2010 de HAAR Liberal Divide Over Trade, Peace and War

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DOI: 10.1177/0047117809362401 2010; 24; 132 International Relations

Edwin van de Haar The Liberal Divide over Trade, Peace and War

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132 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 24(2)

The Liberal Divide over Trade, Peace and War

Edwin van de Haar

Abstract

In IR it is almost common knowledge that a strong relation exists between liberalism and the idea that trade promotes peace. This paper shows that this is based on an incomplete view of the liberal tradition. The trade-leads-to-peace hypothesis does not originate in liberalism, while some of the most important liberal thinkers, notably Smith, Hume and Locke, never predicted trade to have a positive infl uence on peace. The two Scots actually saw a strong relation between trade and war. This has been widely overlooked in IR, largely due to one-sided interpretations of their writings from the early nineteenth century onwards. This article seeks to improve on the disciplinary historiography, calls on IR the-orists to reappraise liberalism in relation to the trade-leads-to-peace thesis, and suggests that scholars working on trade and peace follow up on a number of important insights put forward by Hume and Smith.

Keywords: interdependence, IR theory, liberalism, peace, trade, war

Whether trade promotes peace has been an important question for politicians and polit-ical thinkers for many centuries. It touches upon many fundamental issues, such as wealth creation and distribution, the preferred political, cultural and economic rela-tions with foreigners, or the political effects of capitalism. While academics are split on the issue, some of the important actors in world politics, such as the European Union (EU), the (previous) American administration and the World Trade Organ-ization (WTO) confi dently claim their trade policies have a positive infl uence on world peace.1

The discussion on the peaceful effects of trade is part of the wider debate on the ‘liberal peace’, which focuses on the role of ‘the liberal tripod’: democracy, interde-pendence and international organisation.2 It is alleged that states with liberal polit-ical and economic institutions do not wage war on each other, although they will fi ght non-democracies. Emerging democracies still lack strong institutions and are therefore also more prone to war.3 A world of democracies is expected to be more peaceful, because democracies are seen to develop common national interests, thus creating a zone of peace. The preservation of peace then becomes a key part of demo-cracies’ political culture. The strongest, although inconclusive, evidence for this claim is based on the analysis of pairs of democratic states (the dyadic democratic peace proposition). Most explanations point to the infl uence of domestic institutions, such as the separation of powers, regular elections and the higher transparency levels asso-ciated with democratic public policy.4

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LIBERALISM, TRADE, WAR AND PEACE 133

Besides domestic institutions, the liberal peace is often explained by the pacifying infl uence of international commercial relations. The central question in the ‘trade-leads-to-peace’ debate is whether increased economic interdependence abolishes or at least constrains war. The latter broadly defi ned as the outbreak of violent hostilities between states and peace as a situation is without war. There are a number of (not mutually exclusive) arguments in favour of this idea. Probably the most important is that economic exchange and military conquest are substitute means to acquire the resources needed for political security and economic growth. Growing trade and foreign investment means there is less reason to seek those means through foreign conquest; while, conversely, barriers to international trade stimulate (military) con-fl ict. Related to this is the thought that economic relations between states foster com-munications and ties of interdependence between private actors and governments. These ties promote mutual understanding and cooperative political relations, making war obsolete. A third element is the expectation that increased economic relations between countries will lead economic actors in each state to have an interest in keeping peace, because war would damage their business interests. Accordingly, these actors will infl uence their leaders to stay out of military confl ict.5

These claims are of course the focal points of scholarly research. Most current the-orists of international relations (IR) use a quantitative approach which leads to seem-ingly endless debates over research design, methodology and datasets. The literature is massive and it goes beyond the purpose of this paper to discuss all outcomes, but some of the main studies try to establish the effect of differences in (economic) power on interstate war; how and if the alleged relations between trade and peace exist in dif-ferent regions and between different countries, in different stages of economic and political development; or a possible infl uence of regional organisation, international organisations or global hegemony. Besides statistical work there are many historical case studies published. Yet there is still no convincing explanation for the data that indicates there is a liberal peace, nor is there overwhelming evidence against it.6

What is clear though is that the basic ideas have had an enormous appeal to many different thinkers and politicians throughout history. While it is impossible to deter-mine individual reasons for this embrace, a few likely causes stand out. First, there is an appeal to reason, and rational explanations and solutions for societal problems have traditionally been very popular among the thinking professions and classes. Not many people deny that overall a war is destructive and costly even to the winner, although some people may gain from it. Therefore it is reasonable to expect that once all people understand the price of war, once they realise where their real interests are, they will stop waging war.7 Second, the idea has great moral appeal. Abolition of war has been part of the normative agenda from the start of IR as an academic dis-cipline.8 Obviously, any probable argument in support of that ideal found an inroad, especially, as will be elaborated below, since it was put forward by a number of prom-inent thinkers in the history of ideas. Third, although modern industrial and post-industrial societies are founded and largely depend on the capitalist system, this economic system generally has a rather bad reputation among intellectuals.9 It seems likely that the trade-leads-to-peace thesis allows the existing supporters of capitalism




to add a moral dimension to their defence, by pointing at its alleged positive inter-national political effects. Fourth, most people have personal experience of peaceful economic transactions in the domestic economy, which are easily translated to the international level.

However, this article will not focus on the personal motives of the participants of the debate, but on the shortcomings of relating the trade-leads-to-peace thesis to the liberal tradition. Firstly, it will be argued that the historical evidence for this claim is meagre. Secondly, not all important liberals thought trade had peaceful effects. Hence, there is liberal divide on this issue. The third section offers an explanation for this continual misrepresentation of liberalism in IR theory. The article closes with suggestions for future research based on a number of insights of Hume and Smith. Thus the article seeks to improve the disciplinary historiography and calls on IR theorists to reappraise their incomplete and therefore erroneous portrayal of liberalism in relation to the trade-leads-to-peace thesis.

A strange neglect, given the methodological concerns of many participants, is that liberalism is hardly ever defi ned in this debate. Liberalism as a political theory de-fending the expansion of individual liberty and property originates from the late seventeenth century, but fully blossomed in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, particularly in Scotland and France. It has been one of the most infl uential political theories over the past few centuries10 and is one of the main paradigms in IR theory.11 All members of the liberal family share four characteristics, including Locke, Kant, Hume, Smith, Mill, Spencer, Hayek, Rawls and Nozick. Liberalism is:

• ‘individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collective,

• egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings,

• universalist, affi rming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specifi c historic associations and cultural forms,

• meliorist, in its affi rmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements’.12

Mostly overlooked by IR theorists13 is that liberal thought is divided into several var-ieties, often referred to as classical liberalism, social liberalism and libertarianism. The main dividing point is over the preferred room for state interference in the freedom of the individual. Generally, the libertarians allow no or very limited state inter-ference, the social liberals endorse a rather active state role to improve the quality of individual freedom, while the classical liberals take an intermediate position.

These differences also translate to the international level. Most current forms of liberalism in IR theory are variations of social liberalism, calling for an active govern-mental role to establish intergovernmental organisations and extended international laws and regulations. They also share a rather optimistic view on human nature, as is evident from the belief that the abolition of war is possible.14 Classical liberals think




these are utopian thoughts and argue instead that confl ict and violence are a funda-mental part of human relations at all levels. This distinct classical liberal look on inter-national relations is almost completely overlooked in IR. Libertarian writings on international affairs are numerous, but mostly ignored by the IR mainstream as well, although libertarians also have a tendency to prefer to discuss among themselves.

Other reasons for this one-sided approach in IR theory are the dominance of American academia, where liberalism is identical to the social liberal variant and has been since the beginnings of IR as an academic discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century. Academic pigeon holing is also to blame, with IR theory staying clear of political philosophy, while most political theorists do not look beyond the national border either.15 This general pattern is also visible in the debate on the alleged relation between trade and peace.

