Liberalism Vs Neoliberalism

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After WW1, the winners which were the United States, United Kingdom, and France adapted the underlying principles of liberalism that has been practiced since the 17th and 18th centuries to try and avoid war. Liberal thought is grounded in a notion that human nature is good, not evil, meaning that states thrive in a world governed by morality and law. States want to cooperate to achieve mutual goals in peace. Just like realism, liberalism derives from the observations and interpretations of political situations. Liberalism argues for human rights, parliamentary democracy, and free trade, while also maintaining that all such goals begin within the state. Liberalists want to focus more on the individual’s liberty, while realists will sacrifice an individual’s liberty for the stability of the community. Most time liberalists agree with realists that war is a recurring feature in an anarchic system, but unlike realists, they do not identify anarchy as the cause of war. Some liberalists see the cause of war in imperialism, others in the failure of the balance of power between states. Two leading liberals during the period known as the Enlightenment, were Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. They didn’t like the barbarity of international relations, so they came up with individual plans to try and achieve peace. Even though they were written two centuries ago, they still manifest themselves in core liberal ideas. For Kant, it was imperative to achieve perpetual peace that required the transformation of individual consciousness, republican constitutionalism, and a federal contract between states to abolish war, rather than try to regulate it. Kant’s claim that liberal states are more peaceful in their international relations with other liberal states was brought back up again in the 1980s by Michael Doyle. He argued that liberal states have created a “separate peace” in relation to nonliberal states. Doyle said that there are two elements to the Kantian legacy: restraint among liberal states and “international imprudence” in relations with nonliberal states. It is said free trade would create a more peaceful world order, and it’s a core idea of 19th century liberalism. Trade brings mutual gains to everyone that is trading in the international system. WW1 shifted liberal thinking toward a recognition that peace is not natural, but something that needs to be constructed. Woodrow Wilson was a big advocate for maintaining peace. He argued that “a general …show more content…
A neorealist state needs to be sure it has more to gain than its rivals. Neoliberalism is a theory shaped by the ideas of commercial, republican, sociological, and institutional liberalism. They see the international system as anarchic but believe that relations can be managed. Neoliberals think actors with common interests will try to maximize absolute gains. When applying liberal ideas to the international system today, we find two responses to the problems and possibilities posed by globalization. The first response is that of the liberalism of privilege. Which says the problems of globalization need to be addressed by a combination of strong democratic states, robust regimes, and open markets. The strategy of preserving and extending liberal institutions is open to several criticisms, which will be gathered upon radical liberalism, which sees liberalism as benefiting only a few states and individuals. Radical liberals say that there is a massive democratic deficit at the global level; they are not subject to view by

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