Klasični liberalizam

Sir Ralph Norman Angell (26 December 1872 – 7 October 1967)

The Great Illusion is a book by Norman Angell, first published in Britain in 1909 under the title Europe's Optical Illusion and republished in 1910 and subsequently in various enlarged and revised editions under the title The Great Illusion.

Angell was one of the principal founders of the Union of Democratic Control. He served on the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, was an executive for the World Committee against War and Fascism, a member of the executive committee of the League of Nations Union, and the president of the Abyssinia Association. He was knighted in 1931 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933.

However, the book was updated and a new edition was published in 1933. In this version, Angell changed his initial argument slightly, he no longer proposed that economics would stop a war, or prevent its happening, but instead challenged that waging a war for economic reasons was a futile struggle, that a nation cannot enrich itself by a conquest of its neighbors. This new thesis earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933, and the economic state of Europe in the interwar era, as well as the Post War era, seemed to bring a new validity to his work

What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German ? Each nation pleads the need for defence; but this implies that someone is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbors may obey?

They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others.... It is assumed that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage in the last resort goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker goes to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.

The author challenges this whole doctrine. He attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation's political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another -- to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which people strive....

Wealth in economic World is founded upon credit and commercial contract (these being the outgrowth of an economic interdependence due to the increasing division of labor and greatly developed communication). If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not so be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property in which case it becomes economically futile.

Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.

The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other states, not between the public powers of rival States.

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.

The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element. The diminishing role of physical force in all spheres of human activity carries with it profound psychological modifications.

These tendencies, mainly the outcome of purely modern conditions (e.g. rapidity of communication) have rendered the problems of modern international politics profoundly and essentially different from the ancient; yet our ideas still dominated by the principles and axioms, images and terminology of the bygone days.

The author urges that these little-recognized facts may be utilized for the solution of the armament difficulty on at present untried lines – by such a modification of opinion in Europe that much of the present motive to aggression will cease to be operative, and by thus diminishing the risk of attack, diminishing to the same extent the need for defense. He shows how such a political reformation is within the scope of practical politics, and the methods which should be employed to bring it about.

Are we, in blind obedience to primitive instincts and old prejudices, enslaved by the old catchwords and that curious indolence which makes the revision of old ideas unpleasant, to duplicate indefinitely on the political and economic side a condition from which we have liberated ourselves on the religious side?

Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom -- spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure -- to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity, to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed a nd the constant defeat of all those aims which men, in their sober hours, know to be alone worthy of sustained endeavor?

Paradise is a BazaarGeoffrey Blainey

The mystery of why the nineteenth century enjoyed unusually long eras of peace did not puzzle some powerful minds. They believed that the intellectual and commercial progress were soothing those human misunderstandings and grievances with which had caused many earlier wars.The followers of this theory were usually democrats with an optimistic view of human nature. Thought they had emerged earlier in France than in England they become most influential in the English-speaking World and their spiritual home was perhaps the industrial city of Manchester which exported cotton goods and the philosophy of free trade to the every corner of the globe.

Manchester’s disciples believed that paradise was an international bazaar.

They favored the international flow of goods and ideas and the creation of institutions that channeled that flow and the abolition of institutions that blocked it. Nations, they argued now grew richer through commerce than through conquest. Their welfare was now enhanced by rational discussion rather than by threats. The fortresses of Peace were those institutions and inventions which promoted the exchange of ideas and commodities: parliaments, international conferences, the popular press, compulsory education, the public reading room, the penny postage stamp, railways, submarine telegraphs, three funnelled ocean liners, and the Manchester cotton exchange.

The Long Peace that followed the Battle of Waterloo was increasingly explained as the result of the international flow of commodities and ideas.

Richard Cobden, Robert Peel, William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, England with support of England’s Prince Consort, Albert the Good.

His sponsorship of the Great Exhibition in the new Crystal Palace in London in 1851 popularised the idea that a festival of peace abd trade fair were synonymous. The Crystal Palace was perhaps the world’s first peace festival.

The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square feet (92,000 m2) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m).

After the exhibition, the building was moved to a new park in a high, healthy and wealthy area of London called Sydenham Hill, an area not much changed today from the well-heeled suburb full of large villas that it was during its Victorian heyday. The Crystal Palace was enlarged and stood in the area from 1854 to 1936, when it was destroyed by fire. It attracted many thousands of visitors from all levels of society. The name Crystal Palace (the satirical magazine Punch usually gets the credit for coining the phrase) was later used to denote this area of south London and the park that surrounds the site, home of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre.

