Liberal World Order Research Articles

Rethinking Russo-Chinese Relations in Asia: Beyond Russia’s Chinese Dilemma

Despite both the Russian and Chinese governments proclaiming to have identical interests, the reality is quite different. On global issues like intervention in third world countries, non-proliferation, democracy promotion and Central Asia, Russia and China jointly act to resist US notions of a liberal world order dominated by American power. However, in regard to the regional security agenda in Asia, we find only barely concealed and even potentially serious if unadvertised rivalries (e.g., over Japan and Southeast Asia). Thus Russia is trying to juggle two contradictory things simultaneously: bandwagon with China on the global and anti-America agenda and attempt to pull off a balancing act to constrain China at the regional level. The deep-seated regional divergences in Asia between Moscow and Beijing have not been resolved and may not be capable of resolution given the dynamic forces at play in the region.

Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order

Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order

Liberalism in Crisis: A Collapsing World Order

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 �

Response to William Scheuerman's review of A Liberal World Order in Crisis: Choosing Between Imposition and Restraint

Thanks to William Scheuerman for his thoughtful and stimulating comments on my book. It is certainly true that the crisis of liberalism in general and of the liberal world order in particular is not a new subject. Then why take it up again? For two reasons: first, many of the previous and contemporary critical analyses of the liberal world order tend to be prejudiced by theoretical and/or political convictions that serve to predetermine their view of the subject. I consider myself a skeptical liberal in the sense that the progress which most liberals talk about is possible and desirable, but it cannot be taken for granted and the obstacles to progress are much more serious than many liberals think. Differently put, there is no end of history, no secure path to modernity for all, no safe, upward arrow towards progress. “History has no libretto,” as Alexander Herzen said.

Time for Tough Love in Transatlantic Relations

The furore that greeted news that negotiations were to start on a transatlantic free trade agreement revealed not only the potential importance of any putative deal, but also the tendency of Europeans to view international politics almost uniquely in economic terms. This neglect of security and broader geostrategic issues is short-sighted and dangerous. It is precisely the liberal world order in place since the Second World War that has allowed Europeans to develop their economic potential. Leaving it to the United States to preserve that order is an increasingly problematic strategy, with the US ever more reluctant to police the world in the way it once did. The US has, for many years, asked its partners to contribute more to the preservation of common security interests. Given the failure of these attempts to date, it might be time for Washington to resort to tougher tactics in an attempt to entice Europeans out of their geostrategic retirement.

From Peacemaker to Warmonger? Explaining Denmark's Great Power Politics

AbstractDanish post‐Cold War security policy is typically portrayed as a transformation from an anti‐militaristic and multilateralist member of a Nordic bloc in international relations promoting international solidarity and global peace into an activist proponent of a liberal world order to be defended by military means when necessary. Focusing on Danish peace policy, this article puts forward a contending analysis arguing that what appears as change entails a considerable amount of continuity. Now, as in the past, the Danish contribution to international peace reflects a combination of international demand and the ability and willingness of Danish policy‐makers to meet this demand in accordance with their liberal‐egalitarian values and pragmatic approach to international relations.

Gordian knot: apartheid and the unmaking of the liberal world order

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Opening the Curtain Part One * Winds of Change 1. Architects and Earthquakes 2. Defining the Debate 3. Africa for the Africans Part Two * White Redoubt 4. Halls of Justice 5. The Status Quo 6. Looking Outward Conclusion: Toward a New Order Notes Bibliography Index

Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order, Ryan M. Irwin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, xi–244 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-985561-2

Article Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order, Ryan M. Irwin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, xi–244 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-985561-2 was published on July 12, 2013 in the journal New Global Studies (volume 7, issue 2).

