Global Liberal Order Research Articles

Digital Actors and Digital Platforms in the System of International Relations: Between Complex Interdependence and Online Sovereignty

The article analyzes deep changes in international relations that are taking place in the context of the increasing role of digital actors and platforms in shaping the global agenda. The emergence of the Internet was a turning point in the development of the entire system of global communications. The Internet changed the way information is spread and public opinion is shaped, while digital platforms became a new factor of globalization. At the same time, as the authors demonstrate, the original nature of the Internet, which was viewed by the United States and the West as an integral part and technology of the liberal order, in the end started to reflect the increasing confrontation between states, and became a space for the spread of political conflicts, stereotypes and information wars. In addition, new digital oligopolies began to shape the digital space based on their corporate interests, prioritizing their market share rather than the quality of online discussions and the strengthening of the civic democratic culture. The weaponization and securitization of the Internet is a logical continuation of the crisis of the global liberal order. The complex interdependence, which was strengthened by digital actors and digital platforms, is increasingly being replaced by the idea of digital sovereignty. States aim to decouple from a single communicative space and to create norms protecting them and their citizens from the excessive influence of the Big Tech. The authors conclude that we are experiencing the sunset of the era of information openness. Depoliticization of the Internet is impossible without reducing international tension and reviving the spirit of rationalism in world politics. Only through getting back to reason can we return to the Internet the role of a creative, rather than destructive technology.

Organizing Minds and Managing People: J.P. Morgan Bankers on Transatlantic Consolidation of Communication and Capital, 1917–1920

AbstractDuring the Great War, J.P. Morgan bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Henry P. Davison, and Dwight W. Morrow expanded their visions of organizing across distances and supported the development of spaces where like-minded individuals could make coordinated decisions regarding the stability of industrial capitalism. These financial elites focused not only on profits but also on deeper ideas. Their experience organizing across distances, first domestically and then across the Atlantic, demonstrates the importance of these financiers to visions of global economic governance centered on information exchange and communication, intimate long-distance relationships, and deliberation among perceived equals, which are essential elements of merchant banking. Their visions further reflected a hierarchical and racial understanding of a liberal global order. Highly flexible in their strategies, these bankers possessed long-term views of national and global development that engaged overlapping connections among networks, institutions, and the public that privileged the creation of transatlantic spaces for deliberation and socialization among Western economic elites.

Global liberalism, emerging illiberalism, and human rights, 1980 to 2018

The international institutions established after 1945 enshrine and expand human rights norms. Recently, the global liberal order has been challenged by a variety of illiberal oppositions. We discuss how the trajectories of global liberalism and illiberal challenges may affect country human rights practices in both direct and diffuse ways. Hybrid panel regression models of human rights scores for 158 countries from 1980 to 2018 evaluate our arguments. We observe direct effects of global liberalism: countries linked to liberal organizations in world society have higher scores on measures of human rights practices. The growth of global liberalism also explains a great deal of within-country variation in human rights practices over time. However, recent illiberal challenges have the opposite effect. Countries linked to illiberal intergovernmental organizations are less respectful of human rights, and the global rise of illiberalism undermines human rights. We conclude with reflections on the importance of the global institutional and normative context for sustaining (and eroding) human rights.

The Weimar/Russia Comparison Revisited

Abstract Just over a quarter-century ago, the authors published a widely read essay comparing Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia in historical perspective. After Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine, comparisons of Vladimir Putin’s regime with Nazi Germany are once again tragically relevant. Reexamining our arguments from 1997 shows the continuing relevance of the variables we emphasized in that essay: the burdensome legacies of the past imperial regime, intense international pressure to marketize post-Soviet Russia’s statist economy, and Russia’s weak party system. Three main issues in our earlier article, in retrospect, required greater development: pinpointing the time span needed to assess regime change, distinguishing mobilizational and patrimonial forms of ‘anti-liberal statism,’ and exploring more fully the foreign policy options for would-be defenders of the liberal global order facing powerful revanchist challenges. We conclude that this sort of ‘replication’ of earlier research should be encouraged more often among political scientists adopting the comparative-historical approach.

