A college campus or a high school I think is a good metaphor,
because in a sense you're kind of stuck there.
But there's all sorts of opportunities to join organizations,
to make friends,
to be part of all sorts of activities
that are not just fun but kind of mutually beneficial
to lots of people.
Or you can be the high school bully
and get in fights all the time,
or you can...there are all sorts of possibilities to do anything.
So opportunities are there for bad things to happen,
but also there are lots of possibilities for good outcomes.
But at the same time you're stuck, right,
so it's not like an environment that you can transcend and get out of.
But you can make of it whatever you like to make out of it
in cooperation with the people around you.
The basic definition of liberalism is that
the international system creates opportunities for cooperation and conflict.
And it's up to the states and other actors in the international political system
to either take advantage of those or not.
And there's an important distinction here between realism and liberalism,
where for realism the only real important actors are states.
So you've got 160,
however many states are in the international system right now.
And those are the important actors,
and those are the only real actors that matter.
For liberals we can talk about --
states are obviously important,
some more important than others,
but also businesses, churches, religious movements, social movements.
Other sorts of organizations also matter.
Probably the biggest misunderstanding is that
when we start talking about cooperation,
people start thinking that, you know, it's all kittens and rainbows,
we all sing Kumbaya, we all love each other, everything is wonderful.
That's actually not true.
What liberals think about international politics
is that we have lots of opportunities to cooperate,
lots of opportunities to pursue goals that are beneficial to everyone,
not just me or not just you.
That doesn't mean that we always do it;
that means we often have the opportunity.
Where other theories such as realism really stress conflict:
if it's good for me, it must be bad for you.
Yes, states go to war sometimes, and states are really important,
and conflict is a major component of the international system.
But that's not all that's there.
There's a whole other world out there beyond conflict
and concerns about security that realism just really fundamentally
doesn't have a good grasp on.
I think if you start with a realist lens,
you get very security-driven answers,
which often involve conflict and often involve arms.
And when you start from a liberal perspective,
you may get to that same solution.
Again, we are not opposed to war or the use of force,
but we want to exhaust absolutely every other opportunity first.
And we are convinced that along those lines,
as you exhaust every opportunity before you get to military conflict,
99 percent of the time, something in there is going to pan out.
Something in there is going to work.
We don't know what that is all the time,
but when we work through international institutions,
follow international law,
99 percent of the time we can come up with acceptable solutions
to our problems short of violent conflict.
I think if you look at the root of lots of the major institutions in the world today,
they come out of a clearly liberal logic.
The United Nations, the European Union,
these are things, for example, the UN,
that was created after World War II explicitly
with the goal of saying, you know,
after we just slaughtered a big chunk of the world in World War II,
how do we make sure we don't do this again?
How do we set up rules and institutions and authorities to make sure that,
for example, a country like Germany before World War II,
you know, when they start behaving aggressively towards their neighbors,
we can rein them in before they essentially light half the world on fire.
And so you get this concept of collective security coming out of the UN that says,
maybe what we should've done in World War II is when the Germans invaded Poland,
we shouldn't have said, oh, too bad for the Poles,
right, they've got a problem and they need to defend themselves.
We should've said, this is an attack on everyone;
this is a global problem, not just a problem for Poland,
and so we need a global response, or a collective response.
So the United Nations was set up with that goal in mind.
Obviously it's expanded into lots of other things.
The European Union is probably the best example
of a liberal institution that really has taken on massive powers,
and it actually does a lot.
The UN I think is criticized a lot for not being very effective,
and I think that's fair.
But the European Union actually does an incredible amount
in terms of making economic policy,
in terms of setting immigration policies.
You know, it really does a lot for the countries that are members.