Enter The Dragon! An Empirical Analysis of Chinese versus US Arms Transfers to Autocrats and Violators of Human Rights, 1989-20061

The rise of China has led to a spate of scholarly and journalistic speculation about the future of a liberal world order. Apparently, the rise of a nondemocratic, Asian rival to US hegemony potentially undermines the growth of democracy throughout the system. Many see a resource-hungry China engaging itself globally out of purely self-interested motives, and Chinese business and aid offer a viable alternative to Western influence. Using the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research's (SIPRI) data on arms transfers since the end of the Cold War, we test the proposition empirically by assessing the nature and strength of Chinese politico-military support, measured as conventional arms transfers, globally and to African regimes. In short, we find that China relative to the United States transfers greater amounts of arms to democracies rather than autocracies, whereas the United States seems to prefer more autocratic regimes, despite rhetoric that claims an ethical foreign policy. The same result holds when we assess this relationship using human rights data. Moreover, Chinese arms transfers to countries suffering civil wars are much lower than the United States’. The findings are robust to the inclusion of several control variables and alternative estimation techniques. The findings show that popular perceptions about China's role in Africa do not match reality, particularly when assessed against the current hegemon's behavior.

A liberal world order in crisis: choosing between imposition and restraint

A liberal world order in crisis: choosing between imposition and restraint

Before Hegemony: Britain, Free Trade, and Nineteenth-Century World Order Revisited

This article argues that neo-Gramscian theorizations of “hegemony” have failed to illuminate the role of nineteenth-century Britain in the rise of a liberal world economy in three respects. First, they have provided mutually exclusive accounts of the social forces underpinning domestic and international hegemony. Second, they have failed to show Britain's agency in the making of a liberal world order. Third, they have posited a uniformity of social forces and liberal state forms that elides the differences between British and continental societies, thereby obscuring the real reasons for the general shift to liberal internationalism. We argue that it was the structural differences in the economic, social, and political organization of Britain and continental Europe that made free trade without a hegemon possible. Neo-Gramscian theorists of hegemony—just like their mainstream peers—have unduly generalized from the unique structures of American hegemony after 1945. Instead of serving as a master concept to organize the history of international relations, hegemony itself needs to be historicized: as a singular and temporally limited possibility of societal and international rule, preceded and succeeded by other forms.

Critique in a time of liberal world order

The dominance of liberalism in world politics today is widely interpreted as attesting to its universal validity. This claim provides the basis for a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate criticism — the former operating within a broadly liberal framework and the latter questioning the universal validity of that framework. This special issue brings together critiques of liberalism in the second register. The introduction sets out the two competing notions of critical analysis and argues that, far from being ‘illegitimate’, it is this second concept of critique that ensures that liberalism does not betray its core promise of replacing might with right in a time of liberal world order.

Liberal internationalism and the law vs liberty paradox

This article examines and critiques the engagement of liberal international law with liberal internationalism in international relations (IR), demonstrating that the results are not to the credit of either discipline. In particular, two key assumptions of the legal liberal international order are flawed. First, the attempt to establish a two-tiered international liberal order based on law and democracy results in intervention (both forceful and performative) that counterproductively embroils liberal states, generating resentment and counter-democratic movements. Second, the assumption that security in a globalising world can only be created by the total globalisation of the liberal order and the removal of ‘outlaw’ states creates a new version of the security dilemma in which the actions taken to secure the liberal world order create the very conditions of its insecurity. The article concludes with recommendations for a critical post-structuralist engagement with a post-liberal politics of virtu that paradoxically allows for the liberal identity to be better secured in its international relations with the other.

Journeys beyond the West: World Orders and a 7th century Buddhist Monk

AbstractNovice Lee (‘Frank’) seeks world peace and thinks he has found it in the Liberal world order. He informs the Learned One, head of the monastery. Through their discussions, Frank discovers that the Liberal world order, despite its promises, offers neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘peace’. Turning to the Confucian world order of ‘all-under-heaven’ (tianxia), they find it similarly top-down and one-way. Finally, Frank and the Learned One, now joined by their brother monks and sister nuns, consider the life of the 7th century monk, Xuanzang. He inspires Frank to imagine a ‘worldly world order’ where humility and learning drive one's engagements with others, rather than what we have today: hegemony and imperialism.

