From the Turmoil of International Anarchy to the Calm of the Liberal Peace

  • Eric S. Easley
Part of the The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series book series (PMHIT)

Abstract

Complementing the principal explanation for patterns developed in chapter 8 is a subsidiary explanation that reflects on the steady increase in the number of liberal states in the western hemisphere over the past one hundred and fifty-five years and the affect of this evolving historico-political phenomenon on the minds of interpreters at work during this time period and in this geographical space.

Keywords

Liberal State Definitive Article North Atlantic Treaty Organization Liberal Regime Interwar Period 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 119–23 cited inCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. Wade L. Huntley, “Kant’s Third Image: Systemic Sources of the Liberal Peace,” International Studies Quarterly, 40 (1996), p. 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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  5. 4.
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  10. 8.
    Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12 (1983), pp. 209–12.Google Scholar
  11. 9.
    Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” p. 212. Importantly, I use the terms “liberal” or “illiberal” and Doyle’s terms “liberal regime(s)/state(s)/republic(s)” or “non-liberal regime(s)/state(s)” throughout this chapter. The terms “ ‘republican,’ representative government(s)” or “non-republican, unrepresentative government(s)” are also used and are a subcategory of Doyle’s terms “liberal regime(s)/state(s)/republic(s)” or “non-liberal regime(s)/state(s),” respectively. According to Doyle’s adopted terminology and definition here, a “liberal regime [or state]” necessarily has “republican, representative government.” The key is to avoid use of the terms “democratic” or “democracy” (unless it is understood to be “representative democracy” as in the Freedom House survey later) in discussion of Perpetual Peace. Kant was clearly against the establishment of pure “democracy” since it was not “representative.” In Perpetual Peace, he states, “Of the three forms of sovereignty [autocracy, aristocracy and democracy], democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and indeed against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people; and this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself, and thus also with freedom.” Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 101 (emphasis in original). This is a further reason why I choose the phrase “liberal peace” over the more widely used phrase “democratic peace” throughout this chapter and the book as a whole. Many scholars do, however, use the latter phrase throughout their studies and articles on the subject.Google Scholar
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    John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 51.Google Scholar
  14. 45.
    Doyle notes the following important point from Melvin Small and J. David Singer’s influential work Resort to Arms: “Significantly, the most war-affected states have not been liberal republics.” Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982), pp. 176–79 cited in Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” p. 228.Google Scholar
  15. 48.
    A.C.F. Beales, The History of Peace: A Short History of the Organized Movements for International Peace (New York: The Dial Press, 1931), p. 36.Google Scholar
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    Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Eric S. Easley 2004

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  • Eric S. Easley

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