Kant and Liberal Internationalism

Extract

Kant and Liberal Internationalism, Antonio Franceschet, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 164

Few political notions are at once so normative and so equivocal as liberal internationalism. Today, the official discourse of the West resounds with appeals to a term that was long a trademark of the Left. Whatever sense is given it, the meaning of internationalism logically depends on some prior conception of nationalism, since it only has currency as a backward construction referring to its opposite. Yet while nationalism is of all modern political phenomena the most value-contested—judgements of its record standardly varying across a 180-degree span, from admiration to abhorrence—no such schizophrenia of connotation affects internationalism: its implication is virtually always positive. But the price of approval is indeterminacy. If no one doubts the fact of nationalism, but few agree as to its worth, at the entry to the millennium the status of internationalism would appear to be more or less the reverse. It is claimed on all sides as a value, but who can identify it without challenge in the form of force?