LIBERALISM

Liberalism has had a profound impact on the shape of all modern industrial societies. It has championed limited government scientific rationality, believing individuals should be free from arbitrary state power, persecution and superstition. It has advocated political freedom, democracy and constitutionally guaranteed right, and privileged the liberty of the individual and equality before the law. Liberalism has also argued for individual competition in civil society and claimed that market capitalism best promotes the general welfare by most efficiently allocating scarce resources within society. To the extent that its ideas have been realized in recent democratic transitions in both hemispheres and manifested in the globalization of the world economy, liberalism clearly remains a powerful and influential doctrine.
However, according to C.B. Macpherson there is a tension within liberal thought between two conception of the human condition.
The first of this is the liberal individualist concept of man as essentially a consumer of utilities, and infinite desirer and infinite appropriator. This concept was fitting, even necessary, for the development of the capitalist market society, from the seventeenth century on: it antedates the introduction of democratic principles and institution, which did not amount to anything before the nine teens century. The order is the concept of man as an enjoyer and exerter of his uniquely human attributes or capacities, a view which began to challenge the market view in the mid nineteenth century and soon became and integral part of the justitying theory of liberal democracy.
These two strands within the liberal tradition – between the market view of human being as consumers maximizing their utilities and the ethical view of human striving to the realize their potential – are defining characteristic of the species. But as views of the human essence they also remain largely irreconciled. They form two quite distinct and at times contradictory sub traditions within a broad philosophical outlook. Consequently their underlying principles and the tension between them must form the organizing themes of any assessment of liberalism’s contribution to international thought.
After the Colt war
The demise of Soviet Communism at the beginning of the 1990s enhanced the influence of liberal theories of international relations within the academy, a theoretical tradition long though to have been discredited by perspectives which emphasis the recurrent features of international relations. In a confident reassertion of the teleology of liberalism, Fukuyama claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union proved that liberal democracy hat no serious ideological competitor: it was ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government’. It is an argument that has been strengthened by recent transition to democracy in Africa, East Asia and Latin America.
For Fukuyama the end of the Cold War represented the triumph of the ‘ideal state’ and a particular form of political economy, ‘liberal capitalist, which ‘cannot be improved upon’: there can be ‘no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions’. According to Fukuyama, the end of the East-West conflict confirmed that liberal capitalism was unchallenged as a model of, and endpoint for, human kid’s political and economic development. Like many liberal’s he sees history as progressive, linear and ‘directional’ and is convinced that ‘there is a fundamental process at work that dictate a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies- in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.
Fukuyama’s belief that western forms of government and political economy are the ultimate destination which the entire human race will eventually reach poses a number of challenges for orthodoxy within International Relations. First, his claim that political and economic development always terminates at liberal-capitalist democracy assumes that the non-western world is striving to imitate the western route to modernization : to put in another way, that the western path to modernity no longer faces a universal challenge of the kind passed by communism, and will eventually command global consent.
Liberal Internationalism: Inside Looking Out
Fukuyama revives a long held view amongst liberal internationalists that the spread of legitimate domestic political orders will eventually bring an end to international conflict. This neo-Kantian position assumes that particular states, with liberal-democratic credentials, constitute ideal which the rest of the world will emulate. Fukuyama is struck by the extent to witch liberal democracies have transcended their violent instinct and institutionalized norms which pacify relation between each other. He is particularly impressed with the emergence of shared principles of legitimacy amongst the great powers, a trend which can be expected to continue now that the ideological contest of the Cold War has passed into history. The projection of liberal-democratic principles to the international realm is said to provide the best prospect for a peaceful world order because ‘a world made up of liberal democracies …should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy.
This approach is rejected by neo-realists who claim that the moral’ aspirations of states are thwarted by the absence of an overarching authority which regulates heir behavior towards each other. The anarchical nature of the international system homogenises foreign policy behavior by socialising states into the system of power politics The requirements of strategic power and security are paramount in insecure world, and they soon override the ethical pursuits of states, regardless of their domestic political complexions, Waltz for example, highlights the similarity of for eign policy behavior amongst states with diverse political orders, and argues that if any state was to become a model for the rest of the world one would have to conclude that ‘most of impetus behind foreign policy is internally generated’. The similarity of United State and soviet forieger policy during the Cold War would suggest that this is unlikely, and that this common location in international system is a superior explanation. From : www.kabulsetioutomo.blogspot.com