Russell Buchan, Senior Lecturer of International Law at the University of Sheffield, won the Lieber Prize of the American Society of International Law for 2014 for his monograph on ‘International Law and the Construction of Liberal Peace’. This was a well-deserved recognition of an important piece of scholarship that offers a nuanced explanation for the perseverance of liberal values and liberal interventionism in contemporary international law. Indeed, despite the accumulation of negative factors in the highly conflictual post-9/11 environment, the author argues that liberal values are firmly embedded in international practice. Though I agree with the thrust of this argument, I have some reservations on aspects of his methodology. Whilst the author's analysis reveals some ‘blind spots’ regarding current debates, he nonetheless advances the intellectual debate on the preservation of peace.
Buchan aspires to create an explanatory, but not normative, framework, and argues that some forms of State practice can be explained by recourse to perceptions on liberal values and liberal peace (6–7, 220). At the same time, an underlying prescriptive dimension can be discerned, whereby a weak ‘ought’ is linked to a strong ‘is’, as the author expects liberal values to ultimately ‘carry the day’ (223–24). Buchan's overall approach is founded on the antagonistic relationship of two co-existing ‘spaces of the international’, the international society and international community, whereby the latter is future-oriented and appears normatively stronger than the former. The author implies that the policies of ‘liberal peace’ are perhaps the only ‘game in town’, despite the shortcomings or occasional failures of liberal interventionism. It should be noted that Buchan makes an excellent argument on the threats to international community, including in particular his insightful response to Wendt's social constructivism (88–95).
The foundation of Buchan's analysis is the distinction between international society and international community (ch 1). Whilst the society/community dichotomy has been extensively discussed in sociology, political theory, and international relations theory, its transfer in the international legal theory raises two questions: first, on the affiliation of States with the international society and international community; and second, on the relationship of the international legal system with the two spaces of the international.
As far as the first aspect is concerned, Buchan argues that international society and international community are two forms of associations of States; the inclusive international society that took shape after the end of the Second World War and became universal over time, and the international community with a more limited constituency that emerged after the end of the Cold War. The author underscores that the international society technically ‘extends membership to all states’, but practically ‘contains only non-liberal states’, and the international community is composed only of liberal States (19). However, if, as he admits, the international society ‘institutionalize[d] its association by creating the United Nations’ which is ‘the legitimate representative of the international society’ (26–7), then ‘in practice’ the United Nations should be considered as being under the control of non-liberal States, a position that the author does not accept. The distinction can be salvaged if international community and international society are considered as ‘pre-legal’ formations mirroring the functional distinction between core and periphery of world society, and as ‘hermeneutical topoi’, so that the reification of the concepts is avoided.
Furthermore, Buchan links the principles of prohibition of recourse to force and non-intervention to the international society, and the adaptations of the above principles, as well as the development of new rules, such as democracy and the responsibility to protect, to the international community. This construction raises the question of the scope and personal sphere of validity of the two layers of international law: in the book, it remains underdetermined whether the ‘law of international community’ and the ‘law of international society’ constitute two different ‘sub-systems’ with different subjects, or two subsets of norms of the same system, which either differ with respect to their normative quality, or are positioned on different stages of normative evolution.
The role and function of the Security Council in the context of the international society/international community distinction raises perhaps the most fundamental questions. Buchan devotes the largest part of the book to the activities of the General Assembly and the Security Council, whereby the latter appears to be dominated by liberal States and to have become the locus of global governance for the expansion of liberal democracy (96–219 [120–21]). This is a paradoxical situation, not only because the Council is the normatively strongest political organ of the UN (Articles 25 and 103 UN Charter) as an institution of the international society, but also because the two illiberal powers, China and Russia, could block the policies of ‘liberal peace’ at any time.
Here, Buchan skillfully navigates the path of demonstrating the progressive transformation of peacekeeping (international society) to peacebuilding (international community). The author discusses the peacekeeping operations in Congo and Cyprus, and the peacebuilding missions in Kosovo, East Timor, and Afghanistan, as well as the legal problems of the occupation of Iraq, and succeeds in demonstrating the change of paradigm after the end of the Cold War. His argument in the analysis of the Congo operation is differentiated and conclusive. He demonstrates that despite the variations from the classical model of peacekeeping, the Congo mission was not an early case of peacebuilding, but a peacekeeping operation whose ultimate purpose was not to reform the Congolese State, but to safeguard its sovereignty and institutions without intervening in its domestic affairs (142). Buchan's analysis of the reform of Iraq under the occupation, and the emphasis on the normative impact of the Security Council action, helps dispel many myths on the response of international institutions to the intervention (ch 7). The author confirms the obvious truth that, despite the differences of opinion as to the necessity of the intervention, the members of the Security Council supported the reform process by authorizing the occupying powers to impose the ‘liberal peace’ and transform the law of occupation.
The book does not satisfactorily answer two big questions: first, how was it possible for the Security Council to mutate into the main vehicle for the imposition of liberal peace; and second, how can it be explained that liberal values have been so deeply embedded in the process of restoration of peace after the end of the Cold War. I would argue that the answers should be sought through the consideration of liberal peace and hegemonic peace theories. First, liberal States were able to exploit the collapse of legitimacy of authoritarian governance in the period 1989–91, and appropriated the definition and content of preservation of peace, maintaining supremacy in practice until at least 2011 (intervention in Libya). This is a situation of exercise of liberal hegemony within the legal hegemony of the Security Council (cf Ian Clark, Hegemony in International Society, OUP, 2011, ch 7). Second, from the participants' perspective, the pervasiveness of liberal values in matters of restoration of peace can be attributed to the paradoxical necessity to prevent the risk of failure of liberal intervention itself. Even in cases where no consensus on the use of force could be established, the P5 would agree that collective action at the stage of post bellum could only be guided by liberal values. Illiberal members of the Council would ultimately lend their support to liberal interventions, because, after failing to balance the hegemon, they would prefer to bandwagon, either in order to mitigate the systemic risks arising from the intervention, or to reap some benefits in the course of the peacebuilding process. Either way, liberal hegemony would have succeeded in translating the ‘liberal interest’ into collective interest.
The (temporary?) neutralization of the Security Council post-2011 can be partly attributed to the increasing assertiveness of some ‘illiberal democracies’, but does not signify any fundamental normative change. Versions or visions of illiberal, authoritarian or totalitarian governance as dystopian models for the preservation of peace, such as practised by Russia in the occupied territories of Georgia and Ukraine, or as attempted by the Maliki government in Iraq, or as propagated by Islamist fundamentalists in the form of a Caliphate, not only have not received any normative acceptance, but they have been treated, directly or indirectly, as endangering world peace and security. There are two deeper systemic reasons explaining the posture of international institutions: first, there exists no real list of ‘illiberal values’ in international law to guide a Chapter VII action, with the exception of the default, but ‘empty’, concept of sovereignty—and the problem here is, how to ‘build’ sovereign States; and second, there is concern that a Hobbesian international system banning societal pluralism with the purpose of securing an ‘illiberal peace’ would strengthen the forces of dedifferentiation, destabilize the complex but sensitive, edifice of world society, maximize the space of exclusion, and condemn various regimes of international law into obsolescence.
Russell Buchan's book offers a sophisticated and in-depth analysis of the enduring relevance of the project of liberal peace in the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding the open methodological issues, and the need to reposition the theory in a broader systemic context, the author presents a well-structured account of the strength of liberal values in the area of preservation of peace, and contributes to the rationalization of the debates on the use of force. His book enriches scholarship and can be expected to advance academic debate on the structure, finality, and legitimacy of international law and international order.
