Reflection Week 4

This week was very interesting, both in class and out of the class, in which I had the chance to get a new experience and learn something new. Focusing on the issues we discussed inside the class, liberalism was an interesting view on IR theory, because the foundation of it is something that most people from a liberal state would assume is universally true.

The interesting aspect of our discussion that I want to point out was that we were talking about "liberalism," yet our focus shifted to a general concept of "democracy." It is true that liberalism usually goes hand in hand with democracy, but liberalism isn't necessarily democracy; if it was, we would call it democracy and not liberalism. As the discussion was going on, an interesting though I tried to wrestle with was whether liberalism is possible without democracy. Up till now this train of thought was largely unsuccessful, especially because it is so difficult to distinguish between liberalism and democracy, and usually, they are interchangeable. Furthermore, the basic principle of liberalism, which is individual rights, seem to point to democracy only, but it would be interesting if somehow liberalism could be separated from democracy.

Another interesting point was how liberal states don't fight each other, because this is largely true in the world we live in. However, I think we should alter this statement a little bit, because in my views, it should be "established liberal states don't fight other established liberal states." The main point is that the liberal states respect each other's sovereignty, which is only the case when the state has been recognized and is stable. This is the case of Iraq, where the US remained to stabilize the democracy and to make it established in the society.

Liberalism in general was an interesting topic to discuss about, especially because it was a concept that everyone was familiar with and was challenging to actually defend what we simply accepted as truth.