The most serious crisis of modern times is the weakening, if not the breakdown, of faith in the durability and purpose of traditional values, which are a foundation of the European Union and, more broadly, of the whole political community of the West. The West in civilizational, not geographical terms. These are the values which bind all the main ideological currents in Europe : liberalism, conservatism and socialism . Human rights, civil liberties, including the freedom of speech and religion , free market and a competitive economy based on private property, reasonable and fair redistribution of goods, restrictions on power resulting from rules and tradition, tolerance and political pluralism; my generation knows this catalogue by heart.¹

—Donald Tusk (2016)

The fundamentals of the world order are fraying, and some of its ideological foundations are being challenged in a way that is seriously worrying. The liberal global order , which has been astonishingly successful and whose widening and deepening has produced a golden quarter-century, was built on strong security relationships and a commitment to an open global economy. Now, those security relationships are under pressure as isolationist sentiments grow in key countries and revisionist powers become more assertive.²

—Carl Bildt (2017)

We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.³

—Donald Trump (2018)

We have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st-century Christian democracy, which guarantees people’s freedom, security .

—Victor Orbán (2018)⁴

We categorically reject the allegations of those who accuse Russia and the new centres of global influence of attempting to undermine the so-called ‘liberal world order’. […] It is clear that such a system could not last forever. Leaders with a sense of responsibility must now make their choice. I hope that this choice will be made in favour of building a democratic and fair world order, a post-West world order, if you will, in which each country develops its own sovereignty within the framework of international law, and will strive to balance their own national interests with those of their partners, with respect for each country’s cultural, historical and civilisational identity .⁵

—Sergey Lavrov (2017)

Crisis of the liberal order abounds everywhere. Indeed, it has in various forms become a part of Western self-experience since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first wave of crisis was experienced in the early 2000s during the Iraq War when the trans-Atlantic divide was declared. The next wave hit the shore with the 2008 financial crisis, which crumbled trust in the ability of the West to steer the global economic order, and eroded Western claims to supremacy in the order. The current third wave of crisis-talk has perhaps been the strongest and most broadly propagated one. Not only European and US politicians, but politicians from around the globe have been vocal in proclaiming that the liberal order is in crisis. At the heart of this discussion has been the rise of illiberal tendencies and populism within the West. The experience of crisis is widely shared among civil society actors, too. Furthermore, crisis of the liberal order has (again) become a phenomenon that attracts the attention of international relations (IR) scholars. Just look at the themes discussed in recent ISA and other international relations conferences, the themes of Munich Security Conference Reports,⁶ or the special issues⁷ and books⁸ published after 2016.

Contestations of liberal values, norms, and principles; financial and economic stumbling; increasing populism , nationalism, and tribalism; global power shifts—all these phenomena have been turned into crisis narratives: into signifiers of the frailty of the trans-Atlantic partnership between the United States and Europe ; erosion of liberalism among previously liberal countries and peoples; or the weakness and failures of the liberal international order . In this volume, we turn our attention to these narratives of crisis. Effectively, this makes the recent crisis narratives rendered in discussions on international relations the objects of our analysis. We reflect on questions such as: What is perceived to be in crisis and by whom? What these crisis narratives argue for, and what do they aim to defend or contest?

We expand our inquiry into the current crisis narratives by introducing the questions: Why do these narratives willfully revolve around the notion of “the West”? How the crisis narratives turn into the “Two Wests” debate, the “Internal Division of the West over liberal values,” and the crisis of the “Western-led International Order”? How the concept and idea of the West is utilized and understood in these narratives? How the crisis narratives, or experience of living in the era of crisis, condition our understanding of global order and the West—and perhaps, how our understanding of the West conditions the crisis narratives?

Naturally, we can take a variable, such as democracy , and turn to data like the Democracy Index for Europe and North America showing a slight decrease in pluralism, civil liberties, and political culture ,⁹ or the surveys suggesting that “the gloomy discourse on democracy dominating today is exaggerated,”¹⁰ in order to assess whether the liberal West actually is in crisis. However, statistics do not provide exhaustive answers to pertinent philosophical, political, ideological, and theoretical questions relating to the crises of the liberal West. Thus, our objective is not to verify or measure the depth of the crises, which in many terms is not possible as crisis is primarily about experiences, and the term introduces overarching interpretations for otherwise disconnected phenomena and events. Rather, we consider crisis as something perceived, interpreted, and narrated. We hold that these experiences are various and contingent, with diverse consequences to (self-)identification, norms, and ordering practices. Thus, what we aim to do is to analytically elaborate these relationships, multiple truths, parallel perspectives, and realities. In this book, we use crisis narratives as our entry point to scrutinize how the “Western liberal order,” and its cherished norms and practices, are alternately embraced, accepted, and contested.

By combining discussions on the liberal (order) and the West, we distance ourselves from such real political debates as the role of the United States as a hegemon of the liberal order, and instead, consider the global order from the perspective of the notion of the West as the (sole) bestower of ordering principles and liberal values. We also elaborate on the normative contestations of the international order from a broader perspective and emphasize that there are various simultaneous processes of contestation going on at the moment—processes that are only loosely connected.

By focusing on the idea of the West we are better able to contextualize the current crisis discussion and reflect on its significance for the principles and ideals of regional and global liberal orders. The notion of the West has been incessantly conjoined with the modern world order. The West has been invoked in creations of hierarchies, in introductions of ordering principles, and in claims to the ability to be the sole actor to envision and uphold global peace . Here, the West becomes closely associated with “liberal,” as for the past decad...