Liberal Internationalism Research Articles

The Ethics of Coalition-Building

The Ethics of Coalition-Building Samuel Moyn (bio) Progressives face a democracy on a knife's edge. In a system of popular choice disfigured by the Electoral College, fewer than 80,000 votes, .06 of the total, swung the 2016 presidential election. The 2020 election that Joe Biden won was even closer. Fewer than 45,000 votes, or .02 percent, in three states (Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin) decided the result. Many have celebrated Biden's ambitious early bills, and understandably so. But hopes that big spending alone, along with Biden's competent management of the COVID-19 pandemic, will forge a new supermajority seem premature. Shockingly, four years of delegitimating Donald Trump in the strongest terms (whether as charlatan or fascist) failed to do the trick. Only arguing and organizing for policies that bridge current gaps between the Democrats and the disaffected could do so. This includes a variety of different kinds of voters and nonvoters. Some of Biden's emergency and infrastructural generosity seems designed to reach them. But no one knows whether it will suffice. The meme that Biden is Franklin Roosevelt reincarnate anticipates a coalition that does not yet exist. (Roosevelt won in 1932 by nearly eighteen points in the national popular vote, with a whopping 472 Electoral College votes to 59.) What are the ethics of coalition-building and outreach, which could someday evolve into national partisan realignment that might break the American impasse? Few have asked the question, though it is perhaps the most important one of the medium term for the United States in its Second Gilded Age. Political thinker Avishai Margalit's neat distinction between compromises and "rotten compromises" furnishes some help. Margalit argued that compromises are worthwhile if, on balance, they advance our goals. Rotten compromises, which entrench an indecent regime, are unjustifiable. The excellence of Margalit's distinction is its acknowledgment of impurity, while trying to draw some kind of line between acceptable and unacceptable forms. We should therefore rule out compromises in two situations: when they give away too much, or they negotiate away the non-negotiable. Bad deals aren't worthwhile—but good [End Page 74] ones can be noxious, too, like agreeing to kill or enslave someone even for massive collective benefit, or bargaining with the devil, even when he offers a good price. (In Margalit's framework, devised to think about peace processes, the line marking the intolerable is a concession to cruel and humiliating arrangements, but Margalit asks far too much, given the ubiquity of such arrangements.) American political parties remain un-realigned, but we are witnessing some left-right coalition building. In areas like making war and dealing with tech giants, some of the most prominent voices for new policies have come from the right, not merely from the left. No one can claim these are natural coalitions. For all that it might make sense to put militarists and neoliberals in one party and a transracial working-class majority in the other, there are too many issues to make that realignment implausible for the moment. Agreement will have to be built in an exploratory, piecemeal, and slower way, working from case to case, in the details of what compromises make sense. Take war. There is increasing awareness of the need to curb the excesses and learn from the mistakes of neoconservatism on the American right, and liberal internationalism in the center, which together defined the foreign policy of America for the decades straddling the Cold War's end. The founding of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, led by conservative Andrew Bacevich but including many progressive voices (including mine), has made visible that fatigue with American wars and allowed the mainstreaming of once marginal perspectives. In this case, the left and right agree more than they disagree on the short term—both calling for restraint or withdrawal—even if the one aspires in the longer term to a new progressive internationalism and the other to something between a more prudent and more self-interested American foreign policy. This is not even a compromise for either side for the moment. There is something to gain, and nothing to lose. Together, there is strength in numbers. Nor...