The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America , and: Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War , and: The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (review)

The Railroad and State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America. By Robert G. Angevine. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii, 351. Cloth, $70.00.)Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and American Civil War. By Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2006. Pp. xii, 362. Cloth, $45.00.)The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and State, 1861-1865. By Mark R. Wilson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 306. Cloth, $47.00.)Reviewed by Samuel WatsonDid nineteenth-century nationalism serve liberalism, or vice versa? Each of these works implicitly addresses that question; each does so from different angle and arrives at different answer, from intermittent but ultimately mutually beneficial collaboration between railroads and state (Angevine) to tradition of nation-state authority, unknown to most historians, that became decisive during nation's greatest crisis but faded afterward (Wilson), to contest between sectional economic nationalisms that ultimately posited individualist liberalism against compromises essential to national union (Onuf and Onuf).Nations, Markets, and War is difficult book, tremendously broadranging and sophisticated, but sometimes maddeningly abstract because it operates on many levels, employing protean thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith to examine development of nationalism and coming of Civil War through debates over commercial policy. This second collaborative book by brothers Nicholas and Peter Onuf begins with a conjectural of conjectural history (19), half philosophical and half an exploration of modernity as a mode of historical thinking that . . . authorized nation-states making up modern (6). In second half of their book, Onufs examine transformation of federal union, initially seen as model for liberal world order, into national union, even nation-state, through over the proper extent of market (6), nationalism fashioned in anticipation of discipline of nations - war. Was this process reversion to European balance of power and terrible evils of necessity that Jefferson and other founders had sought to transcend, or was it part and parcel of nineteenth-century liberalism, product of tragic declension as nationalism submerged impulses of age of revolutions?For United States, this path was embodied in conflict rooted in slavery. Here questions of cause and effect, causal priority, and levels of analysis appear most acute. The Onufs observe that conflicts of interest over commercial policy - like divisions over slavery - drove Americans apart (6) and that divisions over slavery often operated through definitions . . . predicated on assumptions about future of American foreign trade relations (259). But these of interest - the tension between nation-as-market and world-as-market (181) - were rooted in specific markets for specific products, some produced by slave labor and some by free. I am not persuaded that absent slavery debate between traders - essentially slaveholding planters - and protectionists would have been so potent, or that it would have been argued by slaveholders in uncompromising political languages of republicanism and minority rights, rather than negotiable, potentially utilitarian economic ones of cost-benefit calculations. Indeed, reader is left wondering how to account for protectionist demands of sugar and hemp producers, southerners and slaveholders, often Whigs and Constitutional Unionists, who did not espouse sectionalism of cotton kings. As Onufs observe, during 1830s or 40s southern nationalists abandoned liberal cosmopolitanism of an earlier generation of free traders (324). One might ask, however, how cosmopolitan Old Republicans and Quids (the earlier free traders) really were, and whether we can or should characterize them principally through their exchange relationships as free traders, rather than through their labor relationships as lords of lash? …

The EU as a Global Actor: Grand Strategy for a Global Grand Bargain?

AbstractLike it or not, the European Union, in the wake of Lisbon, has become an international actor. It now faces two major external challenges. The first is to develop a strategic vision for a potentially tumultuous emerging multi‐polar world. The European Council's December 2008 ‘Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy’ recognized that, over the last five years, the threats facing the EU had become ‘increasingly complex’, that ‘we must be ready to shape events [by] becoming more strategic in our thinking’. The second challenge is to help nudge the other major actors towards a multilateral global grand bargain. Such a bargain will be the necessary outcome of the transition from a US‐dominated post‐1945 liberal world order, towards a new 21st‐century order accommodating the rising powers and sensitive to the needs of the global south. Without such a comprehensive and co‐operative bargain, the emerging multi‐polar world will be rife with tensions and highly conflict‐prone.