Race, nation, empire? Historicising outward and inward-facing British nationalism

Brexit has continued to capture the attention of International Relations (IR) scholars, where it has been linked to the burgeoning debate on race and postcolonialism. This article adds to this scholarship by historicising the question of imperial nostalgia, which has been central to these intersecting literatures. It re-examines how influential theorists Hall and Gilroy linked the peculiarities of British national consciousness to traumas issuing from the loss of great power status. It emphasises two themes often lacking in recent accounts of Brexit nationalism: namely, the centrality of military mobilisation to national consciousness; and the unevenness between popular and elite sentiment with regards to the imperial dimension. In historicising themes of extroversion and introversion, it reconsiders the significant metamorphoses in post-Thatcherite British nationalism, which had centred on proclaiming a national renaissance founded in foreign policy successes, international moral leadership and a state-led consensus for rolling out globalisation worldwide. The research shows that revisionism about the British Empire played a significant role in foreign policy discourse across this period, as did pro-EU sentiment among the governing and ruling elite. It highlights the mechanisms which allowed UK foreign policy intellectuals to link the military roll-out of ‘postmodern’ social norms with the European project’s end goals. These findings help historically situate Brexit amid a succession of crises for the liberal global order. The research finds that, whereas Brexit appeared initially as a retreat or break from the UK’s post-Thatcherite ‘globalising’ nationalism, subsequent developments highlight significant continuities.

Global order and its enemies

Motivation: A series of crises have demonstrated the low resilience of the global economy to shocks and triggered a discussion about the possible end of globalisation understood as the unrestrained growth of mutual trade and business ties on a global scale. The emerging tendencies to shorten supply chains and block trade as well as calls for an active and strategic trade policy are contributing to the decay of the liberal global order built after World War II. The potential disintegration of the world economy into antagonised blocs and the conflict between the Western model of liberal democracy and autocratic regimes should be considered particularly dangerous. The above phenomena deserve the utmost attention, and the desire to understand them has provided inspiration for taking up this topic.Aim: This study aims to define and interpret the concept of global order in both economic and political dimensions. In this context, two interrelated questions are addressed. The first one is about the character of the global order after World War II and the second one concerns the causes and consequences of its decay.Results: The emerging disintegrative tendencies in the global economy and the anarchisation of international economic relations constitute a negative-sum game. Globalisation has allowed most countries in the world to achieve significant gains in wealth. The benefits that it provides to consumers are too great to be consciously abandoned in favour of an autarkic economic model. Capitalism seems to be able to operate under very different political regimes, hence — with all the differences between political models at the national level — it creates an effective platform for cooperation on the global stage. Nevertheless, the end of the “peace dividend” indicates that effectively preventing the danger of armed conflict by means of economic and military deterrence will be an important part of the future world order.

Antagonism and Radical Politics in the Philosophy of Slavoj Žižek

The relationship between truth and politics in Slavoj Žižek’s political philosophy is a problematic relationship, particularly in post-modern discourse and global liberal order, because in the context of this discourse, the relative truth has a direct impact on politics as a subordinate filed leading to the fragmentation of the society.
 Žižek believes that within the dominant system and its ideology, which finds itself in consumer capitalism, there are always possibilities of resistance, especially as he defines politics as a manifestation of class struggle in its economic dimension. The perpetrator of this struggle appears as a historical subject and manifests in the form of deprived and excluded groups, or marginalization of society. This will become an empty hole or group that the system does not embrace or include.
 In return, this will remain as a permanent crack or hole in the system and will not allow the system to be completely closed or reach absolute integration. In addition, this will remain as a possibility of revolution and protest and become a dynamic element in a dialectic relationship that moves politics at its radical level.
 This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, the article talks about the politics of truth and events, universal truth, representation, event and change, and holes in the system. The second part of the article is dedicated to analyzing the concept of antagonism and highlighting the tensions between anthos, demos, polis and politics. Then, the article refers to class struggle as the core of politics by Žižek, and focuses on the concept of revolution and the role of historical subject in the process of change.

INDIA, GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: A STUDY ABOUT INDIA’S RACE FOR INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION IN THE REALM OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Global Governance is a continuous process that transcend national boundaries to provide action for public good. This is done through a purposeful order of international organizations and mechanisms, policies and laws and strategies for global cooperation. India has been an important part of Rising Asia and has established itself as a competent authority to play in the big boys club of global governance. India after the end of World War II maintained itself as a part of NonAligned Movement and remained so during the Cold War. This greatly reduced the pace of India’s engagement with the outer world. However, the end of Cold War era coincided with the Economic Liberalization in India and it helped India break free from the practice of Universalism of the Weak.In this paper we will revisit the multilateral strategies incorporated by India to embrace the new liberal global world order to voice itself not just as a rule taker but as global contributor. India has come a long way from being a mere dissident and its role in Climate Change Initiatives, Nuclear Non-Proliferation and International Trade manifest the fact that India has risen in the sphere of Global Governance. India with its principled past often finds itself in debate with its pragmatic present and such are the factors which will ultimately decide India’s future in New World Order.

