Here the emphasis is on a disjuncture between the aims of liberalism and its apparent effects.
DEFINE LIBERAS DRIVER
Here we focus on the powerful irony that successful liberalism, especially in its economic practice, appears to be the main driver of a strong movement to securitise a wide array of economic, societal, political and environmental issues, as well as traditional military ones. The second turn of the dialectic starts from the ending of the Cold War, when "real existing liberalism" is the hegemonic ideology, substantially in operation for most parts of the planet, and intellectually dominant in the deep Gramscian sense of being widely accepted as the truth. What starts as a liberal theory of international peace eventually delivers the goods for a large and expanding group of countries. In this part of the story the aims of liberalism eventually come into line with its effects. In the classical liberal view, security logic pointed towards the economic closure of mercantilism, which was precisely what liberals wanted to eliminate. Its aim was to maximise openness between states and societies, and to avoid a spill-over of security behaviour into sectors other than the military one. economic interdependence) and democratisation (i.e.
DEFINE LIBERAS FREE
This project linked economics, security and the state into an integrated interpretation, using the still familiar arguments of free trade (ie. By the nineteenth century this project had expanded from the domestic to the international realm, with liberals aiming to eliminate war internationally. Liberals wanted to restrict the rhetorics of threat and survival to the military sector and the state, in order to open up space for a civil society in which individuals did not deal with each other in a security mode. By the end of the Cold War, the classical liberal project had not only seen off all of its rivals, but also successfully established an extensive zone of peace (in the form of a security community centered on the Western powers and Japan) within which the problematique of security defined as war had largely been solved.Īs far back as Hobbes's Leviathan, classical liberalism was a project for "desecuritisation" - understood mainly as reducing the number of issues over which force could legitimately be used. It also saw a separation and professionalization of security and international political economy (IPE) considerations into distinct fields.
The Cold War period saw some surprising twists in the attitude of liberalism to security with first a broadening of security to include economic and ideological concerns (manifested in the launch of the concept of national security), and later during the high Cold War an intense militarization of politics, which in its own way went against the liberal tradition. Then it gains increasing strength and influence as the ideology of successive hegemonic powers (Britain and US), and becomes the main opponent of two totalitarian bids (fascism and communism) to become the hegemonic ideology of industrial society. It starts by being an ideology of opposition to the dominance of monarchism and mercantilism. The first cycle of the dialectic covers the rise and eventual success of classical liberalism. It is a dialectical story in two parts: "classical liberalism" (sections 3 and 4) and "real existing liberalism" (section 5). This story is about the relationship between liberalism as a practicing political ideology, and the agenda of international security. We think that there is an additional, deeper, story to tell, and one that has important implications both for how security policy is made and for how analysts understand and approach the new security agenda. To the extent that this question is asked at all, the answer is posed in simple terms either as an accumulation of random events (economic globalisation, the rise of environmental concerns), or as an effect of the ending of the Cold War (the relative decline of military priorities leaving more room at the top for other issues to claim security status). Some people in the field regret this turn, and others embrace it, but few bother to ask why it happened. Security policy, and thus security studies, are no longer only, or even predominantly, about military and "high politics" issues, but also about economic, societal and environmental ones. It is now commonplace to observe that the agenda of international security has expanded. Introduction "Feare and Liberty are consistent"
Liberalism and Security: The contradictions of the liberal Leviathanġ.
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