Rational Idealism: The Political Economy of Internationalism in the United States and Great Britain, 1870-1945

Between 1870 and 1945, American and British leaders made a number of costly, “high politics” commitments to international law and multilateral cooperation. Of course, this period was not a golden age of peace and love; most of the time, foreign policymakers acted in their states’ parochial, short-term interests. The occasions in which they did initiate legalistic and multilateralist policies, however, were sufficiently common and had such a profound impact on the development of the international system that their actions cannot be dismissed as either aberrant or inconsequential. They revived the Concert of Europe as a progressive instrument of conflict resolution and humanitarian intervention, created the League of Nations and United Nations, settled long-running bilateral disputes through arbitration, and signed treaties requiring them to submit to conciliation and arbitration in future conflicts. They were not pacifists or isolationists, but rather believed that intervention and war should be subject to strict legal limits and sanctioned by multilateral organizations whenever possible. This approach to foreign policy has been known since the early twentieth century as internationalism.

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