Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Liberal internationalism and the origins 
of the discipline
The destruction on the battlefields of 1914–18 produced a sequence of
reactions. The first response of many was to assign personal responsibility
for the carnage – in Britain and France the Kaiser was widely blamed and
‘Hang the Kaiser’ became a popular cry, although after the war no serious
attempt was made to reclaim him from his exile in the Netherlands. Even
during the conflict, more thoughtful people quickly came to the conclusion
that this was an inadequate response to the causes of war. While Germany
might bear a greater responsibility than some other countries, there was
something about the system of international relations that was culpable,
and a variety of different thinkers, politicians and philanthropists gave
thought as to how to change the system to prevent a recurrence. Most of
these individuals were American or British (and, in fact, the discipline of
International Relations remains to this day largely a product of the English-
speaking world, although, happily, this may not be the case for much
longer). The dominant mood in France was for revenge against Germany,
while in Russia the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 posed a challenge to the
very idea of international relations. In Germany the ideas of British and
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Understanding International Relations

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American thinkers were eagerly adopted at the hour of her defeat, which led
to widespread disillusion when these ideas were only imperfectly realized at
the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Britain and America were the
homes of the new thought, partly because these two countries were less
devastated by the war than others, and thereby, perhaps, more willing to
look beyond the immediate issues, but also because the anarchic nature of
world politics seemed particularly unfortunate to those nurtured by the lib-
eral traditions of the two English-speaking powers. Given this latter point,
the new thinking that was produced in Britain and America is conveniently
summarized as ‘liberal internationalism’ – the adaptation of broadly liberal
political principles to the management of the international system.
In Britain, liberal internationalist ideas were developed by Fabians and
radical liberals through bodies such as the Union for Democratic Control;
although there was some sympathy for these ideas in the government of the
day, the general Foreign Office line was a more traditionalist one. Their
account of what went wrong in 1914 stressed the failure of diplomacy, and
in particular the slowness of the great powers in mobilizing an international
conference on the problems of the Balkans, rather than any systemic failure.
However, if British liberal internationalism was largely unofficial, in the
United States these ideas were espoused by the President himself, Woodrow
Wilson, and set out in the Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, in which
America’s war aims were specified. Liberal internationalism offered a two-