Contestations Of Liberal Order

This volume explores the Western-led liberal order that is claimed to be in crisis. Currently, the West appears less as a modernizing or civilizing entity leading the way and more as being engulfed in a deep crisis. Simultaneously, the West still appears to be needed in order to imagine the global order by promoters of liberal peace as well as its opponents. This book asks how and why “crisis” is needed for constituting “the West,” liberal, and global order and how these three are conjoined and reinvented. The book encompasses narratives endorsing and rejecting the West and the liberal international order, as well as alternative visions for a post-Western world conceived within the rising and challenging powers. The study is of interest to scholars and students of international relations, critical security studies, peace and conflict research, and social sciences in general.

The notion that we are experiencing a change in times, whereby an old global order is giving way to a new one, has been gaining legitimacy in international debates. As US power is waning, the argument goes, so is the set of liberal norms, rules and institutions around which the Unites States organised its global supremacy. Ideational contests, power shifts, regional fragmentation, and socio-economic turmoil paint a broad picture of complex and often inter-related challenges that fuel contestation of the liberal order, both as a normative project and as an emanation of US power. Major players - China and India, Europe and Russia, and the United States itself - are all engaged in a process of global repositioning, most notably in areas where the liberal project has only fragile roots and order is contested: Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. This volume aims to provide critical frames of reference for understanding whether geopolitical and ideational contestations will eventually bring the US-centred liberal order down or lead to a process of adjustment and transformation. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue in The International Spectator.

A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element unpacks the counter-intuitive inclination towards institutional cooperation in populist foreign policy and discusses its implications for the LIO. Straddling Western and non-Western contexts, it compares the regional cooperation strategies of populist leaders from three continents: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The study identifies an emerging populist 'script' of regional cooperation based on notions of popular sovereignty. By embedding regional cooperation in their political strategies, populist leaders are able to contest the LIO and established international organisations without having to revert to unilateral nationalism.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States engaged in the most ambitious and far-reaching liberal order building the world had yet seen. This liberal international order has been one of the most successful in providing security and prosperity to more people, but in the last decade the American-led order has been troubled. Some argue that the Bush administration undermined it. Others argue that we are witnessing he end of the American era. In Liberal Leviathan G. John Ikenberry argues that the crisis that besets the American-led order is a crisis of authority. The forces that have triggered this crisis have resulted from the successful functioning and expansion of the postwar liberal order, not its breakdown.

The notion that we are experiencing a change in times, whereby an old global order is giving way to a new one, has been gaining legitimacy in international debates. As US power is waning, the argument goes, so is the set of liberal norms, rules and institutions around which the Unites States organised its global supremacy. Ideational contests, power shifts, regional fragmentation, and socio-economic turmoil paint a broad picture of complex and often inter-related challenges that fuel contestation of the liberal order, both as a normative project and as an emanation of US power. Major players – China and India, Europe and Russia, and the United States itself – are all engaged in a process of global repositioning, most notably in areas where the liberal project has only fragile roots and order is contested: Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. This volume aims to provide critical frames of reference for understanding whether geopolitical and ideational contestations will eventually bring the US-centred liberal order down or lead to a process of adjustment and transformation. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue in The International Spectator.

In 2000, Ian McKay, a highly respected historian at Queen's University, published an article in the Canadian Historical Review entitled "The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History." Written to address a crisis in Canadian history, this detailed, programmatic, and well-argued article had an immediate impact on the field. Proposing that Canadian history should be mapped through a process of reconnaisance, and that the Canadian state should be understood as a project of liberal rule in North America, the essay prompted debate immediately upon publication. Liberalism and Hegemony assembles some of Canada's finest historians to continue the debate sparked by McKay's essay. The essays collected here explore the possibilities and limits presented by "The Liberal Order Framework" for various segments of Canadian history, and within them, the paramount influence of liberalism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is debated in the context of aboriginal history, environmental history, the history of the family, the development of political thought and ideas, and municipal governance. Like McKay's "The Liberal Order Framework," which is included in this volume with a response to recent criticism, Liberalism and Hegemony is a fascinating foray into current historical thought and provides the historical community with a book that will act both as a reference and a guide for future research.

Liberal World Orders is a timely contribution to debates about the current world order in the face of declining US hegemony and rising new powers. It examines the history and durability of liberal thought. Neo-liberalism is criticised as a theoretical perspective ill-equipped to understand the current crisis or possibilities for its amelioration.

Articulates the interwar modernist response to the crisis of liberal world order after 1919.