Historical traces

When reading the IR literature on the topic,16 it is easy to get the impression that the idea of a positive relation between trade and peace was an original contribution of the liberals. Yet thinking about the economy and foreign trade goes back much longer. Centuries before the thinkers of what we now know as the liberal tradition appeared on the scene, many of the fundamental issues relating to the possible peace-promoting effects of trade were already articulated. A comprehensive overview is lacking, but the writings of economic historians and political theorists provide abundant material for an initial reconstruction, with a focus on Europe.

Logically, only people with a positive basic attitude towards trade as such will argue in favour of its possible peace-enhancing effects. It works as a ‘spillover effect’: one fi rst values the economic arguments for trade, before contemplating possible political effects. Starting with the ever-relevant ancient Greek and Roman writers, they generally looked down on commercial activities and were rather ambivalent towards foreign trade. Still their views already reveal some of the enduring elements in the debate on the merits of trade, encompassing economics, culture and politics. For example, Aristotle argued that ‘the state ought to engage in commerce for its own interest, but not for the interest of the foreigner’.17 Plutarch emphasised the positive sides of sea links and mutual exchange, because without them man would be ‘savage and destitute’. Horace noted moral dangers relating to regular contact with foreign ‘barbarians’, while Cicero and Plato thought trade was something that should be left to resident aliens, since it was an indecent activity for civilians to be engaged in.18 The Stoics, an inspirational source for many Enlightenment thinkers, were among the early supporters of trade. They developed the Doctrine of Universal Economy, which took into account the broader effects of economic exchange. The doctrine com-bined four elements: the Stoic–cosmopolitan idea of the universal brotherhood of man; a description of the advantages of trade in goods for humanity; the uneven global distribution of economic resources; and the idea that this arrangement was based on an intervention by God, who intentionally wanted to promote commerce and peaceful cooperation among people. The doctrine was spread by some of the early




Christians and would remain infl uential among Christian thinkers until at least the sixteenth century.19

Christianity as a whole was divided between thinkers who underlined the chances on increased prosperity through trade and those who saw it as a threat to a decent or just life. In AD 437, the theologian Theoderet wrote:

for the Creator, wishing to instil harmony into human beings, made them depend on one another for various needs … nor has providence allocated to each section of the earth all the needs of mankind, lest self-suffi ciency should militate against friendship.

Still the majority of Christians, among them infl uential writers such as St Augustine and St Ambrose, put more emphasis on the alleged negative effects of trade on morality, particularly the abetting of fraud, the promotion of avarice and the encour-agement of ‘worldly gains’.20 These negative sentiments remained infl uential for many centuries, although of course trade continued to take place. By the time of the Reformation trade was generally accepted as a part of life, but most Catholics and Protestants still thought that the pursuit of wealth and profi t was hard to reconcile with a virtuous life.21

From the medieval scholastics onwards a more favourable attitude towards trade provided a counterweight. St Thomas Aquinas was infl uential in this respect, as he justifi ed mercantile profi ts and trade. In his view some commercial activities were benefi cial to society, such as the storage and conservation of goods, the import-ation of useful goods and the transport of goods from places of abundance to places of scarcity. This line of thought was further developed by the Spanish scholastics who argued that republics depended on trade for their survival. They denied that most commerce had any moral implications. Vitoria contended that the right to trade was a fundamental human right, part of the ius gentium, or the natural law of nations. Most Spanish scholastics believed trade to be ‘one of the most natural contacts to exist in humanity’.22 The combined modernising forces of urbanisation, growing popu-lations, imperialism and innovation aided a lively public debate on economic issues, especially in England and to a lesser extent in France. Trade and traders were looked upon more favourably and rulers started to realise the importance of trade.23 Hume noted ‘commerce, for the fi rst time, became an affair of state’, due to the ‘great opulence, grandeur, and military achievements’ of the two leading trading countries, England and Holland.24

In the seventeenth century this debate became more economic, focusing on the direct benefi ts and costs of trade. Hotly debated was the balance of trade, the (mercantilist) idea that a state must ensure an excess of exports over imports, which was also associated with higher employment rates. Actual policies employed to ensure a favourable balance were the levying of tariffs and duties, prohibitions and regulated access, for example to ports. A related concern was the demand to keep enough stock of bullion (unminted gold and silver), because precious metals were seen as a storage of wealth.25 Findlay and O’Rourke point out that those mercantilist




sentiments were dominant in this period, and all major European powers were in a perpetual struggle to control trade in general and the political and economic resources of the New World in particular. The actual ability to control depended on accumu-lating enough resources to pay for navies and military and imperial expenditure. Arguments for free trade were not very relevant in actual politics.26 By the 1650s some English writers started to argue for increased protectionist state policies, with the principal aim of fostering a more powerful rather than just a prosperous England. In the words of the merchant Child: ‘Foreign trade produces riches, riches power and power preserves our trade and religion.’27 The state was seen as one great enter-prise, in which the members of society collectively participated to increase its wealth and power.28 Hence, the mercantilists certainly did not aim for world peace based on mutual benefi cial international economic bonds. Instead trade was a source to meet the costs of military expenditure.29

In this increasingly polarised climate some of the free traders referred to the pos-itive political effects of international commerce and used religious arguments in support. Misselden claimed that trade was ‘pleasing to God because it bound people together’. Coke, in his Society and Commerce of Nations, wrote that to restrict trade to people of the same religion was to violate the meaning of God.30 In 1690 Barbon made an attempt at synthesis between the two poles of the debate, albeit with a bel-ligerent focus. He argued that trade would lead to greater welfare and as a result an increased military power. Trade was important in getting and then keeping a global empire. He also thought that trade brought peace, not by making war obsolete, but by allowing the European countries to get essential supplies from the South without having to invade them!31

The rise of imperialism also raised a number of trade-related questions. These were most prominently addressed by some of the early natural law thinkers, who ap-plied the ideas of Aquinas to international relations. For example, both Suarez and Gentili believed that international commerce should be free because it was a funda-mental part of international law. The latter even added that war may be fought against states which refused to take part in trade, or put trade barriers in place. Gentili also recognised the right of states to prevent imports which were considered morally troublesome, or the export of precious metals. Grotius argued that ‘all men should be privileged to trade freely with one another, nor might they be deprived of that pri-vilege by any other person’.‘The principle of commerce was developed for the sake of necessities of life’, so that hindrance of the right to trade may be a just cause for war.32 However, Grotius never connected trade with peace and never expected war to be abolished.33 Neither did the other natural lawyers. Some of them actually added to the divide between mercantilists and free traders, such as Pufendorf and Vattel, who argued that every nation had a right to regulate its own trade.34

Compared to England, French society and its economy lacked substantial freedom. The French public economic debate, in so far as it was permitted by the state censor, was more about general economic reform and less about trade. It was not until the 1760s that the grain trade was liberalised to a limited extent.35 French rulers generally saw foreign commerce as ‘a perpetual ... war of wit and energy among all nations’. Yet a number of writers opposed this mixing of political and economic reason of state.




