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Organizations representing economic interests within individual nation states peaked in both social importance and academic interest during the 1970s and 1980s. It is often argued that since then they have declined in significance. There are four reasons for this: increasing economic globalization, the dominance of neo–liberal economic ideology, the rise of the individual enterprise, and the challenge of various non–functional (non–producer) interests. This chapter assesses the significance of each of these, paying attention to both general or convergent trends and to those that suggest differences of national experience among European countries. The range of organizations included in the discussion are first established, and the four types of interest relationships (contestation, pluralism, bargained corporatism and authoritarian corporatism) between the organizations and their members and those with whom they deal are identified.

This chapter examines the United States' liberal democratic internationalism during the period 1989–2008, with particular emphasis on the evolution of American democracy promotion from what Reinhold Niebuhr called its “fortunate vagueness” to a hard ideology. It begins with a discussion of the neo-Wilsonian ideology that appeared in the “long decade” of the 1990s—a way of thinking characterized by both voluntarism and a pseudoscientific certitude that was absent in liberalism of the earlier periods. In particular, it considers the emergence of a “hard liberal internationalist ideology” that was comparable to Marxism–Leninism. It also explores the rise of democratic globalism as progressive imperialism, focusing on democratic peace theory and democratic transition theory. The chapter argues that American democracy promotion had become a pretext for “just war,” as evidenced by the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

This book addresses the assumption that the historiography of International Relations (IR) and (British) intellectual history needs to be integrated, arguing that liberal internationalism is best conceptualised as an ideology focused on encouraging progress, sowing order and enacting justice in international affairs. It shows how liberal internationalism travelled into the twentieth century. The chapter then brings the insights of British intellectual history to bear on British international thought and to supply IR with a more sophisticated understanding of its own intellectual roots. Michael Freeden's approach provides tools for understanding how different versions of the same ideology coexist and change over time, and enables a differentiation of contexts or ‘languages’ in which liberal internationalism was promulgated by ideological agents. The book deploys a contextualist approach to the study of liberal internationalist ideology in Britain between 1880 and 1930. This chapter provides an overview of the chapters included in the book.

Kraig Beyerlein and A. Joseph West’s chapter examines what qualities congregations that mobilize for progressive causes share. Generally speaking, progressive political mobilization out of congregations is rare, but Beyerlein and West identify several “causal recipes” that suggest which congregations are most likely to engage in progressive politics. In particular, they focus on combinations of variables including the presence of a liberal ideology and social justice orientation in the congregation, and the presence of educated clergy and laity. In so doing, Beyerlein and West provide broad templates of the kind of congregations that we may see engage in progressive action.

This chapter summarises the arguments of the book and discusses their wider implications for, in particular, the historiography of International Relations (IR), contemporary liberal IR theory and British intellectual history of the period. Liberal internationalism enjoys a position in the current theoretical landscape of IR as opaque as that which it occupies in real-world political practice. The liberal internationalist vision is at once pervasive, ignored and exploited. Diversity in unity is a central characteristic of liberal internationalist ideology from the late nineteenth century through to the inter-war years. The history of internationalist ideas provides a marked contrast to the technical and bloodless versions of liberalism that are predominant in contemporary American IR. Liberal internationalism clearly had many drawbacks, including an unwarranted faith in gradual or manufactured progress and a complacent attitude towards the achievements of civilisation.

This chapter examines two novels that were written in response to a crisis in liberal-national ideology in the middle of the nineteenth century: Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. This pairing is unusual, not the least because Freytag's anti-Semitism starkly contrasts with Eliot's proto-Zionism. However, both these texts can be read as responses to the rise of modern imperialism, a political development that was frequently justified with new forms of historical emplotment, such as Social Darwinism. Imperialism poses a significant threat to liberal-national ideology, because it unites different ethnic and cultural groups within a single state, and thereby challenges the traditional foundations of national communities.

This chapter emphasizes that the views and interests that prevail in struggles over accountability have profound political regime implications. Which ideologies dominate accountability institutions affects which interests might be protected or challenged through them. Only democratic ideologies insist that governance problems be determined and addressed, directly or indirectly, through expressions of popular sovereignty. Yet the most powerful basis of ideological and political mobilization around concerns over abuses of state power in Southeast Asia invoke various forms of moral political authority including: nationalism via Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam; traditional values via the King in Thailand; and of God via Catholicism in the Philippines and Islam in Malaysia. Nondemocratic ideologies of accountability – especially moral ideologies – are linked to the broader struggle over whose authority the organization of the political regime rests upon.

