The Liberal Peace:
Ethical, Historical, and Philosophical Aspects
Markus Fischer
2000-07
April 2000
CITATION AND REPRODUCTION
This document appears as Discussion Paper 2000-07 of the Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs. BCSIA Discussion Papers are works in progress. Comments are
welcome and may be directed to the author in care of the Center.
This paper may be cited as: Markus Fischer. “The Liberal Peace: Ethical, Historical, and
Philosophical Aspects” BCSIA Discussion Paper 2000-07, Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University, April 2000.
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Since the publication of Michael Doyle's seminal articles in 1983 and 1986,1 a growing
number of students of international relations have argued that democracy causes states to live in
peace with each other. For the United States and France have not been at war since 1798, the
U.S. and Britain since 1812, and Britain and France since 1815. France ended its historical
conflict with Germany as the latter became democratic after 1945. Indeed, war seems to have
become almost unthinkable among the democratic nations of the West. This democratic peace
argument is of the greatest significance for our understanding of foreign affairs, for it suggests
nothing less than suspension of anarchic constraint—the fact that fear induces every state to
perceive all others at least as potential enemies. Moreover, since such a suspension cannot be
plausibly claimed for any other period of history—be it antiquity with its perpetually warring
city-states, tribes, and empires, the middle ages with its feudal anarchy, or modernity with its
cataclysmic contests between nation-states—a fundamental change of international politics
seems to be taking place before our eyes.
Democracy and Liberalism
Whereas Michael Doyle—in keeping with his Kantian inspiration—was careful to attribute
this peace in large part to liberal norms, most writers have pointed to the democratic character of
the states in question. Likewise, policy makers regularly speak of the need to promote democracy
1 Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs vol. 12, no. 3
(1983), pp. 205–35; Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 2,” Philosophy and Public
Affairs vol. 12, no. 4 (1983), pp. 322–53; and Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and world politics,” American
Political Science Review vol. 80, no. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151–69.
for the sake of peace, rather than liberalism.2 This conflation may seem insignificant since both
theorists and practitioners refer quite obviously to the liberal kind of democracy that has come to
prevail in the West. Nonetheless, it is important to appreciate the significant differences between
the democratic and the liberal aspect of these regimes in order to grasp the peace that prevails
among them.
Simply put, democracy prescribes the rule of the people in the sense that every member of a
collective should have equal weight in deciding how it is to be governed. In the direct
democracies of antiquity, such decisions were made by assemblies where each male citizen had
one vote; in the representative democracies of modernity, they are made by public officials who
are periodically elected by the citizens who care to go the polling stations. Accordingly,
democratic institutions promote every citizen's equal capacity to determine government by means
of: open, fair, and competitive elections at all levels of collectivity (from legislators and chief
executives to judges, town sheriffs, city clerks, and school boards), the concentration of supreme
authority in the people and its representatives, referenda and plebiscites that allow the people to
decide important issues directly, measures aimed at enhancing the representatives' responsiveness
to the electorate (e.g., shortening their terms of office and reducing the number of voters in their
electoral districts), widening the franchise, and taxation and welfare policies that promote
equality.
In contrast, liberalism aims at the freedom of the individual from oppression, especially
from the rulers, and enshrines this freedom in a number of rights that must be respected under
almost all circumstances: the right to life or immunity from violence, the right to assemble freely,
to speak one's mind, to move about and choose one's abode, to acquire and dispose of property,
to engage in arts, crafts, and commerce without hindrance, to profess and practice one's chosen
faith, to educate one's children as one sees fit, etc. Liberal institutions guarantee and promote
these rights through: a constitution that enumerates the basic rights of the citizens and limits the
powers of government (usually dividing it into separate institutions, such as parliament,
executive, and courts), the strict rule of law, separation of church and state, protection of private
2 See, for instance, Ronald Reagan, “Address to Parliament,” New York Times, June 9, 1982; Howard Baker on
February 5 and April 21, 1992, as quoted by Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), pp. 128–29; Anthony Lake, “From containment to enlargement,” U.S. Department of State,
Bureau of Public Affairs, Dispatch 4, no. 39 (September 1993), p. 3; William Jefferson Clinton, “Confronting the
challenges of a broader world,” U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Dispatch 3, no. 39 (September
1993), p. 3; “Excerpts from President Clinton's State of the Union Message,” New York Times, January 26, 1994,
A17; and Anthony Lake, “The reach of democracy: Tying power to diplomacy,” New York Times, September 23,
1994, A35.
2
property, the free exchange of goods and services on an open and competitive market, and
keeping regulation and taxation at a minimum. As a result of this laissez faire attitude, a free
market society develops, where individuals compete for goods that satisfy their desires while
government provides security and procedural justice.
In Western modernity, these two approaches to government have been regularly combined in
what are called “liberal democracies.” This combination is congenial in the sense that a
democracy must, at a minimum, grant its citizens the freedom to vote in order to function as the
rule of the people. In addition, it may allow them to form parties that compete for votes, voice
political opinions, and publish newspapers. Conversely, liberalism enshrines these liberties as the
right to vote, to practice free speech, to assemble, and to associate. Further, the liberal principle
of equality before the law (which derives from respect for rights in abstraction from men's
concrete attributes), tends to agree with the democratic passion for equality (which arises from
resentment of whatever exceeds the common measure), but only insofar as the latter does not
lead to a levelling of all social and economic conditions.
Thus, the democratic impulse contains at least three illiberal tendencies as well. First, the
plenitude of power asserted by the democratic assembly tends to diminish the rights of
individuals, especially those in the minority, and may even put the will of the majority above the
law; for power corrupts commoners just as much as princes, perhaps even more since they taste it
for the first time. Second, the democratic tendency to equalize all conditions curtails the kind of
freedom that issues in or thrives on distinctiveness, as when the diligent and enterprising have to
yield the fruits of their labor to support the lazy and incompetent, or when the creative and wise
are forbidden to express what offends the majority. Third, the common people are easily swayed
by demagogues, who stir their passions and mislead their reason in order to gain power or pursue
policies that sacrifice the common good to the ambition of the few—contrary to the rational
deliberation prized by liberals. Athens, the world's first democracy, instantiates each of these
illiberal tendencies only too well. Its citizens were free to participate in political life and enjoyed
the protection of laws. Yet, its assembly acted not only as legislature but also as magistrate and
judge, leading to such abuses as condemning to death generals who had lost in battle, expelling
undesirable but otherwise innocent individuals, and executing Socrates for using reason to
challenge popular pieties. In other words, it was the Athenian experience that gave rise to the
3
classical view that democracy degenerates by nature into the despotic rule of the mob.3 Until the
end of the nineteenth century, liberals used to share this view. For instance, Alexander Hamilton
called for vigorous government on the grounds that “of those men who have overturned the
liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court
to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”4 James Madison assumed that “the
instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils have, in truth, been the
mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished,” as policies are
decided by the “superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”5
Thus, although democracy may imply some of the rights that liberalism holds dear, it tends
to infringe so many others that it cannot be considered a cause of liberty. The deeper reason for
this illiberal tendency of democracy is this: liberalism assumes human beings to be individuals,
whereas democracy not only permits the assumption that they think and act collectively but
positively thrives on it; for the more opinions are alike, the more they can be said to express the
will of “the people” as a unitary actor. Indeed, democratic institutions tend to generate
homogenous masses, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy's most perspicacious
observer:
In times of equality men, being so like each other, have no confidence in others, but this same
likeness leads them to place almost unlimited confidence in the judgment of the public. For they
think it not unreasonable that, all men having the same means of knowledge, truth will be found on
the side of the majority. The citizen of a democracy comparing himself with the others feels proud
of his equality with each. But when he compares himself with all his fellows and measures himself
against this vast entity, he is overwhelmed by a sense of his own insignificance and weakness. The
same equality which makes him independent of each separate citizen leaves him isolated and
defenseless in the face of the majority. So in democracies public opinion has a strange power of
which aristocratic nations can form no conception. It uses no persuasion to forward its beliefs, but
by some mighty pressure of the mind of all upon the intelligence of each it imposes its ideas and
makes them penetrate men's very souls.6
3 The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, Robert B. Strassler, ed. (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), vol. II. pp. 59–65, vol. III. pp. 42, vol. VI. pp. 60–61; Plato's Republic, 2nd ed.,
trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 492a–496e, 555b–569c; Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes
Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 1277b33–1278a24, 1279a28–1279b10, 1281a40–1282a41,
1291b29–1292a37; Cicero, The Republic, Vol. I. pp. xxviii, xlii–xliv, in De Re Publica & De Legibus, trans. C. W.
Keyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928).
4 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, Clinton Rossiter, ed. (New York,
Penguin Books, 1961), p. 35.
5 Federalist Papers, p. 77.
6 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1969),
Vol. III. p. 2.
4
On the other hand, liberalism entails democracy to a considerable extent. For to be free
means to be subject to one's will rather than to the will of others. To be fully free thus means to
rule oneself not only in private matters of faith, family, and business, but also in affairs that
concern society as a whole, that is, government. As John Locke, the founder of liberalism, put it,
“by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to
the political power of another without his own consent.”7 And to ascertain this consent, there
really is no substitute for explicit declarations of will, such as elections, referenda, and
plebiscites. Moreover, the early liberal practice of excluding from the franchise those deemed
insufficiently rational and responsible, such as women, the poor, and the illiterate, has proven
impossible to maintain; for if by nature all are free, equal, and independent, who can claim to be
so superior as to consent for them? For all these reasons, liberal regimes tend to be democratic.
The history of the first liberal regimes instantiates this democratic implication of liberalism
rather well. From medieval times, the kings of England had granted extensive privileges to their
subjects, ruled with the counsel and consent of the realm, and considered themselves bound by
customary laws. Ostensibly to defend these liberties against royal encroachment, Parliament
asserted its supreme authority in the seventeenth century with the beheading of Charles I (1649)
and the Glorious Revolution (1688). At the same time, the franchise remained confined to the
most propertied, land-owning class, a mere two percent of the population. Yet, as
industrialization increased the power of the middling and lower classes, suffrage was gradually
extended (1832, 1867, 1884, 1918), until all men over 21 and women over 30 had the right to
vote. In the United States, a similar process took place with the elimination of freeholding and
taxpaying qualifications in the 1820s and '30s, the emancipation of slaves in 1865, women
suffrage in 1920, the inclusion of American Indians from 1924 to 1948, and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965.
In sum, the relation between liberalism and democracy is asymmetrical: liberalism implies
democratic institutions to a large degree, whereas democracy entails liberal rights only to a
minimal extent. On the empirical level, this asymmetry has two consequences. First, the fact that
liberalism implies democracy means that the democracies of the West, which either arose in
already liberal societies, such as Britain and the United States, or spread in conjunction with
liberal ideas, as in the case of Germany, Italy, Spain, or Poland, consistently demonstrate a high
7 John Locke, Second Treatise [1680], in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960), Vol. VIII. p. 95.
5
level of respect for the rights and liberties of their citizens. Second, the fact that democracy as
such implies only few rights means that its establishment in countries without liberal traditions
often leads to regimes where the leaders are popularly elected but human rights abuses remain
rampant, such as Brazil, Zimbabwe, India, or Turkey. According to the ratings in Charles
Humana's World Human Rights Guide, Western democracies respected human rights in 1991 at
an average level of 94.3 percent, whereas non-Western democracies did so only at 69 percent.8
According to Freedom House's Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, Western
democracies in 1999 earned 1.1 and 1.6 points for the political rights and civil liberties they
granted their citizens, with 1 being the best possible rating and 7 the worst, whereas non-Western
democracies scored only 2.6 and 3.3 points.9
Humana
Survey 1991
Western Democracies
Non-Western
Number
of
States
22
Freedom House
Survey 1999
Human
Rights
Political
Rights
Civil
Liberties
(1 best, 7 worst)
(1 best, 7 worst)
1.1
1.6
94.3
Number
of
States
28
45
69.0
62
2.6
3.3
37
41.2
59
5.9
5.5
(Percent)
Democracies
Other regimes
Fig. 1: The Liberality of Western and Non-Western Democracies
Democracy and Liberalism As Causes of Peace and War
Does the democratic element as such dispose a state to peace? Kant, the originator of the
democratic peace thesis, certainly thought so when he argued that
the republican constitution . . . offers a prospect of attaining . . . perpetual peace, and the reason is
as follows.—If . . . the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be
8 Charles Humana, World Human Rights Guide, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
9 Adrian Karatnycky, “The 1999 Freedom House Survey: A century of progress,” Journal of Democracy Vol.
11, no. 1 (January 2000) pp. 187–200.
6
declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an
enterprise. For this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war . . . But under a
constitution where the subject is not a citizen, and which is therefore not republican, it is the
simplest thing in the world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow citizen, but the owner
of the state, and a war will not force him to make the slightest sacrifice so far as his banquets,
hunts, pleasure palaces and court festivals are concerned.10
Insofar as wars have been undertaken by autocratic rulers for personal reasons, such as dynastic
rights, honor, and their desire to gain glory, power, and riches, Kant certainly has a point. But his
assumption that “the people will not readily place itself in danger of personal want . . . out of a
mere desire for aggrandizement, or because of some supposed and purely verbal offence”11 is
belied by the enthusiasm with which peoples of all ages have supported wars that promised
benefits to them as well. Just consider the almost erotic passion that befell the ancient Athenians
over the military campaign against Sicily (415 B.C.):
Everyone fell in love with the enterprise. The older men thought that they would either subdue the
places against which they were to sail, or at all events, with so large a force, meet with no disaster;
those in the prime of life felt a longing for foreign sights and spectacles, and had no doubt that they
should come home safe again; while the idea of the common people and the soldiery was to earn
wages at the moment, and make conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the
future.12
Democracy may mitigate wars that are only in the interests of the rulers. But should the people
believe that war will gratify their own desires for glory, power, wealth or the fulfillment of some
religious or ethnic ideal, democracy actually facilitates belligerence since its institutions can
move the masses to labor for the common good like no other regime. True, the people will still
be more cautious than princes, for they endanger their own lives rather than those of others; but if
they believe that the likely results are worth the risk, they will vote for war nonetheless. This can
be seen most directly from tribal societies that are egalitarian and democratic and yet highly
belligerent, such as the Yanomamo of Brazil and the Mapuche of Chile.13 Similarly, the people
10 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch [1795], in Political Writings, Hans Reiss, ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 93–130, at 100; cf. Susan Peterson, “How democracies differ:
Public opinion, state structure, and the lessons of the Fashoda Crisis,” Security vol.5, no.1 (Autumn 1995), pp. 10–
11; Alex Mintz and Nehemia Geva, “Why don't democracies fight each other? An experimental assessment of the
'political incentive' explanation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution vol. 37, no. 3 (September 1993): pp. 484–503.
11 Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying: 'This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice”
[henceforth “Theory and Practice”] [1793], in Political Writings, Hans Reiss, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), pp. 61–92, at 91.
12 Landmark Thucydides, 6.24.3.
13 See Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 103–04, 113–14.
7
in such modern democracies as Britain, France, the United States, and the Netherlands usually
supported their nations' imperialist adventures, even though it meant risking their lives in
faraway lands and often unhealthy climes.
But shouldn't the deliberative aspect of democratic decision-making attenuate people's
aggressive impulses? First, won't reason prevail when the people have the benefit of hearing a
diversity of opinions in the assembly? This question is as old as democracy itself and cannot be
fully answered without making difficult assumptions about the intellectual capacity of ordinary
folk. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the wisdom of any assembly will be limited by the ability of
the majority to grasp the reasons of the wisest among them and to reject the appeals to passion by
warmongering demagogues, who are rarely in short supply. Moreover, this argument assumes
that starting a war is never rational as if its benefits were never worth the cost. But the Romans
became secure, rich, and glorious by subduing and despoiling their rivals in the Mediterranean
world; Germany became a unified, industrial nation in the wake of Prussia's attacks on Austria
(1866) and France (1870-71); and the United States could not have become a superpower in the
twentieth century without conquering the lands west of the Appalachians in the nineteenth.
Second, shouldn't people used to dealing with their differences through debate apply such nonviolent conflict resolution to foreign affairs as well?14 Not necessarily, for there is no
supranational assembly with the power to enforce its decisions, which is an obvious prerequisite
for democratic decision-making in the domestic setting; and absent a universalizing norm, such
as liberal respect for rights, democrats will treat fellow citizens better than foreigners, debating
the former and fighting the latter. Thus, the Athenians had no problem acting democratically at
home and tyrannically abroad, even when the foreign power was a democracy as well.15
14 Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 31–33; Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative and
structural causes of democratic peace, 1946–86,” American Political Science Review vol. 87, no. 3 (September
1993): pp. 624–38; Christopher Layne, “Kant or cant: The myth of democratic peace,” International Security vol.
19, no. 2 (Fall 1994) pp. 5–49, at 9; William J. Dixon, “Democracy and the peaceful settlement of international
conflict,” American Political Science Review vol. 88, no. 1 (March 1994) pp. 14–32; Kenneth A. Schultz, “Do
democratic institutions constrain or inform? Contrasting two institutional perspectives on democracy and war,”
International Organization vol. 53, no. 2 (Spring 1999) pp.233–66.
15 That the Athenians later regretted their attack on Syracuse and its allies on grounds that these cities “were
similar to their own in character, under democracies like themselves” cannot be taken as an expression of sympathy
for fellow democrats, as Bruce Russett seems to do, but needs to be understood as the Athenians' belated insight that
an already democratic regime cannot be divided or brought over “by holding out the prospect of changes in their
governments,” that is, allying with its common people against the ruling class, and that it cannot be crushed by
“superiority in force,” that is, the superior numbers that democracies can put into the field on account of the
multitude's consent to war. In other words, the world's first democrats understood their relations with other
democracies in terms of power rather than right. See Landmark Thucydides, 7.55; Russett, Grasping the Democratic
Peace, p. 55.
8
Likewise, the social democrats of Germany and France supported their respective fatherlands in
World War I, rather than obeying the socialist imperative to make common cause with their
fellow proletarians across the border.
At root, the reason that democracy as such shows little propensity to peace is simple. The
democratic ideal holds that all people should be equal in deciding the actions of their collective,
be it a village, city-state, nation, trade union, or bowling club, but implies nothing about the
content of these actions—except that equality ought to be fostered within. Hence, democratic
norms and institutions will promote peace if the majority is disposed to peace, but lead to war if
it is not.