They started to publish tracts which contained references to a relation between trade and peace. These were mostly general schemes aimed at the establishment of international organisations to preserve peace, following older plans published else-where, for example in Italy.36 The tendency was to include references to trade in those general schemes; trade was not seen as an independent force capable of bringing peace. Prominent thinkers were Crucé,37 the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Melon and Voltaire.38 Boisguilbert thought trade would bring ‘harmony in the world’. Others, such as Cantillon, Turgot, Quesnay and Say, were generally supportive of free trade but did not touch upon any alleged international political effects.39 A balanced con-temporary appreciation can be found in Abbé Raynal’s A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and the Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (1770). It was put on the Index and the author was exiled, but it still went through 30 editions in 20 years. Raynal asserted that a war of commerce was unnatural and contradictory, because commerce was the source and the means of subsistence. ‘War puts a stop to every branch of commerce’, although he acknowledged that ‘commerce may, possibly, give rise to war and continue it’, especially due to treaties of com-merce that were more benefi cial for one of the signatories.40

Meanwhile in America, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton addressed the issue head-on. In the sixth Federalist Paper he argued that there were many causes of hostility among nations, most notably political or commercial rivalry and personal motives among members of the ruling class. History showed that republics such as Athens or Sparta were not more pacifi c than monarchies, and great commercial re-publics such as Holland or a trading nation such as England were just as likely to be engaged in war. He noted that commercial considerations were important motives behind numerous French and English wars, and he therefore asked:

have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imper-fections, weaknesses and evils incident to society in every shape? Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age?41

This short overview shows that dreams of a golden age when trade would lead to peace were restricted to a minority of thinkers with a diverse philosophical back-ground, mainly in continental Europe and most dominantly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They did build upon a long-established tradition of thought, even though the idea that peace may be caused by international commerce was ‘generally formulated in vague generalities and unsupported pronouncements’.42 Important to note is that history does not provide ground for a particular liberal claim to its origins.

Liberal divide

Indeed there is no reason to think there has ever been a unifi ed liberal position on the issue. This becomes clear even if we just concentrate on fi ve of the most important




founding liberal thinkers: Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Hume and Smith. Any valid claim to the existence of a relation between liberalism and the alleged peace-enhancing effects of trade must include evidence from work of all of them. With the exception of Locke, they favoured free trade and opposed mercantilism. Yet it is mistaken to think they also had the same opinion on the possible political effects of trade. Again, there appears to be a distinction between continental and Anglo-Saxon thinkers.

Montesquieu was an infl uential thinker among his contemporaries. Today he is mainly associated with domestic politics, most notably the idea of the separation of powers. His The Spirit of the Laws (1748) also contains one of the most outright state-ments on the issue of trade and peace: ‘The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace’, because ‘two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally depend-ent. If one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and all unions are based on mutual needs’.43 He had held this view since the 1730s.44 According to Hirschman, Montesquieu extrapolated from his ideas on the domestic political consequences of economic growth. If concerns for growth and economic expan-sion could constrain the behaviour of rulers domestically, it would most likely have the same effects internationally.45 Still, Montesquieu probably did not really expect commerce to have this pacifying effect in practice, either in monarchies or his own ideal republic for that matter. He did not detect a relation between human nature and war, but regarded war as a normal and regular feature of relations between states, which justifi ed far-reaching rights of war to them.46 Political leaders should attempt to minimise the effects of war by abiding by just war rules, but he never predicted or expected a peaceful world to emerge.47

Kant’s embrace of the trade-leads-to-peace thesis was unequivocal. This is im-portant because his ideas on international relations have become most strongly associated with liberalism in IR. Some scholars question this, but that is beyond the scope of this article.48 In both Metaphysics of Morals and Idea for a Universal History Kant argued that trade was a cosmopolitan right. He expected trade to foster inter-dependence between people and nations. Perpetual Peace provides more detail, and here Kant argues that ‘nature’ would bring nations together through their concern for mutual self-interest. ‘The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war.’ States will promote peace, not out of benevolence or morality, but with a view to their own (fi nancial) interest. If there is a threat of war, states will try to prevent its outbreak through mediation, ‘just as if they had entered into a permanent league for this purpose; for by the very nature of things, large military alliances can only rarely be formed, and will even more rarely be successful’. In this way, nature would guarantee perpetual peace through the mechanism of human inclination. Kant cautioned that it was not likely that this situ-ation would be realised any time soon, but nevertheless he considered it a moral duty to work towards the goal of perpetual peace.49 Of course, this is only a small element of Kant’s much disputed ideas on international relations.50 Still, the positive rela-tion between trade and peace is important for the Kantian ideas on international relations. It is also one of the main reasons for the existing link between liberalism, trade and peace.51




This is only one part of the liberal story though. In many ways an early liberal, par-ticularly in his calls for individual rights, limited government and religious toler-ation,52 Locke was not much of a free trader. Although he wrote about its merits,53 his strongest economic sentiments were in favour of the balance of trade and other mercantilist viewpoints.54 He defended a bullionist position against the prominent free traders of his time, such as North, Barbon and Hodges,55 much in line with his rather Hobbesian view of the international arena.56 He believed that ‘all princes and rulers of independent governments, all through the world, are in a state of nature’. Like Montesquieu, Locke did not expect a world without wars.57 He argued along the lines of the just war tradition and favoured English colonial expansionism in America for economic gain.58 There is no indication at all that he expected any peace-enhancing effects from trade.

Locke was not the proverbial exception to the liberal rule, as the analysis of the work of Hume and Smith shows. Generally, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, from Gershom Carmichael and Smith’s teacher Francis Hutcheson onwards, followed Locke and other English writers in their ‘tough minded approach to problems of war and peace’.59 While indebted to the French philosophes, thinkers like Hume, Smith, Robertson and Ferguson held less idealistic views on international relations than many of their French contemporaries. Civilisation was not ‘just about civility, civil society, commerce and freedom’, but also about ‘states, military power and the perils of empire’. Importantly, they consistently pointed out that commerce and war were related phenomena, due both to the larger welfare resulting from commerce and its characteristic competitive element which led states to compete for access to mar-kets, resources and imperial expansion.60 So it not surprising that Hume and Smith knew and appreciated the work of Montesquieu ,61 but did not share his view on trade and peace.

David Hume was one of the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and an important founder of the liberal tradition. Hume’s historical and political work was strongly related to his general philosophy.62 He believed that political arrange-ments were the outcomes of human action, with the individual as the key actor.63 The purpose of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature was to fi nd a ‘new science of human nature’ and he believed that the explanation of the principles of human nature was key to explaining all other social phenomena.64 In general, the passions or the emotions had more infl uence on the human will than reason; therefore Hume regarded them as the most important explanatory factors of human behaviour. Reason alone could not produce any action; it ‘is and ought to be the slave of the passions’.65 Human nature was frail and perverse, and it was not possible to keep all men on the path of justice. Some men were prone to harmful behaviour, while a more important and larger group was often ‘seduced from the more important, but more distant interest, by the allurement of the present, though very often very frivolous temptations. This great weakness is incurable in men’.66 Hume therefore contended:

It is universally acknowledged that there is great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its




principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions; the same events follow from the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friend-ship, generosity, public spirit; these passions, in various degrees and distributed through society have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are the source of all the actions and enterprises which have ever been observed among mankind.67

This had serious implications for his views on international relations, which deviate strongly from the standard liberal and Kantian positions, which are mostly charac-terised by an optimistic view on human nature and the expectation that war can be abolished through a mix of commerce, international organisation and regimes, do-mestic political arrangements and infl uence on foreign policy by individual agents.68 States, in Hume’s view the central actors in world politics, were collections of indi-viduals, including their natural tendency to quarrel and fi ght. Human selfi shness and ambition would remain perpetual sources of war and discord.69 Therefore, the public good in foreign politics often depended on accidents, chances and the ‘caprices of a few persons’.70 Hume accepted the inevitability of war, not least to keep the balance of power, which he greatly valued.71 War was often justifi ed, for example when a nation threatened the freedom of other states. Free trade was an important part of his ideas on international relations.72 In general Hume thought that commerce, the greatness of a state and the happiness of its inhabitants were positively related.73 Trade and com-merce could be sources of opulence, grandeur and military achievement, as long as they were accompanied by free government and general liberty, as in the British and Dutch cases. The increase in imports and exports led to more industry, delicacies and luxuries, which were benefi cial to the individual citizen.74 Hume strongly rejected the mercantilists’ inclination to be jealous of the commercial success of other nations, or the related concern about a positive balance of trade. Trade was a positive-sum process; the increase of richness and commerce in one nation normally promotes the richness and commerce of all its neighbours. It was almost impossible for one state to fl ourish on the basis of trade and industry, if it is surrounded by states that ‘are buried in ignorance, sloth and barbarism’.75

Hume also saw a direct relation between foreign trade and international political power. A richer commercial society was likely a greater military power.76 Hume did not foresee perpetual peace in a world dominated by commerce .77 No matter how benefi cial commerce was, and despite its occasional peace-promoting effects, human nature was not changed by trade. Peace in the commercial age depended on wise policies and the application of prudence in order to overcome pride and jealousy, the eternal sources of confl ict and war. Trade made nations richer, but this also stimulated the development of military technology.78 Hume did not defend utopian ideals, nor was he overly optimistic in his views on world politics.

