Postwar Liberal Order Research Articles

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

The Big Screen: Mapping the Diffusion of Foreign Investment Screening Mechanisms

In the decade following the 2008 financial crisis, many advanced industrialized economies engaged in a competition to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), whose flows had plummeted following the global shock. At the same time, however, they also implemented or tightened Investment Screening Mechanisms (ISMs), which empower governments to restrict foreign takeovers, especially in strategic sectors. ISMs are an understudied phenomenon in the International Political Economy literature. This research note describes patterns in the evolution of foreign investment screening policies and suggests a research agenda for analyzing these patterns. After defining ISMs and establishing the puzzle of rising investment screening in conjunction with rising efforts to attract FDI, we present a newly coded dataset on ISMs in OECD countries from 2007-2021, examining the evolution of seven key features of investment screening over time. Next, we set an agenda for future research by suggesting three explanations for their recent evolution in the shadow of rising Chinese investment: the role of bottom-up backlashes to economic globalization; elite-driven foreign policy arguments about the increasingly blurred lines between national and economic security in the information economy; and geopolitical transformations that have challenged key features of the post-war liberal order.

Doubtful Ally or Ally Full of Doubts? The Course of Transatlantic Relations under Donald Trump’s Presidency

Donald Trump’s “America-fi rst” diplomacy has undermined the foundations of many alliances, including a transatlantic relationship on which post-war liberal order would rest. Under the current American presidency, EU–US relations are facing signifi cant challenges whose implications are still far from clear. The list of discrepancies between the allies are growing ever longer and the American administration’s decisions are antithetical to those taken by Brussels and other European capitals. Divisions, among other things, have occurred over policies towards the Paris Climate Agreement, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the Middle East approach. The special relationship between Europe and United States can no longer be taken for granted. In this presented paper, the author has looked beyond current political disagreements in order to focus on the long term factors underlying the “special relationship”. The rationale behind this research is the dawn of great power politics that happens during the transition from uni-to-multipolar order. America’s disengagement from (and defunding of) the global scene means that the European Union will have to adjust to a world with numerous centres of power and different sources of threat. Ursula von der Leyen announced, upon assuming office in December 2019, that she would lead a “geopolitical Commission” engaged in tackling global challenges. All of this in the face of the fi rst American administration in post-war history that opposes European integration. Due to the space limit (and deservedness for sole attention), the security and defence dimension of transatlantic cooperation will only be briefly mentioned. Regardless of any comments made by former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that the European Union will not create an alternative model to NATO1, the creation of a Permanent Structure Cooperation (PESCO) and the establishing of a European Defence Fund cannot be omitted. Enhanced European defence will be essential for a “healthy transatlantic partnership with the United States”2. That partnership will, almost certainly, become more transactional.

Supreme Court Precedent and the Politics of Repudiation

This is an invited essay that will appear in a book titled Law's Infamy, edited by Austin Sarat as part of the Amherst Series on Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought. Every legal order that aspires to be called just is held together by not only principles of justice but also archetypes of morally reprehensible outcomes, and villains as well as heroes. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who believed himself to be a hero solving the great moral question of slavery in the Dred Scott case, is today detested for trying to impose a racist, slaveholding vision of the Constitution upon America. Likewise, the knowledge that he might wind up on the wrong side of history in part explains the anguished quality of Justice Felix Frankfurter’s dissent in the coerced flag salute case, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, for he had not merely lost the argument over what a post-war liberal order should look like, but also saw the consensus represented in his earlier opinion on the issue collapse as his colleagues abandoned him for Robert Jackson’s rights-centered vision of justice. But what exactly renders a particular legal outcome, which surely begins as a good-faith effort to do the right thing, a despised precedent over time? Some judicial rulings are infamous because they are one day cast aside with great fanfare, as Bowers v. Hardwick was by Justice Anthony Kennedy in Lawrence v. Texas or the Dred Scott case was through consistent denunciation by abolitionists and a dramatic defeat for the Slave Power during the Civil War. But other precedents are treated disdainfully through a more nuanced process of shunning or erosion, so that they remain formally alive but shamble about, a vestige of their former selves—Korematsu v. United States, Roe v. Wade, and Miranda v. Arizona might fall into this category. This is true even though there may have been efforts by judges to rescue some aspect of each of these decisions. Whether renounced openly or surreptitiously, each of these precedents has been deeply marked by public condemnation. This essay investigates the politics of repudiation—the socio-legal dynamics by which losers to a contest over the meaning of the U.S. Constitution seek to castigate and de-legitimate a controversial outcome. It will ask what actions can spur the sense of moral outrage with a judicial ruling, and what components are necessary to transform a precedent into an exemplar of public regret. The politics of repudiation begins with the notion that every judicial ruling is a first draft, a sketch of legal and political values. Judges’ words are only fragments, composed by a single collection of influential individuals reading a legal text for a particular moment in time. What a judicial ruling means in the social world depends on what it becomes. Along these lines, the command to obey that is intrinsic to every ruling is satisfied through compliance by those who are immediate parties to the controversy; no one else is obliged to endorse the constitutional vision sketched by judges who presided over that dispute. The republican and federalist design features of our constitutional order therefore join with the necessary cultural processes upon which every legal system must depend to foster a broad range of efforts to either entrench or contest a particular vision of law. What matters more than the ideas contained in a judicial opinion, then, is what average citizens and elites do with that legal decision once it reenters the stream of democratic discourse and, if they disagree with it, what steps they take to inscribe a very different narrative about that decision in the public imagination. Much of this work of public repudiation is done through unglamorous politics: activism of civic groups and church organizations that educates citizens and the enactment of local policies, state laws, and other texts through which the people turn a legal ruling into an object of obloquy. National party dynamics can play a significant role by sharpening and broadening the politics of repudiation. For instance, by making opposition to Roe a central tenet of the party platform and political identity, the Republican party helped make Roe reviled among a generation of conservative lawyers who now hold a majority of seats on the Supreme Court. These efforts have put conservatives on the cusp of codifying a final victory should the Court overrule that decision.

