Table Of ContentINTERNATIONAL-
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VOLUME II
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
SAGE LIBRARY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
INTERNATIONAL
SECURITY
VOLUME I1
The Transition to the Post-Cold War
Security Agenda
Edited by
Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen
OSAGE Publications
Los Angeles London New Delhi Singapore
Introduction and editorial arrangement 0 Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen 2007
First published 2007
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VOLUME I1
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
22. Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of
the Liberal Case Barry Buzan
23. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals
Carol Cohn
24. Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
Simon Dalby
25. International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on
the State of the Field Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and
Sean M. Lynn-Jones
26. Base Women Cynthia Enloe
27. The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and
National Security Daniel Deudney
28. Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics
R.B.]. Walker
29. How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO
Bradley S. Klein
30. Soft Power Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
31. Security and Emancipation Ken Booth
32. The Renaissance of Security Studies Stephen M. Walt
33. The Quagmire of Gender and International Security
Rebecca Grant
34. Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector!
Edward A. Kolodziej
35. A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the
Post-Cold War Era James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul
36. Japan's National Security: Structure, Norms, and Policies
Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara
37. The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict Barry R. Posen
38. The Clash of Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington
39. The Emerging Structure of International Politics
Kenneth N. Waltz 378
vi Contents
40. Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
David Dewitt
41. New Dimensions of Human Security Human
Development Report 1994
42. 'Message in a Bottle'? Theory and Praxis in Critical
Security Studies Richard Wyn Jones
Economic Structure and International Security:
The Limits of the Liberal Case
Barry Buzan
T
he theory that a liberal international economy is a necessary factor
in sustaining an international security system which avoids major
conflict and war is widespread. The economic theory of security rests
on arguments that connect economic structure to the use of force: specif-
ically, that a liberal economic system substantially discourages the use of
force among states, while a mercantilist economic structure stimulates it.
In this article I shall challenge the validity of this theory on two levels.
First, I shall argue that the theory is seriously unbalanced in its attempt to
associate liberal structures exclusively with benign effects on the use of force,
and mercantilist structures exclusively with malign ones. Liberal structures
can also, and in their own terms, stimulate the use of force, while mercantilist
structures can be benign. Second, I shall argue that the whole attempt to
link economic structure, whether liberal or mercantilist, to international
security overrates the determining role of economic factors in the broader
issues of peace and war. Noneconomic factors provide much more power-
ful explanations than do economic ones for the major phenomena that are
usually cited as supporting the theory.
The immediate relevance of these arguments is to the current concern
that the decline of American hegemony will lead to a collapse of the liberal
economic system and therefore to a renewed cycle of conflict and war along
the lines of events during the 1930s. If the arguments made here are correct,
then this concern is misplaced. The current liberal system does not have to
be maintained for security reasons, and security reasons are not a convin-
cing motive for opposing a transition to some form of mercantilist economic
system.
I start by examining the intellectual origins of the liberal case, and by iden-
tifying which of its supporting arguments still plausibly connect economic
structure to the use of force within the context of the international system since
1945. Section 2 outlines the nature of the decline in the use of force associated
with the post-1945 liberal system, and it argues that noneconomic factors
Source: International Organization, 38(4) ( 1984): 597-624.
2 The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
provide more convincing explanations for the observed phenomena than do
economic ones. Section 3 argues that the liberal case against mercantilism on
security grounds is not credible under the conditions of the 1980s and that a
good case can be made for a benign view of mercantilism. Section 4 makes the
case that liberal systems contain a severe structural instability, which means
that they, like mercantilist systems, can stimulate as well as constrain the use
of force.
I. The Liberal Case
The essence of the liberal case is that a liberal economic order makes a sub-
stantial and positive contribution to the maintenance of international secur-
ity. Where a liberal economic order prevails, states will be less inclined to
use force in their relations with each other than would otherwise be the
case. Economics thus gives rise to a structural theory of international secur-
ity, which posits an unspecified, but significant, level of causal linkage
between the structure (basic ordering principle) of international economic
relations and the noneconomic behavior of states (the use of force).' The
theory is politically influential precisely because the arguments are struc-
tural: a liberal system in any historical period should generate significant
restraint on the use of force.
