Abstract
The liberal international economic order has been facing high-profile legitimacy challenges in recent years. This article puts these challenges in historical context through a systematic analysis of rhetorical challenges towards both the order per se and specific global economic institutions. Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s classic typology of exit, voice and loyalty, we coded leaders’ speeches in the General Debate at the UN General Assembly between 1970 and 2018 as articulating intentions to abandon elements of the order, challenges or calls for reform, unequivocal support, or factual mentions of cooperation. Surprisingly, we find that explicit criticisms towards the liberal order are at an all-time low and that exit threats remain rare. An analysis of the historical evolution of criticisms to global economic institutions reveals a move away from the Cold War insider-outsider conflict towards insider contestation. For example, we find that as countries’ economies become more open, their leaders expressed more support for global economic institutions during the Cold War but less support since. Finally, we demonstrate consistency between the public policy positions leaders announce in UNGA General Debate speeches and their government positions on consequential reform debates on debt relief.
Highlights
The liberal international economic order has been facing high-profile legitimacy challenges in recent years
In examining legitimacy challenges articulated by leaders in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), our analytical aim is twofold: we study challenges both to the order per se, as well as to its three most prominent organizational underpinnings—the world trading regime (GATT/World Trade Organization (WTO)), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Employing the corpus of General Debate speeches between 1970 and 2018 (Baturo et al 2017) and a purpose-built dictionary of terms, we identified all mentions of broad terms associated with the liberal economic order—like ‘liberal order,’ ‘neoliberalism,’ ‘free trade,’ ‘Washington Consensus,’ ‘economic order,’ ‘structural reform,’ or ‘debt management’—and very narrow terms associated with the GATT/WTO, the World Bank and the IMF
Summary
The liberal international order has been remarkably resilient, with relatively limited cases of states exiting organizations or abandoning treaties (Bromley and Meyer 2015; Shanks et al 1996; von Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019). Analysis of discourse provides part of the story: it is the ‘missing link’ between ideas about the appropriate course of action and the actions themselves, whether manifested, planned, or contemplated (Schmidt 2008, 2011) Employing such methods has yielded important advances in our understanding of states’ decisions to alter their foreign policies (Schmidt 2017) or our knowledge of how ideas change over time within organizations like the European Union, the World Bank or the IMF (Carta and Morin 2016; Kaya and Reay 2019; Moretti and Pestre 2015). Knowing who supports or undermines this legitimacy, and how, is important for understanding continuity or change in world politics
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