Liberal Internationalism: Theory/History/Practice | Beate Jahn

‘Liberalism’ is famously difficult to define in politics around the world. In the United States, liberals are center-left, akin to social democrats in Germany. Similarly, in Sweden, the Liberal People’s Party supports social liberalism and has a strong ideological commitment to a mixed economy, with support for comprehensive but market-based welfare state programs. In Germany, liberals are nowadays thought to be center-right, and usually allies of the conservative party, even though they have worked with the social democrats in the past. In Brazil, the term ‘liberal’ is reserved for laissez-faire, right-wing libertarians. The term is so unpopular that political parties whose name included the term ‘liberal’ changed their name. When I decided to offer a post-graduate seminar called “The History of Liberal Internationalism”, a colleague suggested I change the name to “Liberal Internationalism and its Critics” to avoid running the risk of being called a liberal. International discussions about liberalism, in short, are bound to lead to confusion.

In the same way ‘Liberal internationalism’ is perhaps one of the most misunderstood theoretical strands in international relations. For some, it is best represented by liberal thinkers such as Harvard’s Michael Ignatieff, Princeton’s G. John Ikenberry and the New America Foundation’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, who see themselves as ‘Wilsonians’. Others -both in the United States and abroad- regard liberal internationalism as a dangerous school of thought which has provoked disasters such as the 2003 ‘missionary’ intervention in Iraq. Thinkers in the Global South tend to agree with the latter assessment. (The debate about whether Bush was a Wilsonian is best summarized in “The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the 21st Century”). At other times, the term is used more broadly to describe the application of liberal principles and practices to international politics, and sometimes simply the foreign policies of liberal states. Leia Mais