Liberal World Order and Its Critics

Civilisational States and Cultural Commonwealths

Adrian Pabst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429670954
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Liberals blame the retreat of the liberal world order on populists at home and authoritarian leaders abroad. Only liberalism, so they claim, can defend the rules-based international system against demagogy, corruption and nationalism. This provocative book contends that the liberal world order is illiberal and undemocratic – intolerant about the cultural values of ordinary people in the West and elsewhere while concentrating power in the hands of unaccountable Western elites and Western-dominated institutions.

Under the influence of contemporary liberalism, the international system is fuelling economic injustice, social fragmentation and a worldwide "culture war" between globalists and nativists. Liberals, far from defending rules, have broken international law and imposed their version of market fundamentalism and democracy promotion by military means. Liberal "civilisation" has fuelled resentment across the world by imposing a narrow worldview that pits cultures against one another. To avoid a descent into a violent culture clash, this book proposes radical ideas for international order that take the form of cultural commonwealths – social bonds and crossborder cultural ties on which international trust and cooperation depends.

The book's defence of an older order against both liberals and nationalists will speak to all readers trying to understand our age of anger. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and readers of liberalism, political theory and democracy, and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.

1 Hubris

The rise and fall of the liberal world order

The liberal world order in question

The beginning of the liberal world order is commonly traced to the post-1945 creation of a new set of multilateral arrangements – from the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the World Bank) via the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Genocide Convention to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which subsequently became the World Trade Organisation (WTO). After two great depressions (1873–1896 and 1929–1932) and two world wars, the aim was to tame the forces of imperialism, nationalism and laissez-faire capitalism while at the same time avoiding the totalitarian state corporatism of the communist, fascist and national-socialist regimes. Thus was born the idea of “embedded liberalism”, which sought to constrain the sovereign power of national states and regulate the flow of free-roaming global capital.¹

The 1930s and early 1940s had seen a lethal mix of depression, tyranny, war and genocide. After 1945, the Western world witnessed the creation of a US-led liberal order that consisted in a rules-based system in which cooperation between like-minded countries supplanted inter-state competition, multilateralism replaced the imperial balance of power and commitment to universal values overrode the sole pursuit of national interests. This order rested on the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the US-dominated institutions of Bretton Woods, NATO and GATT/WTO, which gave the US special rights and privileges in exchange for providing security for its allies in Europe and Asia. It created an “international society” of sovereign states that is, in the words of Hedley Bull, more than an unstable balance of power (contra realism) but less than a unified world government (contra cosmopolitanism).²

As one of two super-powers, the US provided not just global public goods such as free trade and freedom of the seas but also an economic and security umbrella for old friends and former foes: loans to the UK (the Marshall Plan) and the creation of open-ended alliances with Western Europe and Japan. However, as Joseph Nye reminds us, the post-war system of embedded liberalism was limited in scope and success.³ It was originally confined to the Atlantic part of the world and failed to prevent the Cold War with the USSR that led to the “loss” of China, Soviet expansionism in Central and Eastern Europe, the partition of Germany, a permanent standoff on the Korean peninsula and nuclear brinkmanship involving Turkey and Cuba, as well as the devastating war in Vietnam. Elsewhere, the US-sponsored “free world” included support for dictatorships as well as democracies, and it served US self-interest as much as it served the interests of American allies old and new.

After 1989, liberalism became for some time the dominant ideology, as the “end of history” seemed to herald a global convergence towards Western liberal market democracy as the “final form of human government”.⁴ First, the former Soviet bloc appeared to abandon totalitarian communism in favour of democratic capitalism, while China and India looked set to replace central planning with the bureaucratic free market. Then Latin America was joined by much of Asia in embracing neo-liberal structural reforms and a gradual integration into the world economy. Bipolarity gave way to unipolarity with the US as the sole superpower now in charge of upholding the new world order and spreading open markets, democracy, the rule of law, individual human rights and elected governments – or so the theory went. Underpinning this order was the belief that open and transparent markets with minimal government intervention, combined with democratic rule, would generate prosperity, peace and partnership.

For some time, this belief seemed to be borne out by evidence. Economic reforms led to the spread of democracy: according to the independent and non-profit organisation Freedom House, the number of market democracies increased from 44 in 1997 to 86 in 2015, and this group of countries accounts for around 70 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and 40 per cent of the world’s population.⁵ Moreover, liberal values also spread as the order expanded – including the notion that foreign military intervention is legitimate in cases where governments oppress their own populations or destabilise neighbouring countries. This led to the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998 and the UN vote on enshrining the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) that enables foreign governments to intervene in order to prevent atrocities within the borders of a sovereign state. Thus, the liberal world order sought to combine the Westphalian principle of national sovereignty with supposedly universal (but in reality, narrowly Western individualistic) standards of human rights.

Today, the US – even under the administration of President Donald Trump – continues to provide key global public goods based on its economic and military might. Building on the “Washington consensus” in place since the late 1970s, the US Federal Reserve secures some measure of financial stability by acting as a lender of last resort and using the “exorbitant privilege” of the US Dollar that still enjoys the status of the sole world currency.⁶ The US Navy patrols worldwide waters to police the law of the seas and defend the freedom of navigation, while the US Army and the Air Force can be deployed from around 750 bases around the globe to protect critical global infrastructure such as access to space and the independent worldwide web. In addition, the NSA has built a global network of surveillance via a complex satellite system. Complementing its hard power is American soft power,⁷ such as the most extensive web of embassies, consulates and trade missions, as well as bilateral treaties and the influence of the American “culture industry”.

