It was no coincidence that the century during which this international order of states continuously existed was also the century of capitalism's most vigorous expansion. For the stability and security of foreign relations created the basis of trust for the commerce of international capital, and made it possible for a network of long-term trade treated to be developed that hindered the sudden interreuption of international trade, and so eased the intensification of the international division of labor. (62-3)
As I argued in the Summer of 2017 a few years ago (recall here; here and here), a salutary effect of returning to the roots of the twentieth century liberalism we have inherited, is to discover its internationalist dimensions. The other salutary effect is that they are good company in the midst of our challenges because they did not succumb to despair under worse conditions. The internationalist feature of neoliberalism guides a fascinating (2018) book, The Globalists, by Quinn Slobodian that has been garnering a lot of much-deserved attention (and that I am sure to mention again these digressions). But his book has a tendency to treat the neoliberal turn to global affairs as tactical or instrumental in the service of the defense of markets. I would not deny that such a narrative is grounded in evidence. But not unlike others who are critical of neoliberalism there is also a tendency to overlook other, more noble motives. I mention this not in the interest of historical justice, but rather because it means that some of the more interesting arguments get ignored altogether.
Eucken's general argument is (which anticipates my own useful myth recall) that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mercantilism created capitalism and that liberalism was a response to it (65). Through the Enlightenment and especially the nineteenth century, Liberalism succeeded in separating to some degree the state from the economic sphere while not undermining the state as a political agent distinct and autonomous from (and so capable of impartiality toward) the economic forces that it had once guided. To what degree such a state really existed is worth questioning. But it is a useful analytic fiction.
And a key feature that contributed to the liberal success in the nineteenth century was a characteristic of the state system that Eucken highlights in the quoted passage above. (Eucken's dad, a once famous philosopher, won the Nobel literature prize in 1908.)++Rather than treating the state as a global Hobbesian anarchy with states constantly signaling war preparedness (and so fitting Hobbes' account of the state of nature), Eucken presents the state system as an order capable of distinguishing sharply between peace and war. While undoubtedly, the idea has deeper roots, Kant's Perpetual Peace had made it clear that if you take the Hobbesian argument for the existence of a state seriously, then one's conduct in war must be oriented toward peace (or be self-undermining). Eucken himself treats "the development of the "principles of peace" as an eighteenth century (re-)discovery (61).
Now, it is true, and important to Eucken's argument, that the very possibility of demarcating peace and war, and generating a set of practices that facilitate the demarcation and that would allow states and their citizens to plan for peace, has very important economic effects. Uncertainty is dramatically reduced, and communication and mobility (of people, capital, goods) greatly facilitated, and so the division of labor enhanced (etc.).
What makes this possibility of demarcation possible, according to Eucken (an economist important to the development of social market economy and neoliberalism), are two features of the global order: first, the existence of states that (i) are rights bearers and (ii) accept that other states have equal rights; second, the willingness to treat the state system as operating by a balance of power (recall also this post), where the balancing role is exercised by the great powers (especially, but not solely, England). Rather than treating balance of power politics as an invitation to open-ended war, Eucken sees in it the means to securing a lasting demarcation between war and peace.** We may add with Hume, that this is only possible when commitment to preserving a balance of power has "an authority...among those who govern the world."
Some other time, I discuss Eucken's analysis of why this authority disappeared alongside the collapse of the nineteenth century world order into the first world war. But while peace is instrumentally useful, there is no reason to doubt that Eucken thinks that acting in accord with the "principle of peace" as a ground of order is a desirable end for its own sake. The (Thomas Biebricher and Frieder Vogelmann) reader from which I quote does not list 'peace' as a distinct entry in the index.
The pursuits of peace is a key motive for neoliberals.+ The attack on the mercantile spirit is (recall), since the time of Adam Smith, an attack on principles that justify war and conquest. From this vantage point, the revival of fortune after the second world war also reflects a partial failure. Rather than helping to re-create a world in which principle of peace was anchored, neoliberal ideas got subsumed into a hegemonic, imperial power structure on one side of a cold war. That this hegemonic structure encouraged, perhaps made possible, a European experiment (recall) that is grounded in the principle of peace now nearly forgotten is not the least of history's ironies.
*The German has "eine Liquidierung des Krieges während der Geltung der Verträge unmöglich gemach."Tribe translates it "as making a liquidation of war through the work of the treaties impossible." But the German clearly has Krieges.
**Eucken recognizes that a European balance of power has a further effect: it freed European states to pursue overseas activities "far beyond Europe's frontiers." A weakness in his account is that he shows little interest in marking the costs to non-Europeans of this freedom.
+An Austrian economist, Von Mises writes (in 1927) "One would think that after the experience of the [first] World War the realization of the necessity of perpetual peace would have become increasingly common."
++Update: I thank Daniel Nientiedt for correcting my mistaken claim that he won the peace prize!
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