Millennium: Journal of International Studies

The American-led world system is troubled. Some would argue that it is in crisis. But what sort of crisis is it? Is it a crisis of America’s position in the global system or is it a deeper world historical transition in which liberalism and liberal international order are at risk? Is the American-led ‘liberal era’ ending, or is it transforming into a new sort of liberal order? In this article, I argue that the American liberal hegemonic order is in crisis. But it is a crisis of authority within liberal international order and not a crisis of its underlying principles and organisational logic. That is, it is a crisis of the American governance of liberal order and not of liberal order itself. The crisis of liberalism today will ultimately bring forth ‘more liberalism’. The post-Cold War liberal international order is more durable than many think. Russia and China are not inevitable enemies of Western international order. A grand alternative to liberal order does not exist. To put it sharply: the pathway to the future still runs through institutions and relationships created over the last 60 years. American unipolarity will eventually give way to something new. Power and authority will shift in the global system as they have over the centuries. But rival orders will not emerge — even if new leaders will. In the decades ahead, the United States and Europe and rising states — many of which are in Asia — will have more reasons and not fewer reasons to cooperate in open and rule-based ways. The future still belongs to the liberal international order.

E.H. Carr’s contribution to IR is recognised as being of central importance in the history of the field. But it is sometimes forgotten that he began to develop his world viewpoint — through a critique of liberalism — almost 20 years before he published his classic The Twenty Years’ Crisis in 1939. These views began to take shape during the Paris peace negotiations in 1919, and were then given sharper definition still following the world economic crash and the launching of the first of many Five Year Plans in the USSR. Carr’s thought continued to evolve while holder — ironically — of the liberal-inspired Woodrow Wilson Chair in Aberystwyth, a position he held until 1947. The onset of the Cold War and his decision to undertake a sympathetic study of early Soviet history strengthened the reputation he had already acquired as the enfant terrible of the British establishment. A few years after his death in 1982, however, communism and the USSR collapsed, dealing his anti-liberal perspective a serious political blow. However, new problems at the heart of the world order today make Carr a writer from whom much can still be learned about the causes of crisis and the limits of liberalism.

A persistent struggle within liberal thought is how to recognise cultural particularity within an ethical system in which toleration does not become indifference. The liberal internationalism espoused by leading US-based authors assumes a single logic of modernity, in which adherence to liberal rules and institutions is both necessary and inevitable. The article finds an echo of this view in earlier English School work on the expansion of international society, and subsequently teases out some lessons from recent revisionist accounts of how international society and its institutions were shaped by the multiplicity of their interactions. Historical and cultural encounters in international society show that liberal internationalists are mistaken in their belief that there is only one pathway to modernity and that re-rising powers, such as India, Russia and China will sustain the liberal order after American hegemonic decline.

Liberalism will survive this crisis, as it has many others, but it will have changed. The felt need to ensure the security of the economy, and the threats posed to the social order by individuals with potentially threatening capabilities, will require more and more surveillance of our everyday lives and more and more of our participation in those processes of ‘keeping an eye out’ for anonymous parcels, suspicious behaviours, provocative speech and dangerous thoughts. We will all be enlisted in the Army of Observation, free to choose but self-regulating in our choices. Everyone will watch everyone, and the new age of opto-liberalism will have dawned.

Taking Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry’s demand for a ‘more selfconscious and robust liberal statecraft’ as its point of departure, this article considers whether this demand can be realised in practice, given the apparent contradiction between a desire for a self-conscious Liberalism and a desire for a robust Liberalism. By weaving a path through the work of Deudney, Ikenberry and Kant, and through the film District 9, this article suggests that Liberalism and especially Liberal Internationalism 3.0 fail to provide an ethical basis that could supply a ‘non-negotiable demand of human [and “alien”] dignity’, which is what a more self-conscious Liberalism ought to strive for. This failure is down to the way Liberalism draws its limits on political subjectivity. It is these Liberal practices that we cannot be ‘after’ in a temporal sense so long as Liberalism carries on. And so we need to be ‘after Liberalism’ in a different sense of being after — of calling it to account by being aware ourselves of how the core principles of Liberalism are both beneficial and destructive in their crafting of all political subjectivities.