Adam Smith shared Hume’s view on human nature and drew comparable con-clusions from it concerning international politics. War and confl ict were normal features of international society, if only because human sympathy, the binding force in domestic politics, could not be stretched indefi nitely.79




The best-known part of Smith’s ideas on international relations is his defence of free trade. He equated mercantilism with the politics of special interests, most notably those of merchants and manufacturers, who had a natural desire for monopoly and shifting of risks.80 Smith strongly rejected this type of economics and noted with dis-approval that state leaders believed their interest lied in beggaring their neighbours. They erroneously saw trade as a zero-sum game. Smith held that commerce, among individuals as well as nations, ‘ought naturally to be’ a bond of union and friendship. This sentence is often cited in IR literature, but as often overlooked is that Smith also admitted that trade could not transform the nature of human affairs, which mani-fested itself in the violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind. The most foolish ambitions of kings and princes could not match the immense losses resulting from the monopolies and other privileges granted to jealous merchants and manufacturers. Trade had become the eternal source for discord and animosity, although in every country it was in the interest of the majority of people to have access to free com-merce and trade.81

In the international context, Smith thought the only good reason for suspicion was the increase of a neighbour’s naval and military power.82 Abolition of war was not part of Smith’s thought. One of the least noted aspects of his work is the importance he attached to defence, military organisation and patriotic and heroic military virtues.83 Commerce and war were related; he regularly referred to the bellicose side-effects of international trade. Free trade enabled countries to carry on foreign wars and to keep fl eets and armies in distant places.84 Insuffi cient defence was a danger to the stability of the state, which in its turn would lead to a loss in national wealth. Smith did not think that economic interdependence promoted a harmony of interests between countries either.85

Smith was not even a free trader in the absolute sense. For example, he was con-cerned about preserving the industry involved in national defence. In relation to ‘high politics’ trade restrictions against foreign imports were justifi ed, even though they bred monopoly and other disadvantages. In Smith’s famous words: ‘defence is of much more importance than opulence’.86 He also thought it reasonable to demand retali-ation in cases of a trade war. Smith concluded: ‘to expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it’.87 He never predicted that trade would promote peace in any structural way.88

With this overview a fundamental liberal divide has been uncovered. Of fi ve important liberal thinkers, only two predicted positive political external effects of trade. One of them, Montesquieu, did this in a rather inconsistent way. Hume and Smith wrote favourably about trade, but also viewed it as a probable cause of war. They regretted this but found it inevitable given their view on human nature, which is entirely consistent with their other views on international relations.89 This also has implications for IR theory. Kant and Smith are the two thinkers most regularly referred to in the context of trade and peace, but the Scot needs to be dropped. For example, Doyle famously and infl uentially described Smith as a founding thinker of ‘commercial pacifi sm’.90 Other important scholars such as Russett, Oneal, Gelpi,




Grieco and Moravscik confi rm this,91 which partly explains why this categorisation found its way into a number of important textbooks. 92

These claims mainly lack a solid foundation in political theory analysis. In his Ways of War and Peace Doyle notes some of Smith’s more belligerent positions, but just leaves it there. He quotes in a limited way from the Wealth of Nations to support his claims, but leaves Smith’s other writings out of consideration. Consequently, Doyle fails to identify and present the more sophisticated views Smith had on this and other international relations issues. Oneal and Russett only refer to two sources of secondary IR literature. At least one of these, Michael Howard’s War and the Liberal Conscience, lacks any direct reference to Smith’s writings, which makes for a shaky foundation at best. Gelpi and Crice largely rely on Doyle, while Moravscik refers to a limited number of indirect sources as well.

This is an example of how poorly researched statements make their way into the IR canon. Besides the primary resources, secondary literature with counter-information was also available when most of these works were written. Prominent examples are found in the writings of the political theorists Manzer and Hont93 and international relations scholars Walter, Onuf and, in a more general way, Keohane.94

This is not just a minor issue; it concerns one of the most characteristic ideas attributed to liberals in international relations. Therefore a reappraisal of liberalism in IR is clearly needed, which must aim to include the diverging classical liberal viewpoints.95

Causes of misrepresentation

Given the infl uence of Locke, Hume and Smith on the development of liberalism, the question is how the relation between trade and peace could ever have become such an accepted and infl uential idea associated with liberalism in IR.

It is hard to believe this was only due to the infl uence of Kant and Montesquieu. Important thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham appeared to be on their line,96 but his ideas on international relations have actually been misrepresented for a long time, through unreliable editing of his Works in the 1840s, including his essay A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace. Contrary to current established opinion he does not fi t in the group of perpetual peace thinkers, as he largely held the same ideas as Smith.97 Constant, another infl uential contemporary liberal, thought that war was a natural phenomenon in human affairs, or ‘a necessity to be endured’. Wars were often fought for commercial purposes and he did not regard trade as a safeguard against war.98 There is no indication that Tocqueville, who was generally appreciative of inter-national power politics, expected any peaceful effects from trade either.99

Part of the explanation can be found in the work of John Stuart Mill, in many ways the greatest liberal of the nineteenth century. In his views on international rela-tions he differed from Kant in many respects, but not on the issue of trade and peace. His focus was on non-intervention between the European powers, which is also the topic he is mostly associated with in IR. Mill also advocated European imperial-ism, as he expected civilising effects from it on the conquered parts of the world.100




In his economics Mill was a free trader, not least because he also saw commerce as a civilising force. ‘Commerce is what war once was, the principal source of [inter-national] contact’, which is ‘one of the primary sources of progress’. In addition:

it is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multi-plying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions and the character of the human race.101

It is likely that Mill infl uenced many of his readers, as The Principles of Political Economy went through many editions and was widely read by (economics) students well into the twentieth century. His infl uence on Angell was also profound,102 and therefore his views made a direct mark on the development of IR theory. However, not Mill, but Richard Cobden was the major populariser of the trade-leads-to-peace thesis in the nineteenth century.

Cobden, together with John Bright, was one of the most infl uential leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League. This League is usually referred to as ‘the Manchester School’. Yet it is better to see it as a group of different people expressing a middle-class radicalism, sometimes religiously inspired, but without a coherent philosophy or common doctrine.103 The main objects of the League’s attack were the protectionist aristocrats and landowning higher classes, and people who were regarded as their close allies, such as diplomats and military commanders. Many Manchester activists had close ties with the pacifi st movement, which consisted of Quakers, the Peace Society and the international Peace Congresses.104 The League prominently associated itself with the link between free trade and peace.105 As a public single-interest group the League was successful, because at least partly due to its activism the protectionist Corn Laws were repealed in 1846.