Insofar as peace among liberal democracies is nonetheless a fact, we must therefore look to
the liberal element for its explanation. But is it mainly liberal institutions or liberal norms that
dispose these states to peace? Regarding the former, the weakness of the liberal state and the
separation of its powers should attenuate war, for they make it more difficult for any part of
government to decide on war by itself and for government as a whole to make such a decision
quickly and without discussion.16 Yet, as with the parallel claim for democratic institutions, this
argument applies only to wars caused by irresponsible governments, but not to hostilities that
enjoy the consent of the governed. Moreover, the tendency of liberal government to give rise to
interest politics may make it actually easier for those who profit from war to gain influence over
policy-makers.17
More significantly, the liberal institution of a free market has been thought by many to
dispose men to peaceful division of labor. For all countries are economically better off if each
specializes in those goods and services that it produces most efficiently and then exchanges the
surplus, which in turn creates shared interests in peace as well as ties of dependency that
constrain warlike impulses. Among Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu, for instance, argued
that “the natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace. Two nations that trade with each other
16 T. Clifton Morgan and Sally Howard Campbell, “Domestic structure, decisional constraints, and war: So why
Kant democracies fight?” Journal of Conflict Resolution vol. 35, no. 2 (June 1991) pp. 187–211; T. Clifton Morgan
and Valerie L. Schwebach, “Take two democracies and call me in the morning: A prescription for peace?”
International Interactions vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer 1992): pp. 305–420; Russett, “Grasping the Democratic Peace,”
pp. 38–40.
17 Doyle, “Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 2,” p. 326; John M. Owen, “How liberalism produces
democratic peace,’ International Security vol. 19, no. 2 (Fall 1994) pp. 87–125, at 100; Henry S. Farber and Joanne
Gowa, “Polities and peace,” International Security 20, no. 2 (Fall 1995) pp. 123–46, at 127–28.
9
become reciprocally dependent . . . . and all unions are founded on mutual needs.”18 In more
general terms, liberalism believes in a “harmony of interests” among men that will be realized if
most of them tolerate the differences in their various pursuits of happiness and cooperate when
it serves their self-interest, based on a far-sighted instrumental rationality that takes into account
the remote consequences of actions. Hobbes thus contrasted the “perturbed” use of reason,
which keeps men in the state of war as they consider only the immediate benefit of anticipatory
violence, with a “right” reason that makes them understand that foreswearing private violence
and submitting to the laws of the state would redound to the long-term benefit of all.19 In the
twentieth-century, students of international relations have taken this logic to account for a host
of phenomena, from simple interdependence to functional integration, international
organizations, international regimes, collective security, and multilateralism.20 Most recently,
such harmony of interests has been taken to account for the peace among liberal democracies, on
the grounds that they believe each other to be “reasonable, predictable, and trustworthy, because
they are governed by their citizens' true interests, which harmonize with all individuals' true
interests around the world.”21
European integration provides an important corroboration of this thesis. In 1951, France,
Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg formed the European Coal and Steel
Community in order to promote economic cooperation in these sectors and peace between
France and Germany. In 1957, the E.C.S.C was transformed into the European Economic
Community, with the aim of establishing a fully integrated common market where goods,
capital, and labor would flow freely. In 1993, European integration was given a decidedly
political dimension by replacing the E.E.C. with the European Union, joined by Sweden,
18 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, Harold Samuel
Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4.20.2.
19 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive [1642], in Man and Citizen, trans. Charles T. Wood (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter
Smith, 1978), pp. 86–386, at II.1, III.31–33; Thomas Hobbes, De Homine [1658], in Man and Citizen, trans. Charles
T. Wood (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978), pp. 33–85, at XII.1; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected
Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 [1651], ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994), vol. XV pp.
40–41.
20 For a sample of seminal works, see Ernst Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International
Organization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964); Edward L. Morse, “The politics of interdependence,”
International Organization vol. 23, no. 2 (Spring 1969) pp. 311–26; Joseph S. Nye and Robert O. Keohane,
“Transnational relations and world politics,” International Organization vol. 25, no. 3 (Summer 1971) pp. 329–52;
Robert Keohane, “The demand for international regimes,” International Organization vol. 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982)
pp. 325–55; Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Robert Jervis, “From
balance to concert: A study of international security cooperation,” World Politics vol. 38, no. 1 (October 1985): 58–
79; Robert O. Keohane, “Multilateralism: An agenda for research,” International Journal 45 (Autumn 1990) pp.
731–64.
10
Finland, and Austria in 1995, which introduced not only a common currency and a European
central bank, but also E.U. citizenship, elections to the European Parliament, a European Court
of Justice, whose decisions are binding on member governments (including the striking down of
laws) and to which individual citizens can appeal, as well as a common foreign and security
policy. Today, the European Union has been accepted by most of its citizens as an institution
that brings prosperity and makes war among its members almost unthinkable.
While surely accounting for a significant part of the liberal peace, this harmony-of-interest
argument has some serious limitations. First, its underlying assumption—that people act from
far-sighted rationality once understand that taking advantage of others makes all worse off in the
long run—cannot be taken as given in the absence of central protection. For states would be
irresponsible if they did not worry about gaining relatively less from trade than their neighbors
and thus becoming vulnerable to attack or extortion. Moreover, mutual dependency not only
constrains countries to remain on good terms with their suppliers, but makes them vulnerable to
each other, especially when dependency is asymmetrical. And if such a sense of vulnerability is
grave, a beleaguered government might well give in those who argue that only a victorious war
can overcome the nation's economic disadvantages. Thus, World War I erupted among countries
that were quite interdependent in terms of trade and investments, namely Britain, France,
Germany, and Russia,22 and by one account was actually triggered by the threat that free trade
with Britain and Russia posed to Germany's land-owning aristocracy—the reactionary “Junker”
from east of the Elb river.23 In other words, far-sighted economic rationality may not be
sufficient to keep the peace when prosperity is asymmetrical.
But even when prosperity is fairly symmetrical, states must first value commercial
prosperity more highly than honor, glory, empire, salvation, before they will keep peace in order
to have a better life. And this preference for what Hobbes called “commodious living” is not
simply the result of becoming enlightened and looking objectively to one’s real interests, but is a
value judgment contingent on the dominant paradigm of the age. Thus, the states of Western
Europe have been at peace since the end of World War II not simply because they have found the
logic of the market inescapable, but, more fundamentally, because they have come to value
commercially attained prosperity and respect for human rights more highly than almost anything
21 Owen, “How liberalism produces democratic peace,” p. 95.
22 Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 138–46, 212.
23 Eckhart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur preussisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte
im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 2nd ed. (Berlin: deGruyter , 1970), pp. 149–75.
11
else but their own preservation. In sum, the harmony of economic interests is surely an important
cause of peace in the contemporary world, but only a proximate one; the ultimate cause consists
of liberal values.
That liberal values ultimately matter more than liberal or democratic institutions finds
support in the fact that liberal states have not been shy to initiate war against non-liberal
regimes, as, for instance, when Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, when the
United States intervened militarily against communist regimes in Central America and Asia
during the Cold War, 24 and when the U.S., Britain, and France attacked Iraq after its invasion of
Kuwait in 1992. For such liberal use of force can be readily explained on normative grounds as
execution of natural law against those who transgress it, 25 but contradicts the idea that
democratic peoples don’t want to bear the burden of war. Regarding natural law, liberals
generally accept Locke’s notion that it consists of “Reason, which . . . teaches all Mankind, who
will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his
Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”26 Consequently, those who invade these rights can be
said to lack the reason that makes them subjects of the natural law and deserving of its
protection: “such Men are not under the ties of the Common Law of Reason, have no other
Rule, but that of Force and Violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey.”27 In other words,
transgressors of the natural law lose their immunity from the violence that is needed to put an
end to their wrongdoing and make justice prevail. Now, one of the worst aggressions is
committed by rulers who tyrannize their subjects, as “he who attempts to get another Man into
his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him; It being understood
as a Declaration of a Design upon his Life.”28 And since “the Execution of the Law of Nature is
in that State [of Nature], put into every Mans hands,”29 a liberal state has certainly the right to
make war on a state that deprives either its subjects or foreigners of their liberties. Indeed, since
natural law also commands that everyone, “when his own Preservation comes not in
competition, ought he, as much as can, to preserve the rest of Mankind,”30 and since “Freedom
from Absolute, Arbitrary Power, is so necessary to, and closely joyned with a Man’s
24 Cf. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 121–24.
25 Cf. Doyle, “Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs, part 2,” pp. 324–37.
26 Locke, Second Treatise, vol. II. p. 6.
27 Locke, Second Treatise, vol. III. p. 16.
28 Locke, Second Treatise, vol. III. p. 17.
29 Locke, Second Treatise, vol. II. p. 7.
30 Locke, Second Treatise, vol. II. p. 6.
12
Preservation,”31 there is a positive obligation to intervene. This then is the philosophical root of
the liberal crusading spirit: waging just war to liberate the victims of oppression and other
injustices in order enforce the observance of human rights worldwide.32
This liberal warrant for starting a war also helps explain how Britain, France, and the
United States were able to reconcile their colonial conquests with their liberal principles. To
justify its war on Spain (1898) and the subsequent acquisition of its colonies, the United States
thus claimed the “right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the
maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual
liberty.”33 To justify British rule over India, an inscription on the statue of Lord William
Bentinck, Governor-General of India (1833-35), thus asserts that “he abolished cruel rites” and
sought “to elevate the intellectual and moral character of the natives committed to his charge.”34
And, indeed, there can be a good measure of truth in such a liberal justification of imperialism;
for the Indian rites which Bentinck abolished included such practices as suttee (burning widows
alive on the funeral pyre of their husbands), thuggee (ritual murder of travelers by robber gangs
in the name of the goddess Kali), infanticide, and human sacrifice. Nonetheless, liberal
imperialism suffers from the self-righteous belief that its way of life is the only rational one,
failing to see that traditional regimes may give human beings an attachment to communal and
concrete ways of life that they need as much as liberty. And, of course, the fact that liberal
imperialists more often denied than granted their charges the liberties in whose name they had
been conquered, suggests at any rate that shouldering the “white man’s burden” or “mission
civilisatrice” had more to do with self-aggrandizement than concern for natural law.
In sum, the peace that has prevailed among such countries as Britain, the United States,
France, and postwar Germany is not a democratic peace, but really a liberal peace. More
precisely, it is caused by the commitment of these countries’ citizens (1) to value commerciallyattained prosperity more highly than glory and domination, and thus to eschew violence for the
sake of reciprocal benefit and (2) to respect the rights of all innocents.
The Ethical Aspect of the Liberal Peace
31 Locke, Second Treatise, vol. IV.p. 23.
32 Cf. Russett, Grasping the Demo cratic Peace, pp. 34–35.
33 Platt Amendment; see Thomas Paterson (ed.), Major Problems in American Foreign Policy: Documents and
Essays (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1978), vol. I, p. 328.
34 Earl Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism (London: Longmans, 1910), p. 67.
13
Thus, the liberal peace is ultimately an ethical phenomenon. There are two general
approaches to ethics on which liberal norms have been based: utilitarianism and absolutist
morality. According to utilitarianism, agents respect the rights of others because they understand
that so doing will make everyone better off. For, in the words of Jeremy Bentham, “it is the
greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” with utility
being the tendency of actions to lead to happiness.35 Further, since utility is but another word for
interest, it is clearly the peace from a harmony of interests that utilitarianism prescribes. In other
words, the institutional account of the liberal peace assumes that happiness consists of
commodious living and argues that states eschew war because they realize that observing the
non-violent rules of such institutions as the free market, the United Nations, GATT, the
Antarctica regime, or the Law of the Sea maximizes the sum of happiness.
But utilitarianism cannot satisfy the moral sense that it is wrong to sacrifice a few to the
greater good of the many—as when thousands of Romans gain great pleasure from the slaughter
of a few individuals in the circus—because it merely subtracts the negative utility of the few
from the positive utility of the many, rather than stating that any utility thus gained is
inadmissible. In foreign affairs, this bookkeeper’s approach to ethics would have sanctioned, for
instance, that Poland was carved up by Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the end of the eighteenth
century in order to prevent war among them; for the loss of statehood suffered by the Poles was
arguably outweighed by the peace enjoyed by a much greater number of Russians, Prussians,
and Austrians. Or, it clearly played a role at Munich in 1938, when the British prime ministers
accepted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany to obtain the superior utility
of “peace in our time.”
Since the moral sense that revolts against such cynicism is shared by liberals, utilitarian
calculations of interest must be constrained by absolutist morality—which holds that certain acts
are wrong regardless of consequences—in order to provide an ethical ground for such political
phenomena as the rule of law or the liberal peace. Absolutist morality originates in the Law of
Moses, which prohibits murder, robbery, adultery, etc. for the simple but profound reason that
such actions are abominations before a God who personifies ethical being.36 Among the Greeks,
35 Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment of Government [1776], ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 3, 25–26.
36 See Exodus 20–23, 34.6–7, Leviticus 5, 18–20, 24.17–22, Numbers 15.22–31, Deuteronomy 6.18, 10.17–18,
in Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1985).
14
Aristotle recognized such intrinsic wrongness in the group of actions and feelings where vice is
not a matter of excess but inheres in any quantity, such as spite, shamelessness, envy, adultery,
theft, and murder, without elaborating them further.37 In his thirteenth-century synthesis of the
Hebrew-Christian and Aristotelian traditions, Thomas Aquinas framed these prohibitions as
precepts of natural law that are intrinsically known to rational creatures, and provided the most
convincing reason why even the survival of an entire city does not justify the sacrifice of
innocents: a city that harms innocent people in order to preserve itself actually ceases to exist as
a community because justice, which includes the protection of innocents, belongs to the essence
of community.38 In the seventeenth century, absolutist morality was given a liberal face by John
Locke, who recast the natural law as the prohibition to “invad[e] others rights,” in particular to
“harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions,” on the grounds that men are not
"made for one another’s uses.”39 A century later, Immanuel Kant gave this rights-centered
approach its final form by determining the very essence of morality to consist of the maxim,
“Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person
of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end”; for “rational
nature exists as an end in itself.”40 Given the significance of Kant’s work in deontological
ethics,41 it thus can be said without undue exaggeration that the absolutist morality of the West
culminates in the liberal norm of respect for the rights of individuals.
Overall, the peace among liberal democracies rests on two ethical developments: the
preference for commercially attained prosperity and the various desires it can satisfy over the
joys of glory and domination, and the conviction that this prosperity—or any other end—must
not be gained by violating the rights of others, that is, by using them as mere means. In this way
absolutist morality constrains utilitarianism in the liberal ethos. Such a dual scheme is precisely
what Kant had in mind when he prophesied perpetual peace among liberal republics; for the
interest-based mechanisms that Kant conceived as leading humanity toward peace—in the main,
37 Moreover, in all other actions and feelings, rightness or virtue is relative to the situation of the agent,
including the consequences of his action. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1985), pp. 1106b15–1107a26, 1110b32–1111a1–20; cf. MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 150–54.
38 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [1273], trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New
York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), II–II, QQ. pp. 64, 94.
39 Locke, Second Treatise, §§6–7.
40 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785], trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1964), p. 96, emphasis removed.
41 Ethics based on the notion of duty (what is permissible, impermissible, and obligatory to do), a philosophical
concept that subsumes absolutist morality.
15
that those who bear the burden of war decide and that war doesn’t pay for commercial and
interdependent societies—are merely the material conditions that enable human beings to
advance to the point where they shun aggression because it is morally wrong. For the task of the
“moral politician,” in Kant’s words, is “to bring about perpetual peace, which is desirable not
just as a physical good, but also as a state of affairs which must arise out of recognizing one’s
duty,”42
But liberalism is hardly the only ethical system that enjoins its believers to keep peace with
each other. During the middle ages, most Europeans sincerely believed in the truth of the
Christian religion and the spiritual authority of the Church of Rome, which commanded them to
forsake worldly glory, power, and riches for the sake of loving God and neighbor with all their
heart. Since about the tenth century, peoples from the Atlantic ocean to the Indus valley have
been united in their faith in the teachings of Mohammed, who exhorted its followers to
assimilate the attributes of an all-good and all-merciful God. And, ruling rather recently from
the Elb river to the Mekong delta, the followers of Marx and Lenin believed that all conflict
would cease once classless society has been brought about by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Nonetheless, Christian, Muslim, and communist countries have repeatedly made war on their
ideological brethren. Thus, it is unlikely that ideological likeness or even the ethical injunction
not to harm innocents have been the sufficient causes of liberal peace; for the former has failed
too many times before and it can hardly be assumed with regard to the latter that liberals are
more observant of their norms than Christians or Muslims who must fear an all-knowing and
all-powerful God if they stray from the right path. In other words, there must be something
unique to the liberal ethos that has enabled its devotees to establish a seemingly durable peace
for the first time in history.
In all likelihood, this unique feature consists of the liberal reduction of the state from the
classical provider of the “good life” (eu zen) to the mere protector of persons, their possessions
and liberties. The first reason for this reduction rests with political philosophy’s response to the
wars of religion, the massive violence that tore apart France (1562-98), Germany (1618-48), and
England (1642-48) in the wake of the Reformation. To prevent people from ever again killing
each other over ethical and spiritual ideals, the founders of liberalism lowered the aim of
political life to the goods that everyone can be assumed to desire and to enjoy without depriving
others: preservation, liberty, and commercially-attained prosperity. In Hobbes’s words, “all men
42 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 122.