In that Palace of glass and iron the locomotives and telegraphic equipment were admired not only as mechanical wonders: they were also messengers of peace and instruments of unity.

The telegraph cable laid across the English Channel in 1850 had been welcomed as an underwater cord of friendship. The splicing of the cable that snaked beneath the Atlantic in 1858 was another celebration of brotherhood, and the first message tapped across the seabed was a proclamation of peace: Europe and America are united by telegraphic communication. Glory to God in the Highest, on Earth peace, Goodwill towards men”.

The first official telegram to pass between two continents was a letter of congratulation from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom to the President of the United States James Buchanan on August 16.

Henry Thomas Buckle (Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821 – 29 May 1862

an English historian, author of a History of Civilization.

One of the many influential prophets of the idea that telegraphs and railways and steamships were powerfully promoting peace.

The first volume of the History of Civilisation in England appeared in 1857, the second volume in 1861 and they were devoured by thousands of English readers, published in French, Spanish, German, Hungarian and Hebrew editions and translated four timesd into Russian.

One of Buckle’s themes was the decline of warlike spirit in western Europe. As a freethinker he attributed that decline not to moral influences but to the progress of knowledge and intellectual activity.

Just as commerce now linked nations, so the steamship and railway now linked peoples: the greater the contact, the greater the respect.

Buckle thought foreign travel was the greatest of all educations as well as a spur of peace.

He believed that the enlightened public opinion was coming mainly from the expansion of free commerce, the railways and steamship, an the study of modern languages. Henry Thomas Buckle would have sympathized with the emphasis on modern languages: he spoke nineteen.

Kenet N. Wolc, Čovek, država i rat

Međunarodni odnosi: gledišta liberala

Ne verujem da će nacije na zemlji imati mogućnost moralnog napredovanja u svojim unutrašnjim poslovima do najvišeg stupnja do kojega bismo mi želeli, sve dok su međunarodni odosi u svetu postavljeni na drugačiju osnovu. Postoječi sistem kvari društvo, iscrpljuje njegovo bogatstvo, uzdiže lažne bogove kroz obožavanje heroja i postavlja pred nove generacije podsticajne i blistave standarde slave. Zbog toga što verujem da je princip Slobodne trgovine stvoren da bi promenio odnose u svetu na bolje, u moralnom smislu, zahvaljujem Bogu što mi je bilo dopušteno da značajno učestvujem u njegovom zagovaranju. Pa ipak, nemojmo biti potišteni. Ako možemo saluvati svet od rata, a ja verujem da će to Trgovina učiniti, veliki impuls će odsad biti dat društveni reformama. Javno mnjenje je praktično raspoloženo, i sad će se svim silama baciti na Obrazovanje, Umerenost, Reformu kriminala, Zdravstvenu zaštitu i tako dalje s većim žarom nego ikada.

Ričard Kobden, 1853.

Michael W. Doyle

Doyle faults liberal regimes for “imprudent vehemence” (a term borrowed from Hume) in foreign policy, which is characterized by “confusion, costly crusades, spasmodic imperialism” resulting in “a failure to negotiate with the powerful and create stable clients among the weak” (324). This failure is caused by the fact that “the very constitutional restraint” and concern for individual rights that works so well within liberal societies “can exacerbate conflicts in relations between liberal and non-liberal regimes” (325). This is because according to liberal principles, non-liberal regimes—which do not respect the individual rights of their citizens—are illegitimate. This leads to “an extreme lack of public respect and trust” on the part of liberal regimes towards non-liberal states.

In addition liberal regimes assume that non-liberal regimes (particularly communist regimes) “do not respect the political independence and territorial integrity of other states.” This lack of trust in turn leads to less than optimal rational, realist behavior. For instance, as a result of mistrust liberal regimes will refuse to cooperate with non-liberal (communist) regimes even when it would be in their best interest (e.g. arms reduction treaties).

1. Imprudent Vehemence

Declining or less powerful liberal states (think, Britain, Japan, Netherlands) on the other hand, are reluctant to fund the military establishment necessary to play a role in global politics. And more worrying from a Realist perspective, liberal regimes fail to sufficiently support their strategic allies who happen to be authoritarian or oppressive (South Africa, Somoza’s Nicaragua) out of concern for human rights abuses; or to engage in détente with potential allies (Cuba, Angola) who are non-liberal.

