more
firmly upon the necks of the people’

 Wars provide governments with excuses to raise taxes, expand their

bureaucratic apparatus and increase their control over their citizens.

 The people, on the other hand, were peace-loving by nature, and forced
into conflict only by the desire of their unrepresentative rulers.
 Ex: Conflict in Northern Ethiopia

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 Prospects for peace

 War was a cancer on the body politic. But it was an disease that human
beings, themselves, had the capacity to cure.
 The treatment which liberals began prescribing in the eighteenth century
had not changed:
 the ‘disease’ of war could be successfully treated with the twin

medicines of democracy and free trade.

 Democratic processes and institutions would break the power of the ruling
elites and limit their propensity for violence.
 Free trade and commerce would overcome the artificial barriers between
individuals and unite them everywhere into one community.

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 Prospects for peace

 For liberals such as Schumpeter, war was the product of the aggressive
instincts of unrepresentative elites.
 The warlike character of rulers drove the reluctant masses into violent
conflicts which, while profitable for the arms industries and the military
aristocrats, were disastrous for those who did the fighting.

 For Kant, the establishment of republican forms of government in which

rulers were accountable and individual rights were respected would lead to
peaceful international relations because the ultimate consent for war would
rest with the citizens of the state.

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 Prospects for peace

 For both Kant and Schumpeter, war was the outcome of minority rule

 Liberal states, founded on individual rights such as equality before the law,
free speech and civil liberty, respect for private property and representative
government, would not have the same appetite for conflict and war.
 Peace was fundamentally a question of establishing legitimate domestic
orders throughout the world.
 ‘When the citizens who bear the burdens of war elect their governments,
wars become impossible’
 This does not mean that liberals are less inclined to make war with non-
democratic states.

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 Prospects for peace
 Liberal democrats maintain a healthy appetite for conflicts with
authoritarian states, as recent conflicts in the Middle East attest to.
 liberal societies are ‘less likely to engage in war with non-liberal outlaw
states, except on grounds of legitimate self-defense (or in the defense of
their legitimate allies), or intervention in severe cases to protect human
rights’
 the best prospect for bringing an end to war between states lies with the
spread of liberal-democratic governments across the globe.

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 Liberalism and globalization

 Globalization is the growing interdependence of the world's economies,

cultures, and politics, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and
services, technology, and flows of investment, labor, and information
 To a significant extent, the globalization of the world economy coincided
with a renaissance of neo-liberal thinking in the Western world.
 The political success of the ‘New Right’ in Britain and the United States in
particular during the late 1970s and 1980s was achieved at the expense of
Keynesianism, the first coherent philosophy of state intervention in
economic life.

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 Liberalism and globalization
 According to the Keynesian formula, the state intervened in the economy

 to smooth out the business cycle

 provide a degree of social equity and security

 and maintain full employment.

 Neo-liberals, who had always favoured the free play of ‘market forces’ and
a minimal role for the state in economic life, wanted to ‘roll back’ the
welfare state, in the process challenging the social-democratic consensus
established in most Western states during the post-war period.

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 Conclusion
 liberalism is an ‘inside-out’ approach to international relations, because
liberals favour a world in which the endogenous determines the
exogenous.
 liberals challenge is to extend the legitimacy of domestic political
arrangements found within democratic states to the relationships between
all nation states/international relations
 liberals believe that democratic society, in which civil liberties are
protected and market relations prevail, can have an international analogue
in the form of a peaceful global order.

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 Conclusion
 The globalization of the world economy means that there are few obstacles
to international trade
 Liberals want to remove the influence of the state in commercial relations
between businesses and individuals, and the decline of national economic
sovereignty is an indication that the corrupting influence of the state is
rapidly diminishing.
 TNCs and capital markets exerted significant influence over the shape of
the world economy, in the process homogenizing the political economies
of every member state of the international community.

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THANK YOU!

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