16
agree on this, that peace is good; and therefore also the way or means of peace,” that is, the
“means of peacable, sociable, and comfortable living.”43 According to Locke, a commonwealth
is a “Society of Men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing of their own
Civil Interests,” that is, “Life, Liberty, Health, and Indolency of Body; and the possession of
outward things”; but it “neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the Salvation of
Souls.”44 The second reason is, of course, that a state which concerns itself with the character
and ethical quality of the life of its members cannot but diminish their freedom as selfdetermining individuals; as Aristotle put it in his authoritative account of political community
(koinonia politike), the postulate that “virtue must be a care for every city” implies that the
citizens “take thought that the others should be of a certain quality" and that the laws aim to
"make the citizens good and just.”45 And this liberals cannot possibly accept. What they want, in
the words of Locke, is that in “private domestick Affairs, in the management of Estates, in the
conservation of Bodily Health, every man may consider what suits his own conveniency, and
follows what course he likes best,” so that, contrary to the ethical concern praised by Aristotle,
“no man complains of the ill management of his Neighbour’s Affairs . . . no body corrects a
Spendthrift for consuming his Substance in Taverns.”46 Overall, liberalism inaugurated a
fundamental break in the history of political ideas: whereas ancient and medieval thinkers
considered the question of how people should live an entirely public affair, liberal writers—
assuming men to be individuals and fearing both strife and oppression—relegated it to the
private sphere of individual conscience, family, and church, and thus limited the state to the
protection of rights and the provision of procedural justice.
The history of the countries where liberalism became the dominant paradigm first, that is,
England and its settlements, suggests that this project has succeeded astonishingly well. Ever
since the bloodless revolution of 1688, England has been free of major political violence—
except for the forcible repression of early nineteenth century riots, which were caused by the
strains of industrialization and abated as the economy kept growing and liberal reforms were
instituted. While the secession of the United States was still resisted by force at the end of the
eighteenth century, the departure of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand at the beginning of the
43 Hobbes, Leviathan, XV. p. 40.
44 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration [1689], ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983), p.
26, cf. 33.
45 Aristotle, Politics, pp. 1280b1–12.
46 Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 34.
17
twentieth was entirely peaceful, a condition these countries have been happy to maintain ever
since. True, the United States did soon plunge into a bloody civil war, but this lapse was due to
the continued presence of a strongly illiberal element in its society—the slave-holding planter
aristocracy of the South—rather than the principles of its liberal regime as such. A similar
observation holds true for liberal democracy: from 1900 to 1987, only 0.14% of the population
of liberal democracies died from internal violence, whereas 0.59% did so in authoritarian states
and 1.48% in totalitarian ones;47 and, of course, only the latter regimes murdered their own
citizens on a large scale.48
In other words, liberalism has pacified political life by emptying it of much of its content.
How individuals live, how they look and dress, what moral attitudes they cultivate, with whom
they associate, or which gods they worship are matters of indifference to the state, as long as no
one’s rights are infringed. Liberalism has abstracted what is right from what is good to such an
extent that most of the concrete and particular differences that engender quarrel within and
between traditional societies have ceased to be issues of political contention. A good Christian or
Muslim cannot stand idly by when his brother fails in the positive duties of their faith, such as
worshipping God at the appointed hour, holding the right opinions, honoring elders, performing a
pilgrimage, etc. As his brother’s keeper, he is obliged to correct him first by admonition and then
by constraint, not only from concern for the soul of the latter, but even more importantly for the
sake of their shared way of life; for in a real community one man’s depravity pollutes the lives of
many others. An orthodox Jew must feel offended by the fact that a mosque sits atop Mount
Zion, which God himself had chosen as his dwelling place among his people Israel. A patriotic
Serb is likely to resent the fact that Kosovo, where the Serb nation was born in fighting the
advancing Turks, is now in the hands of Muslim Albanians. A traditional German or Austrian
cannot but perceive the presence of so many immigrants of alien ethnicity as a threat to the
integrity of their Volk. In contrast, for a true liberal, all these concrete differences are so many
occasions to practice tolerance because none of them infringe his own right to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of prosperity. Thus, it is the fact that ethics ceases to be understood in terms of virtues
and the community of the good life which enables individuals who used to be religious and
47 R. J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Transaction Books), pp. 87–88.
48 R. J. Rummel, “Power, genocide, and mass murder,” Journal of Peace Research vol. 31, no. 1 (February
1994) pp. 1–10.
18
ethnic enemies to discover a harmony of interests in the workings of procedural justice and the
free market.
But to become a good liberal is no easy task, for it demands that we overcome our natural
inclination to be with people we know and who are similar to ourselves in values, customs,
language, looks, dress, and demeanor—which William Graham Sumner conceptualized some
time ago as the sentiment of “in-group” against “out-group.”49 Indeed, since sticking together
against outsiders enhances the evolutionary fitness of human beings living in hunter-gatherer
bands and small tribes, we probably have a genetic disposition to feel friendly towards those who
are familiar or alike and to be afraid of and feel hostile toward those who are unknown or
strange.50 Moreover, to overcome this natural ethnocentrism is to deprive ourselves of the
traditional essence of political life, that is, a passionate sense of belonging to a particular
community whose concrete way of life gives us identity. Given these affective obstacles, for the
liberal ethos to become reliably effective in the political practice of a country takes a long time,
as ethnic and religious preferences that had been culturally engrained for centuries must become
taboo and the abstract rights of man need to become the accepted norm. And such an ethical
transformation requires far more than the adoption of a liberal constitution or the enlightenment
of a narrow elite. It must affect the entire people’s “habits of the heart,”51 that is, their way of
feeling and thinking about what is right and making sense of the world, which inform not only
their political attitudes but shape their daily dealings with family, friends, colleagues, and
strangers as well. For people who habitually resort to violence when nothing but their pride has
been injured, who discriminate on the basis of ethnicity and religion, and who find nothing
wrong with taunting and putting down their fellows will have even less of a problem with a
foreign policy that seeks greatness and dominion by violating the rights of foreigners. And to
produce such a change in moral sentiments requires generations.
The Historical Aspect of the Liberal Peace
49 William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs,
Mores, and Morals (New York: Dover, 1906), pp. 12–18.
50 See P. L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1981), and Gary R. Johnson, “Kin
selection, socialization, and patriotism: An integrating theory,” Politics and the Life Sciences vol. 4, no. 2 (February
1986) pp. 127–40.
51 I am borrowing this term from Robert N. Bellah et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in
American Life, updated ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996), pp. xli–xliv.
19
The liberal peace rests on the fact that most people value preservation and commercial
prosperity more highly than glory and domination and consider the reduction of human beings to
mere means to be morally wrong. Contemporary Western culture takes these attitudes for
granted, but they really are historically contingent. For there have been societies, such as that of
the ancient Greeks, where glory was the highest good and ostentation the norm, where honor
was defended unto death, where rush to reckless violence was a virtue and vengeance a duty,
where mastery over the weak was celebrated as the reward of superior prowess, where any
foreigner was counted as an enemy, and where, conversely, a preference for prudence,
moderation, equality, peace, and commodious living was derided as an attitude fit for slaves. In
Homer’s Iliad (8th cent. BC), Achilles, the archetypal hero, thus yearns for battle to win glory at
the risk and even certitude of death, but also deserts his comrades because he feels slighted in
his honor by the king who took away the woman Achilles had won as spoil, and returns to
avenge his fallen friend. According to the sophist Callicles (5th cent. BC), “nature itself reveals
that it’s a just thing for the better man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the
worse man and the less capable man,” and “wantonness, lack of discipline, and freedom, if
available in good supply, are excellence and happiness.”52 Indeed, if Nietzsche’s concept of
“master morality” is to be believed, there was a time when the “exalted sensation of being
allowed to despise and mistreat someone as ‘beneath him’” was the “right of the masters,” and
when seeing and especially making others suffer were affirmed as one of life’s true pleasures.53
Over the millenia, this ethos of violence and honor has given way to the valuation that we
have come to understand as morality as such. As we saw already, the idea that injury to
innocents is inherently wrong developed from the Law of Moses in the thirteenth century BC to
the natural law of Aquinas in the thirteenth century AD. The utilitarian belief that life and
material comfort are more valuable than glory and honor arose from such developments as the
ethic of Epicurus (341-270 BC), who recommended maximizing pleasure over one’s life time,
the conceptualization of what is useful (utile) in contrast to what is right (honestum) in the
writings of Cicero (106-43 BC); Christ’s bestowal of dignity on the lowly and their basic needs,
the emphasis on the value of human life in the Talmud (3rd to 4th cent. AD), Augustine’s
condemnation of worldly glory, and Bacon’s call for science to relieve man’s material condition
(1605). In addition, it is doubtful whether the liberal ethos could have been created without the
52 Plato, Gorgias, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), pp. 483d, 492c.
20
Mosaic notion of a single and invisible God, which introduced the idea that all that exists
emanates from and is governed by one abstract principle; the development of inwardness and
conscience among the Israelites, which provided the basis for the Western notion of personhood;
the systematic use of reason in the sixth century BC by pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales
and Anaximander, who sought to determine arche, the root cause of all things, which introduces
once more the principle of unity in difference; the critical use of reason by the sophists and
Socrates (d. 399 BC) in order to challenge the traditional beliefs of society; the doctrine of Ideas
by Plato (427-347 BC), which entrenched the Western belief in the world as a rationally-ordered
and ethical whole; the teaching of Aristotle(384-22 BC) that the practically best regime is
mixed, so that the rich and the poor balance each other, and that it has a plurality of functions
among its parts; the Stoic idea that all human beings—including women, slaves, and
barbarians—are equal before the law of nature, which rests on reason; the Roman ideal of
republican liberty, the concepts of property and contract in Roman law, the notion of the
magistrate as speaking law (magistratus lex loquens) in the writings of Cicero; the Christian
compassion for the weak , the equality of all souls before God, the individual nature of
salvation, and the separation of spiritual and political authority; the emphasis that St. Augustine
(354-430) put on the freedom of the will and his conception of a linear and progressive history;
the Germanic practice of electing rulers and binding them to the immutable law of the people;
the Frankish practice of trial by a jury composed of the peers of the accused; the diffusion of
power among the various elements of feudal government—the king, the king’s council, law
courts, parliament, lords—as famously affirmed by Magna Carta (1215); the rise of the Church
as an autonomous community, independent from the state; Marsilio of Padua’s limitation of the
Church to spiritual affairs in his Defensor Pacis (1324); the fifteenth-century conciliar theory of
the Church, which made clerical government rest on the consent of the council that represented
the community of the faithful; the humanist restatement of the dignity of man and the autonomy
of the individual; the empiricist approach to political knowledge taken by Machiavelli (14671513); the stress on the inward freedom of the individual Christian by Luther (1483-1546); John
Knox’s claim to the right to resist a ruler who adhered to the wrong faith; the argument of the
Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos that the people have a right to resist the king because his authority
53 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals [1887], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1967), Vol. II., pp. 5–6.
21
derives from his contract with them; and Grotius’ reconceptualization of ius from an objective
condition to a subjective claim (1625).
It was on these grounds, painstakingly prepared over the millenia, that Hobbes, at the
beginning of seventeenth century, was able to conceive human beings as individual persons who
naturally possess all rights and thus the liberty to do or forebear whatsoever they will, who value
preservation and commodious living more highly than glory and honor, and who can use
scientific reason to create political order by a social contract that gives authority to government.
Thus, Locke, some forty years later, could define the law of nature as the mandate to protect
every individual’s right to life, health, liberty, and property, develop the idea of limited
government, argue that a sovereign who endangers these rights can be resisted by revolutionary
force, and call for the toleration of those who worship differently. Thus, the American founders,
at the end of the eighteenth century, could develop representative government on a large scale,
elaborate the separation of its powers, separate church and state, and give fresh meaning to the
idea that government rests on the consent of the governed.
These liberal ideas took about three centuries to be realized in the societies where they first
appeared. For even though England became formally a liberal regime when it committed itself
to the rights of individuals in the Act of Habeas Corpus in 1679 and the Declaration of Rights in
1689, it took the country until the beginning of the twentieth century to cleanse itself of such
illiberal remnants as slavery (abolished in 1833), limitation of the franchise to the upper classes
(extended in 1832, 1867, 1884, 1918), censorship of the press, suppression of trade unions
(legalized in 1824), discrimination of Catholics (emancipated in 1779, 1829), child labor
(limited to 8 hrs. in 1833, forbidden underground in 1842), and mercantilist economic policies
(repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, free trade treaty with France in 1860). In the American
colonies, this process took about the same time to be completed. Although the United States
leaped ahead with its written constitution in 1787, it continued slavery until 1863 and other
forms of legal discrimination until 1965.
More precisely, liberalization tends to proceed in a dialectical fashion because it involves
changes in collective consciousness. A new value or a new ethical concept is suggested by a few
innovators (usually philosophers and other writers), then the traditionalist majority reacts with
an effort to suppress or eradicate it. If this effort succeeds, decades or centuries may pass before
the idea surfaces again; if it fails, a verbal or violent struggle ensues for years and decades
without coming to a decisive result, but nonetheless winning further converts. Yet, eventually
22
and often imperceptibly, collective life moves forward by combining some elements of reform
with many aspects of tradition in a practical synthesis, before another innovation or problem
occurs and the cycle begins anew. France negated its traditional monarchy first in the writings of
Rousseau, who denounced all previous governments as illegitimate (1754), and sought to
reconcile liberty with community through the concept of the general will (1762). France became
nominally a liberal republic when the revolutionaries declared the Rights of Man (1789) and a
constitution (1791), but then lapsed into a mob-rule that murdered political opponents en masse
(1792-94), Napoleon’s dictatorship (1799-1804). These birth pangs were followed by a seesaw
of relatively more authoritarian regimes (1814-30, 1852-60) and relatively more liberal ones
(1830-52, 1860-75), until the liberal cause prevailed with the declaration of the Third Republic
in 1875, which extended the franchise to all males (1873), guaranteed the freedom of assembly
and the press (1881), and separated church and state (1905). Illiberal sentiment remained
significant, however, as shown by the anti-Semitic outpouring during the Dreyfus Affair (18941906), the nationalist agitation of the Action Francaise (founded in 1898), the right-wing
conspiracies triggered by the decolonization of Algeria (1958, 1961-62), De Gaulle’s dreams of
the grandeur of France, and the highly centralized administration of the French départements
(loosened in 1982). A similar account can be given of Germany, which became acquainted with
liberal ideas in the wake of the French revolution, including the writings of Kant in the 1790s,
who grounded liberalism in the infinitely free subjectivity of the individual, centered it on the
moral principle that human beings are never to be used as means alone, and prophesied that
history has liberal republics and perpetual peace as its end. In political practice, Germany
enjoyed a precocious moment of liberalization in response to its occupation by the Napoleonic
armies, issuing in two revolutions (1830, 1848) and the declaration of basic rights by the St.
Paul’s Assembly (1848). But then, a period of reaction set in that curtailed the new liberties
(1850-62), before a workable synthesis was found in the Second Reich (1871)—a Rechtstaat
(state of law) where laws were made by an elected assembly while executive authority lay with
the emperor. However, this mixed regime contained a fatal flaw: an unaccountable and overly
powerful executive, which eventually brought about the disaster of World War I. Thereafter, a
truly liberal regime, the Weimar republic, was established in 1919, but the illiberal element in
German society was still too strong, leading to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, World War II, and
the mass murder of innocents for the sake of racial purity and national greatness. In 1949, liberal
democracy was tried once more under the tutelage of the Western allies, who “denazified” the
23
country, supervised its politics, and tied it firmly into their alliance. Since then, more and more
Germans seem to have learned from their previous lapses into nationalist authoritarianism and
have become firmly committed to Grundrechte (basic rights) and parliamentary democracy. At
the end of the twentieth century, with the postwar generation having come to power and German
citizenship being finally granted on a non-ethnic basis, the liberalization of Germany seems
largely complete.
In other words, liberalizing societies contain both liberal and illiberal elements for quite
some time, issuing in a corresponding ambiguity in their foreign affairs. During the nineteenth
century, the relations among Britain, France, and the United States thus show a persistent mix of
liberal respect for the sovereignty of fellow republics and such illiberal attitudes as concern for
honor, love of glory, raison d’état, and ambition for empire. In 1798, for instance, privateers in
the employ of the French republic made war on American vessels in the Caribbean in retaliation
for the Jay Treaty (1794), in which the United States—contrary to the liberal ideal of a free
market—had promised Britain not to trade with France. The U.S. defended its commerce with
vigorous naval action, but was kept from declaring war on France by a sense of solidarity with its
republican regime.54 During the Civil War (1861-65), the United States and Britain became
adversaries because of the U.S. blockade of Confederate ports and the consequent loss of cotton
to British textile manufacturers; when the U.S. seized the Trent, a British vessel carrying
Confederate emissaries to London, the British would have declared war had Lincoln not backed
due to power-political considerations. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation
(1862), British sympathy finally swung from the Confederacy to the Union on liberal grounds.55
In its late nineteenth-century lapse into imperialism, the United States provoked another serious
crisis with Britain during 1895-96, by claiming the right to decide a boundary dispute between
British Guiana and Venezuela. American public opinion was at first gripped by war fever, but
then turned against confrontation on the grounds that Britain was now—after further expanding
the franchise in 1884—a republic that should be treated as a friend. The crisis was resolved when
Britain accepted U.S. arbitration, partly from awareness of its strategic isolation and America’s
vastly increased power, partly from a moral revulsion against bloodshed between fellow Anglo-
54 On the French-American “Quasi-War,” see Owen, “How liberalism produces democratic peace,” pp. 105–
108; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Penguin, 1965), Vol. I, pp. 65–
76.
55 On the Trent affair, see Layne, “Myth of democratic peace,” pp. 16–23; Owen, “How liberalism produces
democratic peace,” pp. 110–14.
24
Saxons and liberals.56 In 1898, prompted by its quest for empire and prestige, France provoked
the Fashoda crisis with Britain, where both public opinion and the government took a hard line
out of concern for Britain’s reputation as an imperial power. With the Royal Navy deployed in
full, France had no choice but to back down in the face of superior might.57
In sum, the liberal peace among the Western democracies of today is a deeply historical
phenomenon. For the process of liberalization that has led to this peace has taken about three
centuries in the case of the innovator, England and its settlements, and two centuries in the case
of such emulators as France and Germany; and this liberalization depended in turn on
conceptual and practical antecedents—from Moses to Grotius—that took two to three millennia
to develop.
Liberalism Beyond the West?
