#BEST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS BOOKS 2014 FREE#
The key concepts found in liberal theory are absolute gains, international institutions, free trade, and democracy. Earlier generations of scholars refer to liberalism as “idealism.” More recent scholarship uses “idealism” to refer to “utopianism” or even “constructivism.” However, all postwar liberal theories share a few basic concepts that allow them to be called “liberal”: (1) states are the primary actors in the international system, but they are not unitary-domestic politics matters (2) there are factors beyond capabilities that constrain state behavior and (3) states’ interests are multiple and changing. For the purposes of a broad overview of the theory, only the predominant strains of liberal IR theory are included. There are other forms of liberal IR theory that are not explicitly dealt with in this article, such as functionalism and neofunctionalism, for example.
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Democratic Peace Theory argues that democracies rarely, if ever, go to war with each other, and thus an executive accountable to the people or the parliament is important to maintain peace (Kant’s call for all states to have “republican constitutions”). Commercial Liberalism emphasizes the importance of economic interdependence and free trade (Kant’s “universal hospitality”) in maintaining peace. Neoliberal Institutionalism (also called “neoliberalism” or “institutional liberalism”) emphasizes the importance of international institutions (Kant’s “federation of free states”) in maintaining peace. In that essay Kant provided three “definitive conditions” for perpetual peace, each of which became a dominant strain of post–World War II liberal IR theory.
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The roots of modern liberal international relations theory can be traced back farther than utopianism to Immanuel Kant’s essay “To Perpetual Peace” (1795) (and arguably farther see Kant 2003, cited under Immanuel Kant). The utopians believed that war could be eliminated either by perfecting man or by perfecting government. Liberal international relations (IR) theory is related to, but distinct from, the Utopianism of the interwar period.