ABSTRACT

Underlying liberal internationalism – the projection of liberal thought and political principles to the international realm – is the assumption that one can apply reason to extend the possibilities for individual and collective self-rule, or freedom. Liberal internationalism emerged as a coherent worldview in the Enlightenment and reached its height as a systematic statement of international reform with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, intended to form the basis of the post-World War I peace. Liberals tended to believe that the outbreak of World War I had vindicated their critique of the prevailing system of International Relations (IR) and sought to establish a liberal peace marked by open diplomacy, the right of self-determination, free trade, disarmament, the peaceful settlement of disputes, and the establishment of an international security organization in the form of the League of Nations. The role of the League would be to resolve differences between states, guarantee their political independence and territorial integrity, and address a range of other contemporary international questions such as the position of labor and minorities. However, hopes for a reformed world, already badly damaged by the punitive Versailles Peace Treaty (1919), were shattered with the militarization and expansionism of Italy, Germany, and Japan in the 1930s, culminating in World War II. These events and the rapid onset of the Cold War after 1945 generated a number of influential realist critiques that were widely (if not necessarily fairly) perceived as devastating to liberal internationalism, both as an intellectual construct and as a guide to the practical conduct of IR. Since the 1980s, however, liberal internationalism has attracted renewed interest both on empirical and on normative grounds, and it may be that IR is moving toward a position in which it can provide a more satisfactory account of liberal internationalism’s legacy, potentialities, and limitations.