Hence it is no accident that the liberal peace has emerged first among those cultures who
have participated the longest in this many-layered tradition, that is, the peoples of Western
Europe and their offspring in English-speaking America, Australia, and New Zealand. Further,
if France and Germany took two centuries to emulate Anglo-Saxon liberalism, despite having at
their ready disposal the intellectual resources of the Western tradition, we should not expect
non-Western peoples to succeed at this difficult task any more quickly. True, they enjoy the
advantage of the very late emulator, who has before him the fully-fledged model of liberal
democracy and thus can learn the most from the problems experienced by his forerunners. But
this advantage should be largely undone by not having gone through many of the conceptual and
cultural developments that led to liberal democracy in the West. For instance, a Confucian
society where identity is defined by the family or some other community, will find it difficult to
accept the liberal prohibition of using individuals as mere means for the good of the state. From
its communitarian perspective, the good of the part cannot be separated from the good of the
whole; hence, the individual whose rights are diminished for the sake of the public good merely
does his duty and fulfils his natural purpose. Generally put, ideas are understood much more
readily from within the tradition in which they have evolved, for understanding is a matter of
56 On the Venezuela boundary dispute, see Layne, “Myth of democratic peace,” pp. 23–29; Owen, “How
liberalism produces democratic peace,” pp. 114–19; Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 5–7.
57 On the Fashoda crisis, see Layne, “Myth of democratic peace,” pp. 29–34; Russett, Grasping the Democratic
Peace, pp. 7–8.
25
meaning which is inherently contextual. This context-dependency may be less important in
technical matters, but it becomes highly significant with regard to concepts from the humanities,
such as personhood, rights, and the rule of law.
This is not to deny that liberty belongs to the inherent aspirations of human beings as such,
for all of them are endowed by nature with the capacity to act from free will and thus to govern
themselves. Also, the failure of state-led economies during the late twentieth century
demonstrated rather clearly that liberal or free-market economies are far more productive and
thus more likely to raise people’s standard of living and endow states with the resources to
generate military might. On these grounds, liberals are certainly right when they claim universal
appeal for their paradigm and refer to such corroborating instances as the coming down of the
Berlin Wall and the raising of a statue of liberty in Tianamen Square during 1989. Moreover, the
quality of human consciousness that makes for free will also enables societies to change their
basic premises and acquire new cultural traits. After all, the West itself underwent a
fundamental change when it abandoned the communitarianism of the classical tradition for the
sake of liberal individualism and removed the good life from the purview of the state.
In other words, my claim is not that non-Western societies are inherently incapable of
becoming truly liberal because they remained outside the Western tradition, but that it will take
them a long time to do so—centuries rather than decades. For liberalization requires far more
than adopting a Western-style constitution, passing the corresponding laws, holding elections,
and privatizing the economy. As we have seen, it presupposes the many conceptual shifts that
occurred prior to liberalization in the West, such as valuing life and prosperity more than glory,
honor, and power, understanding norms as abstract universals, conceiving people as persons to
be absolutely respected, believing in the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts, separating
church and state, etc, which are often lacking in non-Western societies. Further, turning liberal
ideals into the corresponding practices is a lengthy proposition in itself, since we must first
overcome our natural inclination to exempt ourselves from the laws before our aspiration for
liberty can serve not only ourselves but others as well. And whereas the consciousness of select
individuals might be capable of internalizing all these concepts in a lifetime, such rapid learning
is impossible for the collective consciousness of entire societies, which develops dialectically
over generations.
Liberals often fail to recognize these facts and thus tend to underestimate the time it takes
for non-Western societies to liberalize. The reason for their ahistorical optimism lies with the
26
scientific epistemology of Hobbes and Locke, the founders of liberalism, who took knowledge
to consist of the objective representation of things and believed to have discovered the true
principles of government for the first time. As a result, liberals consider it “self-evident” that
human beings are individuals who desire to be free, secure, and prosperous and that natural
reason prescribes limited government based on rights and consent of the governed as the best
regime for all, regardless of time or place. Moreover, since all human beings are endowed with
the same faculty of reason, liberals assume that peoples the world over will accept their
principles once they have been made known to them; hence, their penchant for declarations of
the rights of man, such as those by England in 1689, Virginia in 1776, France in 1789, and the
United Nations in 1948. Should people still not grasp the scientific truth of the liberal paradigm,
the myths that obfuscate their true interests can be dispelled by enlightenment, such as UN
literacy campaigns, teaching by Peace Corps volunteers, the Civic Education Project of the
Soros Foundation, World Bank seminars, etc.
Further, liberals assume that peace, freedom, and prosperity suffice for human beings to
develop their full potential for a good, happy, and meaningful life. But, as the growing
disenchantment with modernity in Western societies suggests, there are aspects of the human
soul that liberalism fails to reach. In particular, as detailed below, replacing the concrete virtues
of traditional society with the abstract rights of individuals leads to a loss of community and the
sense of belonging that it provides. Concomitantly, the capitalist economy that arises in a liberal
society leads to a consumptive hedonism as people’s passions are aroused for the sake of selling
them more; a spiral of ever increasing competition arises as economic agents are constrained to
outbid each other to succeed in the free market; and an urban loneliness sets in as individuals
acquire things and activities rather than relationships and move every few years to reach the next
rung of the corporate ladder. Perhaps most insidiously, the liberal celebration of difference makes
not only for peace, but also deprives people of a substantive sense of the good. In contrast,
traditional societies—such as those existing in the West before liberalization and to varying
degrees in the non-Western world of today—endow human beings with concrete and particular
identities that are strongly rooted in the narratives of family, tribe, and people, and thus satisfy
their deeply affective need for ethnocentric bonds. They prevent capitalism from tearing apart the
organic fabric of life by regulating trade and commerce in accordance with religious and political
purposes. And they guard people against the existential anxiety that results from limitless
freedom in the realm of the spirit. Hence, non-Western peoples have very good reasons to resist
27
liberalization—however difficult it may be for Western liberals to accept that theirs is not the
only desirable way of life. Thus, when China and others claim that the Western demand to
observe the full catalogue of human rights is an alien imposition, 58 they may not be simply
trying to legitimate oppression, but could also speak from a deeper awareness of the good of
traditional community.
India
To illustrate these points, let us study the case of India. Indian culture received its first
recorded impulses from the Indus civilization (ca. 2500-1600 BC), whose Dravidian people
maintained commercial and cultural ties Mesopotamia, built well-ordered cities, worshipped
fertility and sexuality, and discovered the enrapturing effects of yogic meditation.59 Around 1500
BC, Indoeuropean pastoralists, calling themselves Aryans (aryas, i.e., “nobles”), entered the
Indian subcontinent from the northwest, subdued the dark-skinned Dravidians (whom they
named dasas, later coming to mean “slaves”), and settled its northern parts over the next
thousand years. The Aryans valued manliness, war, fame, dominion, and riches, and affirmed life
as an eternal cycle of consumption, in which the stronger rightfully devoured the weaker.60 The
human aspect of this cycle consists of the four classes (varnas, meaning “colors”) of society—the
three Aryan classes of priests (brahmans), warriors (kshatryas), and herder-cultivators
(vayishas), and the Dravidian class of slaves (shudras)—with the higher rank being entitled to
consume the lower.61 At the same time, sacred law commands men to be loyal to their guests,
comrades, friends, and brothers, not to steal their cattle, and not to deceive them in a game of
dice.62
Around 600 BC, this kind of “master morality” was overturned by the Upanishads, the
teachings of forest-dwelling sages, who renounced the attractions of bodily life, which they
58 See Richard Bilder, “Rethinking international human rights: Some basic questions,” Human Rights Journal 2
(1969): pp. 557–608; Raimundo Panikkar, “Is the notion of human rights a Western concept?” Diogenes pp. 120,
75–102; James V. Feinerman, “Chinese participation in the international legal order: Rogue elephant or team
player?” China Quarterly (March 1995).
59 Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 8–23.
60 See The Rig Veda, trans. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 1.1, 1.32, 2.12, 6.70; Sources
of Indian Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 7–20; The
Satapatha-Brahmana: According to the Text of the Madhyandina School, trans. Julius Eggeling, 2nd ed. (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), VI.6.3.11, XI.1.6.8, XI.7.1.1, XII.8.3.12.
61 See Rig Veda, 10.90; Katha Upanishad 2.9, cited in Wendy Doniger, “Introduction,” in The Laws of Manu,
trans. Wendy Doniger (London: Penguin, 1991), p. xxvi.
62 See Rig Veda, 5.85, 7.86.
28
judged a cause of misery on accord of its transience, and instead pursued the liberation (moksha)
of the individual soul or self (atman) from its otherwise eternal migration from body to body.
Through ascesis, which weakens the desires that make us cling to the body, and meditation,
which strengthens our spiritual capacity, they sought to leave behind the phenomenal level by
becoming nothing but soul and merging into the subtle and blissful energy (brahman) that
constitutes unified permanent reality on the metaphysical level.63 As part of this revaluation,
Mahavira (599-527 BC), the founder of Jainism, elevated non-injury to all beings (ahimsa) to a
supreme duty, but also rejected compassion and doing good to others as attachments that hinder
liberation, which is ultimately attained by fasting unto death. Further, Jainism asserted the
manysidedness of truth, allowing the affirmation of a proposition and its opposite at the same
time.64 In contrast, the Buddha (563-483 BC), founder of the third major renunciatory movement,
elevated compassion and loving-kindness (metta) to cardinal virtues (together with joy and
equanimity) and rejected extreme asceticism by asking laymen merely to abstain from killing any
sentient being, from stealing, from wrongful sexual activity, unjust speech, and intoxicating
drink; and, issuing a serious challenge to Upanishadic thought, he denied the soul as an illusion
of self that lies at the root of all suffering (dukkha), and asserted that the four ranks of society are
merely functional in origin and that even the lowliest could thus attain liberation.65
From about 500 BC to 500 AD, these Dravidian, Aryan, Upanishadic, and Jain elements—
but not the Buddhist ones that challenged them—merged into Hinduism, a highly syncretic and
increasingly theistic combination of the Aryan affirmation of life and its renunciation by the
Upanishads, which has shaped the mainstream onsciousness of India ever since. Accordingly,
society is by nature a hierarchy of the four classes (varnas), which in turn is divided into a great
number of hereditary, endogamous, and commensal castes (jatis) that impose on their members
distinct codes of conduct (sva dharma) concerning their daily duties, privileges, disabilities, and
livelihoods. Below this society are the excluded castes, among them the “untouchables”
(pariahs), whose hereditary livelihood consists of the most impure work, such as removing
garbage and human waste, disposing of the dead, working leather, and whose touch, shadow, or
even view is considered pollution. Crime and punishment are conceived in reference to the caste
63 On the Upanishads, see Sources of Indian Tradition, 26–36; Ray Billington, Understanding Eastern
Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 31–42.
64 On Jainism, see Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 45–92; Billington, Understanding Eastern Philosophy, pp.
45–50.
65 On Buddhism, see Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 93–153; Billington, Understanding Eastern Philosophy,
pp. 51–70.
29
of perpetrator and victim, with offenses against members of higher castes being punished more
harshly and offenses by members of higher castes treated more leniently.
The good life according to Hinduism has four ends: dharma (righteousness, duty, or virtue),
artha (material gain), kama (pleasure, especially sexual), and moksha (spiritual liberation). These
ends are to be realised in four stages, which seek to reconcile the spiritual emancipation of the
individual with the needs of society: student of the sacred scriptures in youth, married
householder in adulthood, retired forest-dweller after grandsons have been born, and, finally,
wandering ascetic until death. In a later resolution of this tension, devotion (bhakti) to a god,
such as Shiva, Vishnu (or his incarnations Rama and Krishna), and Shakti (the Mother Goddess
and Shiva’s consort), offered a path to liberation within the bounds of society, which, moreover,
is available without regard to class and caste. Among the four ends, artha and kama are
subordinated to dharma, which looks to moksha. Thus, the pursuit of wealth and sexual
enjoyment are permitted only to the married householder within the limits of his caste-specific
duties; and the king ought to promote the wealth and pleasure of the community within the
bounds of his kingly duty (raja dharma).
However, this claim to the supremacy of dharma was not really maintained in the particular
maxims listed by the principal Hindu treatises on political, social, and moral matters, namely the
Kautilya Arthashastra (Kautilya’s Treatise on Material Gain), which was completed around 250
A.D. but undoubtedly goes back to Kautilya, the learned adviser of Chandragupta, who founded
the Mauryan empire in 322 B.C., and the Manava Dharmashastra (Laws of Manu), ascribed to
the mythical ancestor of man but most likely composed around the beginning of the common era.
The significance of these two texts for the Hindu tradition is expressed in the words of R. N.
Dandekar, when he writes that the “total polity of Hindu India throughout its history from the
Shunga period (second to first centuries B.C.) onward may be said to have been the result of the
political ideology of Kautilya’s Treatise on Material Gain (in its present or an earlier form) and
the social ideology of the Lawbook of Manu.”66
In opening his treatise, Kautilya presents the wholesome picture of a community bound
together by dharma that is enforced by kingly justice: “harmlessness, truthfulness, purity,
freedom from spite, abstinence from cruelty, and forgiveness are duties common to all"; the
"king shall never allow people to swerve from their duties” by holding over them the “rod of
punishment” (danda), for “punishment, when awarded due consideration, makes the people
30
devoted to righteousness (dharma) and to works productive of wealth (artha) and enjoyment
(kama).”67 Should just punishment fail, people would lapse into the kind of behavior that the
Aryans had considered the natural order before the Upanishadic revaluation: the cycle of
consumption, which by now is often called the “law of fishes” (matsyanyaya): “in the absence of
a magistrate, the strong will swallow the weak.”68 To perform his office properly, a king must
learn to restrain “lust, anger, greed, vanity, haughtiness, and overjoy,” so that he “shall enjoy his
desires” by “not violating righteousness and economy.”69 In short, pleasure must not diminish
material gain, and both must not violate righteousness.
But soon thereafter we read that “those who are disaffected” with the rule of the king shall
be brought round not only by conciliation and gifts, but also by less savory means: “dissension
may be sown among . . . . Failing this measure, they may be so employed in collecting fines and
taxes as to incur the displeasure of the people”; and, as last resort, “those who are inebriated with
feelings of enmity may be put down by punishment in secret.”70 Whereas these actions could
perhaps be justified by assuming that the disaffected undermine a legitimate ruler, no such
justification is possible when Kautilya recommends a whole series of measures in which
completely innocent third persons are injured in order to deal with sedition:
Instigated by a spy, the brother of a seditious minister may put forward his claim for
inheritance. While the claimant is lying at night at the door of the house of the seditious
minister or elsewhere, a fiery spy may murder him and declare, “Alas! The claimant for
inheritance is thus murdered (by his brother).” Then taking the side of the injured party, the
king may punish the other (the seditious minister).71
Or, spies with concealed weapons may be ordered to seek admittance to the king, and upon
discovery, declare themselves accomplices of seditious ministers; then, the “doorkeepers shall
put the ministers to death, and in the place of the fiery spies some others are to be hanged.”72 Or,
a cook may be made to request some food from a seditious minister, mix it with poison, and
serve it to the king; then, “the king may put them (the minister and the cook) to death, under the
plea that they are poisoners.”73 But not only sedition justifies injury to innocents in Kautilya’s
66 R.N. Dandekar, “Artha, the second end of man,” ch. XI of Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 236–57, at 239.
67 Kautilya's Arthasastra, trans. R. Shamasastry (Mysore: Mysore Printing and Publishing, 1960), I.III–IV.
68 Arthasastra, I.IV; cf. III.I.
69 Arthasastra, I.VI.
70 Arthasastra, I.XIII.
71 Arthasastra, V.I.
72 Arthasastra, V.I.
73 Arthasastra, V.I.
31
eyes. Should a king be in “great financial trouble,” his spies may cause an “outcaste person to be
bitten by a cobra” in order to “collect revenue under the pretext of undertaking remedial
measures against ominous phenomena.”74 Indeed, should a prince (i.e., a potential king) have to
flee his father’s court from fear of unjust imprisonment or death, he may gain “close intimacy
with heretics, rich widows, or merchants” and “by making use of poison, rob them of their
wealth” to acquire the means to reclaim his position75 In other words, Kautilya embraces an
unrestrained consequentialism with regard to the political good: whatever is necessary to
maintain state and dharma, and thus prevent the people from lapsing into anarchy, is justified, or,
as he put it, “whatever pleases himself [a king] shall not consider as good, but whatever pleases
his subjects he shall consider as good.”76
The same consequentialism holds in foreign affairs. Assuming his audience to consist of
righteous kings, Kautilya teaches them how to conquer the world by means of force and fraud in
order to establish dharma.77 With foreign affairs being wholly under the law of the fishes, enmity
and friendship among rulers are reduced to geographical position and relative capabilities. One
king’s gain is another’s loss, and not even proven friends can be trusted: “the king who is
situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed the
enemy”; “no king shall keep that form of policy, which causes him the loss of profit from his
own works, but which entails no such loss on the enemy; for it is deterioration”; and the
“conqueror has reason to fear his ally.”78 Further, foreign kings should be assassinated after
luring them to a suitable place.79 Overall, Kautilya teaches that “obstructions of profit” consist
not only of such vices as lust, anger, timidity, and haughtiness, but also “mercy, bashfulness, . . .
pity, desire for the other world, strict adherence to a virtuous life, . . . generosity.”80 On the
practical level, artha therefore is in conflict with dharma and moksha.
But, it might be objected, Kautilya’s treatise delt explicitly with artha; thus, shouldn’t we
look to a treatise on dharma, such as the Laws of Manu, to find true morality? According to
Manu, the “root of dharma is the entire Veda, and (then) the traditions and customs of those who
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
Arthasastra, V.I.
Arthasastra, I.XVIII.
Arthasastra, I.XIX; cf. V.II.
Arthasastra, VI.I–II, XIII.IV.
Arthasastra, VI.II, VII.I, VII.V.
Arthasastra, XIII.II.
Arthasastra, IX.IV.
32
know (the Veda), and the conduct of virtuous people, and what is satisfactory to oneself.”81 In
other words, in a situation where it is unclear what the Veda prescribes, one ought to follow
brahmanic tradition; should this tradition fail to give a clear answer, one ought to follow the
example of people known for their virtue; should even this recourse fail, one may do what
satisfies one’s desire. This sequence of escape clauses refers in particular to cases of “extremity”
(apad): thus, a woman may have intercourse with her brother-in-law if her husband fails to
produce a male heir, an Aryan may eat a cow or even a dog to save his own life, indeed, a man
may kill and eat his own son if he would otherwise starve to death.82 In other words, Manu and
Kautilya agree on this: actions that Western morality prohibits absolutely, such as killing
innocents, are permissible if they alone can generate good consequences of sufficient importance.