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism: Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism:Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan Noriko Ishii On 18 April 1934, Kobe College, one of the first women's colleges in Japan founded by the American Congregational women missionaries, celebrated the dedication of its new Okadayama campus, built in a beautiful Mediterranean style. This was a product of a thirty-year transnational collaboration of American Protestant women's networks across the Pacific. Japanese women of the Kobe College alumnae association provided the land and American women of Protestant churches provided the buildings for the one-million-dollar expansion. At the dedication ceremony, Mrs Hazel Thorne Wilson, representing the Kobe College Corporation in Chicago, declared that the corporation would continue promoting Kobe College as "a symbol of international friendship and goodwill."2 Hashimoto Hatsue, Class of 1926, speaking on behalf of the Japanese women alumnae, said the alumnae's success was due to "a burning love for the college" and "the loving kindness of many American friends,"3 inferring Japanese women's deference to American women's friendship. This case study of the Kobe College expansion campaign provides us a window to examine how the notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism were imagined and used as we historicize the campaign against the backdrop of the shifting world order and the changing landscape of the American foreign missionary movement between 1905 and 1934. The thirty years of the expansion campaign coincided with the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the 1924 US Immigration Act prohibiting Japanese immigration, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and the emergence of uneasy tensions between the United States and Japan, each with their Pacific empires. Both Japanese and American missionaries were forced to face the controversial question of how to deal with the Japanese empire's religious policy of encouraging the three major religions, Shintoism, Buddhism and Christianity, to evangelize among the colonized in order to assimilate them into the Japanese empire. In addition, during the 1920s, women of the American foreign missionary movement faced an internal crisis in which most of the separate women's mission boards were merged with their male-led denominational parent boards. These mergers epitomized the decline of female autonomy in American Protestant foreign mission enterprises.4 Robert also points out that after the First World War, "'World Friendship' decisively replaced 'Woman's Work for Woman' as the missiology of the woman's missionary movement." Robert explained that "World Friendship assumed that western culture no longer had a monopoly on virtue" and that "what was needed of missions was not paternalism, but partnership and friendship: united work for peace and justice,"5 suggesting that such partnership entailed an equal relationship between the western missionaries and their Indigenous counterparts. This article argues that in the Japanese mission field, the transition was more complex. In the Kobe College expansion campaign, the nineteenth-century mission ideology of Woman's Work for Woman remained salient and coexisted with the ecumenical notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism. David A. Hollinger links the concept of what he called "missionary cosmopolitanism" or liberal internationalism in the missionary movement to Wilsonian internationalism. He also called for more attention to study the role of missionary-connected individuals in postwar American diplomacy, including the so-called "mish kids" or the missionary children, because they served as the informants of prewar Asian history and culture, and became the key purveyors of liberal internationalism in the United States.6 This article argues that such was the case in the Kobe College expansion campaign, for both American and Japanese women often used the notions of Wilsonian internationalism and friendship and the concept of Christian internationalism interchangeably. Moreover, Kobe College was imagined to be an ecumenical space of aspirational cosmopolitanism and friendship by both American and Japanese women, especially under the leadership of missionary president Charlotte B. DeForest, herself a "mish kid" born in Japan. Drawing on the conceptual framework of "aspirational cosmopolitanism" defined as "the pursuit of conversations across lines of difference, between disparate socio-cultural, political and linguistic groups, that provisionally created shared public worlds,"7 this article examines how the Kobe College expansion campaign...

Ліберально-ідеалістична традиція в дослідженні миру

The article analyzes the role of the liberal-idealist tradition in the study of peace. The author provideі information on the general features of the liberal-idealist vision of peace and the anticipation of the perspective opposition to its development in modern international political science. It is recognized that in the modern conditions of changing the nature of war and moderation and subordination of conflict settlement, it is important to create a theoretical basis for peace building. The article emphasizes that theoretical issues of peace are mostly not the subject of academic interest of Ukrainian researchers and the available scientific research is represented by foreign publications. In view of the potential of the liberal-idealist tradition in building peace, domestic science needs a comprehensive research on theories of peace. The article focuses the reader’s attention on the thesis that idealism laid the foundations for the discussion of peace, vision of peace, understanding of peace. The author reveals the origins of the liberal-idealist vision of peace and characterizes different directions of the liberal-idealist tradition. Particular attention is focused on the discussion of liberal peace and the concept of J. Galtung on positive and negative peace. The thesis that today the theory of democratic peace as a basic vision of peace by neoliberals is the most realistic and achievable version of peace is substantiated. The article describes in detail idealism, liberal internationalism, liberal institutionalism, liberal pacifism, liberal interventionism, neoliberal institutionalism and compares these approaches. It has been found that these approaches have common features and a common framework for peace research. It is emphasized that these approaches are based on the idea of a universal liberal world not on the basis of hegemony, but on the basis of functional networks and organizations. It is argued that all the above concepts depict an achievable general peace. The article suggests the existence of a liberal consensus on peace, but highlights issues that are still unresolved. According to the author, a broad discussion of peace in the scientific space based on an interdisciplinary approach is needed.