The objective of this article is to develop a novel distinction among four IR approaches and especially to highlight the approach which will be called here ‘offensive liberalism’. This four fold division is based not only on a distinction between realism and liberalism, but also on an internal division inside each camp between offensive and defensive approaches. Indeed, besides the distinction between offensive and defensive realism, there is also an overlooked parallel distinction between offensive and defensive liberalism. As I will show, this distinction goes deeper and has lasted much longer than the recent debate on the neoconservative agenda during the Bush presidency. While sharing the same liberal objectives, offensive and defensive liberals diverge sharply in the means they are willing to deploy to advance these objectives, especially the use of force to democratise non-democratic societies. I evaluate the advantages and the shortcomings of each approach as an avenue to fulfilling a durable world or regional peace and security. Each approach has some appeal but also major disadvantages. I will examine what the different perspectives suggest on the road to accomplishing security and peace. I will also briefly contrast the liberal and realist approaches with some constructivist ideas on peace. Finally, in order to clarify the differences among the four approaches, I apply their logic to a concrete issue, which led to major debates recently: democracy promotion and regime change by the leading superpower — the US. Thus, I open the discussion in this article by presenting the variations of ideal-type strategies towards regime change and conclude the article by linking these strategies and relevant examples to the approaches.

While realists and neoconservatives generally disagreed on the Iraq invasion of 2003, nothing inherent in either approach to foreign policy accounts for this. Neoconservatism’s enthusiasm for democratisation would appear to distinguish the two but its rejection of all other liberal mechanisms in world politics suggests that the logic linking democracy and American security shares little with liberalism. Inspecting the range of neoconservative thought reveals a unifying theme: the enervating effects of democracy on state power and the will to wield it in a dangerous world. Consequently, the United States enjoys greater safety among other democracies due to a more favourable distribution of relative power. Viewing regime type through the prism of state power extraction in a competitive, anarchic world puts neoconservatism squarely in the neoclassical realist camp. The article concludes by suggesting why the rest of International Relations should care about this new ‘neo—neo’ debate.

Liberal internationalism is the default setting for thinking about the development of international institutions since 1919. It provides the template for practitioners whose job it is to juggle contending norms of power and justice, rights and responsibilities. For complex reasons, proponents of liberalism believe that the default needs to be reset — their critics agree. Liberalism is in trouble because of the fragility of the inter-state order coupled to the challenge posed by rising, non-liberal powers. Closer to home, liberalism is in trouble because of a contestation over its specific liberal values. Contemporary liberal international theory understands this challenge in subtly different ways. For US-based internationalists, the crisis is one of authority; for English School internationalists, the problem with international order is that its institutions are ‘deformed’ because of a failure to legitimise power and institutions. Whether the crisis is on the legitimacy or authority side of the register, we argue that both internationalisms fail to adequately theorise world order in part because of their flawed characterisation of hierarchy and their related lack of attention to performances of social conventions.

Post-Cold War peacebuilding is increasingly conflated with the smooth functioning of a range of processes associated with democracy, governance, development and securitisation. However, critiques of these approaches tend to focus on their liberal-democratic norms and to ignore their underlying processual logics. This article problematises two facets of process with regard to peacebuilding: its postulation as a basis for peace grounded in everyday human activity and its construction of violence as anti-process. Its goal is to present the critique of process as a means for understanding the complex relationship between international and local actors in the context of peacebuilding, thus enriching the ‘liberal peace’ debate. Drawing on normative political theory, including that of Arendt and Deleuze and Guattari, the article demonstrates how the problems raised by these two issues can help to explain a range of concerns associated with contemporary peacebuilding and provide starting points for imagining forms of peace that are not so reliant upon processual logics or opposed to those acts which disrupt them, which may in fact be attempts to realise radically different versions of peace. In so doing, it extends and enriches the perspectives offered by existing ‘liberal peace’ critiques.

This article discusses what an IR and peacebuilding praxis derived from the ‘everyday’ might entail. It examines the insights of a number of literatures which contribute to a discussion of the dynamics of the everyday. The enervation of agency and the repoliticisation of peacebuilding is its objective. It charts how local agency has led to resistance and hybrid forms of peace despite the overwhelming weight of the liberal peace project. In some aspects this may be complementary to the latter and commensurate with the liberal state, but in other aspects the everyday points beyond the liberal peace.