Here we have reached a decisive difference between the Western and Hindu traditions. In
the West, such unrestrained consequentialism was uttered only by marginal and much maligned
thinkers, such as the sophist Thrasymachus(late 5th cent. B.C.), whom Plato gave an important
voice in the Republic in order to show what kind of thought political philosophy had to
overcome, and, of course, Niccolò Machiavelli (1467-1527 A.D.), whose writings caused such a
scandal in Christendom that his first name became synonymous with the devil (“Old Nick”) and
an entire literary genre—anti-Machiavellianism—arose to refute his consequentialist maxims.83
In contrast, in the Hindu tradition, consequentialism belongs to the mainstream.84 In the words of
Bikhu Parekh’s concise assessment,
the Hindu political thinkers were also preoccupied with the possible conflict between
danda and dharma. They knew that the king may sometimes have to be untruthful, cruel,
deceitful and so on, and questioned if and how it was justified. They were all convinced
that it was justified, largely on the ground that the preservation of society was the highest
political value. The preservation of society meant not just the physical security of the
subjects but also the maintenance of the social order and the preservation of dharma. In the
Mahabharata, even Krishna, the Lord Himself, tells a few lies and practices deception on a
few occasions. These were all justified on the ground that they were required to uphold
81 Laws of Manu, 2.5–6, emphasis added. The “entire Veda” refers to the sacred scriptures from the beginning
around 1400 BC to the end of the Upanishadic period around 500 BC, thus comprising the Vedas in the narrow sense
(Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda, and Atharva Veda), the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads.
82 Laws of Manu, 9.56–63, 10.105–108.
83 See Rodolfo de Mattei, Dal premachiavellismo all' antimachiavellismo europeo (Rome: Edizioni ricerche,
1956); Mario D'Addio, “Machiavelli e antimachiavelli,” Pensiero Politico 2 (1969): pp. 329–336; Salvo Mastellone,
“Aspetti dell'antimachiavellismo in Francia: Gentillet e Languet,” Pensiero Politico 2 (1969): pp. 376–445.
84 On this point, see also Ben-Ami Scharfstein, “The Machiavellian political science of ancient India,” ch. 3 of
Amoral Politics: The Persistent Truth of Machiavellism (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press,
1995), pp. 55–92.
33
dharma. As far as relations with foreign rulers were concerned, the Hindu writers generally
emphasized the considerations of self-interest and saw little reason for moral restraint.85
From the perspective of Western philosophy, the proposition that “lies, cruelties, and deceit are
justified if necessary to uphold the dharma” is a contradictory and therefore meaningless
statement, because it purports to affirm the dharma by acts that negate it. Or, as Aquinas helped
us see, a king who commits crimes to maintain a political community may thereby preserve its
physical existence for a while, but immediately negates its ethical existence, turning it into a
tyranny of some over others.
Hindu thinkers never bothered with this problem because their epistemology, going back to
the Jain doctrine of the manysidedness of truth, finds nothing wrong with affirming ethical ideals
and the consequentialist maxims that violate them at the same time. To them, logical
contradictions belong to the many illusions we suffer on the phenomenal level, whereas those
who have attained spiritual liberation know that all things fuse into “the One” (tad ekam) on the
ultimate level of reality (brahman). According to Manu, for instance, anyone who faults the
sacred scriptures for their apparent contradictions, “because he relies on the teachings of logic,
should be excommunicated by virtuous people as an atheist and a reviler of the Veda”; for
“where the revealed canon is divided, both (views) are traditionally regarded as law; for wise
men say that both of them are valid laws.”86 As a result, Hindu treatises tend to be descriptive
and classificatory rather than analytic. They seek to illumine a subject from as many angles as
possible and to give advice in as many cases as possible, rather than submitting to the rigor of
deductive logic and endeavoring to subsume all statements under a single regulating principle.
Thus, they can claim to accommodate both the high-minded invocation of dharma and the hardnosed exercise of danda, but at the price of failing to provide a fundamental critique of using
immoral means for good ends. As a result, “the Hindu tradition of political thought is largely
uncritical and apologetic of the established social order.”87
With regard to political life, the Laws of Manu thus differ little from Kautilya’s
Arthashastra. Having paid homage to the renunciatory ideal by stating that “a king is
traditionally regarded as the equal of a butcher who runs ten thousand slaughterhouses,”88 Manu
85 Bikhu Parekh, “Some reflections on the Hindu tradition of political thought,” in Political Thought of Modern
India, ed. Thomas Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 17–31, at 25.
86 Laws of Manu, 2.11, 2.14.
87 Parekh, “ Hindu tradition of political thought,” pp. 28, 30.
88 Laws of Manu, 4.86.
34
calls for a king who wields the “rod of punishment” (danda) with “due consideration” to prevent
men from living by the law of fishes: “if the king did not tirelessly inflict punishment . . . "the
stronger would roast the weaker like fish on a spit.”89 Although generally bound by dharma, a
king should use whatever means are necessary to maintain his rule, whether it means
exterminating asocial elements, spying on people, or saving himself “at the cost of his wife.”90 In
foreign affairs, a king “by means of his army should seek what he has not got,” that is, additional
territory, wealth, and subjects.91 “To bring under his control all those who may stand in his way,”
a king should first try conciliation, then bribery, then dissension, and “if [those who may stand in
his way] cannot be stopped by the first three expedients, he should overpower them by physical
force.”92 And, as in Kautilya, enmity is a matter of geostrategic location, as “the king should
regard as his enemy . . . the king who is his immediate neighbor.”93
To confirm that this syncretic combination of dharma and danda is the norm among Hindu
thinkers, let us briefly turn to the Shantiparvan, which forms part of India’s greatest epos, the
Mahabharata (3rd-4th centuries A.D.). For, according to such an authority as U. N. Goshal, “in
the Shantiparvan, the Indian speculative genius is seen in its richest form, and here also the
political ideas of the Hindus undoubtedly reached their high watermark.”94 According to the text,
“the Lord [Krishna] created Dharma for the advancement and growth of creatures. For this
reason, a king should act according to the dictates of Dharma for benefiting his subjects.”95 But
“when calamities overtake the king,” he should be “sharp as a razor” and “raise [him]self up by
any means in [his] power, mild or stern; and after such a rise, when competent, [he] should
practice righteousness.”96 In particular, a king in distress should first “conciliate a foe with sweet
assurances as if he were a friend . . . . When, however, the opportunity has come, one should
break him into fragments like an earthen jar on stone.”97 In other words, fraud and force must be
used to impose order on this fish-eat-fish world before dharma and artha can be pursued; for “no
89 Laws of Manu, 7. 14–19, 7.20.
90 Laws of Manu, 7.213, 9.252–69.
91 Laws of Manu, 7.101; cf. 7.96, 7.99, 7.206, 9.215.
92 Laws of Manu, 7.107–108; cf. 7.198–200, 7.214–15.
93 Laws of Manu, 7.158.
94 U. N. Goshal, A History of Hindu Political Theories—From the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter
of the Seventeenth Century A.D. (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 173.
95 The Santiparvan, in The White Umbrella: Indian Political Thought from Manu to Gandhi, by D. Mackenzie
Brown (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1959), pp. 38–48, at 38.
96 Santiparvan, pp. 44, 46.
97 Santiparvan, p. 44.
35
man can reap good without incurring danger” and “without slaughtering living creatures after the
manner of the fisherman, one cannot acquire great prosperity.”98
In sum, the Hindu tradition is a poor preparation for the adoption of liberalism because it
lacks the essential prerequisite: rules of conduct that are absolutely true and override
consequentialist calculations. For the liberal respect for natural and inalienable rights is but the
culmination of the Hebrew-Christian commitment to absolutist morality. This commitment in
turn is rooted in the idea of a single, all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God, who reveals in
explicit fashion which actions are inherently wrong—as opposed to the multitude of Hindu
deities, who not only conflict with each other but commit their own transgressions, and the
shapeless energy of brahman at the ground of all being. In addition, the Socratic turn in Greek
philosophy—from speculation about nature to systematic inquiry into ethics and politics—made
it impossible for the West to tolerate contradictions between right and might on the level of
practice—as opposed to Hindu thought, which not only limited itself to metaphysics,
epistemology, logic, and language, but celebrated the manysidedness of phenomenal truth.
To this criticism, a Hindu thinker would probably respond that the genuine sage—who
dwells in brahman and thus transcends not only all opposites but is one with all beings—knows
intuitively how to do what is politically necessary without diminishing what is morally right.99
Indeed, he could point with considerable justification to Gandhi, who succeeded as a politician
while remaining a saint. Nonetheless, this rejoinder fails insofar as most people will never attain
such enlightenment, whether from spiritual inertia or the need to generate the material resources
that sustain them as well as the sages. And the hope that a sage will ascend to the throne and be
obeyed by all—voiced with great persistence by both Indian and Chinese political thinkers—is
surely as idle as any Western utopia. In short, there is no substitute for absolute prohibitions in
preventing multitudes from injuring innocents, or, in liberal diction, from violating men’s rights.
When Hindus became acquainted with liberalism in the wake of the British conquest during
the nineteenth century, their response was markedly mixed. Impressed by Christian ethics,
Rammohun Roy (1772-1833) and G.K. Gokhale (1866-1915) sought to put India’s emerging
national consiousness on a cautiously liberal course, by supporting English education in Indian
schools, arguing for the emancipation of the lower castes, welcoming the abolition of widow
burning, and demanding freedom of the press and eligibility of Indians to all ranks of the civil
98 Santiparvan, p. 46.
99 Cf. Billington, Understanding Eastern Philosophy, pp. 157–59.
36
service.100 Soon, however, in reaction to such attempts at Westernization, traditional Hindus,
most notably Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) and Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), asserted the
superiority of India’s spiritual and organic society over the materialistic and rights-centered
individualism of the West, defending the caste system on functional grounds, defining the nation
as a village community writ large, and declaring sacrifice of self to the nation a religious duty.101
This tension between liberal and traditional ideas also shaped the thought of Mohandas K.
Gandhi (1869-1948), the father of independent India. Gandhi’s encounter with Christianity in
England deepened his embrace of equality, brotherly love, humility, and absolutist obedience to
one’s consience regardless of consequences. His training as a lawyer in England made him argue
that natural reason forbids caste discrimination, untouchability, and the degradation of women—
regardless of what Hindu scripture might say. At the same time, the Mahatma (“great soul”)
rejected the materialism, individualism, and life-corroding competitiveness of the West,
proclaiming the simple and spiritual life of the Indian village community as his ideal. He also
thought that liberal democracy as practiced in the West amounted to little more than legalized
exploitation of the weak, hoping that India would develop an “integral democracy” (purna
swaraj) instead, where the masses would enjoy genuine participation in the political process and
the rich would be trustees of the national wealth for the sake of the poor.102 Following in
Gandhi’s footsteps, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister (1947-64), wanted a secular
state with civil liberties, but also thought that only a socialist order could uplift India’s
impoverished masses.103
Five decades later, India is a functioning democracy with regular elections, an independent
judiciary, political parties, trade unions, and a partially free press. Entrepreneurship thrives and
100 See Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 571–95, 694–704; Thomas Pantham, “The socio-religious and political
thought of Rammohun Roy,” in Political Thought of Modern India, ed. Thomas Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch
(New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 32–52.
101 See Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 646–55, 725–32; D. Mackenzie Brown, The White Umbrella: Indian
Political Thought from Manu to Gandhi (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1959), pp. 89–104, 122–
61; Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta and Indian Nationality, in Brahmavadin 1895–1914, vol. I—Philosophy
(Bangalore: Swami Vivekananda Seva Samithi, 1981), pp. 166–95; Sri Aurobindo [Ghose], On Nationalism: First
Series (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1965); Kenneth L. Deutsch, “Sri Aurobindo and the search for political
and spiritual perfection,” in Political Thought of Modern India, ed. Thomas Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch (New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 192–208.
102 See Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 799–826; Mahatma Gandhi, Selected Political Writings (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1996); Indira Rothermund, “Gandhi’s satyagraha and Hindu thought,” in Political Thought of
Modern India, ed. Thomas Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 297–306;
Ronald J. Tercheck, “Gandhi and democratic theory,” in Political Thought of Modern India, pp. 307–324; Thomas
Pantham, “Beyond liberal democracy: Thinking with Mahatma Gandhi,” in Political Thought of Modern India, pp.
325–346.
37
much has been done to recognize the rights of the lower castes, tribal populations, and women.
And yet, the country continues to be plagued by strongly illiberal patterns of behavior.104 Social,
economic, and political relations are still organized along caste lines, especially in rural areas.
Bonded and child labor continue to exist. Ill-disciplined police and security forces commit
wrongful arrests, detentions without warrant, extortion, torture (including children), rape
(including rounding up village women for gang rapes), and summary executions. Differences of
religion, ethnicity, and caste regularly lead to riots, guerilla warfare, abductions, murder, torture,
and rape, with the authorities doing little to protect minorities and lower castes. The electoral and
parliamentary process is marred by the assassination of political leaders. Marriages continue to
be arranged by elders; thousands of brides are beaten and murdered each year—many of them
burnt to death—by the groom’s family who deem them wanting in dowry, virginity, or
pleasingness; wives remain subordinate to their husbands, who harass, beat, and desert them at
will. Rape is a widely practiced form of sexual activity and rarely prosecuted, and hundreds of
thousands of women and children are held in debt servitude in brothels that thrive with the
complicity of local authorities. While some of these abuses, such as rural child labor, may be due
in part to the necessities imposed by poverty, the shocking normalcy of rape, murder, extortion,
torture, and abduction—committed by individuals, families, mobs, guerilla forces, police and
army squads—can only be attributed to the deep-seated illiberality of Indian culture, especially
the ancient belief that some people are intrinsically worth less than others and can thus be abused
as a means to one’s own pleasure, which, as we know, rests on the divine establishment of
ethnic, religious, and caste cleavages and, most deeply, on the absence of absolutist morality.
At the same time, we should not forget that these rights violations are part and parcel of the
traditional Hindu way of life, which, in different contexts, bestows a number of goods that would
be seriously attenuated by its liberalization. For instance, many Indians have retained a concrete
sense of belonging to the community of family, village, caste, and divine cosmic order, rather
than being thrust into isolated individuality and doubt about how they should live. Their lives
continue to be governed by the organic rhythms of agriculture and craft, rather than the steely tact
of industrial production or the dizzying speed and bewildering complexity of the information age.
Seen in this light, the recent rise to power of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party may
103 Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 896–905.
104 See Humana, World Human Rights Guide, pp. 137–140; Freedom House, Freedom in the World: The Annual
Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties 1998–99 (http://www.freedomhouse.org/survey99/country/india.html);
38
have been caused by more than just fatigue with the long ruling Congress Party. It could have
been a traditionalist backlash against modernization—as happened in a number of other countries
in the closing decades of the twentieth century—based on the deep ambivalence that both the
ordinary Hindu and the educated elite feel toward the blessings of the liberal West.
Overall, insofar as India is a representative case for non-Western cultures in general, the
latter will take a long time—centuries rather than decades—to become truly liberal, should they
so desire. Of course, to substantiate this claim would require additional inquiries into the other
major cultures: the Muslim world with its ethnically different branches in the Middle East,
Central Asia, South Asia, and South East Asian; Sub-Saharan Africa; the Chinese civilization,
which encompasses not only China but also Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; and the hybrid cultures
of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Since such a comparative investigation far
exceeds the limits of this essay, our argument about the liberalization lag of non-Western
countries should be considered a hypothesis in need of further study.
Respect for Rights in the Contemporary World
Nonetheless, we can corroborate this hypothesis in summary fashion by arranging the
ratings in Humana’s World Human Rights Guide and Freedom House’s Annual Survey of
Political Rights and Civil Liberties into groups that reflect the world’s major cultural regions, as
done in Figures 2 and 3.
West
Australia (D)
Austria (D)
Belgium (D)
Canada (D)
Czechoslovakia (D)
Denmark (D)
Finland (D)
France (D)
Germany (D)
Hungary (D)
Ireland (D)
91
95
96
94
97
98
99
94
98
97
94
Latin America/Caribb.
Argentina (D)
84
Bolivia (D)
71
Brazil (D)
69
Chile (D)
80
Colombia (D)
60
Costa Rica (D)
90
Cuba
30
Dominican Rep. (D)
78
Ecuador (D)
83
El Salvador (D)
53
Guatemala (D)
62
Sub-Saharan Africa
Angola
27
Benin (D)
90
Botswana (D)
79
Cameroon
56
Ghana
53
Ivory Coast (D)
75
Kenya
46
Malawi
33
Mozambique
53
Nigeria
49
Rwanda
48
S.W./Central Asia
Afghanistan
28
Iran
22
Turkey (D)
44
Average
31.3
South Asia
Bangladesh (D)
India (D)
Nepal (D)
Pakistan (D)
Sri Lanka (D)
Human Rights Watch, World Report 2000 (http://www.hrw.org/wr2k/Asia-04.htm#TopOfPage); Amnesty
International, Annual Report 1999 (http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aireport/ar99/asa20.htm).
