Explain the various facets of the idealist approach to the study of international relations. Comment on its contemporary relevance. (2020, 2024, 10 Marks)
Idealism was the discipline’s founding outlook after 1919: war is a remediable defect of institutions, and reason, law and organisation can transform international anarchy. Hedley Bull (1972) identified its hallmark as a belief in progress, that the states system can become fundamentally more peaceful and just.
Facets of the approach
- Philosophical roots. Christian universalism, Hugo Grotius‘s law among sovereigns and Immanuel Kant‘s Perpetual Peace (1795), with republican constitutions, a federation of free states and cosmopolitan right.
- Improvable human nature. Bad conduct reflects bad institutions, so reforming institutions reforms behaviour.
- Harmony of interests. States’ long-run interests converge; war comes from ignorance, secret diplomacy and unaccountable rulers. Norman Angell‘s The Great Illusion (1910) held that conquest no longer pays.
- Law and organisation over the balance of power. Woodrow Wilson‘s Fourteen Points (1918) sought open covenants, arms reduction, self-determination and a general association of nations: the League of Nations, collective security and the Permanent Court of International Justice.
- Democracy, public opinion and functional cooperation as forces for peace, with the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928) renouncing war as policy and David Mitrany‘s functionalism building peace through technical agencies.
Contemporary relevance
E. H. Carr‘s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939) called idealism utopian, and Manchuria (1931) and Abyssinia (1935) exposed collective security. Peter Wilson (1998) has since shown that “idealism” was largely Carr’s label for a varied group. Its residue frames world politics:
- Article 2(4) of the UN Charter turns Kellogg–Briand’s renunciation into a ban on the threat or use of force; aggressors now deny conquest rather than proclaim it.
- The human-rights regime, the International Criminal Court and the Paris Agreement institutionalise cosmopolitan aims; democratic peace theory and neo-liberal institutionalism rebuild idealist conclusions on firmer foundations.
- Jawaharlal Nehru‘s Panchsheel and faith in the UN gave the outlook an Indian voice.
Relevance in peace-building
- Boutros Boutros-Ghali‘s An Agenda for Peace (1992), the Peacebuilding Commission (2005) and the Pact for the Future (2024) carry the premise that conflict yields to institutions, rule of law and reconciliation.
- India has sent nearly 300,000 peacekeepers to more than 50 UN missions and ranked third among contributors in February 2026.
- Oliver Richmond shows the limit: liberal peacebuilding produced a thin peace of elections and markets without justice or local ownership. The vetoes over Ukraine and Gaza show power still overriding law.
Conclusion
Idealism fails as a description of how states behave but succeeds as a programme whose institutions now frame world politics. It did not abolish power politics; it changed the currency in which power must justify itself. Peace-building needs that aspiration, rooted in local legitimacy.