Rise of Nativism Imperils Postwar World Order
of European policy since the end of the Cold War. Expanding NATO and the European Union by bringing in Eastern European nations was supposed to have prompted the newcomers to adopt the democratic values of their fellow members. Things went differently.
China has used its economic power — enhanced by its entry to the W.T.O. in 2001 — to reinforce the authority of a state still controlled by the Communist Party. And Russia, which joined in 2012, has intensified a foreign policy that is centered on confrontation.
“What we are returning to is great power politics,” said Derek Shearer, a former American ambassador to Finland.
The causes of this vary, but a common element is public distrust of institutions amid a sense that the masses have been abandoned.
“Many people in Europe and the United States have not benefited very much from overall economic growth over the past few decades, and they are naturally skeptical of the policies and leaders in place,” said Douglas W. Elmendorf, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “But the solution is not to throw out the liberal order. It is to complement it with government policies that allow people to share in the benefits.”
In Poland, Hungary, Britain and Italy, distrust of the European Union reflects public anger at its liberal immigration policies, and an influx of people from Muslim countries. In the United States, Mr. Trump has found support among those inclined to blame immigrants for joblessness, and Muslims for security threats.
When Mr. Trump bypassed the W.T.O. in March to slap tariffs on some $60 billion in Chinese imports, he reinforced his scorn for multilateralism. In Europe, his willingness to flout trade rules has combined with his denunciation of the Paris climate accord and his equivocal support for NATO to force questions about America’s reliability. The institutions created after World War II have never lacked for critics. But if the justice of the liberal order has been contentious, now its basic endurance appears in question.
In the early 1990s, shortly after the West claimed victory in the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford University in California, suggested that the global arrangement of power had reached its conclusion. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history,” he wrote in a book that took that phrase as its title. “That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Thinkers across the ideological spectrum excoriated Mr. Fukuyama for penning history’s premature obituary. But last year, Mr. Fukuyama suggested a new obituary might be required — for the “liberal world order.” More than a year into the Trump era, Mr. Fukuyama has only grown more alarmed.
“What you’re seeing now is really insidious, because it’s coming from within democracies,” he said. “It’s not just the U. S., but Hungary, Turkey, Poland and Russia, where you have a democratically elected leader who is trying to dismantle the liberal parts of liberal democracy. We are seeing a new type of threat that I don’t really think we’ve seen in my lifetime.”