The Janus Face of the Liberal International Information Order: When Global Institutions Are Self-Undermining

AbstractScholars and policymakers long believed that norms of global information openness and private-sector governance helped to sustain and promote liberalism. These norms are being increasingly contested within liberal democracies. In this article, we argue that a key source of debate over the Liberal International Information Order (LIIO), a sub-order of the Liberal International Order (LIO), is generated internally by “self-undermining feedback effects,” that is, mechanisms through which institutional arrangements undermine their own political conditions of survival over time. Empirically, we demonstrate how global governance of the Internet, transnational disinformation campaigns, and domestic information governance interact to sow the seeds of this contention. In particular, illiberal states converted norms of openness into a vector of attack, unsettling political bargains in liberal states concerning the LIIO. More generally, we set out a broader research agenda to show how the international relations discipline might better understand institutional change as well as the informational aspects of the current crisis in the LIO.

“Honeymoon” of the Russian Empire and the United States during WWI

The article focuses on the debatable issues of Russian-American relations from 1914 until the fall of Tsarism, such as the degree of the two countries’ rapprochement, ethnic questions, the positive dynamics of mutual images and the intensified process of Russians and Americans studying each other. Based on primary and secondary sources, this work intends to emphasize that the conflict element in bilateral relations did not hamper cooperation between the two states. The author’s multipronged and interdisciplinary approach allowed her to conclude that the United Sates was ready to engage in wide-ranging interaction with the Russian Empire regardless of their ideological differences. From the author’s point of view, it was the pragmatic agenda that aided the states’ mutual interest in destroying the stereotypes of their counterpart and stimulated Russian Studies in the US and American Studies in Russia. Therefore, the “honeymoon” between the two states had started long before the 1917 February Revolution. However, Wilson strove to turn Russia not so much into an object of US’ “dollar diplomacy”, but into a destination of its “crusade” for democracy. The collapse of the monarchy provided an additional impetus for liberal internationalism by integrating the Russian “Other” into US foreign policy. Ultimately, an ideological (value-based) approach emerged as a stable trend in structuring America’s attitude toward Russia (be it the Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia).

Domestic Politics, China's Rise, and the Future of the Liberal International Order

AbstractWith the future of liberal internationalism in question, how will China's growing power and influence reshape world politics? We argue that views of the Liberal International Order (LIO) as integrative and resilient have been too optimistic for two reasons. First, China's ability to profit from within the system has shaken the domestic consensus in the United States on preserving the existing LIO. Second, features of Chinese Communist Party rule chafe against many of the fundamental principles of the LIO, but could coexist with a return to Westphalian principles and markets that are embedded in domestic systems of control. How, then, do authoritarian states like China pick and choose how to engage with key institutions and norms within the LIO? We propose a framework that highlights two domestic variables—centrality and heterogeneity—and their implications for China's international behavior. We illustrate the framework with examples from China's approach to climate change, trade and exchange rates, Internet governance, territorial sovereignty, arms control, and humanitarian intervention. Finally, we conclude by considering what alternative versions of international order might emerge as China's influence grows.

