Liberal Imperialism and Global Security

Jedediah Purdy.

“Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments”

Ethics and International Affairs 17/2, (Fall 2003).

The Global Security Argument for liberal imperialism holds that imperial policy promotes global security. The combined threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction mean that “global security may require that entire regimes be brought forcibly to heel” (37), and that this would entail forcibly removing them from power and replacing them with a democratic government.  Purdy advances two arguments against this argument. 

First, he claims that liberal empire presupposes the existence of hegemony, a single “dominant superpower,” when in fact the world is rapidly shifting from post-Cold War uni-polarity to economic and military multi-polarity.  As Russia regains its military momentum, as China slowly liberalizes, as India continues its massive economic boom, and as the European Union matures, American dominance begins to look less and less stable.  In the new multi-polar world, as in the old, respect for the rules of sovereignty have a great deal more practical importance to human welfare than they did during the period of alleged American ascendancy, since no single entity had, nor presently has de facto authority over matters of global security.

Second, he claims that an American policy of unilateral intervention is likely to have perverse incentives for nuclear proliferation.  Some states will take such a policy not as a deterrent to seeking nuclear arms, but as a prod.  He does not say so, but this claim, if true, would buttress the prior objection, because if and when nuclear proliferation accelerates, the prospects for US hegemony will dissolve more rapidly.

The Neoconservative Moment

Summary: Francis Fukuyama
"The Neoconservative Moment"
The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq.
Cambridge University Press (2005). pp. 170-85.

In "The Neoconservative Moment," Francis Fukuyama argues that Charles Krauthammer's "democratic globalism" brand of neoconservativism is too realist and too idealist by turns.  Democratic globalists, according to Krauthammer, believe that American military supremacy should be used to "support U.S. security interests and democracy simultaneously."  

Fukuyama argues that Iraq was hardly a strategic threat, even less a global, existential threat to freedom.  But even if it had been it was clear from the beginning that neither the nature of Iraqi society nor the United States' past experience with regime change lent themselves well to the prospects of success. Finally, Fukuyama argues that democratic globalism fails to appreciate the value of legitimacy, and overlooks the fact that many of our allies "did not trust us...to use our huge margin of power wisely and in the interests of the world as a whole."  The US can no longer count on post facto legitimacy as it did during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was a competing power, and the United States and its allies agreed that frequent demonstrations of resolve, in the form of military action, could be beneficial.  

Focus now is on the Middle East, and a pre-emptively and frequently intervening superpower is as unlikely to coax the Arab world into democracy as force is unlikely to drag them into it. Fukuyama advocates a gentler, more multilateral brand of democratic globalism: reinstate diplomacy and coalition-building, promote democracy “through all of the available tools,” be more realistic about our abilities, be better prepared for nation-building when the need arises, and build institutions.  Whether this can be called ‘neoconservativism,’ Fukuyama does not know.

The Political Economy of Hierarchy

Summary: Gary Miller.
Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy.
Cambridge University Press. 1992.
Introduction, pp. 1-13.

In the Introduction to his Managerial Dilemmas, Gary Miller explains that his main aim in the book is to connect two different literatures on hierarchical organizational control: organizational economics, with its emphasis on incentivizing self-interested employee behavior, on the one hand, and political science and organizational psychology, with their emphasis on organic processes of leadership able to inspire employees to transcend self-interest, on the other.  The tools needed to build a "theoretical bridge" between these literatures, Miller maintains, are to be found in modern game theory and political economy.  

Organizational economics, rigorous as it is, generates incorrect predictions about the kinds of incentive structures we should expect to find in firms subject to competitive pressures in a free market.  This means that “Either competitive market pressures are less likely to discipline hierarchies than economists have imagined, or else there are reasons outside of current economic theory that egalitarian incentive systems are more efficient than those typically prescribed by economists." (7)  

Miller will therefore adopt an institutional approach to the political economy of hierarchies, since this has the best potential to explain outcomes produced in contexts with high transaction costs, information asymmetry, inefficient property rights, and multidimensional exchanges involving non-monetary goods like status and services.  Following Ronald Coase, institiutional theorists believe that hierarchies allow firms to avoid some of the transaction costs associated with using the price mechanism to coordinate exchange rates: under hierarchy, the employee and employer benefit by allowing the employer to have "broad discretionary authority" over the employee by means of a single contract, rather than negotiating a price for each particular service the worker provides.  

This discretionary authority as an important feature of organizational behavior.   Ultimately, Miller believes he can explain how authority is established in firms, why these firms exhibit persistent inefficiencies that weaken their ability to solve market failures, and the extent to which managers who inspire cooperation--voluntary deviations from self-interested behavior--can minimize those inefficiencies.