Do you agree that liberal international theories are essentially ‘Eurocentric’ and not necessarily imperialist? (2012, 12 Marks)
The proposition separates two charges that post-colonial critics often merge. John M. Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (2012) draws exactly this line: Western international theory is pervasively Eurocentric, but that Eurocentrism comes in an imperialist (paternalist) and an anti-imperialist form. The claim largely holds, with one important caveat.
Why liberal theory is Eurocentric
- A European universal. The sovereign state, the market, the rule of law and representative government are treated as history’s single endpoint, and other societies are ranked by their distance from it.
- Hierarchy without conquest. Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795) condemns European conquest overseas, yet grounds peace in republican constitutions: anti-imperialist and Eurocentric at once. Democratic peace theory and governance conditionality on aid carry the same benchmark today, assuming the West as the reference point.
- Selective history. The liberal story runs from Westphalia to Bretton Woods and omits the Haitian Revolution, Bandung (1955) and the South’s part in rights norms, such as Hansa Mehta’s insistence that the Universal Declaration say “all human beings”, not “all men”. Amitav Acharya’s Global IR exists to correct this.
Why it is not necessarily imperialist
- Anti-imperial liberals. Adam Smith and Richard Cobden attacked empire as costly and corrupting; Jennifer Pitts (A Turn to Empire, 2005) shows that Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham were broadly critical of conquest.
- Turned against empire. Woodrow Wilson’s self-determination was seized by anti-colonial nationalists; Dadabhai Naoroji indicted colonial rule as “un-British”; Jawaharlal Nehru built a liberal internationalism of sovereign equality and decolonisation.
- Shields for the weak. Sovereign equality and non-intervention (Article 2 of the UN Charter) are the norms India defends most firmly.
The imperial strand nonetheless
John Stuart Mill held in On Liberty (1859) that despotism suits “barbarians” if aimed at their improvement, and Uday Singh Mehta (Liberalism and Empire, 1999) finds an inner urge to reform others in liberal universalism. The League’s mandate system (1919) called colonial rule a “sacred trust of civilisation”, and Michael W. Doyle (1986) concedes liberal states’ “imprudent vehemence” toward non-liberal ones, visible in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011). Hobson himself places most post-1989 liberal theory in the paternalist camp.
Conclusion
Liberal theory is Eurocentric in its premises but imperialist only where its universalism licenses tutelage; where it insists on equal sovereignty it has served the formerly colonised. With Washington withdrawing from 66 international bodies under a January 2026 memorandum, India’s push for a more plural multilateralism shows liberal institutions being reclaimed from outside the West.