Introduction: Liberal Internationalism, a Social Movement for Peace

Abstract

Towards the end of his life, Alfred Milner, the nineteenth-century British colonial administrator, member of Prime Minister Lloyd George’s cabinet and liberal imperialist, gave a statement of his political creed. ‘I am’, he recorded, ‘a Nationalist and not a Cosmopolitan. This seems to be becoming more and more the real dividing line of parties’. Describing himself as a ‘race patriot’ favouring a ‘British League of Nations’ (the Empire), he claimed that ‘competition between nations, each seeking its maximum development, is the Divine order of the world, the law of Life and Progress’.¹ It had ceased to be a dominant view before his death in 1925. Cooperation rather than struggle between nations had become the leitmotiv of mainstream British discourses on security. This study contributes to the literature on peace by analysing the historical contingencies and internecine politics, the streams and flows, of the potent British socio-political movement for an interwar liberal peace that assembled a dominant orthodoxy.