Introduction: ???things can only get better???

Because much of the introduction to this chapter was established in the introduction to Chapter 11, here I shall merely highlight three key points. First and foremost, this chapter focuses on the Eurocentric origins of what I call Western-liberalism. This is a conglomeration of theories that can loosely be captured by the umbrella term of ‘cosmopolitanism’, comprising liberal internationalism, liberal-cosmopolitanism, mainstream ‘liberal-constructivism’, and solidarist English School theory. I shall also consider some versions of ‘realist-liberalism’ (having considered the ‘realist-liberal’ theories of US neo-imperialism in the last chapter). The prime task here is to reveal the paternalist Eurocentrism of Western-liberalism, which provides a complementary but different metanarrative to the offensive Eurocentrism of Western-realism. And, in the process, I shall show how post-1989 Western-liberalism propels us back to the future of the post-1830 phase of manifest paternalist Eurocentric liberal international theory.

Second, this point in turn begs the question as to how contemporary Western-liberalism fails to recognize its pre-1945 Eurocentric roots. Here I argue that this is made possible by the performance of a Eurocentric ‘temporal othering’ sleight of hand. In particular, Western-liberals assume that new progressive and egalitarian values associated with democracy, human rights and multiculturalism have come to the fore after 1989 in ways that have not been witnessed before. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, Western-liberals contrast this new progressive humanitarian era with the imperialist and racist values of the nineteenth century. In particular, a kind of ‘temporal binary’ is constructed whereby the nineteenth century is reimagined as more racially intolerant and imperialist than it was so that the post-1989 era can be portrayed as more culturally tolerant and anti-imperialist than it is (cf. Young 1995). Temporally othering the nineteenth century in this way enables the construction of a pure progressive post-1989 ‘self’ that is strictly demarcated or severed off from its nineteenth-century ‘Other’ through the construction of a line of temporal apartheid, thereby serving to elide the Eurocentric continuities between contemporary liberalism and its nineteenth-century forefather. Indeed, the irony here is that much of international theory in general and liberalism in particular has become possibly more imperialist since 1989 than it was in the nineteenth century.