The Changing Dynamics of Liberal International Order: Covid-19 and Its Global Implications

The Changing Dynamics of Liberal International Order: Covid-19 and Its Global Implications

Rising Inequality As a Threat to the Liberal International Order

AbstractThe rise of top-heavy inequality—earnings concentration in a very thin layer of elites—calls into question our understanding of the distributional effects of the Liberal International Order. Far more people lose from globalization, and fewer gain, than traditional economic models suggest. We review three modern trade theories (neo-Heckscher-Ohlin-Stolper-Samuelson or H-O-S-S, new new trade theory, and economic geography) that each arrive at the conclusion of top-heavy inequality by introducing some form of unit heterogeneity—an assumption that the actors we once treated as identical actually differ from one another in important ways. Heterogeneity allows the gains from globalization to concentrate in a narrow segment of workers with superlative talents, extraordinarily productive firms, or heavily agglomerated cities. An analysis of European voting data shows that shocks from trade and migration elicit populist opposition only where the top 1 percent have gained the most. With few politically feasible alternatives to protectionism, most notably the failure of democracies to redistribute income, our analysis predicts a persistence of public support for antiglobalization parties, especially those on the Right.

Trump’s “Exceptionality” in U.S. Diplomatic History: The Decline of the Liberal International Order and Its Aftermath

Trump’s “Exceptionality” in U.S. Diplomatic History: The Decline of the Liberal International Order and Its Aftermath

The Present Opportunity for a Recovery of the Real Liberal International Order: the Liberal International Order and the Illiberalism

The article examines the liberal international order, its evolution and decline, draws on opinions of critics, journalists, diplomats and scholars. The author analyzes the reasons and stages of the decline of traditional liberal order, as well as its transformation into neoliberal democracy. The presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush stand out as a period in which the international order begins to change its nature. In addition, the article touches upon the consequences of hyper globalization in the context of the formation of neoliberal democracy. As a result of this analysis, the author raises the problem of not understanding the essence of illiberal democracies.

The Epistemological Challenge of Truth Subversion to the Liberal International Order

AbstractTruth-subversion practices, which populist leaders utilize for political domination, are a significant source of current pressure on the Liberal International Order (LIO). Truth-subversion practices includefalse speak(flagrant lying to subvert the concept of facts),double speak(intentional internal contradictions in speech to erode reason), andflooding(the emission of many messages into the public domain to create confusion). Aiming to destroy liberal truth ideals and practices, truth subversion weakens epistemological security; that is, the experience of orderliness and safety that results from people's and institutions’ shared understandings of their common-sense reality. It privileges baseless claims over fact-based opinions, thus creating communities of the like-minded between which communication becomes impossible. Truth subversion challenges the LIO's three key institutions: democracy, markets, and multilateralism. If truth-subversion practices prevail, societal polarization, inaccurate information, and emotional inflaming strain democracy and human rights protections. Markets that depend for their functioning on accurate information can falter, and multilateralism that relies on communication and reasoned consensus can decay. International relations (IR) scholarship has recognized knowledge production practices as a key feature underlying the LIO, but has not yet identified challenges to those practices as a threat for the LIO. We discuss what the discipline can do to alleviate its blind spots.

Built on Borders: Tensions with the Institution Liberalism (Thought It) Left Behind

AbstractThe Liberal International Order is in crisis. While the symptoms are clear to many, the deep roots of this crisis remain obscured. We propose that the Liberal International Order is in tension with the older Sovereign Territorial Order, which is founded on territoriality and borders to create group identities, the territorial state, and the modern international system. The Liberal International Order, in contrast, privileges universality at the expense of groups and group rights. A recognition of this fundamental tension makes it possible to see that some crises that were thought to be unconnected have a common cause: the neglect of the coordinating power of borders. We sketch out new research agendas to show how this tension manifests itself in a broad range of phenomena of interest.

America and the Trade Regime: What Went Wrong?

AbstractThe era of American leadership in the multilateral trading regime has ended. This paper argues that this current antipathy to trade is unsurprising: support for US leadership of the regime has always rested on a precarious balance among domestic interests. To overcome a historic bias in favor of home market production, American leaders created incentives for exporters to organize while creating roadblocks for import-competing firms and their employees. The dominance of the exporters’ voice had a significant influence on the policies the US pursued in the design and execution of the global trade regime. Most importantly, the absence of labor's voice undermined the prospect for “embedded liberalism” and instead resulted in an anemic system of adjustment for job loss at home and limited support for worker interests within the regime. While policymakers’ decision to shift power away from potential “veto” groups may have been necessary for US leadership of the Liberal International Order, this institutional design undermined a robust response to the economic dislocation thought to be a result of globalization. The result was a fracturing of the coalition in support of American leadership in the GATT/WTO regime.

