British liberal internationalism, 1880–1930

Making progress?

Casper Sylvest

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847797377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book provides a detailed analysis of the aims, character and trajectory of the ideology of liberal internationalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. The book has a genuinely interdisciplinary appeal and is relevant to students of International Relations, British history and international law.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

When I speak of Idealism I mean not that blind faith in the certainty of human progress which was engendered fifty years ago by the triumphs of applied science and the prosperity they brought, but rather that aspiration for a world more enlightened and more happy than that which we see today, a world in which the cooperation of men and nations rather than their rivalry and the aggrandizement of one at the expense of the other, shall be the guiding aims…. The sensible idealist – and he is not less an idealist, and a far more useful one if he is sensible, and sees the world as it is – is not a visionary, but a man who feels that the forces making for good may and probably will tend to prevail against those making for evil, but will prevail only if the idealists join in a constant effort to make them prevail. (James Bryce, 1922¹)

Among the central ingredients in any history of the twentieth century are the recurrence of massive, bloody and frightening wars, hot or cold, and the pursuit of peace, inspired, partly at least, by visions of liberty and order in a world of nations. The ending of the Cold War and the development of the human rights regime have contributed to the seemingly unequalled position that liberal ideas about freedom, democracy and the economy now enjoy – a hegemony that has profound and sometimes violent implications for international politics. In such circumstances, it is easy to forget that liberalism, like any ideology, has evolved through time. Indeed, there are no vacuums in history and liberal ideology has a past that is not always easy to reconcile with its contemporary manifestations. The alluring liberal rapport with democracy is an obvious case in point: while the two seem natural and inseparable allies today, the majority of nineteenth-century liberals blended their acceptance of, even support for, more democratic practices with apprehension about its consequences. Liberal political thought has always been in part a vision of international relations, but this is similarly not fixed: intuitively it is often thought of in terms of peace and prosperity, but as the post-Cold War era has demonstrated, liberals are perfectly capable of endorsing a bellicose approach to international politics. Although the inability to break the vicious cycle of anarchy and war has made this domain of social and political activity a prime site of liberal failure, liberal visions of international politics are still both popular and powerful. Any attempt to underwrite or understand a liberal project beyond the boundaries of states and nations builds on historical interpretations of the liberal spirit, its aims, means and ideals. Judgements about the status of these interpretations, which (like any other interpretation of history) can appear convincing, distorting, or eye-opening, spurring approval, critique or revision of beliefs, are inescapably made against a background of existing knowledge and prior interpretation. In short, history, politics and ideology cannot be separated.

This book seeks to recover central elements in the liberal jigsaw puzzle of international politics by exploring the development, character and legacy of the ideology of liberal internationalism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain. It is a study of a way of theorising and imagining international relations that dominated well informed political debate at a time when Britain was the most powerful country in the world. Liberal internationalism – which grew out of the amorphous ideology that was Victorian liberalism and became one of its hallmarks – united a diverse group of intellectuals and public figures. Apart from shaping debates about global politics at the time, it left a lasting legacy in the twentieth century. For a number of reasons, it is important to revisit these ideas. Firstly, our current understanding of liberal internationalism is wanting; secondly, liberal approaches to war and peace make up a crucial, but unpredictable, force in contemporary world politics; and thirdly, current liberal theories of international relations are based on a highly selective reading of the liberal tradition. Recapturing a particular manifestation of liberal international thought enables critical analysis of current contemporary liberal ideas about international politics and their deployment in practice. Against this background, this book sets out to uncover the multifaceted nature of the British liberal internationalist tradition through an analysis of its roots, trajectory and ideological resources.

Today, liberal international thought is often illustrated by reference to canonical political philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant, or political campaigners, for example Richard Cobden. The views of such figures were obviously important for the ideology that came to dominate attempts to theorise international politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the more immediate contexts from which liberal ideas emerged have so far received little scholarly attention and, in particular, our understanding of the continuities in liberal thought across the watershed of the First World War is wanting. A parallel problem here is that the (pre-war) ideas and ideals of liberal internationalism were the most important influences on the establishment of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) in the wake of the war, but only the rough contours of this relation are clear. On the one hand, analyses of liberal international thought in IR have, apart from studies of liberal icons like Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham, been confined to ideas emerging in the twentieth century, with a heavy focus on the inter-war years. On the other hand, in British intellectual history, liberal international thought in this period is treated only tangentially, with the exception of studies of the iconic figure of John Stuart Mill. While historians and political scientists continue to benefit from an ever-growing literature on the development of (particularly liberal) political thought in Britain during the country’s remarkable period as a rising, dominant and declining imperial power, wider systematic analyses of international, and to a lesser extent imperial, political thought are curiously absent in this literature. This book attempts to fill some of these lacunae. It starts from the assumption that the historiography of IR and (British) intellectual history needs to be integrated: while IR could potentially gain insights into the contextual preconditions of international theorising, the intellectual history of the period needs a stronger international dimension. Sifting through these literatures, one could be forgiven for thinking both that international politics figured only at the margins of liberal intellectual debate in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that the period produced little of value or interest for the development of liberal approaches to international politics. Both beliefs are mistaken.