Liberal internationalism: from ideology to empirical theory – and back again

This article shows that Andrew Moravcsik’s ‘nonideological’ formulation of a liberal theory of international relations is itself deeply ideological – both in terms of his own criteria and in terms of a broader conception of ideology. The source of this outcome lies in Moravcsik’s mistaken conception of ideology. While ideological knowledge is indeed particular rather than general, it shares this feature with all political knowledge. In the political sphere, it is therefore not general knowledge that transcends the limits of ideology but rather an explicit engagement with these limits. A nonideological study of liberalism would thus require an historical account of the origins and development of liberalism in the context of its struggle with internal and external competitors. While such a study would not constitute a liberal theory of international relations in general, it would provide a general theory of liberal international relations – and would thus be highly relevant in the context of a liberal world order.

For Love of Order and Abstract Nouns: International Administration and the Discourse of Ability

There are generally two ways of thinking about international administration and empire in contemporary world affairs. The first approach involves making a sharp distinction between past and present. This enterprise has as its object the separation of an irredeemable history of domination and exploitation from an enlightened engagement in international governance. The second approach also involves a journey through the world of history, albeit one that seeks to establish a degree of continuity between past and present. At the core of this approach resides the belief that there is something instructive about the age of empire of which contemporary ‘international administrators’ should take notice. This essay challenges both of these approaches by arguing that the ‘is it empire?’ debate passes over more interesting and decidedly awkward questions about international administration as a way of disseminating liberal values in failed states. Thus, the problem presented by international administration is not one of reconciling a changing conception of sovereignty with the emergence of coercive or hierarchical relations that are reminiscent of an earlier age of empire; it is a matter of making sense of a discourse of ability that is equally at home in the empires that once spanned the globe and a liberal world order populated by peace-loving democracies.

Constitutionalism as Liberal-Juridical Consciousness: Echoes from International Law's Past

AbstractThe future of international law is uncertain. The long-hoped-for revitalization of international law and its institutional structures following the end of the Cold War now seems at risk from an increasing deformalization of, and neo-liberal disregard for, international law. Meanwhile European international lawyers are responding by reasserting a Kantian project for a global constitution under an international rule of law. In this article I attempt to position these recent claims that the international legal order is undergoing a process of constitutional transformation in the context of a long-standing connection, since at least the post-revolutionary nineteenth century, between the idea of a positive international law and the emerging structures of the European constitutional nation-state. If one can trace a cosmopolitan or constitutional project to the influence of domestic public law from this time, one can also trace the inherent tension between international law's promise of a substantive ‘good life’, or sense of justice, and its purported legitimacy in a commitment to a voluntarist, or contractarian, form of obligation. These simultaneous commitments seem incompatible, but are inseparable from international law's embedded liberalism, which requires interplay between them to make sense of progress in the absence of any explicit underlying philosophy. In tracing similarities in concerns from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, as well as repetitions in legal arguments, I suggest that the alternatives of American empire and a (European) vision of global constitutionalism are merely necessary oppositions, reflecting this broader tension underlying the discipline. Because lawyers avoid clarity on what is taken for granted in a leap from (selective) empirical realism towards assertive normative ambition, I argue that it is a mainstream, liberal-juridical consciousness – rather than any explicit legal theory – which continues to sustain shared assumptions about international law's past, as well as a promise of a future liberal world order. The apparently opposing visions of future world order are merely different sides of the same coin: each reflecting back, but each ultimately sustained by the other.

Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilemmas of Liberal World Order

Liberal international order—both its ideas and real-world political formations—is not embodied in a fixed set of principles or practices. Open markets, international institutions, cooperative security, democratic community, progressive change, collective problem solving, the rule of law—these are aspects of the liberal vision that have made appearances in various combinations and changing ways over the last century. I argue that it is possible to identify three versions or models of liberal international order—versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. The first is associated with the ideas of Woodrow Wilson, the second is the Cold War liberal internationalism of the post-1945 decades, and the third version is a sort of post-hegemonic liberal internationalism that has only partially appeared and whose full shape and logic is still uncertain. I develop a set of dimensions that allow for identifying different logics of liberal international order and identify variables that will shape the movement from liberal internationalism 2.0 to 3.0.