Populism in Place: The Economic Geography of the Globalization Backlash

AbstractA populist backlash to globalization has ushered in nationalist governments and challenged core features of the Liberal International Order. Although startling in scope and urgency, the populist wave has been developing in declining regions of wealthy countries for some time. Trade, offshoring, and automation have steadily reduced the number of available jobs and the wages of industrial workers since at least the 1970s. The decline in manufacturing employment initiated the deterioration of social and economic conditions in affected communities, exacerbating inequalities between depressed rural areas and small cities and towns, on the one hand, and thriving cities, on the other. The global financial crisis of 2008 catalyzed these divisions, as communities already in decline suffered deeper and longer economic downturns than metropolitan areas, where superstar knowledge, technology, and service-oriented firms agglomerate. We document many of these trends across the United States and Europe, and demonstrate that populist support is strongest in communities that experienced long-term economic and social decline. Institutional differences in labor markets and electoral rules across developed democracies may explain some of the variation in populists’ electoral success. Renewed support for the Liberal International Order may require a rejuvenation of distressed communities and a reduction of stark regional inequalities.

Contestations of the Liberal International Order: From Liberal Multilateralism to Postnational Liberalism

AbstractThe 1990s saw a systemic shift from the liberal post–World War II international order ofliberal multilateralism(LIO I) to a post–Cold War international order ofpostnational liberalism(LIO II). LIO II has not been only rule-based but has openly pursued a liberal social purpose with a significant amount of authority beyond the nation-state. While postnational liberal institutions helped increase overall well-being globally, they were criticized for using double standards and institutionalizing state inequality. We argue that these institutional features of the postnational LIO II led to legitimation problems, which explain both the current wave of contestations and the strategies chosen by different contestants. We develop our argument first by mapping the growing liberal intrusiveness of international institutions. Second, we demonstrate the increased level and variety of contestations in international security and international refugee law. We show that increased liberal intrusiveness has led to a variety of contestation strategies, the choice of which is affected by the preference of a contestant regarding postnational liberalism and its power within the contested institution.

Challenges to the Liberal Order: Reflections onInternational Organization

AbstractAsInternational Organizationcommemorates its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Liberal International Order (LIO) that authors in this journal have long analyzed is under challenge, perhaps as never before. The articles in this issue explore the nature of these challenges by examining how the Westphalian order and the LIO have co-constituted one another over time; how both political and economic dynamics internal to the LIO threaten its core aspects; and how external threats combine with these internal dynamics to render the LIO more fragile than ever before. This introduction begins by defining and clarifying what is “liberal,” “international,” and “orderly” about the LIO. It then discusses some central challenges to the LIO, illustrated by the contributors to this issue as well as other sources. Finally, we reflect on the analytical lessons we have learned—or should learn—as the study of the LIO, represented by scholarship inInternational Organization, has sometimes overlooked or marginalized dynamics that now appear central to the functioning, and dysfunction, of the order itself.

From Colonial to Multilateral International Law: A Global Capitalism and Law Investigation

This Forward integrates international law, international relations, and global history scholarship to understand two global trends that are in tension with each other: 1) the shift from European colonial dominance to a law-based multilateralism, which enabled a more equal and inclusive international law and 2) global capitalism which across time has been a political and economic force that, left to its own devices, promotes exclusion and inequality. Alter builds an encompassing conception of global economic law to show the interplay of colonial law, private law, domestic law and international law in enabling and constraining global capitalism across time. The investigation looks backwards so as to think forward. The larger goal of the endeavor is to imagine how an Asian law-based capitalism might continue past trends and recreate continuities despite a professed desire to be different. Just as capitalism once locked in colonial features despite the shift to multilateral international law, multilateralism and capitalism may be forces that sustain the very features of the Western Liberal International Order that China seeks to move beyond. Theoretically, the article argues that we need to conceive of global economic law as an international regime complex that in the colonial era included colonial law and private contracts, and in the multilateral era includes private contracting and extraterritorial domestic law. The various elemental units in the complex provide states and firms with options, and these options create an incentive to block or circumvent multilateral solutions. Blocking leads to multilateral non-decisions, which then unleash power-based bilateralism, coalition of the willing preferential international law, and private and market forces that step into the void. The non decisions are thus as consequential as the decisions— yet non decisions tend to fall into the blind spots if IL/IR debates. The options alongside the legal and market developments they unleash then constrain states from encasing markets so as to protect domestic, social, and political priorities. The Forward will be published in 2021, with responses appearing in 2022.

