INTRODUCTION

If socialism and liberalism are rivals, one ambition these rivals have shared is that of being a transnational, even universal doctrine. Socialists and liberals have each thought of their own view as being well designed to expand, to reach out and be taken up in an ever–growing number and variety of societies. I do not know whether now is the time to write the final obituary for the socialist version of this dream. But the universalizing dream most vivid before the minds of the inhabitants of the world today clearly is not the socialist one, but the liberal one. “Globalization,” in our day, has come to mean something very close to “liberalization.” For some this is a cause of celebration; for others, it is a cause of protest and despair.

I want to ask what this liberal universalizing dream might amount to politically if it is realized. If global liberalism is what comes after socialism, what institutional structures might liberalism on an international scale require? What form and size of political organization might be appropriate for a global liberal world?

By “global liberalism,” I mean an era in which liberal norms have come to be affirmed in a settled way by most individuals, peoples, and authoritative political structures throughout the world. These liberal norms include the rule of law, democracy, capitalism in some form, and the constitutional protection of a basic set of associative and deliberative liberties (freedoms of religion and the press prominent among them).