Liberalism in Crisis: A Collapsing World Order

Abstract

The four books reviewed here all share the perspective that the liberal world order, created and maintained by American power after the Second World War, is presently under considerable strain. The institutions which support it, whether in Europe or the United States, are currently in disarray. The liberal world order is defined through its promotion of the tenets of liberal internationalism, commonly understood as the desire for global free trade, the adoption of liberal economic policies and promoting the spread of liberal democracy. Liberalism, as a mechanism of organising global politics, has, these authors argue, weakened considerably, resulting in creeping instability and geopolitical uncertainty. The ramifications of this crisis for liberalism differ depending on the author. However, comprehending why the post-war Western liberal order is eroding and offering solutions to arrest its decline are common themes shared amongst the otherwise diverse arguments and analyses presented by each author. Sorensen�s A Liberal Order in Crisis offers the most direct and comprehensive engagement with these issues. For him, the present difficulties faced by Western powers have as much to do with tensions between differing conceptions of liberalism as with current global dynamics. Sorensen argues that post-war liberalism has oscillated between imposition and restraint, each with conflicting ideas of how international order should best be managed. After outlining the foundations of each variant of liberalism and tracing the shifts between them in the decades following the Second World War, Sorensen claims that neither imposition nor restraint provides the answer to the challenges faced by liberalism today. Liberalism today is paralysed, and the emergence of a �patchwork order�, in which liberalism is no longer predominant, is on the horizon (pp. 140, 166). Bisley, in Great Powers in the Changing International Order, develops the concept of great power managerialism to examine the role that �