The leaders of the neoliberal world order are now intensifying their interventions by unleashing force with impunity while slaughtering people in the name of liberal internationalism’s peace, freedom, democracy and security. Their calls, interventions of imperial violence, push us to ask: how do we disrupt these dominant processes guided by ontological antagonisms and existential wars whose ultimate goal becomes ‘bringing life back’? In this article, I draw on Foucault’s biopolitics and articulate beyond his theorisations that imperial processes such as liberal internationalisms, neoliberal entrepreneurships and neoconservative politics are intimately converging and diverging in the reassembling and reconstructing of international life. More concretely, an analysis of the CPA planners and forces in Iraq points to those processes and terrains of antagonism that are foundational to the reassembling and reconstructing of this order: the direct use of force and the racial and gendered corporeal reconstructions (i.e. which bodies are deemed structurally impossible and ontologically dead) to engineer this universal/global order.

This article pursues two trajectories of investigation: one which explores how the construct of autonomy shorn of its liberal sovereign inheritances could serve as a resource for creative enactments of ‘the political’; and the other, which takes up the problematic aspects of the absence of the body in current International Relations scholarship. It will be argued that a relational version of autonomy is what enables and sustains the shift from an ethic centred on liberal atomistic selves to an ethics of engagement between self and other. Engagement, however, involves bodily enactments and, pace Shapiro, the willingness to be afflicted by the performance of the other. Thus the crucial aspect of the body that we must consider is how we might begin to theorise the body as a surface for the resistance of sovereign power that not only operates to individuate and separate but to render docile and disciplined. In the global war on terror, sovereign power’s exercise has reached its most abstract levels yet, as bodies are disappeared within increasingly technologised and biologised forms of war. Abstraction is the key technique that sovereign power wields over fleshy, material bodies and it is our responsibility to stop empowering sovereign power by driving the discourse into ever more abstract lines of argumentation while losing site of the primary resource we wield in this struggle, the creative and relationally autonomous body.

Taking liberalism as a technology of government characterised by its signature impulse — what Michel Foucault called ‘the internal rule of maximum economy’ — the article interrogates the ways in which human rights produce a distinct subjectivity, homo juridicus, which is a subject amenable to self-government and, as such, acts as a partner, indeed a predicate, to neoliberal governmentality. Taking its impetus from Foucault’s discussion of homo oeconomicus , the article traces human rights’ relations of subjectification, that is, the ways in which human rights call homo juridicus into being as a distinct type of subjectivity that, in parallel to homo oeconomicus, makes possible the contraction of the state and its governmentalisation. The article calls such subjectification liberal ‘ontogenesis’ and argues that it takes four distinct but related forms: rhetorical, epistemic, performative and structural ontogenesis. It provides an illustration of how each of these forms of ontogenesis produce, and produce globally — through their discourses, knowledge production, law-making and restructuring of the ‘conditions of freedom’ — a necessary subject for neoliberalism. The article thereby shows that human rights assist in the evolution of government as the conduct of conduct, and irrevocably recast the very meaning of freedom and the possibilities for agonism.

The link between republicanism and international relations theory is far from obvious. Among the many schools of contemporary theories of international relations there is not one that makes any explicit reference to republicanism. However, during the Enlightenment ‘republicanism’ emerged as a theory of liberty that offered an alternative and opposing set of ideas to the domination of absolute monarchy. It provided insights on preserving freedom within the state but it also, and this is less well known, offered a different way of thinking about interstate relations. The ambition of this article is not to elaborate a contemporary republican theory of international relations, but to expand the vocabulary of the current trend of republicanism in international political theory by bringing to light part of the considerable contribution of classical republicanism to the fundamental questions of international politics. To do so, the focus will be on the international dimension of the political thought of Montesquieu.

Has the global credit crunch shifted the foundations of global financial architecture away from the philosophy of ‘neoliberalism’? In this article, we argue that the neoliberal project is most probably dead and buried, despite the apparent commitment, which we detail in this article, to the spirit of neoliberal thinking in economic thought. By analysing three constitutive elements of neoliberalism (its public, private and regulatory components) before and after the credit crunch, we reveal important geopolitical shifts which are likely to prevent a return to ‘business as usual’ in the world of finance. We find that the defining trend among these changes is the global rise of the Eurozone. Specifically, we argue that the ideal, Anglo-Saxon model of neoliberalism was viable because it was heavily subsidised from around the world. Accordingly, the key to the future of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism lies with the willingness of European, East Asian and Middle Eastern creditors to continue extending their financial support to the Anglo-Saxon model of finance. We believe that they are unlikely to do so in the future. Spurred by the magnitude of the credit crunch, the rise of Europe is progressively weakening each of the three dimensions of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism we identify in this article.