As a result of his work for the League, Cobden became an international celebrity, a member of parliament and the famous negotiator of the Anglo-French Free Trade Treaty of 1860 which lifted a number of trade barriers.106 He had been a member of the Peace Society since the 1830s, but there is controversy about his pacifi sm. Cobden kept a distance from people who repudiated war in all cases and contended that war was sometimes needed, for example ‘in defence of our honour, or our just interests’.107 Yet Caedel shows he was very close to the peace movement and mostly shared their aims.108

Cobden argued for a foreign policy with higher and more humane purposes, and called for international arbitration to settle disputes.109 He refuted the balance of power and increased military expenditure, rejected most wars and regularly made pleas against intervention in the affairs of other nations, colonies included.110 In his view ‘commerce was the great panacea, which, like a benefi cent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilisation all the nations of the world’.111 Cobden’s argument for free trade was not just about a linear relation




between peace and free trade. Trade would create international specialisation, which in turn would prevent a nation from becoming self-suffi cient enough to wage a war.Free trade unites two remote communities by the strongest of motives of which our nature is susceptible, rendering the interest of the one the only true policy of the other, and making each equally anxious for the prosperity and happiness of both.112

Foremost, Cobden was a man of action, not a deep thinker, but rather a brilliant orator and politician, taking many of his theoretical insights from his friend and admirer, the French political economist Frédéric Bastiat.113 Perhaps most important was the idea that free markets increase the harmony of the interests between indi-viduals, groups and states.114 Like Hume and Smith, the Frenchman realised that warfare has ‘a root deep in the human heart, in the makeup of man’, but unlike the two Scots he believed this could be overcome by the ‘harmonious laws of the social world’.115

Cobden acknowledged Adam Smith as the greatest single infl uence on his thought. He called for the establishment of Smithian Societies, devoted to the promulgation ‘of the benefi cent truths of the Wealth of Nations’.116 Cobden and his colleagues actively used the legacy of Smith to further their own aims and to discredit economic protectionists and other opponents of Corn Law repeal and free trade measures. But Cobden seriously misrepresented Smith’s views on international relations. The previous section showed the Scot did not believe in the relation between trade and peace, or in harmony between states. Smith was certainly not leaning toward pacifi sm either; he approved of military expenditure and generally held rather belligerent views on international relations.117 Cobden and other Manchester School people thus ‘turned … Adam Smith’s plea for more diversion of labour on an international scale into a call for a utopia of peaceful cooperation through universal free trade, which was certainly not in line with Smith’s more sceptical outlook’.118

Cobden’s big infl uence on IR theory, well into the fi rst half of the twentieth century, largely explains this continued but erroneous linkage of Smith with the trade-leads-to-peace thesis. Of course it is impossible to provide details on the infl uences on all the individual writers concerned; therefore only a few broad lines will be drawn in support of this claim.

In Britain, the idea of a positive relation between trade and peace was held by most liberals from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.119 The Liberal Party was the main infl uence on British politics up until the First World War, and many of its greatest men, such as Green, Gladstone and Morley, were fi rmly under the combined spell of Mill and Cobden in this respect. The general liberal foreign policy framework con-sisted of cosmopolitanism, a belief in the need to globally expand freedom, self-determination, arbitration and support for the US and friendly relations with France. Internal disagreements existed over the questions of intervention, empire and the pacifi st leanings of some liberals, such as Cobden.120 A number of these liberal ideas spilled over to people of other political colour, especially the British ‘idealists’, such as Hobson. He saw Cobden and the Manchester School as important examples in the fi ght for peace.121 While idealism was a broad church, the possibility of an inter-national harmony of interests and the peaceful effects of commerce were certainly




part of the ideas of many people associated with it.122 This lasted at least until the First World War, which provided much empirical counter-evidence to Cobden’s ideas,123 but even in the inter-war period Cobdenism remained one of the main strands of the liberal internationalist tradition. However, the ‘new liberals’ put more emphasis on state-led solutions to counter international anarchy, not least through international organisations such as the League of Nations.124

Cobden’s influence on the development of twentieth-century liberal inter-nationalism125 was further stimulated by his infl uence on the leading interdependence theorists. Although they also favoured a big role for the state in international relations, thinkers such as Merriam, Muir and Ramsay, but especially Angell and Mitrany, were clearly working in the tradition of Cobden.126 Angell was also infl uential in America, where some of the early theorists of international relations emphasised the import-ance of trade and interdependence in order to foster peace.127 Lieber, for example, was a strong supporter of interdependence and free trade and expected both to ‘hasten the advent of general peace’.128 Woodrow Wilson was a ‘self confessed Cobdenite’ and Cobdenism was of general importance in American liberal circles.129

After the Second World War, Western analysts such as Schumpeter saw the pro-tectionism of the 1930s as partly to blame for the war and therefore renewed the call for free trade.130 Interestingly, Schumpeter is a starting point in a number of Doyle’s works on liberalism and (democratic) peace.131 The debate about the merits of free trade became part of the discussion between the realists and liberals in IR theory, which was partly reinforced by the views expressed by realist opponents of the liberal tradition, such as Morgenthau and Carr.132 Along the way the different forms of liberalism of the inter-war period were put together, mixed and reused in all kinds of different forms.133 This partly explains why the historical traces of the trade-leads-to-peace thesis have to a certain extent been obscured, although it is still not a good excuse for the current one-sided and imprecise presentation of its origins.

Suggestions for future research

These fi ndings are not just valuable for the history of IR theory. Some of the insights of Locke, Hume and Smith raise issues often overlooked in current work on trade and peace, due to its focus on quantitative analysis of (pairs of) states in combin-ation with (macro-)economic data.134 Realists and others have of course criticised the trade-leads-to-peace thesis in numerous ways, but the novelty here lies in the liberal origins of these issues. Each of these warrants fuller treatment than can be given here; therefore they are presented as ingredients for possible further research.

First, there is the issue of the commensurability of peace and human nature. An essential point in Hume’s and Smith’s rejection of the alleged ‘peaceful spirit of com-merce’ was their view on human nature. Ultimately, while equipped with rationality, people are seen to be ‘enslaved by the passions’, which means they are prone to prefer the short-term, quick solutions over the long-term wise decision. Humans are inclined, though not destined, to act wrongfully in a moral sense. Powerful emotions,




such as pride, jealousy and a sense of honour ensure there are always grounds for dis-agreement, arguments and fi ghts between people, so war and human nature are positively related. This is a fundamental and ever valuable insight for today’s IR dis-cussions, especially since these old ideas are supported by an increasing amount of new, if still inconclusive, evidence from the bio- and neurosciences. There seem to be inherited patterns in the human mind that promote war and ethnic confl ict: for example, a prime human concern to protect honour ,135 an issue which also remains of enduring importance in international relations.136 Where people live together, at any time there will be a number of them breaking rules and hurting or damaging other people and their property rights. This is the main reason for the liberals to call for a state to administer justice. Confl ict is thus a fundamental feature of both domestic and international politics. Hume and Smith pointed out that trade does not have the power to permanently alter this innate condition. The notion of human nature is of course contested, but as Berry points out, it is also indispensable for all political debate.137 This is an old question, going back at least to Aristotle, but that is no reason for participants in the debate on the trade-leads-to-peace thesis to ignore it.

