19) Liberalism as a political ideology

Liberalism as a political ideology is associated with the attempt to achieve individual rights and liberties (including freedom in the private sphere and in economic matters), on a basis of universality and equality and to promote mutual gain through co-operation, including co-operation among nations.

20) Liberalism as a model of international order

Liberalism as a model of international order is based on three assumptions:

that basic actors are individuals and private groups;

that state preferences represent the interests of some subset of these individuals and groups;

and that state behaviour is determined by the interdependence of state preferences across the international system.

21) League of Nations

League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations (UN). Like the UN it had a Council (with permanent membership for Britain, France and the Soviet Union) and an Assembly. Its main purpose was to prevent international conflict and the central instrument was an ability to impose economic and military sanctions under Article 16. However, none of the major powers was fully committed to supporting the League and the USA never joined. In the 1930s the League proved incapable of preventing Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, or Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and was effectively dead by the time of Nazi Germany’s expansion.

22) The role of nato

The core of NATO is a collective defence regime outlined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty: ‘The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’ and that they will take ‘such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.’ The Treaty explicitly places this arrangement for collective defence within the ambit of the UN Charter, Article 51, which allows for the creation of regional security arrangements designed to maintain international peace and security.

The Treaty also provides for the Parties to ‘separately and jointly’ to ‘maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack’ (Article 3).

Furthermore, the Treaty commits the Parties to seek peaceful solutions to international conflicts (Article 1) and to promote co-operation on economic matters between the Parties (Article 2).

As such, NATO became the dominant security organization for Western states.

Extensive co-operation was developed on the core issue of security, including joint planning in the military field which penetrated deep into these states’ core purposes.

23) Penetrated hegemony (chapter 4)

Penetrated hegemony refers to the way in which the dominant power (the USA) allows access to and representation within its own political system to other liberal states.

24) Co-binding (chapter 4)

Co-binding is the novel institutional form by which liberal states have sought to mutually constrain one another’s actions.

Co-binding, ‘is a practice that aims to tie potential threatening states down into predictable and restrained patterns of behaviour ... that is, they attempt to tie one another down by locking each other into institutions that mutually constrain one another.

Binding is a foreign policy practice of establishing institutional links between the units that reduce their autonomy vis-a`-vis one another.

Co-binding thus helped to consolidate the penetrated hegemony of the USA and the semi-sovereignty of Germany and Japan in a single interlocking international order (NATO).