Introduction

Abstract

Liberalism — defined, in its broadest sense, as the Western paradigm of thought that posits the individual as the normative standard of political and economic activity — has long had a strange courtship with the discipline of International Relations (IR). Indeed, it could be argued that liberalism has come in and out of intellectual fashion, largely as a response to world events. After two world wars and the Great Depression, the founding fathers of the discipline of IR sought to distance themselves from the unfulfilled promises of Wilsonian liberalism by taking a hard and “scientific” look at power politics. A few decades later, its perceived “triumph over communism” in 1989 seemed to have provided it with a degree of ideological legitimacy uncommon in the history of political thought: both its twentieth-century totalitarian challengers lay at its feet, defeated. A “New World Order”, based on the now-unquestioned precepts of liberal democracy and neoliberal economics, would propel the world into an era of peace and prosperity where Marx’s historical dialectic would reach a premature end point (Fukuyama, 1993). If anything, this brave new world would be a boring place, bereft of ideological conflict and discussion, with technocratic governments “kept in line” through a combination of market forces and a US-led international society.