What was the recipe for the success of Raiffeisen’s banking model? What made it possible for imitations of this German rural cooperative microfinance institution to work well in some European countries, but fail in others? This paper answers these questions with a comparison of Raiffeisenism in Ireland and the Netherlands. Raiffeisen banks arrived in both places at the same time, but had drastically different fates. In Ireland they were almost wiped out by the early 1920s, whilst in the Netherlands they proved to be a long-lasting institutional transplant. Raiffeisen banks were successful in the Netherlands because they operated in a niche market with few viable competitors. Meanwhile, rural financial markets in Ireland were unsegmented and populated by long-established incumbents, leaving little room for new players, whatever their perceived advantages. Whereas Dutch Raiffeisen banks were largely self-financing, closely integrated into the wider rural economy and took advantage of socioreligious division, their Irish counterparts did not.

This essay reviews recent developments in liberal international relations theory, both empirical and normative. Furthermore, we seek to highlight parallels between contemporary liberal scholarship on international relations and the thought of classical figures such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Giuseppe Mazzini, and John Stuart Mill. In the first part of the essay we introduce key liberal principles and ideas and identify three different traditions of liberal thought on international relations. Thereafter we discuss the relationship between liberal democracy and international peace, followed by an overview of related scholarship on cooperation among democracies. In the final part of the essay, we briefly discuss two alternative liberal approaches to the ethics of military intervention: we show that although liberal theorists all share a fundamental attachment to representative governance and human rights, they can fundamentally differ in their support for coercive regime change.