In short, the liberal world order unwritten by the US has set the rules for the entire international community – an interlocking web of values, institutions and relations that makes up the international system and encompasses maritime law, non-proliferation mechanisms, trade deals and financial arrangements.

Yet the Brexit vote and the election of Trump raise fundamental questions about the continuity and resilience of this order in the face of unprecedented opposition from outside and inside the Western world – including the extra-civilisational challenges of Islamic terrorism and the authoritarian rollback of democracy worldwide, as well as the intra-civilisational challenges of economic and cultural insecurity combined with the lack of public trust in the institutions of liberal democracy.⁸ These two challenges threaten the foundations of the post-war international system and cast doubt on the ability of liberalism to provide a robust response.

Can the liberal world order endure?

The current crisis of the liberal world order is associated with one (or more) of the following challenges. First of all, there are the costs of upholding the system that may outweigh its benefits for the US and there is a lack of commitment to the foundational values of free trade, open borders and democracy promotion (President Trump’s position). Second, at a time when the US seems to be retreating (former President Obama’s notion of “leading from behind”), the global power shift towards countries such as China, India and Russia boost those forces that not only contest US leadership and Western values but also build parallel institutions – including the Eurasian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. This defies Western norms of liberal governance and represents a rejection of any external interference in support of democracy or human rights. Third, the rise of non-state actors such as multinational corporations or terrorist organisations has the effect of undermining transparent markets, democracies and fundamental freedoms.⁹ Fourth, there is deep domestic unease with globalisation and the rise of anti-establishment insurgencies that promise more protection and a greater emphasis on national sovereignty – as encapsulated by the Brexit motto “take back control” and Donald Trump’s pledge to “make America great again”.

The advocates of the liberal world order contend that the current crisis is but a temporary setback in an otherwise broadly linear history of progress. Their argument is that the ship of globalisation will not be blown off course for long: liberalism and democracy are resilient and can cope with headwinds because liberal institutions adapt to popular concerns and have a better capacity to renew themselves than authoritarian alternatives. The peaceful transfer of powers within democracies between rival parties and candidates is the most effective way of restoring the legitimacy of the political system. Similarly, developed market economies regain momentum thanks to models of growth and distribution of wealth that are consumption- and innovation-driven rather than being as dependent on export and foreign investment as in the case of emerging markets or developing countries.

Crucially, the supporters of liberalism claim that the post-war system endures even at a time when US leadership is weakening and Western moral authority is in crisis. According to G. John Ikenberry, the liberal world order can survive and even thrive precisely because it can accommodate the rising powers.¹⁰ The four reasons Ikenberry gives are, first of all, the low likelihood of a war between the “great powers”; second, the integration of new powers into the liberal world order and its expansion, as evinced by the behaviour of China, India and others; third, the absence of a systemic alternative to the liberal world order; fourth, the general tendency of major states to align themselves with others around shared interests, such as financial stability, nuclear non-proliferation and free trade. In Ikenberry’s words, the liberal world order is “is also distinctive in its integrative and expansive character. In essence, it is ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’”.¹¹

Although we are seeing the rise of both old and new “great powers” and multiple pathways to modernity, no grand alternative to dominant liberalism seems to exist.¹² Multipolarity – in the sense of alternative models to Western capitalism or global governance – has failed to materialise as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have all adopted variants of capitalism that depend on access to world markets for growth and development. Neither they nor any other emerging powers – so the argument goes – have created blocs, exclusive spheres of influence, or closed geopolitical systems that could rival, never mind replace, the open, rules-based system organised around national state sovereignty and transnational cooperation. While some power and authority might shift from West to East and North to South, liberal domination looks set to last for three reasons given by Michael Cox: first, the US is one of the most powerful countries with a young population and a growing power to innovate, especially in robotics and automation; second, the transatlantic alliance remains the only global military structure capable of projecting power worldwide and deploying military means; third, so far, China is neither able nor willing to replace the US as the sole global super-power, and the “rising rest” want to integrate rather than overthrow the Western liberal order.¹³

China’s stunning economic performance since 1989 is part of an accelerated process of catching up with advanced economies, but, so far, the Chinese economy is only about 70 per cent of the size of the US economy, and its population is rapidly ageing, while the relaxing of the one-child policy has until now not produced the hoped-for reversal in the country’s demographic fortunes. In addition, Washington spends approximately four times as much on its military as Beijing does, and even the extensive modernisation of China’s army and navy will not lead to parity for many years. Although the Chinese leadership is flexing its muscles in relation to the South and East China Sea, it will not be able to push the US out of the Western Pacific, never mind exercise global military hegemony. It is far from clear whether China’s model of state capitalism could ever compete with the vibrant innovation culture, buoyant demographics and falling energy costs of the US.

But more fundamentally, the claim is that China has embraced...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: liberal world order in retreat
• 1 Hubris: the rise and fall of the liberal world order
• 2 Backlash: the global revolt against liberalism
• 3 Interregnum: the battle for hegemony
• 4 Commonwealths: the case for cultural association
• 5 Covenant: the resurgence of civilisation
• Conclusion: the once and future order
• Index