Book Description

A proper understanding of liberal internationalism requires an appreciation of both its domestic and international aspects. This dissertation reconstructs and evaluates the debates on international order that occurred within the most influential non-state foreign policy organizations in Britain and the United States between the 1930s and the 1950s—the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The members of these two organizations played an integral role in the project to contrive a coherent intellectual framework for the largely incoherent and contentious system of liberal internationalism that the Allies had tried to impose in 1919. One of the hallmarks of liberal states is the prominence of non-state elites in the policymaking process. These non-state elites—just as much as the liberal internationalism they played an indispensable role in propagating—played a crucial role in the formation of a new foreign policy orthodoxy within the United States and Great Britain. But the nature and extent of the relationship between the liberal state and its non-state elites is contentious. In contrast with liberal and Marxist theorists—who argue that the liberal state is weak in comparison with either civil society or capitalist interests—I argue that the relationship between the liberal state and the CFR/Chatham House was one of symbiosis rather than of simple domination by one over the other. While the state in each instance was always the senior partner and always decided policy, the CFR and Chatham House nevertheless provided useful—arguably indispensable—functions for the liberal state in the formation and implementation of foreign policy.