A second point for further elaboration is that Hume and Smith note that inter-national trade does not erase other causes of confl ict, for example of a geopolitical or religious nature. States may act against their economic interests in the name of some higher goal. The confl ict between Georgia and Russia in 2008 may serve as an example, as Russia was one of Georgia’s main trading partners at the time.138 Regional trade integration does not automatically lead to peace,139 and as Cobden and Bright painfully discovered during the Crimean War, and as has since been repeat-edly shown, public opinion is not inherently peaceful either. It hardly ever infl uences foreign policy, prevents the outbreak of war, or determines a termination of a confl ict.140 In general, as Ohlson points out, IR still needs to come to terms with the causes of war and peace, which are multifaceted and complex. People take up arms because they have reasons in the form of grievances and goals, the resources in the form of capabilities and opportunities, and the resolve because they do not see an alternative to violence.141 Commercial ties and economic interdependence are not of more weight in this mix than other common factors promoting war, such as specifi c local conditions, chance, luck, coincidences or of course insensitive, thoughtless, or outright reckless acts of the individuals infl uencing public policy. International com-merce is not a ‘perfectly effective anti-war device’, if only because war is a multi-causal phenomenon, with many contributing factors and various causal paths.142 Hence, ‘by focussing on single causes, researchers have been trying to place round pegs in square holes, although occasionally they do fi nd the round hole, in which case they argue all holes are round’. Causes of war are to be found in combined research into risk factors and context.143

The third and last point is that trade could just as well be such a risk factor. There are at least three aspects to this. First, is the fundamental character of trade. Put briefl y, according to standard economic theory trade is a non-personal exchange, taking place on the basis of a common interest and a voluntary process of truck and barter. Both sides gain from the exchange, otherwise it would not take place, or




it would be an act of coercion. Free trade promotes the international division of labour and encourages specialisation in fi elds of comparative advantage, which on the whole reduces production costs and increases national and international pro-ductivity and welfare.144 Yet by widening markets geographically, a free economic system also makes a larger number of possible trading partners available. Economic interdependence is not a bilateral, but a multilateral process. Trade makes it easy and relatively cheap to change one trading partner for another, at least in most sectors. Therefore one of the effects of the expansion of trade is the reduction of the costs of warfare, because in times of political turmoil it is relatively easy to substitute a trading partner from country A for one from country B. The second aspect is that commerce is just as likely to be a source of confl ict. Closer ties between people also foster disagreement and trade makes nations richer, and, as Hume noted, this in-creased welfare can be used for bellicose purposes. Historically, trading partners have not been prevented from killing each other in a civil or international confl ict, as happened in both world wars, or more recently during the Rwandan genocide or the war in the former Yugoslavia. That business partners are less likely to see each other as enemies is an unsubstantiated claim.145 And, third, there is the question of the particular character of the trade relations. Some products or resources, for example energy-related ones, may easily give rise to international confl ict.

Of course, this is not to argue that Hume and Smith thought that trade necessarily leads to war. In some cases, commercial interests may be important in a decision not to wage war. State leaders may value their trade relations more than a possible geo-political gain. Or a buyer and a seller, destined to be eternal enemies for example due to religious differences, become close friends due to their commercial engagements. It is all possible, but it will always depend on the particular circumstances.

Conclusion

The trade-leads-to-peace thesis has a long history. Liberals have no special claim to its origins. It is an important element in the work of Kant and to a lesser extent of Montesquieu’s thought on international relations, but Locke, Hume and Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers never embraced this idea. Human nature, the nature of economic exchange and the multiple factors causing war did not allow such expectations. For Hume and Smith it was not a foregone conclusion that trade would tame war. The combination of the two in modern politics could give rise to new insti-tutions and new kinds of warfare that might turn out be more dangerous than the conquests and tributary empires of the previous era.

Hence, ‘no plans of a libertarian Utopia could originate from Smith’,146 nor from Locke or Hume for that matter. It is better to speak of a sharp liberal divide on this issue, which has mostly been overlooked in IR, although Onuf and Walter are notable exceptions.

The fl awed historical awareness and simplifi cation of the liberal tradition in IR makes the call for a liberal reappraisal in IR theory rather urgent. The discipline needs




to come to better grips with this part of the history of ideas, if only because a number of insights of the great liberal thinkers are still relevant for today’s discussions.

The thought of Hume and Smith suggests that trade relations are just another element in international political relations and decisions about war and peace, with-out any special peace-enhancing characteristics. To paraphrase the famous maxim commonly attributed to Bastiat,147 it is by no means certain that if goods do not cross borders, armies will.

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference ‘Thinking (With)out Borders: International Political Theory in the 21st Century’, at the University of St Andrews, 12–13 June 2008, and the Joint Dutch and Flemish Annual Political Science Conference, Berg en Dal, Netherlands, 29–30 May 2008. I thank the organisers, discussants and participants for their questions and remarks. I am also grateful to the editor of this journal, Ken Booth, and the three anonymous referees for their comments. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the valuable suggestions by Nico Roos and a number of other commentators on embryonic versions of this article. Any remaining errors are solely mine.

1 World Trade Organization, The World Trade Organization in Brief (Geneva: WTO, 2007); Offi ce of the United States Trade Representative, 2007 Trade Policy Agenda and 2006 Annual Report of the President of the United States on the Trade Agreements Program (Washington DC: USTR, 2007); European Commission, Directorate General for Trade, available at: http://ec.europa.eu/trade/whatwedo/work/index_en.htm (accessed 18 February 2009).

2 Nils Peter Gleditsch, ‘The Liberal Moment Fifteen Years On’, International Studies Quarterly, 52(4), 2008, pp. 691–712.

3 Edward D. Mansfi eld and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

4 Patrick J. MacDonald, The Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, the War Machine, and International Relations Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1–22.

5 Edward D. Mansfi eld and Brian M. Pollins, ‘Interdependence and Confl ict: An Introduction’, in Edward D. Mansfi eld and Brian M. Pollins (eds), Economic Interdependence and International Confl ict: New Perspectives on an Enduring Debate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 1–5.

6 Edward D. Mansfi eld, Power, Trade, and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); John. M. Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs’, in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller (eds), Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 3–57; Bruce Russett, ‘The Fact of Democratic Peace’, in Brown et al., Debating the Democratic Peace, pp. 58–81; John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, ‘The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Confl ict, 1950–1985’, International Studies Quarterly, 41(2), 1997, pp. 267–94; John MacMillan, On Liberal Peace: Democracy, War and the International Order (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998); John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, ‘The Kantian Peace: The Pacifi c Benefi ts of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885–1992’, World Politics, 52(1), 1999, pp. 1–37; Mansfi eld and Pollins, Economic Interdependence and International Confl ict; John R. Oneal, Bruce Russett and Michael L. Berbaum, ‘Causes of Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885–1992’, International Studies Quarterly, 47(3), 2003, pp. 371–93; John MacMillan, ‘Liberalism and the Democratic Peace’, Review of International Studies, 30(2), 2004, pp. 179–200; Katherine Barbieri, The Liberal Illusion: Does Trade Promote Peace? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

7 This is the type of argument put forward by the infl uential Austrian thinker Ludwig von Mises. See, for example, his Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), pp. 23–5, 110–18, 130–6.

8 See Lucian M. Ashworth, Creating International Studies: Angell, Mitrany and the Liberal Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).




9 F. A. Hayek, ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’, in Socialism and War: Essays, Documents, Reviews, ed. Bruce Caldwell, in The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, vol. X (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 221–38; Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press, 1972). Of course the way capitalism has been criticised during the latest fi nancial crisis confi rms this once more.

10 Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 141.

11 Scott Burchill, ‘Liberalism’, in Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak, Jack Donnelly, Matthew Paterson, Christian Reus-Smit and Jacqui True, Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 55–83.

12 John Gray, Liberalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), pp. xi–xiii.13 A recent example is Tim Dunne, ‘Liberalism, International Terrorism, and Democratic Wars’, Inter-

national Relations, 23(1), 2009, pp. 107–14.14 See, for example, Mark W. Zacher and Richard A. Matthew, ‘Liberal International Theory: Common

Threads, Divergent Strands’, in C. W. Kegly Jr. (ed.), Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 107–50.

