Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Comment on this article   Liberalism is a tradition in political theory that takes individual persons as its units of analysis. Liberalism has always been concerned with security, albeit the security of the individual; institutions, including the state, are all established and sustained by individuals and instrumental to their desires. In recent years, liberal scholarship in international security has adopted realist language by treating states as actors, and its distinctive contribution has been its insistence that foreign policies and international outcomes vary with the types of state, particularly their domestic institutions. In contrast to the claims of realists, liberals argue that liberal democracies compete better and are more secure in an anarchical international system. Seen in its fullness, liberalism also expects transnational networks to build and sustain international institutions to constrain states and make people more secure. Liberalism overlaps partially with both rationalism and constructivism and should not be seen as competing with either. Although liberalism does not necessarily predict an imminent demise of the state and the states system, its implicit functionalism opens it to that possibility: if states no longer make people secure, they may be replaced at some point. Thus liberalism's strength – its conceptual taming of the state – also reveals one of ... log in or subscribe to read full text