What are the major critiques of liberal internationalism? (2009, 20 Marks)
Liberal internationalism holds that free trade, democracy, international law and institutions can tame anarchy and produce a cooperative order. It runs from Immanuel Kant and Woodrow Wilson‘s League to the post-1945 order that G. John Ikenberry calls a liberal Leviathan (2011). It has drawn criticism from every major rival tradition, and from its own record.
The realist critique
- The harmony of interests is ideology. E. H. Carr (The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1939) argued that satisfied powers present their own advantage as the common good. Today’s “rules-based order” invites the same question: rules for whom?
- Moralism breeds crusades. Hans J. Morgenthau warned against identifying a nation’s aims with universal morality. John J. Mearsheimer‘s The Great Delusion (2018) argues that liberal hegemony, spreading democracy by force, produced Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and NATO enlargement that alarmed Russia. Patrick Porter (The False Promise of Liberal Order, 2020) adds that the order was always more coercive than its nostalgic defenders admit.
- Institutions reflect power. Neorealists such as Joseph M. Grieco stress relative gains, and the Security Council veto shows rules bending to the strong.
The Marxist and critical critique
- Robert W. Cox classes liberal institutionalism as problem-solving theory, which makes an unequal order work more smoothly instead of questioning it.
- Dependency theorists argue that free trade between unequal economies reproduces core–periphery inequality, and that conditionality from the international financial institutions serves creditors.
The post-colonial critique
- Liberal international law admitted states to the “family of nations” only by a European standard of civilisation. The League’s mandate system recast colonial rule as trusteeship.
- Humanitarian intervention has been applied selectively, always by the strong upon the weak. India abstained on UN Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya, which went on to serve regime change.
- Third World Approaches to International Law press the point: Antony Anghie (2005) traces sovereignty doctrine to the colonial encounter, and B. S. Chimni (2004) reads today’s economic institutions as an emerging imperial global state.
- Amitav Acharya (The End of American World Order, 2014) argues that the liberal order was never truly global, since much of the world met it as empire.
The pluralist and communitarian critique
English School pluralists, following Hedley Bull, defend sovereignty and diversity of values against solidarist schemes. They argue that order among different societies needs restraint, not a single liberal blueprint.
Empirical weaknesses
- Interdependence did not prevent war. Norman Angell‘s The Great Illusion (1910) preceded 1914, and deep trade ties did not stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
- Democratic peace has caveats. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder (Electing to Fight, 2005) show that democratising states can be more war-prone.
- The backlash. The liberal order now faces a revolt from within, through Brexit, “America First” and populist nationalism. In January 2026 the United States announced withdrawal from 66 international bodies, its exit from the Paris Agreement took effect on 27 January 2026, and the WTO Appellate Body has been idle since 2019.
An assessment
Many critiques strike liberal hegemony, its militarised and missionary form, rather than institutional cooperation as such. Colonised peoples turned liberal universalism against their rulers, through self-determination at Bandung and in decolonisation. India illustrates both sides. Jawaharlal Nehru‘s internationalism faltered in 1962, yet India still invests in the UN, peacekeeping and the International Solar Alliance while guarding strategic autonomy.
Conclusion
The critiques show that liberal internationalism is Eurocentric in origin, blind to power and prone to crusading. Its institutional core has nonetheless outlived each obituary. The live question is not whether the order survives but whether it can be made plural and less hierarchical.