Current Liberal Global Order and Beijing Reaction

This paper mainly focuses on rejecting the much-upheld view regarding the rise of China as a global power. It is widely believed that China being a socialist polity will try to overthrow the liberal world order. The paper tries to establish the view that China because of its political priorities will uphold the current system and will emerge as what the Singaporean political analyst, Mahbubani has called the "Asian Inheritors of Western Legacy". The paper explores China's economic engagement with the rest of the world according to the rules of the liberal multilateral world order. It also discusses China's role as a "responsible player" in world affairs. The conclusion arrived at rejecting the position of China as a revisionist power.

The New Global Direction: From “One Globalization” to “Two Globalizations”? Russia’s War in Ukraine in Global Perspective

Abstract Roland Benedikter surveys the views of globalization experts, politicians, opinion leaders, intellectuals, and international media regarding Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. On this basis, he draws conclusions about the impact on – and prospect for – the overall course and further direction of globalization. Given the general turn toward re-globalization that the globe has witnessed already since the mid of the 2010s, the question is if the liberal global order is transiting from the “one globalization” concept – as generated by the open societies of the West and Europe after 1989/91 – to a “two globalizations” system inspired by the joint rise of non-democratic and authoritarian powers such as Russia and China since the 2010s. Their now programmatic aspiration to create a “second world order” or a “parallel globalization” is using Russia’s Ukraine war as leverage to unify anti-Western powers in order to start to compete with the West’s idea of the future on the macro-, meso- and micro-levels. The competition between two different concepts of “globalization” will unfold according to the different understandings of what a productively globalized society – including reforms to be implemented through the re-globalization process – is and should be. The opposition between the authoritarian’s and democrat’s concepts of “participatory” societies is instrumental to shape and drive the contest between the “two globalizations.”

How not to deal with a rising China: a perspective from south Asia

Abstract Debates on China's rise often limit the focus on the continuity and sustenance of the United States' hegemony and the liberal global order. This debate often ignores the primacy of the regional actors, who are generally reduced to ‘pawns’ in great power politics, acting without agency, interests, or values of their own. Instead, this article suggests that as China rises—like any other great power of the past—it will first aim to secure regional primacy through an array of policy instruments. To test this it examines three case-studies: 1) China–Pakistan relations in nuclear proliferation; 2) China–India relations with respect to border conflict; and 3) Sri Lanka–China relations for development infrastructure. It finds that China's rise has not been benign and instead Beijing has adopted aggressive policies in its neighbourhood. This article finds that the strategic binary of balancing (interest-based containment) and engagement (constructive cooperation) does not reflect immediate realities and long-term sustainability for regional actors. Instead, it suggests the latter would be better advised looking for closer cooperation with like-minded allies in the region (and beyond) as a way forward.

Illiberal Reactions to Higher Education

Higher education has expanded at astonishing rates around the world. We seek to understand the oppositions that periodically arise, which may produce enrollment declines and/or imposition of political controls. The post-1945 growth of higher education was – to a greater extent than is often recognized – propelled by the liberal, and later neoliberal, international order. Oppositions arise from illiberal alternatives, which also may organize globally. The recent weakening of the global liberal order, associated with growing populism and nationalism, creates conditions for a new wave of oppositions. We hypothesize that attacks on higher education emerge in countries less integrated into world society and in countries linked to international structures that support illiberal alternatives. We examine cross-national data on higher education over the period 1960–2017. Enrollments and funding are higher in societies more tightly linked to world society and lower in countries tied to illiberal international organizations. Analyses of enrollments in various fields, constraints on academic freedom, and terrorist attacks on education institutions show similar pattern. Finally, we observe heterogeneity in the forms of illiberal opposition: countries that suppress academic freedom generally are less likely to restrict enrollments.

From Liberal to Liberal Global Order

On November 26, 2021, Dr. Antonio Sanchez Ortega, Assistant Professor at the University of Granada in Spain, presented From Liberal to Liberal Global Order: Implications for Western Security at the 2021 CASIS Vancouver West Coast Security Conference. The key points of discussion were the changes that the great powers have made on the understanding of basic rules in the international arena and the Liberal Global Order is seeing its relative decline. The presentation was followed by a question and answer period with questions from the audience and CASIS Vancouver executives.

To What Extent Can We Speak of a Post-US Hegemonic Order? Will the Global Liberal Order Outlast US Hegemony?

To What Extent Can We Speak of a Post-US Hegemonic Order? Will the Global Liberal Order Outlast US Hegemony?

"Hiroshima Sublime": Trauma, Japan, and the US Asia/Pacific Imaginary

As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installingPatriot missilesas signs of theirglobal supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinatedby self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility:at once urging the globe towards annihilation andyet also towards transactional and dialogical unityat the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, withits “sublime Patriot”missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.