15 Edwin van de Haar, Classical Liberalism and International Relations Theory: Hume, Smith, Mises and Hayek (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–7, 17–40, 125–50.

16 See notes 5 and 6.17 Aristotle, Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 563.18 Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1996), pp. 11–15.19 For an overview see Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (Clifton, NY: Augustus

M. Kelley, 1975), pp. 1–110.20 Irwin, Against the Tide, pp. 15–18.21 Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York:

Anchor Books, 2002), p. 8.22 Alejandro Chafuen, Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics (Lanham,

MD: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 73–7.23 See Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 3–98.24 David Hume, Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty

Fund, 1987), pp. 88–9.25 Jacob Viner, ‘Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth

Centuries’, World Politics 1(1), October 1948, pp. 1–29; Viner, Studies, pp. 1–57.26 Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the

Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 227–62.27 Viner, Studies, pp. 112–13.28 Joyce Oldham Appleby, ‘Ideology and Theory: The Tension between Political and Economic

Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England’, American Historical Review, 81(3), 1976, p. 501.29 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical

Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 209–17.30 Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, pp. 118–28.31 Nicholas Barbon, ‘A Discourse of Trade’, in Henry C. Clark (ed.), Commerce, Culture and Liberty:

Readings on Capitalism before Adam Smith (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), pp. 67, 81–2.32 Hugo Grotius, Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, ed. Martine Julia Van Ittersum

(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), pp. 303–5, 354, 363.33 Renée Jeffery, Hugo Grotius in International Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 109.34 Irwin, Against the Tide, pp. 22–5.35 Gilbert Faccarello, ‘Galiani, Necker and Turgot: A Debate on Economic Reform and Policy in

Eighteenth-Century France’, in Gilbert Faccarello (ed.), Studies in the History of French Political Economy: From Bodin to Walras (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 120–5.

36 F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 13–32.

37 Istvan Kende, ‘The History of Peace: Concept and Organizations from the Late Middle Ages to the 1870s’, Journal of Peace Research, 26(3), 1989, pp. 236–7.

38 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 22–37; see also Yuichi Aiko, ‘Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s Peace Project: A Critique of “History of International Relations Theory”’, in Beate Jahn (ed.), Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 96–120.




39 Irwin, Against The Tide, pp. 64–8.40 Abbé Raynal, ‘A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and the Trade of the Europeans

in the East and West Indies’, in Clark, Commerce, Culture and Liberty, pp. 619–23.41 James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist: Or, the New Constitution (London:

Phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 20–5.42 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its

Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 79–80.43 Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), p. 338.44 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 29.45 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, pp. 79–80.46 Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from

Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 184–7.47 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, pp. 7–9, 138–46; Mark V. Kauppi and Paul. R. Viotti, The Global

Philosophers: World Politics in Western Thought (New York: Lexington Books, 1992), pp.185–8.48 For a critique, see Beate Jahn, ‘Classical Smoke, Classical Mirror: Kant and Mill in Liberal Inter-

national Relations Theory’, in Jahn, Classical Theory, pp. 178–203.49 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),

pp. 50, 172, 114.50 See Eric S. Easley, The War over Perpetual Peace: An Exploration into the History of a Foundational

International Relations Text (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).51 And of course the wider debate about the democratic peace: see, for example, Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal

Legacies and Foreign Affairs’, and the literature in note 6.52 Edward Feser, Locke (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), p. 166.53 John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),

pp. 222, 323.54 Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 88, 395.55 Appleby, Ideology and Theory, p. 508; Mark Goldie, ‘Introduction’, in John Locke, Political Essays,

p. xxvi.56 Andrzej Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke and

Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 119.57 Feser, Locke, pp. 166–8.58 David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 255–70. Also Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, pp. 167–81.59 Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, p. 183.60 Bruce Buchan, ‘Civilisation, Sovereignty and War: The Scottish Enlightenment and International

Relations’, International Relations, 20(2), 2006, pp. 175–92.61 Ernest C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 218, 423; Adam

Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), p. 113; Hume, Essays, p. 460; Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 120–1.

62 J. D. Danford, ‘Hume’s History and the Parameters of Economic Development’, in N. Capaldi and D. W. Livingston (eds), Liberty in Hume’s History of England (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 195–6.

63 Knud Haakonssen, ‘Introduction’, in David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. xi–xxx.

64 John Biro, ‘Hume’s New Science of the Mind’, in David Fate Norton (ed.), The Cambridge Com-panion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 33–63.

65 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 266.

66 Hume, Essays, p. 38.67 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 154.68 Edwin van de Haar, ‘David Hume and International Political Theory: A Reappraisal’, Review of

International Studies, 34(2), 2008, pp. 225–42; Van de Haar, Classical Liberalism, pp. 125–50; Burchill, ‘Liberalism’; Diana Panke and Thomas Risse, ‘Liberalism’, in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 89–108; Lisa L. Martin, ‘Neoliberalism’, in Dunne et al., International Relations Theories, pp. 109–26.

69 Hume, Treatise, p. 362.




70 Hume, Essays, p. 255.71 F. G. Whelan, ‘Robertson, Hume and the Balance of Power’, Hume Studies, XXI(2), 1995, p. 318.72 Hume, Essays, pp. 89, 92; Haakonssen, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxi–xxiii.73 Istvan Hont, ‘The “Rich Country–Poor Country” Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy’,

in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 271–316.

74 Hume, Essays, p. 263.75 Hume, Essays, pp. 328–30; Andrew S. Skinner, ‘David Hume: Principles of Political Economy’, in

Norton, Cambridge Companion to Hume, pp. 239–45.76 D. Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981),

p. 125; Hume, Essays, p. 262; E. Soule, ‘Hume on Economic Policy and Human Nature’, Hume Studies, XXVI(1), 2000, p. 146.

77 Irwin, Against the Tide, p. 76; R. A. Manzer, ‘The Promise of Peace? Hume and Smith on the Effects of Commerce on War and Peace’, Hume Studies, XXII(2), 1996, pp. 269–382; Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 6; Razeen Sally, Classical Liberalism and International Economic Order: Studies in Theory and Intellectual History (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 57; Van de Haar, ‘David Hume’.

78 Manzer, ‘Promise of Peace’, pp. 369–82.79 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfi e (Indianapolis, IN:

Liberty Fund, 1982), pp. 25, 36, 41.80 J. Marcus Fleming, ‘Mercantilism and Free Trade Today’, in Thomas Wilson and Andrew S. Skinner

(eds), The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 164–5.

81 Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 493.82 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 229.83 Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1978), p. 105.84 Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 440–5.85 Christine Margerum Harlen, ‘A Reappraisal of Classical Economic Nationalism and Economic

Liberalism’, International Studies Quarterly, 43(4), 1999, pp. 735–6.86 Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 464–5.87 Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 467–71, 494–6.88 Andrew Wyatt Walter, ‘Adam Smith and the Liberal Tradition in International Relations’, in Ian Clark

and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Classical Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), especially pp. 154–5; Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 240.

89 Van de Haar, Classical Liberalism, pp. 41–74.90 Michael A. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism and Socialism (New York: W.W.

Norton, 1997), pp. 230–41; also Michael Doyle, ‘Peace, Liberty, and Democracy: Realists and Liberals Contest a Legacy’, in Michael Cox, G. John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi (eds), American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 21–40.

91 Oneal and Russett, ‘The Classical Liberals’, p. 268; Christopher Gelpi and Joseph M. Grieco, ‘Economic Interdependence, the Democratic State, and the Liberal Peace’, in Mansfi eld and Pollins, Economic Interdependence and International Confl ict, pp. 44–59; Andrew Moravscik, ‘Liberal International Relations Theory: A Scientifi c Assessment’, in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (eds), Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp.159–204.

