Liberal Internationalism at the Crossroads of Empire and Westphalia

• In Event: Explaining US Intervention and Restraint after the Cold War

Abstract

Across the 20th century, the United States, Britain, and other Western states made efforts to build international order around global institutions. The League of Nations, the United Nations, Bretton Woods, and many other institutions stand as monuments to these repeated efforts to reorganize the world after the world wars. How should we make sense of these postwar order-building projects? Are they best seen as manifestations of Western empire, as “late-imperial” or “neo-imperial” projects, or do they, in fact, reflect a break with the European imperial formations of the past? Those who view liberal internationalism as an anti-imperialist project argue that its expansion subverted imperial rule and facilitated the expansion of international society through the integration of former colonies into an open and rule-based international order. Others counter that liberal internationalism was merely a new ideational and institutional facade behind which the old European world of empire was brought forward into the 20th century.

In this paper, we offer an alternative way of thinking about empire, liberal internationalism, and the 20th century struggles for order. We argue that the relationship between empire and liberal internationalism is analytically contingent and historically spanned periods of both constructive engagement (interwar and early Cold War years) and destructive antinomy (decolonization years). Analytically, liberal internationalism does not implicate empire: it is an ensemble of ideas about how liberal democracies could organize their relationships. In a world of rising economic and security interdependence, new forms of political integration and institutional cooperation were necessary to ensure a stable and peaceful international order. As a matter of historical fact, however, this liberal internationalist vision was built on a complex and shifting foundation of empire and Westphalian nation-states. It accommodated itself to both the world of empire and the world of nation-states and, in this sense, had one foot in each of these two worlds.

In particular, we show that the liberal internationalist project began life as a hybrid institutional form that intimately wedded imperial and Westphalian logics, bringing nation-states, imperial metropoles, and colonial peripheries into a single internationalist framework. That hybrid form, which we shall call imperial internationalism, was neither a blanket affirmation nor an unproblematic sublimation of empire. It was the product of strategic bargaining between the custodians of the fractured world of European empires, desperate to reinvent and bolster imperial rule against amplifying disintegrative pressures, and their opponents in the colonial periphery and the United States, eager to forge a unified world beyond the reach of imperialism. In effect, empires put themselves at the mercy of multilateral institutions because they could not have survived otherwise; but such control also opened the door to a graduated dissolution of their imperial domains – in the measure that empire’s opponents proved adroit at exploiting the new instruments of diffuse control. The geopolitical rivalry between the British Empire and United States was a determining factor bearing on the viability of the compromise of imperial internationalism. On the one hand, the continued viability of the British Empire was the indispensable ingredient in London’s ability to make good on its claim to global preponderance; on the other hand, the United States could only realize its rival claim to global preponderance in a unified world unbounded by imperialist cordons. Decolonization marked the final dissolution of imperial internationalism, as empires lost control over liberal internationalism to their subaltern and geostrategic challengers who, in turn, transformed it into an unreservedly Westphalian and anti-imperialist project, offering ideas about a post-imperial global system organized around the sovereign state-system, inter-governmentalism, and the management of complex interdependence.

Authors

• G. John Ikenberry, Princeton University

• Anatoly Levshin, Princeton University