Back in the liberal interregnum, before powerful states - the “great irresponsibles” as Hedley Bull once termed them - had saddled the vision of collective global responsibility with the politics of the UN Security Council, proposals circulated for the formation of an international air force.[1] 

Between 1908 and 1940 public intellectuals like Leonard Woolf, David Davies, Philip Noel-Baker, Norman Angell and Bertrand Russell argued that air power was both too dangerous and too important to the future of humanity to be left in the hands of bellicose states. The easier it became for states to resort to force, the more tenuous the rules prohibiting the use of force would become. To head off this possibility they called for ceding monopoly control of the technology to an international consortium of public and private trustees of global order. Staffed by people inherently committed to global goods and firewalled from states’ subjective interests, this Authority would be freed to objectively enforce rules promoting international peace and prosperity. 

E. H. Carr, among others, tagged the liberal international vision as hopelessly grandiose and - because of this - infinitely dangerous. By mobilising around a fantasy world in which supranational institutions were capable of exercising the hard power needed to govern, ignoring the world “as it was” where the capability of any global organisations would always be subject to the whims of spoiler states, leaders might be convinced to adopt policies which would leave them catastrophically exposed to the regressive moves of less romantic players on the board. Actually believing that there was an alternative to statist power politics was a foundational mistake. 

But Carr’s caricature of liberal proposals as a series of utopian fever dreams conveniently ignored the motivating claim: that radical policy challenges required radical policy solutions. Proposals for an international air force were conceived as a pragmatic and necessarily ambitious response to a previously unimagined threat to social order. The argument was, in effect, that policymakers were faced with a stark choice. Either watch as a radical new technology wrought a predictably chaotic impact on national and international society. Or get ahead of the curve and empower an authority with the real capability to enforce international law and, in so doing, ensure that the inevitable transformation of society followed humanity’s best interests. In the face of transformative change, maintaining the status quo, as Carr and other realists suggested, wasn’t the ethical or strategically sensible policy. Quite the opposite.  

Of course the critics were right to stress that any policy proposals needed to be alive to the political dynamics which, given the structural incentives shaping international politics, undermined the workability of world government. But with the benefit of hindsight we know that Angell, Davies and co. were equally right to flag the radical transformation to be wrought by air power, with all the attendant changes to international law, global order and national security strategies.