ABSTRACT
Whereas peaceful relations had characterized the nineteenth century more than
any previous one, at least in Europe itself, the twentieth was the century of ‘total
war’ when the full implications of peoples organized as nations with the power of
industry and technology bore their full fruit. Liberal thinking and practice had to
adapt themselves to a totally new situation and were forced into a sharp realiza-
tion that ‘progress’ was a double edged sword. The ‘proto-globalization’ or
‘interdependence’ fostered by Britain in the nineteenth century under its (largely)
benevolent dominance was to see itself unhinged by the First World War and
then re-adapted, first as the ‘West’ after 1945, and then as a doctrine of ‘spheres
of stability’ pitted against ‘rogue states’ in the post-Cold War period by an
increasingly powerful and ‘imperial’ United States. Many of the justifications for
such an expansion of its power can and could have been taken straight out of
Locke’s or Mill’s writing on war and peace outlined in the last chapter. There may
be ‘inconsistencies’, in Locke’s words, in the coercive nature of Anglo-American
liberalism for much of the twentieth-century, but it has the merit of self-belief.
Many (but by no means all) American leaders have claimed that they have a
morally superior claim to equate what is right for peace with what is right for the
United States, much as many leaders in Britain did before 1900. The ‘city on the
hill’ is now one that looks far wider from its shores than before 1914. The question
has to be whether this is hubris that will turn, as it did for Britain, into nemesis?
