The Strange Death of Liberal International Theory 1. Introduction International Relations is a field born of anxiety. When constituted after the traumas of the First World War, those who united under its disciplinary banner struggled to reconcile the dual imperatives of understanding the basic dynamics of international politics while simultaneously seeking to reform the international system - it was a field situated at the interstices of the empirical and the normative. E.H. Carr called for a science of international politics that blended realism and utopianism, and his liberal nemesis, Norman Angell, championed rational empiricism and a moral foreign policy grounded in the general interest. Their writings marked out the poles of an emergent field in which the political loomed large, in which the anxieties of seeking to reconcile the is and the ought were the accepted life-blood of international inquiry, a discomfort made necessary by the imperatives of practical political change. Since the Second World War, however, international relations theorists have struggled to escape these anxieties. Following Waltz, neorealists have sought comfort in the pursuit of a parsimonious explanatory theory of international relations, ostensibly stripped of all normative commitments. For such scholars, liberalism was considered the antithesis of all that was desirable in an international theory, fundamentally flawed by a lurking normativity. It is only in the last five years that liberal theorists have sought to `catch up' with their neorealist counterparts, with Andrew Moravcsik, in particular, `reformulating liberal international relations (IR) theory in a nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science'. This development is important not only for the field of international relations, but also for the discipline of international law. For it is Moravcsik's `positive' liberalism that provides the theoretical foundations for Anne-Marie Slaughter's new liberal theory of international law. This article contends that the move to recast liberal international theory in positivist terms has undermined its status as a political theory. Politics, it will be argued, lies at the intersection of instrumental and ethical deliberation and action, an intersection that actors are drawn towards by the imperatives of practical, collective action. The `new liberalism' abandons the political in two ways: it expels normative reflection and argument from the realm of legitimate social scientific enquiry; and it embraces a rationalist conception of human agency that reduces all political action to strategic interaction. Much could be written about the implications of this for international relations theory. My concern here, however, is with the impact on international legal theory. By constructing such a theory on the basis of Moravcsik's liberal international relations theory, Slaughter impedes her capacity for normative reasoning about international legal change, a crucial dimension of a mature international legal theory. This argument is developed in five stages. I begin in Part 2 with a discussion of the idea of the `political' in which I seek to move beyond the prevailing emphasis on strategic action towards a more communicative conception. Then, in Part 3, I highlight the prominence of such a conception of the political in the classical international theories of the early twentieth century. This is followed in Part 4 by an examination of the retreat from the political evident first in neorealism and most recently in the `new liberalism'. Building upon these foundations, Part 5 explains the problems that the new liberalism in international relations theory poses for the development of international legal theory, focusing particularly on Slaughter's writings. The final section, Part 6, suggests more fruitful strategies of dialogue between international relations and international law, strategies that seek to rediscover the interstices between the political and the legal.
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