39
59
54
69
42
47
Italy (D)
Netherlands (D)
New Zealand (D)
Norway (D)
Poland (D)
Portugal (D)
Spain (D)
Sweden (D)
Switzerland (D)
Unit. Kingdom (D)
United States (D)
Average
90
98
98
97
83
92
87
98
96
93
90
94.3
Honduras (D)
Jamaica (D)
Mexico (D)
Nicaragua (D)
Panama (D)
Paraguay (D)
Peru (D)
Trinidad (D)
Uruguay (D)
Venezuela (D)
Average
65
72
64
75
81
70
54
84
90
75
71.0
Senegal (D)
Sierra Leone
South Africa
Tanzania
Togo
Uganda
Zaire
Zambia (D)
Zimbabwe (D)
Average
71
67
50
41
48
46
40
57
65
54.7
Middle East
Israel (D)
76
Balkans/East. Europe
Bulgaria (D)
83
Greece (D)
87
Romania (D)
82
Soviet Union (D)
54
Yugoslavia
55
Average
72.2
Algeria
Egypt (D)
Iraq
Jordan
Kuwait
Libya
Morocco (D)
Oman
Saudi Arabia
Sudan
Syria
Tunisia (D)
Yemen
Average
66
50
17
65
33
24
56
49
29
18
30
60
49
42.0
Middle East, Asia,
Sub-Saharan Africa
Average
48.7
Non-Western
Democracies
Average
69.0
Average
54.2
East Asia
China
Hong Kong
Japan (D)
North Korea
South Korea (D)
Average
21
79
82
20
59
52.2
South East Asia
Burma
Cambodia
Indonesia
Malaysia (D)
Philippines (D)
Singapore
Thailand
Vietnam
Average
17
33
34
61
72
60
62
27
45.8
Papua N. Guin. (D)
70
Non-Western
Non-Democracies
Average
41.2
Legend: The ratings in Figure 2 express the percentage to which a country respects such rights and liberties as freedom to travel in own country,
freedom from compulsory work permits or conscription of labor, rights to peaceful political opposition, freedom for independent book publishing, legal
rights to be considered innocent until proven guiltyand to be brought promptly before a judge or court, personal rights to practice any religion. (D)
indicates democracy, that is, countries where the principle of “multiparty elections by secret and universal ballot” either enjoys “unqualified respect” or
suffers only “occasional breaches.” Countries with populations below one million have been excluded. Based on Charles Humana,
Human Rights Guide, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Fig. 2: Human Rights by Major Cultural Region
West
Australia (D)
Austria (D)
Belgium (D)
Canada (D)
Czech Rep. (D)
Croatia (D)
Denmark (D)
Estonia (D)
Finland (D)
France (D)
Germany (D)
Hungary (D)
Ireland (D)
Italy (D)
PR
1
1
1
1
1
4
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
CL
1
1
2
1
2
4
1
2
1
2
2
2
1
2
Lat. America/Caribb.
PR CL
Argentina (D)
2
3
Bolivia (D)
1
3
Brazil (D)
3
4
Chile (D)
2
2
Colombia (D)
4
4
Costa Rica (D)
1
2
Cuba
7
7
Domin. Rep. (D)
2
3
Ecuador (D)
2
3
El Salvador (D)
2
3
Guatemala (D)
3
4
Haiti (D)
5
5
Honduras (D)
3
3
Jamaica (D)
2
2
Sub-Saharan Africa
PR
Angola
6
Benin (D)
2
Botswana (D)
2
Burkina Faso
4
Burundi
6
Cameroon
7
Cent. Afric. Rep. (D)
3
Chad
6
Congo (Brazzav.)
6
Congo (Kinshasa)
7
Gabon
5
Gambia
7
Ghana (D)
3
Guinea
6
40
CL
6
3
2
4
6
6
4
5
5
6
4
5
3
5
South West/Central Asia
PR CL
Afghanistan
7
7
Armenia (D)
4
4
Azerbaijan
6
4
Georgia (D)
3
4
Iran
6
6
Kazakhstan
6
5
Kyrgyz Republic (D) 5
5
Mongolia (D)
2
3
Tajikistan
6
6
Turkey (D)
4
5
Turkmenistan
7
7
Uzbekistan
7
6
Average
5.3 5.2
Latvia (D)
Lithuania (D)
Netherlands (D)
New Zealand (D)
Norway (D)
Poland (D)
Portugal (D)
Slovakia (D)
Slovenia (D)
Spain (D)
Sweden (D)
Switzerland (D)
Un. Kingdom (D)
United States (D)
Average
Israel (D)
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1.1
2
2
1
1
1
2
1
2
2
2
1
1
2
1
1.6
1
2
Balkans/Eastern Europe
PR
Albania (D)
4
Belarus
6
Bosnia-Herzeg.
5
Bulgaria (D)
2
Greece (D)
1
Macedonia (D)
3
Moldova (D)
2
Romania (D)
2
Russia (D)
4
Ukraine (D)
3
Yugoslavia
5
Average
3.4
CL
5
6
5
3
3
3
4
2
5
4
5
4.1
Mexico (D)
Nicaragua (D)
Panama (D)
Paraguay (D)
Peru
Trinidad (D)
Uruguay (D)
Venezuela (D)
Average
3
3
1
4
5
1
1
4
2.8
Middle East
PR
Algeria
6
Egypt
6
Iraq
7
Jordan
4
Kuwait
4
Lebanon
6
Libya
7
Mauritania
6
Morocco
5
Oman
6
Saudi Arabia
7
Sudan
7
Syria
7
Tunisia
6
Unit. Arab Emir.
6
Yemen
5
Average
5.9
Non-Western
Democracies
PR
Average
2.6
4
3
2
3
4
2
2
4
3.3
CL
5
5
7
4
5
5
7
5
4
6
7
7
7
5
5
6
5.6
CL
3.3
Guinea-Bissau (D)
Ethiopia
Eritrea
Ivory Coast
Kenya
Lesotho
Liberia (D)
Madagascar (D)
Malawi (D)
Mali (D)
Mauritius (D)
Mozambique (D)
Namibia (D)
Niger (D)
Nigeria (D)
Rwanda
Senegal
Sierra Leone (D)
Somalia
South Africa (D)
Tanzania (D)
Togo
Uganda
Zambia
Zimbabwe
Average
3
5
7
6
6
4
4
2
3
3
1
3
2
5
4
7
4
3
7
1
4
5
5
5
6
4.5
5
5
5
5
5
4
5
4
3
3
2
4
3
5
3
6
4
5
7
2
4
5
5
4
5
4.4
Papua N. Guin. (D)
2
3
Non-Western
Non-Democracies
PR
Average
5.9
CL
5.5
South Asia
PR
3
2
3
7
3
3.6
CL
4
3
4
5
4
4.0
PR
7
1
7
2
2
3.8
CL
6
2
7
2
2
3.8
South East Asia
PR
Burma
7
Cambodia
6
Indonesia (D)
4
Laos
7
Malaysia
5
Philippines (D)
2
Singapore
5
Thailand (D)
2
Vietnam
7
Average
5.0
CL
7
6
4
6
5
3
5
3
7
5.1
Bangladesh (D)
India (D)
Nepal (D)
Pakistan
Sri Lanka (D)
Average
East Asia
China
Japan (D)
North Korea
South Korea (D)
Taiwan (D)
Average
Middle East, Asia,
Sub-Saharan Africa
PR CL
Average
4.8 4.8
Legend: The ratings in Figure 3 express the degree to which a country grants political rights (PR) and upholds civil liberties (CL), with 1 being the best and
7 the worst. Political rights concern the liberty of the citizens to form political parties which represent a significant range of voter choice and whose leaders
can openly compete for and be elected to positions of power in government. Civil liberties include religious, ethnic, economic, linguistic, and other rights,
including gender and family rights, freedom of the press, belief, and association. (D) indicates democracy. Countries with populations below one million
have been excluded. Based on Adrian Karatnycky, “The 1999 Freedom House Survey: A century of progress,” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (Jan. 2000):
187-200.
Fig. 3: Political Rights and Civil Liberties by Major Cultural Region 1999
To this end, we define the West to include the peoples that had been Christianized by Rome
and later became either Protestant or remained Catholic. With the exception of Croatia, which is
just now beginning to liberalize, this cultural group shows the highest respect for human rights at
a rating of 94.3, and for political and civil liberties at 1.1 and 1.6. By contrast, countries which
are clearly non-Western in their cultural heritage—those of the Middle East, Asia, and subSaharan Africa—combine for averages score of 48.7 on the Humana scale and 4.8 and 4.8 on the
Freedom House scale. Among them, the Middle East and South West/Central Asia have the
lowest averages, 42.0 and 31.3 on Humana’s scale and between 4.4 and 5.9 in the Freedom
41
House survey. If we look to the cultural factors that the countries in these regions have in
common, it becomes apparent that they are largely Arabic and Turkic in their ethnicity and that
almost all of them have been Muslim for many centuries. The high scores in the non-Western
group belong to Sub-Saharan Africa (54.7, 4.5, 4.4), South Asia (54.2, 3.6, 4.0) and East Asia
(52.2, 3.8, 3.8). South East Asia, where Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim influences overlaid local
tribal culture, does somewhat worse (45.8, 5.0, and 5.1).
Human
Rights
(Humana 1991)
94.3
West
Political
Civil
Rights
Liberties
(Freedom House 1999)
1.1
1.6
Balkans/East. Europe
Latin America/Caribb.
Average
72.2
71.0
71.2
3.4
2.8
3.1
4.1
3.3
3.5
Middle East
Sub-Saharan Africa
S.W./Central Asia
South Asia
East Asia
South East Asia
Average
42.0
54.7
31.3
54.2
52.2
45.8
48.7
5.9
4.5
5.3
3.6
3.8
5.0
4.8
5.6
4.4
5.2
4.0
3.8
5.1
4.8
Interpolated mean
between West and
Middle East, SubSaharan Africa & Asia
71.5
2.93
3.20
Fig. 4: The Liberality of Major Cultural Regions
But the perhaps most intriguing fact consists of the intermediate scores of the two cultural
regions that can be considered hybrids of Western and non-Western influences: the Balkans and
Eastern Europe, which were Christianized by Byzantium and ruled for many centuries by
Mongols and Turks, at ratings of 72.2, 3.4, and 3.3; and the countries of Latin America and the
Caribbean at 72.2, 3.4, and 4.1, which were not only ruled by Western powers, as most of Africa
and Asia were during the colonial period, but settled by Europeans with mostly Catholic
backgrounds who mingled rather freely with native Americans and transplanted Africans. On the
whole, these mixed regions show a respect for rights that lies very close to the interpolated mean
between the West and the combined average of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.
These results are summarized in Figure 4.
42
In other words, the “third wave” of democratization, which has swept the non-Western
world since the 1980s,105 has not been accompanied by a comparable liberalization. Rather, a
considerable number of “illiberal democracies”—states that have a popularly elected government
but pay scant regard to the rights of individuals and minorities—have emerged from Serbia to
Belarus, and Russia, from Turkey to Kazakhstan and Mongolia, from Sierra Leone to Ghana, the
Central African Republic, and Zimbabwe, from Peru to Chile and Argentina, and from South
Korea to Taiwan and the Philippines.106 Such regimes arise most characteristically when local
elites graft democratic institutions onto a traditional culture to maintain legitimacy and to
mobilize the people for the sake of making the state more effective and the economy more
productive.107 To this end, they grant a number of rights in principle and observe a few of them
in practice, while maintaining their authoritarian hold on power. When such regimes give
expression to the urges of populations whose hearts speak the local idiom of ethnic and religious
difference rather than the universal language of rights, violent aggression against minorities and
foreigners is likely to follow, as we have seen in the Serb attacks on Bosnian Muslims and
Kosovo Albanians, the war between Turkic Azerbaijan and Armenian Nagorno-Karabagh, the
Russian war on Chechnya, etc. For to give political authority to people who put national honor
and greatness above respect for the rights of individuals is to “empower” them to violate those
rights rather than protect them. Thus, it has been argued that the process of democratization at
first raises the risk of war, as a still illiberal electorate gets to influence foreign policy.108
But isn’t the illiberality of non-Western countries merely the temporary result of the
recency of their embrace of democratic principles, a kind of growing pains that will ease in a
few years or, at most, decades? No doubt, becoming truly liberal takes time. But if our argument
105 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman,
Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
106 See Zakaria, “Rise of illiberal democracy”; Akwasi Aidoo, “Africa: Democracy without human rights,”
Human Rights Quarterly 15 (November 1993): pp. 708–709; Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia, ed. D.A.
Bell, D. Brown, K. Jayasuriya, and D.M. Jones (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995); Kieran Williams, “Summing
up Mieciarism: The passing of an illiberal democracy,” The New Presence (November 1998) (http://www.newpresence.cz/98/11/Williams.html); Thomas Nick, Democracy Denied: Identity, Civil Society and Illiberal
Democracy in Hong Kong (Aldershot: Ashgate 1999). In the Latin American context, such regimes have also been
called “restricted democracies” or “semidemocratic” regimes; see Scott Mainwaring, “Latin America's imperiled
progress: The surprising resilience of elected governments,” Journal of Democracy vol. 10, no. 1 (July 1999): pp.
101–14, at 102.
107 See D.A. Bell, D. Brown, K. Jayasuriya, and D.M. Jones (eds.), Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific
Asia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), esp. pp. 2, 13, 14, 163–67, 78–106; Larry Diamond, “Is the third wave
over?” Journal of Democracy 7 (July 1996): pp. 21–24.
43
is correct, then this time has to be measured in centuries rather than decades, let alone years. To
see this empirically, consider in Figure 5 how quickly culturally Western countries, such as
Spain or Hungary, have turned their backs on authoritarian and communist regimes and become
functioning liberal democracies: existing for 12 years, they earn a Humana rating of 92.2 and
Freedom House scores of 1.3 and 2.1. In contrast, the four enduring democracies outside the
West—Mexico, Turkey, India, and Japan—have been around for many decades and yet score
only 61.0, 2.5, and 3.5.
Recent Western
Democracies
Spain
Portugal
Hungary
Poland
Czech Republic
Slovakia
Slovenia
Croatia
Latvia
Lithuania
Estonia
Average
Enduring Non-Western
Democracies
Mexico
Turkey
India
Japan
Average
Year of
Inception
Duration
(Years)
Human
Rights
(Humana 1991)
Political
Civil
Rights
Liberties
(Freedom House 1999)
1977
1976
1990
1989
1990
1993
1990
1990
1990
1990
1990
23
24
10
11
10
7
10
10
10
10
10
12.3
87
92
97
83
97
97
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
92.2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
4
1
1
1
1.3
2
1
2
2
2
2
2
4
2
2
2
2.1
1824
1946
1947
1946
176
54
53
54
84.3
64
44
54
82
61.0
3
4
2
1
2.5
4
5
3
2
3.5
Fig. 5: Recency of Democracy and Liberality
Another objection to the cultural argument rests on the assumption that respect for rights
requires material well-being, as people in dire need of food, clothing, housing, and medicine
cannot be expected to show much concern for the rights of their fellows. But as Figure 6 shows,
109
poor Western nations, such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states,
108 See Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and the danger of war,” International Security
vol. 20, no. 4 (Summer 1995): pp. 5–38; Robert D. Kaplan, “Was democracy just a moment?” Atlantic Monthly
(December 1997): pp. 55–80.
109 Sources: World Bank 1996 (http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/GNPPC.pdf), CIA World Factbook
2000 (http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook).
44
whose per capita GDP averaged $7,000 in 1998, respect rights at a level of 93.5, 1.3 and 2.1,
whereas wealthy non-Western countries, such as Japan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, South
Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates, which averaged almost $17,000 in
1998, score only 56.6, 4.1, and 4.3.
GNP 1991
per capita
(U.S. Dollars)
Poor Western
Countries
Croatia
Czech Republic
Estonia
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Slovakia
Slovenia
Average
Wealthy NonWestern Countries
Argentina
Japan
Kuwait
Oman
Saudi Arabia
South Korea
Singapore
Taiwan
Unit. Arab Emirates
Average
Human
Rights
(Humana 1991)
GDP 1998
per capita
(U.S. Dollars)
Political
Civil
Rights
Liberties
(Freedom House 1999)
n/a
2,710
4,340
3,030
4,260
3,030
1,840
2,320
n/a
3,076
n/a
97
n/a
97
n/a
n/a
83
97
n/a
93.5
5,100
11,300
5,500
7,400
4,100
4,900
6,800
8,300
10,300
7,078
1
1
1
1
1
1
1.3
4
1
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2.1
3,940
26,960
6,380
5,350
7,410
6,670
14,730
n/a
21,390
11,604
84
82
33
49
29
59
60
n/a
n/a
56.6
10,300
23,100
22,700
7,900
9,000
12,600
26,300
16,500
17,400
16,200
2
1
4
6
7
2
5
2
6
3.9
3
2
5
6
7
2
5
2
5
4.1
4
1
Fig. 6: Wealth and Liberality
Of course, this is not to say that enduring democratic practices and economic well-being have no
positive effect at all. For even illiberal democracy implies a number of rights, which provide a
basis for claiming additional ones. And it seems incontrovertible that material hardship makes
illiberal democracies even less respectful of rights, as demonstrated by Weimar Germany and
many other central and eastern European countries in the 1920s and 30s. But democratic
practices and economic prosperity alone will not make a people truly liberal.
At the beginning of the 21st century, liberal society remains limited to the West. Among the
major regime types, only liberal society seems capable of generating a lasting peace in foreign
45
affairs. Consequently, the world is currently divided into a zone of peace in the West and a state
of war everywhere else. For as long as non-Western societies have not become fully liberal, selfaggrandizing ambition, ethno-religious quarrel, and fear itself will keep them in a condition
where war can occur at any time and thus must always be reckoned with.110 Further, if our above
argument is correct, the zone of peace will expand beyond the West only very slowly, if at all.
For becoming fully liberal has proven a most difficult task for cultures that did not participate in
the manifold concepts and practices that made liberalism possible in the West; and the goods that
these cultures would lose by liberalizing could be so many reasons for their not even wanting to.
The policy implication of this conclusion is straightforward: The leaders of liberal states
must be warned against considering countries that have acquired the trappings of democracy but
continue to be illiberal in substance—such as Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, India, Iran, Brazil, and
Argentina—to be members of the pacific union. Put differently, they must be reminded that their
relations with those outside the liberal zone of peace continue to be subject to the vicissitudes of
anarchy, such as lack of trust, deceit, and the ever-present possibility of war.
For instance, sending money and experts to Russia in order to bolster its economy and to
stabilize its democracy also increases the power of a country which, at best, will remain an
illiberal democracy for a long time and, at worst, might revert to dictatorship at any time. In any
case, we can expect Russia to deal with its intractable domestic problems by conducting a
nationalist foreign policy, for nothing rallies illiberal folk more readily to the flag than perceived
threats to the fatherland and the prospect of regaining its former greatness. This attitude can be
seen from the opinions Russians hold about their government’s military campaign against the
secessionist province of Chechnya, where Russian forces have pursued a scorched-earth strategy
that makes little distinction between combatants and civilians. According to polls from
November 1999 to January 2000,111 55% of Russians interpreted the use of army, artillery, and
tanks for the imposition of order in Chechnya as a “sign of strength of the state” rather than
weakness, 53% did not think that human rights were being violated in the campaign, 61%
thought that “the Chechens are now getting what they deserve,” 54% considered the actions of
the Russian forces “humane enough,” even though 87% also felt sympathy for the suffering of
110 In other words, I accept the Hobbesian view that “war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but
in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known” and “there is no assurance to the
contrary.” See Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII.8.