The thrust of my argument is as follows. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent liberal intellectuals in Britain grappled with the central conundrums of international politics, including the nature and causes of war, the role and character of ethics and law, and the preconditions necessary for securing peace.² In fact, this liberal elite shared a relatively coherent and overarching ideology of liberal internationalism, which was promulgated in different ways and in different contexts. This book delineates and brings this ideology to life by looking at some of the most important representatives of the liberal intelligentsia it united. I argue that liberal internationalism is best conceptualised as an ideology focused on encouraging progress, sowing order and enacting justice in international affairs. These three objectives, making up the core of liberal internationalist ideology, were interlocking. Political progress, whether seen as a natural (albeit distant) property of history or dependent on volition, would lead to order and justice. Political order in international politics referred not only to stability and the absence of war, but also to an orderly form of politics often associated with the conduct of politics at home.³ Achieving order would represent progress and, partially at least, the achievement of justice. The latter referred above all to the development of a public morality in international politics, the purpose of which was to subject political conduct to considerations of morality, ameliorating the pursuit of power or interests. To realise a public morality in international politics would to some extent depend on order (and vice versa), symbolising political progress.

Understood in this way, liberal internationalist ideology was a strong trait of political argument among the learned echelons of British society between 1880 and 1930 (and beyond). This book seeks to demonstrate how liberal internationalism travelled into the twentieth century, setting the agenda for debates about international politics and infusing the emergence of the academic discipline of IR in the wake of the First World War. This ideology, as elaborated and defended by public intellectuals, was not the outcome of a rapid resurrection of mid-nineteenth-century ideas during the war. Rather, the renaissance of liberal internationalism was facilitated by the existence of a plethora of ideological and scholarly resources already present within a liberal intellectual milieu. The most important of these resources, including theories and rhetorical strategies – legal, philosophical or historical in nature – are investigated in this book. The analysis demonstrates the relative sophistication and resilience as well as the variety and trajectory of internationalist ideology as it was promulgated, in different ‘languages’, by some of the most prominent liberal intellectuals of the day. In sum, investigating liberal internationalist ideology and its commitments provides, firstly, a much needed understanding of the international aspects of liberal political thought in the period and, secondly, an important sketch of the intellectual resources from which an academic, and avowedly internationalist, discipline of IR arose in the wake of the Great War of 1914–1918.

Liberal international thought: explaining the blind spot

The lack of comprehensive studies of liberal international thought during this period has a number of causes. Here I focus on two compatible explanations. Firstly, IR has for some time now been locked in a number of distorting narratives about its intellectual heritage. As an academic discipline, IR was a product of the trauma of the Great War, the first chair being established in 1919 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and taking its name from the American President Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps unavoidably, this clearly identifiable birth date has taken on a demarcating role in IR. But academic disciplines are not stable phenomena with clearly identifiable empirical domains – a fact that is particularly pertinent in the period surrounding their birth. Traditionally, pre-war intellectuals or politicians have, with few exceptions, not been regarded as having had much of importance to say about international politics and its conduct. In conventional narratives about the early development of IR and IR theory, the most crucial role is performed by inter-war ‘idealism’. The supposedly naïve and unworldly adherents of an ‘idealist’ school of thought were (and sometimes still are) regarded as occupying an uneasy position between the unscientific world prior to 1918 and the realist(ic) and scholarly world of post-1945 IR: they are credited with giving birth to the discipline, but at the same time they are seen as the politically and intellectually immature offspring of a hypostatised liberal tradition holding sway during the nineteenth century.⁴ The continuing hold of this story is not due to any historical lack of interest in the discipline’s development; rather, it reflects some classic pitfalls of disciplinary history and a poorly developed approach to studying political thought.⁵

Fortunately this is changing as IR is witnessing a turn to history that also involves a focus on historiography and approaches to history.⁶ The history of international thought, broadly understood, is now a fast-growing field. A prominent literature is focused on the international dimensions of the history of political thought, particularly during the early modern period and the eighteenth century.⁷ The modern history of the discipline has also benefited from the historical turn. In particular, realism has been well served, with a plethora of studies of the history and character of realist thought.⁸ Although the conventional narrative of the discipline’s development, centred on the realist defeat of a primitive idealism in a debate taking place in the inter-war years, has been effectively undermined, there is no corresponding interest in the history and character of liberal thought.⁹ The chronological focus on the inter-war years and the negative purpose of the revisionist literature, denying the validity and thrust of the conventional narrative, have arguably diverted energy and attention away from more constructive work on the ideological configuration of liberal approaches to international politics. So while we have a much more sophisticated picture of the variety and subtlety of the ideas of individual internationalists during the fateful interlude of 1919–1939, the ideological and intellectual continuities across the watershed of the First World War and between nineteenth-century liberalism and the British study of international politics remain under-studied.¹⁰ In the most comprehensive history of the discipline available, Brian Schmidt has pointed out how important debates about anarchy and the nature of the state had their genesis in the nineteenth century. But this analysis is skewed towards American intellectual debates and does not pay sufficient attention to the character and strength of liberal internationalist ideology. In general, existing attempts to chart developments between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are either broad and suggestive or concerned with a handful of (albeit important) thinkers.¹¹ The history boom within IR presents a welcome opportunity to explore these themes in more depth.

This brings us to the second explanation: there is a growing and quite sophisticated literature on British intellectual history in this period, but here international thought is treated only peripherally. This is a shame, as this impressive body of literature is less inclined to adopt a triumphalist perspective on the development of political thought. Here the Great War also acts as a boundary of change, but generally these studies have been able to identify continuities as well as discontinuities between pre- and post-war Britain. Nevertheless, this literature supplies few answers to questions about the interconnections between pre- and post-war international thought or the links between the wider political and intellectual contexts in which liberals moved and their ideas about international politics.¹² The studies of liberal international thought currently available are either dated or focused on the development of the British peace movement, an important and necessary but, arguably, limited context for understanding ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I – Beginnings
• Part II – Languages
• Part III – Traces
• Bibliography
• Index