The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?

Abstract

This article argues that the biggest challenges facing the post-1945 liberal international order are the need to genuinely embrace ethno-racial diversity and to reduce class-based inequalities. However, this is problematic because the liberal international order's core foundational principles, and principal underpinning ‘theory’ (liberal internationalism), are Eurocentric, elitist and resistant to change. Those core principles are subliminally racialized, elitist and imperial. They are embedded in post-1945 international institutions, elite mindsets, and in the institutions of the US foreign policy establishment—which are seeking to incorporate emerging power elites, willingly, into the US-led order. As illustration, this article considers examples that bookend the US-led system: wartime elite planning for global leadership; the role of the United Nations in Korea from 1945 to 1953, where it served as the primary instrument for the creation and incorporation of (South) Korea into the US-led order; and several US state-linked initiatives in China over the past several decades, including the Ford Foundation. The article compares the contemporary and historical evidence to liberal internationalist claims, as well as to claims implied by work on ‘ultra-imperialism’, based on Karl Kautsky's and Antonio Gramsci's ideas of hegemony. The article concludes that elite incorporation—by a combination of coercion, attraction and socialization—is the principal goal of the US-led order, as opposed to embracing diversity and moving towards genuine change felt at a mass level. Hence, we should expect domestic and international political crises to deepen.