Chaos in the Liberal Order

Chaos in the Liberal Order
Author: Robert Jervis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 638
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231547781

Donald Trump’s election has called into question many fundamental assumptions about politics and society. Should the forty-fifth president of the United States make us reconsider the nature and future of the global order? Collecting a wide range of perspectives from leading political scientists, historians, and international-relations scholars, Chaos in the Liberal Order explores the global trends that led to Trump’s stunning victory and the impact his presidency will have on the international political landscape. Contributors situate Trump among past foreign policy upheavals and enduring models for global governance, seeking to understand how and why he departs from precedents and norms. The book considers key issues, such as what Trump means for America’s role in the world; the relationship between domestic and international politics; and Trump’s place in the rise of the far right worldwide. It poses challenging questions, including: Does Trump’s election signal the downfall of the liberal order or unveil its resilience? What is the importance of individual leaders for the international system, and to what extent is Trump an outlier? Is there a Trump doctrine, or is America’s president fundamentally impulsive and scattershot? The book considers the effects of Trump’s presidency on trends in human rights, international alliances, and regional conflicts. With provocative contributions from prominent figures such as Stephen M. Walt, Andrew J. Bacevich, and Samuel Moyn, this timely collection brings much-needed expert perspectives on our tumultuous era.

A World Safe for Democracy

A World Safe for Democracy
Author: G. John Ikenberry
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300256094

A sweeping account of the rise and evolution of liberal internationalism in the modern era For two hundred years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism’s long journey from its nineteenth-century roots to today’s fractured political moment. Creating an international “space” for liberal democracy, preserving rights and protections within and between countries, and balancing conflicting values such as liberty and equality, openness and social solidarity, and sovereignty and interdependence—these are the guiding aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the upheavals of the past two centuries. G. John Ikenberry argues that in a twenty-first century marked by rising economic and security interdependence, liberal internationalism—reformed and reimagined—remains the most viable project to protect liberal democracy.

The False Promise of Liberal Order

The False Promise of Liberal Order
Author: Patrick Porter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-05-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509542132

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.

Contestations of Liberal Order

Contestations of Liberal Order
Author: Marko Lehti
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019-08-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030220591

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.

Undoing the Liberal World Order

Undoing the Liberal World Order
Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 023155446X

In the decades following World War II, American liberals had a vision for the world. Their ambitions would not stop at the water’s edge: progressive internationalism, they believed, could help peoples everywhere achieve democracy, prosperity, and freedom. Chastened in part by the failures of these grand aspirations, in recent years liberals and the Left have retreated from such idealism. Today, as a beleaguered United States confronts a series of crises, does the postwar liberal tradition offer any useful lessons for American engagement with the world? The historian Leon Fink examines key cases of progressive influence on postwar U.S. foreign policy, tracing the tension between liberal aspirations and the political realities that stymie them. From the reconstruction of post-Nazi West Germany to the struggle against apartheid, he shows how American liberals joined global allies in pursuit of an expansive political, social, and economic vision. Even as liberal internationalism brought such successes to the world, it also stumbled against domestic politics or was blind to the contradictions in capitalist development and the power of competing nationalist identities. A diplomatic history that emphasizes the roles of social class, labor movements, race, and grassroots activism, Undoing the Liberal World Order suggests new directions for a progressive American foreign policy.

The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism

The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism
Author: Yoichi Funabashi
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815737688

A 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Japan's challenges and opportunities in a new era of uncertainty Henry Kissinger wrote a few years ago that Japan has been for seven decades “an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity.” However, Japan has only played this anchoring role within an American-led liberal international order built from the ashes of World War II. Now that order itself is under siege, not just from illiberal forces such as China and Russia but from its very core, the United States under Donald Trump. The already evident damage to that order, and even its possible collapse, pose particular challenges for Japan, as explored in this book. Noted experts survey the difficult position that Japan finds itself in, both abroad and at home. The weakening of the rules-based order threatens the very basis of Japan's trade-based prosperity, with the unreliability of U.S. protection leaving Japan vulnerable to an economic and technological superpower in China and at heightened risk from a nuclear North Korea. Japan's response to such challenges are complicated by controversies over constitutional revision and the dark aspects of its history that remain a source of tension with its neighbors. The absence of virulent strains of populism have helped to provide Japan with a stable platform from which to pursue its international agenda. Yet with a rapidly aging population, widening intergenerational inequality, and high levels of public debt, the sources of Japan's stability—its welfare state and immigration policies—are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Each of the book's chapters is written by a specialist in the field, and the book benefits from interviews with more than 40 Japanese policymakers and experts, as well as a public opinion survey. The book outlines today's challenges to the liberal international order, proposes a role for Japan to uphold, reform and shape the order, and examines Japan's assets as well as constraints as it seeks to play the role of a proactive stabilizer in the Asia-Pacific.

Liberal World Order and Its Critics

Liberal World Order and Its Critics
Author: Adrian Pabst
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2018-11-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429670958

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.

Liberal Leviathan

Liberal Leviathan
Author: G. John Ikenberry
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2012-08-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691156174

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.

Beyond Liberal Order

Beyond Liberal Order
Author: Harry Verhoeven
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2022-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197654215

What does liberal order actually amount to outside the West, where it has been most institutionalised? Contrary to the Atlantic or Pacific, liberal hegemony is thin in the Indian Ocean World; there are no equivalents of NATO, the EU or the US-Japan defence relationship. Yet what this book calls the 'Global Indian Ocean' was the beating heart of earlier epochs of globalisation, where experiments in international order, market integration and cosmopolitanisms were pioneered. Moreover, it is in this macro-region that today's challenges will face their defining hour: climate change, pandemics, and the geopolitical contest pitting China and Pakistan against the USA and India. The Global Indian Ocean states represent the greatest range of political systems and ideologies in any region, from Hindu-nationalist India and nascent democracy in Indonesia and South Africa, to the Gulf's mixture of tribal monarchy and high modernism. These essays by leading scholars examine key aspects of political order, and their roots in the colonial and pre-colonial past, through the lenses of state-building, nationalism, international security, religious identity and economic development. The emergent lessons are of great importance for the world, as the 'global' liberal order fades and new alternatives struggle to be born.

American Power and Liberal Order

American Power and Liberal Order
Author: Paul D. Miller
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 1626163421

Paul D. Miller argues against recent calls for American restraint in international relations. Blending academic rigor with his experiences as former Director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council, he instead calls for active investment in the centuries-old grand strategy of liberal order.