CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

a clear perception of the new world order he intended to introduce, together with
the power to impose it. …….
Above all he believed in the creation of a league of nations who would mutually
guarantee each other’s security; one bound together not just by unwritten
understandings based on perceptions of common interest like the old Concert of
Europe, but by firm legal covenants: a vision sketched out by Kant … that had
become a central aspiration for the peace movements of the nineteenth century.
Championed by Wilson, and proposed by him as early as 1916 53 , the League of Nations
sought to establish the mechanisms of collective consultation and arbitration that, it was
believed, would negate the need to resort to war. If its hopes were dashed, then the
same triumphal optimism can be seen in the wording of the UN Charter nearly three
decades later (though it will be argued later that despite its universalist rhetoric, the UN
Charter was very much a realist construct):
We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow
to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and
worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations
large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for
the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be
maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger
freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with
one another as good neighbours…… 54
The same can be said of much of the rhetoric surrounding President George Bush
(Snr)’s declaration of a New World Order 55 at the end of the Cold War; and Francis
Fukayama’s famous, if now obviously premature, declaration of the ‘end of history.’ 56
We shall conclude this survey of liberalism with a brief description of the liberal
response to post-World War Two neo-realism, a highly deterministic form of realism in
which states are seen as programmed into their responses to events by the international
system in which they find themselves. The response is commonly referred to as neo- or
institutional-liberalism and counts amongst its leading proponents Joseph Nye and
Robert Keohane.
Neorealism has accepted that, notwithstanding international anarchy – in the sense of
the absence of a common government – there is, nevertheless, a structure to
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