The intellectual foundations of the liberal case are closely linked to the revo-
lution in economics triggered by Adam Smith. The new political-economics
reflected the interests of the rising commercial class. Its proponents, among
them Bentham and Paine, looked forward to a society based on individual
rights, in which public opinion would play a major role and the state would
be minimal. They believed that a natural harmony of interest both within
and between states could be obtained by these reforms and that free trade
was the key mechanism by which this harmony could be realized. They
opposed the existing system of mercantilism, in which economic and indi-
vidual interests were subordinated to the pursuit of state power and inter-
national relations were corrupted by secret diplomacy. They saw this system
as serving the narrow class interests of the aristocracy, and they castigated
it for both its economic inefficiency and its encouragement of unnecessary
conflict. The classical liberal case thus amalgamated political and economic
reforms. Free trade was central to the case, but only its most extreme advo-
cates argued that free trade alone was a sufficient condition for peace.2
The great free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden probably represents the
high point in the making of the classical liberal case. Liberal assumptions
about harmony of interest lead naturally to the conclusion that a liberal eco-
nomic system would be substantially less war-prone than a mercantilist one.
But Cobden connected the two politically during the 1840s by bringing the
peace movement into the free-trade coalition. This alliance sealed the con-
nection between free trade and peace, a connection that still underlies the
Economics and Security 3
J ,
economic theory of international security. The belief that free trade was good
for peace as well as good for prosperity was bolstered by the subsequent half-
century experience of the Pax Britannica. So strongly embedded did it become
that even the catastrophe of the First World War did not greatly diminish its
intellectual and political appeal.'
The economic crisis of the interwar years finally destroyed the political
reign of free trade in Britain. But the experience of neomercantilism during
the 1930s, and of the world war that seemed to result from it, stimulated a
powerful revival of the free-trade and peace connection in the United States.
Whatever the historical merits of this interpretation, Cordell Hull and others
in the Roosevelt administration were strongly committed to the liberal case,
believing that "If goods can't cross borders, soldiers will."4 With America
finally acting as heir to Britain's role, Hull and his colleagues had both the
will and the means to create an international order in which the hope for
peace was strongly tied to the rebuilding of an open trading system among
countries that were either democratic by tradition or else made so as a result
of occupation and reform.
This orthodoxy has dominated and legitimized American hegemony for
the past four decades. Commitment to it underlies the current sense of crisis
created by America's inability to maintain the liberal order. Protectionism,
and the demand for it, is everywhere on the rise, creating the fear that another
neomercantilist revival will once again set the world on the path to war.
The arguments used to support the liberal case have not remained con-
stant over the two centuries of its existence. Central to the economic side of
the theory is the assumption that we have only two choices about the form
of economic structure: liberal, based on free trade, and mercantilist, based
on protection. Because the relationship between the two is mutually exclu-
sive, only limited possibilities exist for policies that combine elements of
both. Within this very restricted framework of choice, arguments connect-
ing economic structure to the use of force have been made on two levels:
domestic and international.
In the period leading up to the triumph of free trade, arguments on the
domestic level dominated the liberal case. Mercantilism was seen to arise
from the nature of aristocratic states, and therefore the ~oliticapl riority of
liberals was to topple the interventionist, power-seeking state structures
that were the legacy of the eighteenth century. Liberals envisaged states
that, because the bourgeoisie dominated national politics, would be both
inherently disinclined to seek power and anxious to avoid war.
The classical liberal view was, therefore, that the character of international
relations was determined principally by the character of states. Liberal states
would produce a harmonious system, mercantilist states a discordant one. Free
trade straddled the domestic- and international-level arguments. It served on the
one hand as a device for attacking the domestic bastions of the mercantilist
state and on the other, as both the natural expression of the liberal state and
the mechanism by which international harmony could be realized.