2. “Careless and supine complaisance”

According to liberal principles [or really utilitarian principles], rich countries have an obligation to ameliorate the suffering of those less well off. But liberal regimes have not acted in accordance with this principle, and have not instituted any serious mechanism for the transfer of wealth to poorer nations and peoples. Difficulty arises particularly over the issue of whether the money should be redistributed directly to the citizens of poor nations or to their governments.

Doyle recognizes that public acceptance of the obligation of rich countries to transfer wealth to poorer countries is unlikely, but argues that it remains an obligation of liberal states nonetheless.

3. Income distribution to the world’s poor

Kant argued in 795 that “the natural evolution of world politics and economics would drive mankind inexorably toward peace by means of a widening of the pacific union of liberal republican states.” This would occur through two mechanisms.

One, societies would be driven into forming liberal republics from the pressures of external and internal war.

And two, republics would create commercial ties of mutual advantage that would cause them to be pacific towards each other. Eventually, once the entire world consisted of such pacific, liberal regimes, mankind would attain perpetual peace.

Kant

Doyle takes the two different scenarios for the growth of liberal regimes (transnational—ties of commercialism; international:pressures of war creating more liberal regimes) and extrapolates from historical data to predict when we will attain perpetual peace. For the transnational model he predicts the year 2101. For the international model, 2113.

America’s LiberalIlliberalism: The Ideological Origins

of Overreactionin U.S. Foreign Policy

Michael C. Desch

Why has the United States, with its long-standing Liberal tradition, come to embrace the illiberal policies it has in recent years? Abroad, the United States has pursued a strategy of hegemony, verging on empire, and almost unilaterally launched a preventive war in Iraq in a fashion inconsistent with its Liberal values. At home, policies such as those flowing from the USA Patriot Act, including even the rendition and torture of terror suspects, have called into question the U.S. commitment to other important tenets of Liberalism, such as respect for individual rights and civil liberties

I argue that it is precisely American Liberalism that makes the United States so illiberal today. Under certain circumstances, Liberalism impels Americans to spread their values around the world and leads them to see the war on terrorism as a particularly deadly type of conflict that can be won only by employing illiberal tactics. What makes the war on terrorism so dangerous, in this view, is not so much the physical threat to the United States, but rather the existential threat to the American way of life and the uncivilized means adversaries employ in seeking to destroy it. Were it not for this Liberal tradition, the United States would view the threat from global terrorism in a less alarmist light (more akin to a chronic crime problem than to World War IV) and would adopt more restrained policies in response (i.e., containment rather than global transformation).

Because the Liberal tradition is a constant feature of politics in the United States, it cannot, by itself, explain changes in U.S. policy, particularly why Liberalism has not consistently affected all aspects of U.S. foreign or domestic policies. The two best applications of Louis Hartz’s argument that American Liberalism contains the seeds of illiberal behavior—Samuel Huntington’s Htheory of U.S. civil-military relations and Robert Packenham’s account of the politics of the United States’ development strategy in the third world—concede that the effect of the Liberal tradition is mediated by other variables.

Kant’s objective was to establish a system of perpetual peace that ended war without the need for an overarching world government. For such a system to function effectively, all countries would need the same republican domestic political

order. Kant’s “first definitive article of perpetual peace” states that “the civil constitution of every nation should be republican.” He reasoned that political systems in which individuals who are likely to bear the direct costs of

wars also have a say in whether it is waged are less likely to engage in them. KennethWaltz describes Kant’s solution as “the ‘power’ to enforce law [, which] is . . . derived not from external sanction but from internal perfection.”

Subsequent Liberals, according to Leo Strauss, learned from Kant “that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country or in only a few countries is not possible in the long run: to make the world safe for Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. Good order in one country presupposes good order in all countries and among all countries.

Kant’s imperative to remake the world order is evident in the work of Liberalism’s greatest twentieth-century exponent—John Rawls—who justifies the spread of Liberalism not only for defensive reasons, but also because of the politically obligatory nature of Liberal tenets. Building on Kant, Rawls posits that Liberal states are obliged “to leave the state of nature and to submit [them]selves along with others to the rule of a reasonable and a just law.”

Liberal societies may even employ military force to achieve this end.

Melvin Small and J. David Singer calculate that Liberal states waged 65 percent of non-major power wars (which almost always are against weaker states) between 1871 and 1965. Steve Chan’s more comprehensive data set shows a similar pattern, with Liberal states starting 100 percent of these wars of choice

Historically, the international behavior of the United States has been shaped by Liberalism. In Tony Smith’s words, “The most consistent tradition in American foreign policy . . . has been the belief that the nation’s security is best protected by the expansion of democracy worldwide.”