111 Nationwide VCIOM Survey, November 5–9, 1999, December 30, 1999–January 4, 2000, January 21–24,
2000. Russian Center for Public Opinion and Market Research, Center for the Study of Public Policy, University of
Strathclyde, United Kingdom (http://www.russiavotes.org).
46
the peaceful inhabitants of Chechnya. With regard to the West’s condemnation of Russia’s
policy toward Chechnya, 46% believed that the European Union was “striving to interfere in
Russia’s internal affairs and weaken our country.” On a more general level, 62% believed that
the Western donors of economic aid are “trying to gain political and economic control over
Russia.” Indeed, 13% found it “definitely possible” and 27% thought it “could happen” that
“Russia will be economically enslaved by the West” in the “next year or two.” As a result, only
8% wanted their government to “continue rapprochement with the West,” whereas 55% hoped
that it would “make Russia a great, respected power again.” Clearly, the Russian nationalist’s
favorite myth—Mother Russia corrupted by the West and encircled by enemies who conspire to
subjugate her—is very much alive, drawing strength from the human instinct to feel supportive
of one’s “in-group” and hostile towards the “out-group.”
The Philosophy-of-History Account of the Liberal Peace
Thus far, our effort to understand the liberal peace on ethical and historical grounds has
remained in the realm of contingency. As described, the development of the concepts in the West
that led from the absolute prohibitions of Moses to the liberal respect for rights is merely a
backward-looking narrative that could have been different if history had taken another course.
For instance, the Greeks could have lost their war against the Persian monarchy (500-494 BC),
who would have ended the Athenian experiment with democracy, which, in turn, would have
prevented Socrates or someone like him from challenging the prevailing ethical and political
beliefs. Then, Western philosophy might have remained limited to the kind of metaphysical,
epistemological, and mathematical speculations undertaken by Thales, Pythagoras, and Heraklit,
and ethical and political life in the West would have been shaped by the inconsistent demands of
traditionalist piety and sophistic self-interest—as it happened under similar circumstances in
India. Had the Carthaginians under Hannibal seized the opportunity to take Rome after their great
victory at Cannae (216 BC), the ideas of republican liberty, rule of law, legal personality, private
property, and contract might well have perished together with the Romans. Had there been no
Jesus or Paulus, the absolutist morality of Moses might have remained the sole possession of the
Jews, rather than becoming the dominant ethical paradigm of Europe. And had the Habsburgs
succeeded in subjecting all of Europe—rather than suffering defeats by England in 1588, the
Dutch in 1591-98, and France, Sweden, and the Protestant princes of Germany in the Thirty
Years War (1618-48)—the Counterreformation might have reduced Protestantism to a marginal
47
sect of heretics. In other words, it is quite conceivable that men like Hobbes, Locke, Bentham,
and Kant would have lacked the conceptual prerequisites to create the liberal paradigm, and the
foreign state of war would have continued indefinitely.
But there is a more optimistic view: Kant’s “idea for a universal history with a
cosmopolitan purpose,”112 that is, a philosophy of history which shows why liberal society is the
end (telos) to which the natural development of man is directed. More precisely, Kant sought to
attain a “notion of what a philosophical mind, well acquainted with history, might be able to
attempt from a different angle”—one that “to some extent follows an a priori rule”,113 hoping
that if “history . . . examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to
discover a regular progression among freely willed actions,” with the result that “what strikes us
in the actions of individuals as confused and fortuitous may be recognized, in the history of the
entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original capacities.”114 In
other words, we look for intelligible patterns among the manifold events that happen over time,
based on the assumption that they are shaped in considerable degree by the designs and purposes
of the participants. Thus, a measure of necessity is added that gives direction to the seemingly
contingent stream of history.
Kant’s philosophical argument for the liberal peace rests on two major premises. First, he
assumes that nature has endowed human beings with the faculty of reason, which “enables [a]
creature to extend far beyond the limits of natural instinct the rules and intentions it follows in
using its various powers” so that the “range of its projects is unbounded.”115 In other words,
reason implies free will and therewith man’s capacity “to produce everything out of himself”: to
determine his own way of life, to shape his own character, to govern himself by making rules and
observing them, and, above all, to pass moral judgment and to be morally accountable.116 Kant’s
second major premise is that “all natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be
developed completely and in conformity with their end,”117 probably on the grounds that ideas
and practices that correspond to a capacity develop it in a more lasting way than contrary notions
diminish it. However, reason can be “fully developed only in the species, but not in the
112 Kant, Universal History With a Cosmpolitan Purpose [1784], in Political Writngs, ed. Hans Reiss
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 41–53, at 41.
113 Kant, Universal History, p. 53.
114 Kant, Universal History, p. 41.
115 Kant, Universal History, p. 42.
116 Kant, Universal History, p. 43.
117 Kant, Universal History, p. 42, emphasis removed; cf. Kant, Contest of Faculties, p. 177.
48
individual,” for it “requires trial, practice and instruction to enable it to progress gradually from
one stage of insight to the next.”118 This cannot possibly be accomplished within the life-span of
one or several individuals, but requires “a long, perhaps incalculable series of generations, each
passing on its enlightenment to the next.”119
Based on these assumptions, we can expect that “men will of their own accord gradually
work their way out of barbarism,”120 and eventually come to live in a condition that
approximates full rationality. Kant calls this condition the “kingdom of ends,”121 since a fully
rational society ought to live by the categorical imperative which, as we know, commands us to
treats all rational beings as ends in themselves. Since this command applies equally to fellow
citizens and foreigners, this final condition implies moreover a “universal cosmopolitan
existence,” that is, an international society in which the rights of everyone are guaranteed in
principle and respected in practice. As the “matrix within which all the original capacities of the
human race may develop,” such a cosmopolitan society constitutes the telos of Kant’s philosophy
of history, or, in his words, the “highest purpose of nature.”122 However, to reach this end will
take time, for, at the end of the eighteenth century, “we are still a long way from the point where
we could consider ourselves morally mature.”123
To make this enlightenment scheme more concrete, let us briefly reconsider its core—the
development of absolutist morality. After Moses had taught that such actions as murder, rape,
theft, and adultery are always wrong, most of the Israelites lapsed into the traditional practices of
their Canaanite neighbors, which included idolatry, ritual promiscuity, and human sacrifice. But
since a true advance of practical reason “can never be forgotten, since it has revealed in human
nature an aptitude and power of improvement,”124 the Jewish prophets were able to sustain
Mosaic morality over the centuries and make it the backbone of Jewish consciousness, until it
was carried to other nations by the missionary efforts of Christianity. Then, it again took many
centuries and numerous reverses—such as feudal violence, serfdom, the Crusades, the
Inquisition, the wars of religion, absolutist monarchy, Machiavellianism, utilitarianism, capitalist
118 Kant, Universal History, p. 42, emphasis removed.
119 Kant, Universal History, p. 43.
120 Kant, What Is Enlightenment? [1784], in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), pp. 54–63, at 59.
121 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, pp. 100–01.
122 Kant, Universal History, p. 51.
123 Kant, Universal History, p. 49.
49
exploitation, Nazism, and Stalinism—until a sufficient number of people in Christian societies of
the liberal kind accepted the truth of this morality and realized it to an extent that, at long last, a
cosmopolitan society had become a distinct possibility. In other words, it almost had to happen
that thinkers like Moses, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Christ, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, and Kant
arose and that their ideas became more influential than those of Thrasymachus the Sophist, Attila
the Hun, Ivan the Terrible, as well as Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Hitler, and Stalin. For insofar as it
is objectively true that injuring innocents is wrong, rational beings will eventually grasp this
principle and apply it in practice—even if it takes hundreds or thousands of generations. In
Kant’s words, “the moral principle in man is never extinguished, and reason, which is
pragmatically capable of applying the ideas of right according to this principle, constantly
increases with the continuous progress of culture, while the guilt attending violations of right
increases proportionately.”125 Indeed, the contemporary phenomenon of “political correctness”
shows how far this development of the liberal version of absolutist morality has gone; for the
petty zeal of those outraged by the slightest infringement of what can be construed as a right or
condition of equality, even if it occurs only in speech or surmised thought, is still driven by the
biblical idea that certain acts are absolutely wrong— abominations before the Lord—so that they
must be eliminated root and branch, if good is ever to triumph over evil. In this sense, it can be
argued that the liberal peace is the necessary outcome of the moral development of man.
But Kant’s thesis rests not simply on the logic and power of ideas; it also posits several
material causes that serve as enabling conditions for our moral development. Most
fundamentally, nature has endowed human beings with an “unsocial sociability . . . that is, their
tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which
constantly threatens to break this society up.”126 In other words, human beings have a number of
desires—above all, those for glory, power, and possessions—which incline them to direct
everything according to their own will and thus cause a Hobbesian war of all, which none survive
for long. To solve this problem, reason suggests that they live in a “law-governed social order,”
where desires can be partly satisfied without violent conflict. Thus, a “beginning is made towards
establishing a way of thinking [namely, that laws must be followed], which can with time
transform the primitive natural capacity for moral discrimination into definite practical principles
124 Kant, Contest of Faculties [1798], in Political Writngs, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970), pp. 176–90, at 184, emphasis removed.
125 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 124.
126 Kant, Universal History, p. 44.
50
[of right]; and thus a pathologically enforced social union is transformed into a moral whole.”127
In other words, the natural affect of “moralistic aggression”—the rage we feel when perceiving
an injury to self or in-group—is transformed into genuinely moral judgment by the universalizing
action of reason, as well as the natural affect of empathy (to complement Kantian rationalism
with Rousseauan sentiment). For it is empathy that takes the very first step toward morality by
extending the benefit of moralistic aggression to others, especially those who are familiar and
like ourselves. Young children still wanting in rationality—as well as, by some accounts,
chimpanzees128—thus can get quite angry when they perceive others to have been slighted by
third parties, a sentiment that lives on in adults as well. Next, reason suggests that the chances of
satisfying our own desires will be significantly greater if we abstain from injuring others. Thus,
conflict is replaced by cooperation through an act of will that constrains our lawless ambitions
for the sake of reciprocal utility. However, since it remains instrumentally rational to take a free
ride on the cooperative efforts of the others as long as one can get away with it, cooperation must
be supplemented by coercion from a central authority.129 In Kant’s words, “although, as a
rational creature, he desires a law to impose limits on the freedom of all, he is still misled by his
self-seeking animal inclinations into exempting himself from the law where he can. He thus
requires a master to break his self-will and force him to obey.”130 Obviously, this stage of social
awareness is reflected in the social-contract theory of the state, as proposed by Hobbes and
Locke, in Bentham’s utilitarian theory of morality, as well as Adam Smith’s explanation of
national wealth from self-seeking exchange among individuals—all of which are based on farsighted instrumental reason. In other words,
the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess
understanding). . . . For such a task does not involve the moral improvement of man; it only means
finding out how the mechanism of nature can be applied to men in such a manner that the
antagonism of their hostile attitudes will make them compel one another to submit to coercive
laws, thereby producing a condition of peace within which the laws can be enforced.131
Nonetheless, insofar as the laws are just and their enforcement is impartial, such a society of
127 Kant, Universal History, pp. 44–45.
128 See Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
129 Nonetheless, reciprocal utility remains the primary cause of cooperation because the central coercer must at a
minimum be backed by the cooperation of his organs of coercion.
130 Kant, Universal History, p. 46.
131 Kant, Perpetual Peace, pp. 112–13.
51
coercively-sustained reciprocal utility constitutes a central enabling condition for genuinely
moral development: by habituating human beings to lawful conduct, it provides them with the
object that their reason will in a further step grasp as being right in itself and thus deserving of
unconditional respect. For example, someone who experiences on a daily basis that dense
vehicular traffic functions fairly well as long as most drivers abide by the rules of the road, will
find it much easier to gain immediate respect for the moral law—which, according to Kant’s first
formulation of the categorical imperative, commands to “’act only on that maxim through which
you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’”132—than a rambler on
horseback used to getting his own way on the prairies. To quote Kant again,
Within each individual state . . . the citizen’s inclination to do violence to one another is
counteracted by a more powerful force–that of the government. This not only gives the whole a
veneer of morality (causae non causae), but by putting an end to outbreaks of lawless proclivities,
it genuinely makes it much easier for the moral capacities of men to develop into an immediate
respect for right. For each individual believes of himself that he would by all means maintain the
sanctity of the concept of right and obey it faithfully, if only he could be certain that all the others
would do likewise, and the government in part guarantees this for him; thus a great step is taken
towards morality (although this is still not the same as a moral step), towards a state where the
concept of duty is recognized for its own sake, irrespective of any possible gain in return.133
A state may well govern itself in a republican [i.e., law-governed] way, even if its existing
constitution provides for a despotic ruling power; and it will gradually come to the stage where the
people can be influenced by the mere idea of the law’s authority . . . so that they will be able to
create for themselves a legislation ultimately founded on right.134
This account of the moral maturation of our species is fairly congruent with the moral
development of individuals as described by modern psychology. According to Lawrence
Kohlberg’s well-established scheme, children at first base their standards of right and wrong on
what will bring pleasure and avoid pain, before taking into account what earns them the
approval of authority figures, such as their parents. In contrast to this utilitarian approach, those
who mature to moral adulthood eventually base their norms on principles they themselves have
evaluated and accepted as inherently true. In this process, advances in reasoning enable
132 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 88, emphasis removed.
133 Kant, Perpetual Peace, 121n. “Causae non causae” probably means “apparent reasons are no lawful
reasons,” or, in the more suitable German, “Scheingründe sind keine Rechtsgründe.” In other words, the utilitarian
reasoning on which the social-contract state is based is not a truly moral thinking; for the essense of morality consists
of the will to do what is right without any regard to its consequences for happiness.
134 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 118.
52
individuals to move gradually toward standards that are universal and abstract.135 Others have
argued that the first inhibition to act aggressively comes from empathy with the pain of others,
which infants show already in the second year, rather than merely from anticipation of
punishment.136 In short, the biologist’s adage that “ontogeny equals phylogeny” seems to hold
for moral development as well.
Kant’s concrete example of a nation of devils is the kingdom of Prussia under Frederick the
Great (1740-86). In addition to maintaining the rule of law, Frederick gave his subjects
“complete freedom in religious matters” and allowed them to “make public use of their own
reason . . . even if this entails forthright criticism of the current legislation,” while otherwise
ruling in an autocratic way.137 Such a semi-liberal autocracy is best for public enlightenment,
according to Kant, because its “lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough
room to expand to its fullest extent,” so that, once “man’s inclination to think freely . . . has
developed sufficiently within this hard shell, it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people,
who thus gradually become increasingly able to act freely.”138 In contrast, people who become
self-ruling under a republic without having first been enlightened under a prince, will lapse into
license and prejudice because of their continued “inability to use [their] own understanding
without the guidance of another.”139 Moreover, the public use of one’s reason ought to be
limited to “[men] of learning addressing the entire reading public,” that is, the “few who think
for themselves” and “disseminate the spirit of rational respect for personal value and for the duty
of all men to think for themselves.”140 Those few, of course, are philosophers, for only they can
responsibly use critical reason to illumine what the multitude takes for granted. This is why
Kant, in drawing up his articles for perpetual peace, includes the maxim that “the philosopher
should be given a hearing.”141
As a result of this public enlightenment, autocracy can eventually give way to the “perfectly
135 See Lawrence Kohlberg, Anne Colby, John Gibbs, Betsy Speicher-Dubin, and Clark Power, Assessing Moral
Stages: A Manual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).
136 See Martin L. Hoffman, “The contribution of empathy to justice and moral judgment,” in Empathy and Its
Development, ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 47–80;
Beth Azar, “Defining the trait that makes us human: The ability to empathize with others is critical to our survival as
a species, behavioral researchers say,” The APA Monitor Online, vol. 28, no. 11 (November 1997)
(http://www.apa.org/monitor).
137 Kant, What Is Enlightenment? pp. 58–59.
138 Kant, What Is Enlightenment? P. 59.
139 Kant, What Is Enlightenment? P. 54.
140 Kant, What Is Enlightenment? P. 55, emphasis removed; cf. Kant, Theory and Practice, p. 85.
141 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 115.
53
just civil constitution,”142 which “pure reason . . . legislates a priori,”143 that is, a liberal
republic. Knowing its own essence to consist of freedom, reason can tell us without considering
empirical matters that the absolutely best regime is as follows: (1) It guarantees the rights of its
members so that “each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does
not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the
freedom of everyone else within a workable general law”; (2) it makes “all equal as subjects
before the law” and “entitled to reach any degree of rank which a subject can earn through his
talent, his industry and his good fortune”; and (3) it legislates in accord with the “will of the
entire people” so that “all men decide for all men and each decides for himself,” since “only
towards oneself can one never act unjustly.”144 But since human beings do not live by pure
reason alone, we have to accept that such “a perfect solution is impossible” in the concrete, as
“nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of”;
hence, “nature only requires us that we should approximate to this idea.”145 Moreover, this
approximation will “happen only at a late stage and after many unsuccessful attempts,” taking
the labor of many generations; for, looking back on European history, we “discover a regular
process of improvement in the political constitutions of our continent (which will probably
legislate eventually for all other continents)”; in particular, we can see “how their inherent
defects led to their overthrow, but in such a way that a germ of enlightenment always survived,
developing further with each revolution, and prepared the way for a subsequent higher level.”146
Just as the moral law commands us to construct a civil society that guarantees the rights of
all citizens, so it exhorts us to create a “law-governed external relationship with other states,”147
that is, a cosmopolitan society that protects human rights worldwide. Again, there are a number
of enabling conditions that must be in place for humanity to progress toward this moral goal.
