Liberalism in International Relations

Liberal internationalism promote the aforementioned principles and institutions across national borders and apply variations thereof to international relations. The classical realists from Thucydides onward described an international state of war that could be mitigated, but not overcome, short of a world Leviathan. The classical liberals, with important variations, broke with this skeptical tradition and announced the possibility of a state of peace among independent, sovereign states.

Liberalism is often seen as the characteristic political philosophy of the modern West. Its central principles are freedom, (human) rights, reason, progress, toleration and the norms of constitutionalism and democracy. The basic principles are deeply embedded in Western political culture. Nonetheless, liberal theories of international relations were until recently disdained as utopian by international relations scholars no less than by diplomats. The two world wars and the Cold War seemed to bear out the realist thesis that the international milieu was inevitably subject to the harsh imperatives of power politics.

Features of Liberalism

Liberalism is a school of thought within international theory which can be thought to revolve around these interrelated principles:

• Rejection of power politics as the only possible outcome of making international relations and it questions security/warfare principles of the existed theory of realism.
• It emphasise on the role played by the international organisations and the non-state actors, for shaping state preferences and policy choices

This school of thought emphasizes three factors that encourage more cooperation and less conflict among states:

• International institutions, such as the United States, who provide a forum to resolve disputes in a non-violent way
• International economic links such as trade because when countries’ economies are interconnected through trade they are less likely to go to war with each other
• Spread of democracy as well-established democracies do not go to war with one another, so if there are more democracies, interstate war will be less frequent