Geopolitics and Democracy

Abstract

Abstract A large and widening gap has opened between Western democracies’ international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support these objectives. Drawing on an array of cross-national data on Western governments, parties, and voters, Geopolitics and Democracy traces this ends-means divide back to decisions that Western governments made after the Cold War. The key decisions were to globalize markets and pool sovereignty at the supranational level, while at the same time reducing social protections and guarantees at home. This combination of foreign and domestic policies succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order in the quarter century after the Cold War, but at the cost of mounting public discontent and political fragmentation within the advanced industrial economies. The analysis reveals the large extent to which domestic support for international engagement during the long East-West geopolitical contest had rested on social protections within the Western democracies. At a time when problems of great power rivalry, spheres of influence, and reactionary nationalism have returned, Geopolitics and Democracy reminds us that the liberal order rose in an age of social democracy as well as Cold War. In the absence of a renewed commitment to those social purposes, Western democracies will struggle to find a collective grand strategy that their domestic publics will support.