First, the “wars, tense and unremitting military preparations, and the resultant distress,” which
man’s unsocial sociability generates on the foreign level, will eventually persuade states to enter
a “federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could expect to drive its
security and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgment, but solely from this great
federation (Foedus Amphictyonum), from a united power and the law-governed decision of a
142 Kant, Universal History, p. 46.
143 Kant, Theory and Practice, p. 73.
144 Kant, Theory and Practice, pp. 74–77.
145 Kant, Universal History, p. 47.
146 Kant, Universal History, pp. 47, 52.
54
united will.”148 In other words, the first impulse toward international society comes from the
reciprocal utility that such a system of “general political security”149 can provide. Once the
burden of security is thus born by the federation, it becomes much easier for individual states to
allocate resources to the enlightenment of their citizens, whereas no moral progress can be
expected, “as long as states apply all their resources to their vain and violent schemes of
expansion, thus incessantly obstructing the slow and laborious efforts of their citizens to
cultivate their minds.”150
A second enabling condition consists of the fact that “civil freedom can no longer be so
easily infringed without disadvantage to all trades and industries, and especially to commerce, in
the event of which the state’s power in its external relations will also decline.”151 In other
words, power rests on economic might and scientific progress, which, in turn, are promoted by a
free market economy and free educational and research institutions.152 According to a Heritage
Foundation survey, “free” countries thus achieved an annual growth rate of 2.88% from 1980 to
1993, whereas those considered “mostly free” attained only 0.97%; indeed, the economies of
countries deemed “mostly not free” shrank during the same period by 0.32% and those of
"repressed" countries contracted by 1.44%.153 Kant’s third enabling condition consists of
economic interdependence: “the effects which an upheaval in any state produces upon all the
others in our continent, where all are so closely linked by trade, are so perceptible that these
other states are forced by their own security to offer themselves as arbiters . . . so that they
indirectly prepare the way for a great political body of the future.”154
In other words, once state have overcome the short-sighted pursuit of temporary gain in
order to attain security and prosperity by collective means, further enlightenment will transform
these reciprocal utility arrangements into genuinely moral institutions. The integration of
postwar Europe seems to corroborate Kant’s hypothesis. Born from the economic cooperation of
France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in 1950s and 60s, the
European Economic Community was joined by Denmark, Ireland, and Britain in 1973, by
147 Kant, Universal History, p. 47, emphasis removed.
148 Kant, Universal History, p. 47; cf. Kant, Theory and Practice, pp. 90–91.
149 Kant, Universal History, p. 49.
150 Ibid.
151 Kant, Universal History, p. 50.
152 Cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992), pp. 71–130.
153 Kim R. Holmes and Melanie Kirkpatrick, “Freedom and growth,” Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition,
December 16, 1996 (http://www.interactive.wsj.come/home.html).
55
Greece in 1981, and by Portugal and Spain in 1986. In 1993, European integration was given a
decidedly political dimension by the founding of the European Union, joined by Sweden,
Finland, and Austria in 1995, which introduced not only a common currency and a European
central bank, but also E.U. citizenship, elections to the European Parliament, a European Court
of Justice to whom all E.U. citizens could appeal and whose decisions bind the member
governments (including the striking down of laws), as well as a common foreign and security
policy. While these arrangements were largely motivated by the utility they would bring to its
members with regard to peace and prosperity, the E.U. recently made a significant step toward
being a moral community as well: when the government of Austria was joined in 2000 by a
party whose leader had made apologetic remarks about Hitler’s regime, the Union asserted its
status as a “community of values” by imposing diplomatic sanctions on the country.
What does all this imply for our inquiry into the liberal peace? Human beings have a nature
that makes them in many ways like animals, ruthlessly pursuing their own preservation and
reproduction by means of a narrowly instrumental reason that aims to satisfy their lust for food,
sex, aggression, power, territory, and possessions and makes them form groups that are
inherently hostile toward outsiders. Add to this the specifically human concern with honor and
glory, and the abundance of murder, war, rapine, and exploitation in the history our species is
readily understood. But human beings are also capable of feeling compassion for the suffering
of others, of comprehending the advantages of far-sighted reciprocal utility, of suppressing or
transforming their contrary desires by acts of will, and, finally, of acting from a sense of moral
duty. Hence, history has also witnessed the rise of religions that preach absolutist morality, the
enacting of just laws, revolutions in the name of justice and liberty, and states dedicated to
human rights.
Now, if these two aspects of man—let us call them the beastly and the humane—were
merely juxtaposed in contingent fashion, history would have remained an ultimately senseless
sequence of better and worse conditions. But, as Kant’s philosophy of history suggests, there has
been a gradual movement away from the beastly and toward to the humane. Since the time of
Moses, Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius, the leading minds of the major civilizations have
argued that human beings have the potential to rise high above the cruelties of animal nature and
have suggested various rational schemes for realizing it. And since human beings are capable of
rationality and have a good will, they have gradually enacted these schemes and their successors
154 Kant, Universal History, p. 51.
56
over the millennia—severe relapses notwithstanding. Put differently, becoming virtuous and
acting morally belongs to the telos of human beings and thus gives an inherent direction to their
lives—just as it is in the nature of acorns to grow into splendid oaks under the proper
circumstances. And because there is this inherent direction in human life, we can assume that
history—which is but a concatenation of human lives—has a direction as well, namely, to
advance from the beastliness of our past toward an increasingly humane condition in the future.
The liberal peace thus comes to light as the form this ethical advance currently takes in the
West.
Finally, if liberal society really represents an advanced stage in the ethical development of
man, then we should expect that it will eventually spread to non-Western countries in a major
way. For the telos that guides this development arises from capacities that human beings possess
prior to their cultural differentiation. Once truly liberal regimes exist in one place, their inherent
appeal should thus lead to their adoption in all others. To be sure, this adoption will be a drawnout process with many reverses, as numerous cultural impediments have to be overcome. But if
liberty is really a universal aspiration of man, then liberal society and its peace will eventually
reach the far corners of the earth.
The End of History?
But is the liberal republic really the “perfect civil constitution” and thus lead to perpetual
and universal peace, as suggested by Kant? In other words, does the liberal peace inaugurate the
recently announced “end of history”?155 To sketch a brief answer to these prophetic questions,
we need to examine whether liberal society can develop the human potential for the good life in a
complete and coherent way; for should something essential to this telos remain unfulfilled, either
because liberal society does not recognize it as a good or cannot supply it without reducing
another one, then man’s striving for the truly ethical life is incomplete and therewith history will
continue. The answer given by liberals will be obviously an affirmative one, since they believe
that theirs is the best regime and that the world’s remaining ills could be solved by implementing
it more fully. However, ever since liberal society became an empirical reality during the
nineteenth century, critics from both the left and right have pointed out a number of
155 Francis Fukuyama, “The end of history?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): pp. 3–18; cf. Fukuyama, End
of History and the Last Man.
57
shortcomings that deserve our consideration. 156
To begin with, the liberal substitution of rights for virtue as the central ethical concept has
led to a severe loss of community. Virtues are personal attributes that enable people to perform
the various functions of a particular community. For instance, the virtue of courage helps
citizens defend their city, while charity makes them support the indigent. Virtue ethics are
typical of traditional societies since it is quite natural for human beings to have concrete
expectations about the character they want their fellows to have. In contrast, rights are claims
that protect the freedom of individuals to do and forebear as they list, as long as they do not
thereby diminish the like freedom of others. Indeed, liberalism invented the concept of rights to
emancipate individuals from precisely the kind of character prescriptions that communities of
virtue impose. But this liberty has come at a high price, according to conservative
communitarians: a society of individuals who pursue widely different and even incompatible
“life styles” may share a certain pride in celebrating diversity, but will hardly have a substantive
sense of belonging to the same community; for this sentiment rests on sharing a concrete and
particular way of life—from values and purposes down to customs, dress, and idiom. Based on
nothing more than self-interest and respect for rights, liberal society thus fragments into ever
smaller units, until even the family has become a cancelable contract among autonomous
individuals.
Of course, as left communitarians will remind us, this loss of community stems also from
the rise of capitalism, which is closely linked to the liberal paradigm, insofar as it counts the
freedom to make a profit and accumulate capital among the natural rights of man. Free markets
thrive on vigorous competition among firms and the individuals within them, making
community impossible in the economic realm. Since business is more profitable on a large scale,
firms operate over vast distances, forcing job seekers to leave their hometowns and requiring
employees to relocate repeatedly. Chain stores offer the same products everywhere, destroying
the local particularity that community thrives on. In addition to being deprived of community,
we suffer alienation. For when we meet our needs by exchanging the products of our activity on
156 For a sample of the communitarian critique of liberalism, see Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Powers,
Possessions and Freedoms: Essays in Honor of C.B. MacPherson, ed. Alexis Kontos (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 39–61; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981); Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre
Dame: Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for
a New Age (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985); Amitai Etzioni (ed.), Rights and the Common
Good: The Communitarian Perspective (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995); Robert N. Bellah et al, Habits of the
Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996).
58
competitive markets, we hand over—or alienate—parts of ourselves to a logic that has no
concern for our happiness, but considers us mere means to the advantage of others. As
consumers, we are made to believe in the manipulative messages of advertising and to buy
products we don’t really need. As employees, we must come to work at a given time whether we
feel productive or not, and are expected to act professionally at all times rather than express our
true thoughts and feelings. Indeed, we have to pretend to like our colleagues and find our job
interesting. As entrepreneurs, we must profess to have the best interest of our customers at heart,
even though the bottomline commands us otherwise.
Further, it could be argued that liberalism’s denial of any substantive notion of the good has
left people in the dark as to how they should live. This may be less of a problem, or indeed a
blessing, for the few who can thoroughly educate themselves in the humanities—Kant’s
“reading public.” But the same can hardly be said for the many who nowadays use their freedom
from communal prescription to pursue more and more wealth, power, status, and pleasure,
despite the fact that their basic needs have been met to the point where they could turn to higher
pursuits. In other words, the increasing baseness of popular culture in Western society casts
grave doubt on the liberal belief that popular enlightenment will follow from the destruction of
myths and superstitions, from the untrammeled generation of scientific knowledge, and the
freedom of speech, press, and education. In addition to this license, the emptiness of liberalism
has also facilitated the spread of ethical and cultural relativism in the West. For a paradigm that
asks us to tolerate opinions even though they offend their own is hardly suited to inoculate us
against the skeptical and postmodern claim that all knowledge is relative to one’s perspective.
And where relativism has become an accepted verity, the rise of nihilism—with “nothing is true,
everything is permitted” written on its banner—becomes a real possibility.
In sum, there are serious reasons to doubt that liberal society represents the perfection of
man and the end of history. At some point, loss of community, alienation, license, and relativism
might become so rampant in the West that not only conservatives and leftists will conclude that
the blessings of liberalism—freedom, prosperity, and peace—have come at too high a price.
Thus, a broadly based countermovement might arise to reassert man’s need for unquestioned
attachment to particular communities. In the countries still outside the liberal fold, cultural
resistance to liberal society might reach a point where it is no longer seen as the primary model
for development. Then, the liberal peace would expand no longer, and, indeed, might collapse
where it seemed so enduring.
59
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95-08
Allison, Graham T., Owen R. Coté, Jr., Richard A. Falkenrath and Steven E. Miller.
“Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and
Fissile Material.”
95-07
Falkenrath, Richard A. “The U.S.-Russian HEU Purchase Agreement: Achievements,
Problems, Prospects.”
95-06
Stavins, Robert N. “The Costs of Carbon Sequestrian: A Revealed Preference Approach.”
95-05
Dietrich, William. “The Challenge of Selecting Goals: Case Studies Regarding the Use of
Critical Levels.”
95-04
Ferenz, Michele N. and Stephan D. Sylvan. “The Design of a Palestinian-Israeli Water
Commission: A Best Practices Approach.”
95-03
Stavins, Robert N. and Tomasz Zylicz. “Environmental Policy in a Transition Economy:
Designing Tradable Permits for Poland.”
95-02
Not available.
95-01
Perlman, Brett A. “Pricing the Internet: How to Pay the Toll for the Electronic
SuperHighway.”
94-10
Stavins, Robert N. “Correlated Environmental Uncertainty and Policy Instrument Choice.”
94-09
Falkenrath, Richard A. “The United States and Ballistic Missile Defense after the Cold War.”
94-08
Falkenrath, Richard A. “The United States, the Former Soviet Republics, and Nuclear
Weapons: Problems and Policies of Denuclearization.”
94-07
Stavins, Robert N. and Adam Jaffee. “Environmental Regulation and Technology Diffusion:
The Effects of Alternative Policy Instruments.”
94-06
Not Available.
94-05
Zaborsky, Victor. “Nuclear Disarmament and Nonproliferation: The Evolution of the
Ukrainian Case.”
The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) Discussion Papers, established in 1991, will be issued
on an irregular basis with three programmatic subseries: International Security; Science, Technology, and Public
Policy; and Environment and Natural Resources. Inquiries and orders may be directed to: Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs, Publications, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138.
BELFER CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Discussion Paper Series
94-04
Lachow, Irving. “The Global Positioning System and Cruise Missile Proliferation: Assessing
the Threat.”
94-03
Fairman, David, and Michael Ross. “International Aid for the Environment: Lessons from
Economic Development Assistance.”
94-02
Hahn, Robert W. and Carol A. May. “The Behavior of the Allowance Market: Theory and
Evidence.”
94-01
Bender, Rodd, Wyman Briggs, and Diane DeWitt. “Toward Statewide Unit Pricing in
Massachusetts: Influencing the Policy Cycle.”
93-06
Hahn, Robert W. “An Economic Analysis of Scrappage.”
93-05
Hancke, Bob. “Technological Change and Its Institutional Constraints.”
93-04
Portney Paul R. and Robert N. Stavins. “Regulatory Review of Environmental Policy: The
Potential Role of Health-Health Analysis”
93-03
Parson, Edward A. and Richard J. Zeckhauser. “Equal measures and Fair Burdens:
negotiating environmental treaties in an unequal world.”
93-02
Stavins, Robert N. “Transaction Costs and the Performance of Markets for Pollution
Control.”
93-01
Holla, Rogier A.H.G. “Cultural Attitudes and Institutional Forces: Explaining National
Differences in Biotechnology Policy.”
92-13
Foster, Charles H.W. “Of Vert and Vision: Ensuring the Legacy of the Northern Forest of
New England and New York.”
92-12
Hane, Gerald Jiro. “Research and Development Consortia in Innovation in Japan: Case
Studies in Superconductivity and Engineering Ceramics.”
92-11
Vernon, Raymond. “The Triad as Policymakers.”
92-10
Jorgenson, Dale W. and Peter J. Wilcoxen. “Energy, the Environment and Economic
Growth.”
92-09
Norberg-Bohm, Vicki and William C. Clark, et al. “International Comparisons of
Environmental Hazards: Development and evaluation of a method for linking environmental
data with the strategic debate management priorities for risk management.”
92-08
Hart, David. “Strategies of Research Policy Advocacy: Anthropogenic Climatic Change
Research, 1957-1974.”
92-07
Dembinski, Matthias. “Ballistic Missile Proliferation and the New World Order: A Critical
Survey of the Literature.”
The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) Discussion Papers, established in 1991, will be issued
on an irregular basis with three programmatic subseries: International Security; Science, Technology, and Public
Policy; and Environment and Natural Resources. Inquiries and orders may be directed to: Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs, Publications, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138.
BELFER CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Discussion Paper Series
92-06
Shlyakhter, Alexander I. and Daniel M. Kammen. “Estimating the Range of Uncertainty in
Future Development from Trends in Physical Constraints and Predictions of Global Change.”
92-05
Eaton, Susan C. “Union Leadership Development in the 1990s and Beyond: A Report with
Recommendations.”
92-04
Hahn, Robert W. and Robert L. Axtell. “Reevaluating the Relationship between Transferable
Property Rights and Command-and-Control Regulation.”
92-03
Stavins, Robert N. and Bradley W. Whitehead. “The Greening of America’s Taxes: Pollution
Charges and Environmental Protection.”
92-02
Parson, Edward A. “Protecting the Ozone Layer: The Evolution and Impact of International
Institutions.”
92-01
Branscomb, Lewis M. “S & T Information Policy in the Context of a Diffusion Oriented
National Technology Policy.”
91-15
Hahn, Robert W. and Robert N. Stavins. “Economic Incentives for Environmental Protection:
Integrating Theory and Practice.”
91-14
Hahn, Robert W. “Government Markets and the Theory of the N th Best.”
91-13
Parson, Edward A. and William C. Clark. “Learning to Manage Global Environmental
Change: A Review of Relevant Theory.”
91-12
Branscomb, Lewis M. “America’s Emerging Technology Policy.”
91-11
Lynn-Jones, Sean M. “International Security Studies after the Cold War: An Agenda for the
Future.”
91-10
Rapporteur’s Report of the Executive Session: “Negotiating a Global Climate Change
Agreement.” March 14-15, 1991.
91-09
Jorgenson, Dale W. and Peter J. Wilcoxen. “Reducing U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions: The
Cost of Different Goals.”
91-08
Montgomery, John D., et al. “Values in Conflict: Policy Interactions in the Pacific Basin.”
91-07
Summary of Project 88/Round II Workshop Proceedings. “Incentive-Based Policies for
Municipal Solid Waste Management.” May 16, 1991.
91-06
Proceedings of Project 88/Round II Forum. “Market-Based Strategies for Environmental
Protection: A Tribute to Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania.” May 16, 1991.
91-05
Foster, Charles H.W. and Peter P. Rogers. “Rebuilding the Nation’s Wetland Heritage: A
Challenge for the 1990s.”
91-04
Lerner, Joshua. “The Impact of Patent Scope: An Empirical Examination of New
Biotechnology Firms.”
91-03
Gaskins, Darius and Bruce Stram. “A Meta Plan: A Policy Response to Global Warming.”
The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) Discussion Papers, established in 1991, will be issued
on an irregular basis with three programmatic subseries: International Security; Science, Technology, and Public
Policy; and Environment and Natural Resources. Inquiries and orders may be directed to: Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs, Publications, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138.
BELFER CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Discussion Paper Series
91-02
Merchant, Gery E. “Freezing CO2 Emissions: An Offset Policy for Slowing Global
Warming.”
91-01
Jaffee, Adam and Robert N. Stavins. “Evaluating the Relative Effectiveness of Economic
Incentives and Direct Regulation for Environmental Protection: Impacts on the Diffusion of
Technology.”
The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) Discussion Papers, established in 1991, will be issued
on an irregular basis with three programmatic subseries: International Security; Science, Technology, and Public
Policy; and Environment and Natural Resources. Inquiries and orders may be directed to: Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs, Publications, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138.