This chapter's title comes from Fannie Hurst's 1942 Lonely Parade, in which one character announces to the heroine: “Sex isn't everything.” Her aunt counters with her own declamation about the truth of sexuality: “Perhaps not. But try living a life in a world that has everything but sex.” This is the question that animates almost all of Hurst's novels over four decades. In a culture fixated on codifying sexuality, Hurst poses alternatives to the possibility that sex was becoming “everything,” thus making her career by challenging the centrality of sex. More than any other writer of the 1920s, 1930s, and even 1940s, she offered an amazing range of popular fictions devoted to the same topic: negotiating the demands of sex expression within liberal contract ideology.

Within the context of Indonesia’s encounters with liberalism in late colonial and postcolonial times, this chapter examines Muslim discourses that are critical of both Western liberal ideology and its Islamist detractors. After problematizing the existing categories of Islamic neo-modernism, Liberal Islam, and Islamic liberalism, the chapter focuses on alternative discourses formulated by Muslim intellectuals from both traditionalist and modernist-reformist Islamic backgrounds during the Reformasi era when Indonesia transitioned from a military autocracy to a democratic system of governance. Islamic Post-Traditionalists draws on poststructuralism and postcolonial theory to offer an emancipatory trajectory for Indonesian Muslims in the twenty-first century, while modernist-reformist intellectuals have drawn on the social sciences to develop a new paradigm referred to as Transformative Islam. Instead of presenting sweeping ideas, this younger generation is more concerned with translating new regimes of knowledge into applied thinking about concrete issues, such as democratization, development, justice and battling corruption.

The ‘big bang’ EU enlargements of 2004-7 changed the face of Europe. How much did they change the EU, and particularly its institutional system? This chapter presents evidence to suggest that enlargement has made the Commission a younger and more female administration that is more economically liberal in outlook. Most of its officials – both from the new member states (the ‘EU-12’) and the ‘EU-15’ – believe that the effects of enlargement on career development within the house were badly-handled. Still, many EU-15 officials report that enlargement has led to a significant influx of talented, enthusiastic and competent officials. While we find that there is no ‘typical’ EU-12 official across nationalities, whether or not an official is a national of one of the new EU states is a more powerful determinant of attitudes and beliefs than any other cohort effect, such as DG, nationality, length of service or gender.

The third sector and the nature of active citizenship are both changing rapidly. Indeed the sector may appear ever more confused as it appears to move simultaneously in opposite directions. With the increasing dominance of neo-liberal, market driven ideology, particularly in OECD countries, many third sector organisations, are turning to market-driven models of organisational structure and function and operate more like entrepreneurial businesses. One problem with this approach is the inherent conflict of interest between profit generation and social good. The chapter explores some of the negative aspects of this approach but also some of the positive developments, for example with the growth of cooperatives and hybrid approaches. New emergent (online) activist organisations are also part of the third sector though they sometimes defy categorisation. These are driven by passion and not money but by making astute use of the social media are able to operate with minimal financial resources.

This chapter examines refuge once the initial fanfare for refugees’ causes subsided. Enthusiasm for long-term relief was possible because Chartists, mainstream philanthropists, and officials worked to mitigate the social tensions immigration provoked. They achieved this, in large part, by resettling refugees in the Empire or under Britain’s sphere of influence overseas. Sierra Leone was the model for this type of refuge, becoming the darling of missionaries who viewed the project as the ultimate “city of refuge” in which the homeless foreigners could become the self-supporting subjects idealized in liberal ideology. The conditions of refuge for liberated Africans in Sierra Leone were dismal, however. While the public ignored the practical challenges that their project faced and continued to establish new overseas refuges, this willful blindness could not last indefinitely.

This chapter talks about Australian bioethics and highlights the argument that bioethics have never been above the political struggle for power and influence in the public marketplace of ideas. It describes the Australasian Bioethics Association, as it purposely moves bioethics discourse beyond philosophical or theological inquiry. The chapter concludes with an analysis of bioethics, as it functions as a political field through which the Christian right competes against secular science, bioethics, and liberal ideology in order to amplify religious doctrines, traditional family values and ethics, and social order in Australian society and politics.