Jewish Emancipation Terminable and Interminable

David Sorkin’s Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries is an imposing, textbook-like work of massive sweep. It argues that Jewish emancipation was simultaneously the most significant event of Jewish modernity and not an event at all, but rather a protracted, contradictory, and staggered process that unfolded differently in different regions over the course of time. On the surface, it simply narrates the political and legal changes in Jewish civil status in response to new rulers, revolutions, and wars. Underneath the surface, it makes normative claims about the precarity of liberalism and the Jewish place in the global liberal order.

Challenges to globalization and its impact on prevailing international liberal order

Challenges to globalization have grave implications for the worldwide liberal order that emerged with the end of the cold war. These challenges began to ascend from the West. The occasions like Brexit, ascent of radical rightist political groups in Europe, recognition of isolationist policies, choice of former US President Donald Trump (Originator of isolationist policies), and the strive towards confinement of manufacture and services have altered the contours of global liberal order. The objective of this examination is to find the factors that prepared ground for anti-globalization accounts as well as to discover its effect on the global liberal order by applying the content analysis method. This study will assume qualitative methodology utilizing both primary and secondary data i.e., government documents, annual reports, speeches of leaders, books, journal articles and newspapers etc. The findings of the study concludes that anti-globalization narratives are translating into the electoral processes, progressing hyper-nationalism over liberal order; multi-polarity above Uni-polarity; and Isolationism above free market economy. All such changes have critical repercussions for the global liberal order, hence, should be observed cautiously. If the pattern proceeds, the world pioneers ought to think about modifying the worldwide associations, alliances, as well as national security procedures.

New Actors and Democratic Governance in a Rising Africa

This paper broadly examines the continued nuancing of the practice of democracy in Africa with a focus on how Africa’s democratic governance is increasingly getting influenced by new actors in the international system, who are driving the formation of a new world order that challenges the current unipolar liberal global order. The paper traces the origins and rationale of the democratization project in Africa and uses this as a basis to delve into some issues around which many African countries have increasingly been engaging with new actors. These broad aspects include: Africa’s international relations, peace and security; civil liberties as well as investments and trade. This paper contends that some states in Africa are charting middle grounds that increasingly, specifically align with their national/elite interests, and broadly, is in tune with the consolidating discourse on Africa Rising.

Russia’s Dissociation from the Paris Charter-Based Order: Implications and Pitfalls

The Ukraine crisis of 2014 marked the culmination of Russia’s dissociation from the Paris Charter-based European order, and from the global liberal order more generally. Processes of dissociation—defined as intentional distancing from the core rules and norms of institutions—occur relatively often and may even become an increasingly dominant feature of world politics as de-globalization advances. However, this phenomenon has rarely been tackled in academic research. In particular, it remains unclear what the driving forces of dissociation are and whether tensions between “leavers” and “remainers” in this process are destined to increase. This paper aims to address this issue by analyzing the justifications employed by the Russian government in the process of dissociation from the Paris Charter-based European security order before 2014, differentiating between material and ideational dimensions. The study demonstrates how the order that was once seen as a common project was ultimately perceived by Russia as a mechanism of subjugation by the West, which led to Moscow’s departure from it.

The Implosion of Global Liberal World Order and Russian Foreign Policy: Dimensions, Tensions, and Prospects

The world faces a strategic challenge of reforming the governance basis of international politics, which is displaying the symptoms of significant destabilization, searching for new ways of crafting nuanced equilibria of interests and capacity at the global, regional, and domestic levels. Developing intricate and adaptable formulas to manage individual facets of international engagement is becoming increasingly complex and volatile. The effects of instability vary in different countries, but the global operational and political space is increasingly determined by problems within countries, where external stress becomes a result of domestic discrepancies, aggravating them and producing a set of contradictions. In the context of profound global transformations, what explains Russia’s status and positioning in the world? This article argues that as states are struggling to adapt to new realities and acquire capabilities in an effort to survive or gain more influence, Russia’s standing will depend on how adequately it can respond to the challenges and how effectively it will be able to use its advantages. Russia should not simply take in the results of global turbulence, but rather employ and actively develop areas of leadership and collaboration, by tying foreign policy firmly to the priorities of domestic development. While Russia conducts an active foreign policy consistently defending its interests and combining efforts to find optimal solutions to many contemporary problems, it has not yet arrived at a coherent security strategy or produced a vision of a future world order. The success may depend on understanding of the current trends, recognizing opportunities and demonstrating leadership, willingness to share in responsibility for results, as well as conducting essential domestic reforms.