Camilo Barcia Trelles on Francisco de Vitoria: At the Crossroads of Carl Schmitt’s Grossraum and James Brown Scott’s ‘Modern International Law’

Abstract Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950) undertook a re-interpretation of the modern origins of the discipline of international law, placing Vitoria at its pivot, as the Spanish international law professor Camilo Barcia Trelles (1888–1977) had done before. Barcia’s work had a strong influence on some of the seminal pieces on international law and geopolitics that Schmitt wrote in the period from 1941 to 1950. This was the case for Schmitt’s historical mythology of the opposition between sea and earth and its juridical consequence, his doctrine of the Grossraum, which had as its basis Barcia’s account of the Monroe Doctrine, and also of Schmitt’s critique of the ‘discrimination of war’ formalized in the Kellogg–Briand Pact. According to Barcia, the exclusion of European powers from the American continent by the United States as a rising hegemon was transformed – thanks to its domination of the sea – into the global reach of a world police power. Barcia did not agree with Brown Scott’s transformation of international law through American liberal internationalism into ‘modern international law’. While Brown Scott and Schmitt were competing for two opposing vernaculars of the discipline in search for a new definition and to shape it, Barcia was instrumental in the opposed efforts of these two apparently very dissimilar representatives of international law by ushering Vitoria into their service.

Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order

AbstractFormal racial equality is a key aspect of the current Liberal International Order (LIO). It is subject to two main challenges: resurgent racial nationalism and substantive racial inequality. Combining work in International Relations with interdisciplinary studies on race, I submit that these challenges are the latest iteration of struggles between two transnational coalitions over the LIO's central racial provisions, which I call racial diversity regimes (RDRs). The traditional coalition has historically favored RDRs based on racial inequality and racial nationalism. The transformative coalition has favored RDRs based on racial equality and nonracial nationalism. I illustrate the argument by tracing the development of the liberal order's RDR as a function of intercoalitional struggles from one based on racial nationalism and inequality in 1919 to the current regime based on nonracial nationalism and limited equality. Today, racial nationalists belong to the traditional coalition and critics of racial inequality are part of the transformative coalition. The stakes of their struggles are high because they will determine whether we will live in a more racist or a more antiracist world. This article articulates a comprehensive framework that places race at the heart of the liberal order, offers the novel concept of “embedded racism” to capture how sovereignty shields domestic racism from foreign interference, and proposes an agenda for mainstream International Relations that takes race seriously.

Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change

AbstractWhereas scholars have typically modeled climate change as a global collective action challenge, we offer a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets. Climate politics can be understood as a contest between owners of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants, and owners of assets vulnerable to climate change, such as coastal property. To date, obstruction by “climate-forcing” asset holders has been a large barrier to effective climate policy. But as climate change and decarbonization policies proceed, holders of both climate-forcing and “climate-vulnerable” assets stand to lose some or even all of their assets' value over time, and with them, the basis of their political power. This dynamic contest between opposing interests is likely to intensify in many sites of political contestation, from the subnational to transnational levels. As it does so, climate politics will become increasingly existential, potentially reshaping political alignments within and across countries. Such shifts may further undermine the Liberal International Order (LIO); as countries develop pro-climate policies at different speeds and magnitudes, they will have incentives to diverge from existing arrangements over trade and economic integration.