The Wrecking Of The Liberal World Order

The ‘Liberal World Order’ (LWO) is today in crisis. But what explains this crisis? Whereas its critics see it as the unmasking of Western hypocrisy, its longstanding proponents argue it is under threat by competing illiberal projects. This book takes a different stance: neither internal hypocrisy, nor external attacks explain the decline of the LWO – a deviation from its original lane does. Emerged as a project aiming to harmonize state sovereignty and the market, through the promotion of liberal democracy domestically, and free trade and economic cooperation internationally, the LWO was hijacked in the 1980s: market forces overshadowed democratic forces, thus disfiguring the LWO into a Neoliberal Global Order. The book advocates for a revival of its original intellectual premises, that in the aftermath of World War II marked the zenith of political modernity.

The Liberal World Order was a political project designed to keep together as harmoniously as possible state sovereignty-in its liberal-democratic version-and market economy-entailing free trade on the international level. Framed in this unique way, those three concepts-'international order,' 'sovereignty' and 'market economy'-have characterized the rise of political modernity. This book states that since the 1980s the Liberal World Order has been gradually replaced by a 'Neoliberal Global Order' and exposes the intellectual premises to revive and restore the balance between democracy and market-based economy, the fundamental premise upon which both liberal democracies and the LWO have been built. Vittorio Emanuele Parsi is Professor of International Relations at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy) and Director of ASERI (Graduate School of Economics and International Relations). " Vittorio Parsi offers a sweeping and penetrating account of the rise and fall of the modern liberal international order. Elegant, erudite, and insightful, Parsi chronicles the stormy voyage of the Western democracies as they search for calmer seas and gentler winds." G. John Ikenberry, Princeton University, USA "Vittorio Parsi, one of Italy's leading scholars of international politics, has produced an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the postwar liberal order, what went wrong with it, and whether it might be restored. Michael Mastanduno, Dartmouth College, USA "One of Europe's most original thinkers offers a penetrating assessment of the Liberal World Order and its prospects. Matthew Evangelista, Cornell University, USA "Parsi has written a book of tremendous importance. For anyone interested in a serious examination of the emerging world order, post-Trump and post-COVID, The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order is a must read". Mehran Kamrava, Georgetown University, Qatar "Vittorio Parsi's is exactly the right book for anyone-student, teacher, news reporter, or policymaker-who wants to understand how our domestic and global politics and economics came to such a sorry state, and what we can do to build a better future. Joseph M. Grieco, Duke University, USA.

The collapse of the bipolar international system near the end of the twentieth century changed political liberalism from a regional system with aspirations of universality to global ideological dominance as the basic vision of how international life should be organized. Yet in the last two decades liberal democracies have not been able to create an effective and legitimate liberal world order. In A Liberal World Order in Crisis, Georg Sorensen suggests that this is connected to major tensions between two strains of liberalism: a "liberalism of imposition" affirms the universal validity of liberal values and is ready to use any means to secure the worldwide expansion of liberal principles. A "liberalism of restraint" emphasizes nonintervention, moderation, and respect for others. This book is the first comprehensive discussion of how tensions in liberalism create problems for the establishment of a liberal world order. The book is also the first skeptical liberal statement to appear since the era of liberal optimism—based in anticipation of the end of history—in the 1990s. Sorensen identifies major competing analyses of world order and explains why their focus on balance-of-power competition, civilizational conflict, international terrorism, and fragile states is insufficient.

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.

Liberals blame the retreat of the liberal world order on populists at home and authoritarian leaders abroad. Only liberalism, so they claim, can defend the rules-based international system against demagogy, corruption and nationalism. This provocative book contends that the liberal world order is illiberal and undemocratic – intolerant about the cultural values of ordinary people in the West and elsewhere while concentrating power in the hands of unaccountable Western elites and Western-dominated institutions. Under the influence of contemporary liberalism, the international system is fuelling economic injustice, social fragmentation and a worldwide “culture war” between globalists and nativists. Liberals, far from defending rules, have broken international law and imposed their version of market fundamentalism and democracy promotion by military means. Liberal “civilisation” has fuelled resentment across the world by imposing a narrow worldview that pits cultures against one another. To avoid a descent into a violent culture clash, this book proposes radical ideas for international order that take the form of cultural commonwealths – social bonds and crossborder cultural ties on which international trust and cooperation depends. The book’s defence of an older order against both liberals and nationalists will speak to all readers trying to understand our age of anger. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and readers of liberalism, political theory and democracy, and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.

In an age of demagogues, hostile great powers and trade wars, foreign policy traditionalists dream of restoring liberal international order. This order, they claim, ushered in seventy years of peace and prosperity and saw post-war America domesticate the world to its values. The False Promise of Liberal Order exposes the flaws in this nostalgic vision. The world shaped by America came about as a result of coercion and, sometimes brutal, compromise. Liberal projects – to spread capitalist democracy – led inadvertently to illiberal results. To make peace, America made bargains with authoritarian forces. Even in the Pax Americana, the gentlest order yet, ordering was rough work. As its power grew, Washington came to believe that its order was exceptional and even permanent – a mentality that has led to spiralling deficits, permanent war and Trump. Romanticizing the liberal order makes it harder to adjust to today’s global disorder. Only by confronting the false promise of liberal order and adapting to current realities can the United States survive as a constitutional republic in a plural world.

“Conflict” is a phenomenon as old as human history. Although the actors and reasons have changed, conflicts have occurred in every period of history. In the pre-Cold War era, conflicts in the international system were experienced between states. The conflicts during the Cold War mainly were interstate conflicts arising from the rivalry between the two blocs. In this period, it was expected that the threat to the security of a state would come from outside the borders of the state and from other states.For this reason, all the regulations made by the League of Nations, which was established at the end of the First World War, and the United Nations, which was established after the Second World War, to protect international peace and security included the measures to be taken against the attack or threat of attack by one state against another state. However, the developments that took place right after the end of the Cold War confirmed that the risk of interstate conflict decreased, and new security threats emerged in this period. The conflicts that emerged in the post-Cold War period were separatist conflicts due to ethnic and religious reasons, such as the former Yugoslavia and Georgia, or intra-border conflicts that occurred for other reasons, such as in Syria. Upon the inadequacy of international organizations and international law to intervene in intra-border conflicts, the concept of "security" was redefined, and a transformation from the security of the state to the security of the individual took place. New security threats such as environmental security, human security, food security, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and pandemics have been identified. One of the reasons for the decrease in conflicts between states in the post-Cold War period is that states mostly use "soft power" instead of military force in achieving their foreign policy goals. The structure of the international system is also a dynamic that affects conflicts. After the end of the bipolar system, the transformation of the international system is not yet complete. One of the most critical problems in today's world is the competition and struggle between states to become the future superpower. While the US wants the current status quo to continue, China is trying to change the status quo in its favour. The European Union is to become the dominant power in the international system after its transformation in the post-Cold War period.