The end of liberal international order?

These are not happy times for liberal internationalists. No one can be sure how deep the crisis of liberal internationalism runs. However, in what follows, I argue that despite its troubles, liberal internationalism still has a future. The nature of the crisis is surprising. The threats to liberal internationalism were expected to come from rising non-western states seeking to undermine or overturn the postwar order. In the face of hostile, revisionist states, the United States and Europe were expected to stand shoulder to shoulder to protect the gains from 70 years of cooperation. But, in fact, liberal internationalism is more deeply threatened by developments within the West itself. The centrist and progressive coalitions that lay behind the postwar liberal order have weakened. Liberal democracy itself appears fragile and polarized, vulnerable to far right populism and backlash politics. In recent decades, the working and middle classes in advanced industrial democracies—the original constituencies and beneficiaries of an open and cooperative international order—have faced rising economic inequality and stagnation. Within the West, liberal internationalism is increasingly seen, not as a source of stability and solidarity among like-minded states, but as a global playing field for the wealthy and influential. Liberal internationalism has lost its connection to the pursuit of social and economic advancement within western countries.

The nature and sources of liberal international order

Debates about the future of relations among the advanced industrial countries after the Cold War hinge on theories about the sources of international political order. Realism advances the most defined—and pessimistic—answers drawing on theories of anarchy, balance, and hegemony. But these theories are not able to explain the origins and continuing stability of relations among the United States and its European and Asian partners. This article develops a theory of liberal international order that captures its major structures, institutions, and practices. Distinctive features mark postwar liberal order—co-binding security institutions, penetrated American hegemony, semi-sovereign great powers, economic openness, and civic identity. It is these multifaceted and interlocking features of Western liberal order that give it a durability and significance.

Breaking Trade Dependency: A Global Simulation of Third World Proposals for Alternative Trade Regimes

Calls for a New International Economic Order included proposals for revision of the Liberal trade system in ways which would facilitate Third World development. To assess possible costs and consequences of these proposals a simulation model of the international trade system is employed here to explore changes in trade patterns which could result from alternative trade orders. Specifically, two proposed alternatives are compared to the existing order: one relatively moderate strategy which calls for concessionary tariffs to be granted to developing countries by advanced nations, and a second, more radical strategy which counsels economic disengagement of the South from the North in favor of Collective Self-reliance for the developing nations. The simulation exercise reveals potential difficulties associated with these strategies, including highly unequal distribution of benefits and costs, and the internal incompatibility of the multiple development objectives which these proposals contain. Should global trade relations be governed by the classic liberal norms of openness, non-discrimination and reciprocity, or should the world trade system be structured to facilitate progress in developing areas? For four decades now, trade relations between the industrialized North and the developing South have been deeply politicized because antagonisms go well beyond the individual commercial policies of particular countries and revolve around the trade regime itself. The industrialized countries were largely successful in establishing a liberal world trade order shortly after World War II. Developing nations questioned the underlying norms of this order from the outset and developed proposed regime alternatives over the ensuing years. As scholars, our understanding of the postwar liberal order and proposed alternatives-and thus our understanding of the North-South debate-has been limited by the fact that our observations are quite naturally restricted to outcomes produced by that existing Author's note: The research reported in this paper was conducted while the author was a research scientist in the Global Modeling Group of the International Institute of Comparative Social Research, Science Center Berlin. The extensive support of that institution is gratefully acknowledged. The author would also like to thank the editors of ISQ and three anonymous reviewers for several constructive criticisms and suggestions, and wishes it were possible to have been more responsive to these. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 22nd Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, March 1981.