92 Burchill, ‘Liberalism’; Tim Dunne, ‘Liberalism’, in John Baylis and Steve Smith (eds), The Global-ization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Panke and Risse, ‘Liberalism’, p. 97.

93 See, for example, Hont, Jealousy of Trade; Manzer, ‘The Promise of Peace?’94 Walter, ‘Adam Smith’; Onuf, Republican Legacy, pp. 240–1; Robert Keohane, ‘International

Liberalism Reconsidered’, in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 165–94.

95 This misrepresentation goes beyond the trade-leads-to-peace debate, making the need for a reappraisal even more urgent. See Van de Haar, Classical Liberalism; Van de Haar, ‘David Hume’.

96 Eric A. Heinze, ‘The New Utopianism: Liberalism, American Foreign Policy, and the War in Iraq’, Journal of International Political Theory, 4(1), 2008, pp. 109–10.




97 Gunhild Hoogensen, International Relations, Security and Jeremy Bentham (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 40–80, 161–76.

98 Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), pp. xvii, 277–93.

99 David Clinton, Tocqueville, Lieber, and Bagehot: Liberalism Confronts the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 17–43.

100 Beate Jahn, ‘Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill’, Review of International Studies, 31(3), 2005, pp. 599–618.

101 John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy Part 2, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. III, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965; reprinted Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), p. 594.

102 Ashworth, Creating International Studies, pp. 35–7.103 William D. Grammp, The Manchester School of Economics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press, 1960), pp. 1–6, 16–38, 46–7, 114; Lars Magnusson, The Tradition of Free Trade (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 47.

104 Richard F. Spall, ‘Reform Ideas of the Anti-Corn Leaguers’ (PhD thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985), pp. 237–51.

105 Ashworth, Creating International Studies, pp. 23–32; Richard M. Ebeling, Austrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003), pp. 248–53.

106 See Anthony Howe, ‘Introduction’, in Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan (eds), Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 1–19. However, it is a myth that England then became the leading free trading nation: see John V. C. Nye, War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

107 Richard Cobden, ‘International Arbitration’, in E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish (eds), Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Groce (London: Longman, 1978), pp. 374–78; also Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 42.

108 Martin Caedel, ‘Cobden and Peace’, in Howe and Morgan, Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays, pp. 189–207.

109 William Hartbutt Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy: A Critical Exposition, with Special Reference to Our Day and its Problems (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), pp. 80–2; Cobden, ‘International Arbitration’.

110 Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden (London: William Ridgway, 1878); James E. T. Rogers, Cobden and Modern Political Opinion (London: Macmillan, 1873), pp. 109–110; Francis W. Hirst, Free Trade and Other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), pp. ix–xix.

111 Richard Cobden, ‘Commerce Is the Grand Panacea’, in Bramsted and Melhuish, Western Liberalism, pp. 354–57.

112 Cited in Grammp, The Manchester School, pp. 100–5.113 John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), pp. 309–11.114 Dean Russell, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Infl uence (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for

Economic Education, 1969), pp. 17–29, 42, 73, 114.115 Frédéric Bastiat, The Bastiat Collection, vol. II (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007),

pp. 523–9.116 Per A. Hammarlund, Liberal Internationalism and the Decline of the State: The Thought of Richard

Cobden, David Mitrany and Kenichi Ohmae (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 91.117 As rightly noted by Dunne, ‘Liberalism’, p. 190.118 Magnusson, Tradition of Free Trade, p. 69.119 Howard, War and Liberal Conscience, pp. 13–51.120 F. R. Flournoy, ‘British Liberal Theories of International Relations (1848–1898)’, Journal of the

History of Ideas, 7(2), 1946, pp. 195–217.121 Ashworth, Creating International Studies, pp.27–30; Magnusson, Tradition of Free Trade, pp. 4,

46–69; David Long, Towards a New Liberal Internationalism: The International Theory of J. A. Hobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 121–43.

122 Peter Wilson, ‘The Myth of the “First Great Debate”’, in Tim Dunne, Michael Cox and Ken Booth (eds), The Eighty Years’ Crisis: International Relations 1919–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge




University Press, 1998), pp. 1–15. Also Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: A Study in Twentieth-Century Idealism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 147–51.

123 Frank Trentmann, ‘The Resurrection and Decomposition of Cobden in Britain and the West: An Essay in the Politics of Reputation’, in Howe and Morgan, Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays, pp. 272–6.

124 David Long, ‘Conclusion: Inter-War Idealism, Liberal Internationalism, and Contemporary Inter-national Theory’, in David Long and Peter Wilson (eds), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 312–18.

125 Ashworth, Creating International Studies, pp. 22–42; Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger, International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 519–31, 538.

126 Jaap de Wilde, Saved from Oblivion: Interdependence Theory in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: A Study on the Causality Between War and Complex Interdependence (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1991), pp. 67–75, 88–90, 96–9, 111, 116, 161, 177–80, 208. See also Ashworth, Creating International Studies, pp. 35–42.

127 Schmidt, Political Discourse of Anarchy, pp. 84, 124, 144–5, 239–41.128 Clinton, Tocqueville, Lieber and Bagehot, pp. 54–7.129 Ashworth, Creating International Studies, p. 35.130 Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1987), pp. 56–7.131 Michael W. Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, American Political Science Review, 80(4),

1986, pp. 1151–69; Doyle, Ways of War and Peace, pp. 230–50.132 Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientifi c Man versus Power Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965),

pp. 81–90; E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of Inter-national Relations (London: Papermac, 1995), pp. 43–4.

133 See Zacher and Matthew, ‘Liberal International Theory’.134 For an overview see Barbieri, The Liberal Illusion.135 Bradley A. Thayer, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and

Ethnic Confl ict (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Stephen Peter Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002).

136 Michael Donelan, Honor in Foreign Policy: A History and Discussion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

137 Christopher J. Berry, Human Nature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), esp. pp. 132–40.138 WTO, Georgia Trade Statistics, Geneva, October 2009, available at: http://stat.wto.org/

countryprofi les/GE_e.htm (accessed 12 November 2009); World Bank, Georgia: Trade Brief, Washington DC, 2009, available at: http://info.worldbank.org/etools/wti2008/docs.brief7 (accessed 12 November 2009).

139 Oli Brown, Mzukisi Qobo and Alejandra Ruiz-Dana, ‘The Role of Regional Trade Integration and Conflict Prevention’, in Shaheen Rafi Khan (ed.), Regional Trade Integration and Conflict Resolution (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 231–51.

140 Christopher Hill, The Changing Politics of Foreign Policy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 250–82.

141 Thomas Ohlson, ‘Understanding Causes of War and Peace’, European Journal of International Relations, 14(1), 2009, pp. 133–60.

142 Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 153–210; also Siniša Maleševi, ‘The Sociology of New Wars? Assessing the Causes and Objectives of Contemporary Violent Confl icts’, International Political Sociology, 2(2), 2008, pp. 97–112.

143 David Sobek, The Causes of War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), pp. 195–203.144 See, for example, Steven Husted and Michael Melvin, International Economics, 5th edn (Boston:

Addison Wesley Longman, 2001).145 Peter L. H. Van den Bossche, The Law and Policy of the World Trade Organization: Text, Cases

and Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 23.146 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 6, 383.147 See, for example, George Charles Roche III, Frédéric Bastiat, A Man Alone (New Rochelle, NY:

Arlington House, 1971), p. 49. There is no written evidence to link Bastiat to this quote, but possibly John Bright or Richard Cobden was the source. I want to thank Mark Thornton, the editor of the most recent edition of Bastiat’s collected writings (see note 115) for this information.

