The liberal global order mounts a comeback
THE defenders of what’s called the “liberal international order” have recently suffered setbacks from adversaries inside and outside their home countries. But those who want to see the Westernled post-World War II system survive or even thrive are plotting its resurrection.
When the United States and European countries came together in the second half of the 20th century to build multilateral relationships and institutions to strengthen and spread liberal values such as rule of law, democracy, open markets and human rights, it was an aberration. The project ran counter to centuries of global politics based on strength, solipsism, greed and war. In France this weekend, former White House official Steve Bannon told far-right nationalists that “history is on our side” – and he wasn’t entirely wrong.
While Bannon was working to undermine what he and his like deride as “globalism”, a group of US and European officials, lawmakers and experts were meeting to figure out how to save it. The German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum kicked off with a call to action.
“We lost sight of what it took to create this international order and what an act of defiance of history and even defiance of human nature this order has been,” author Robert Kagan told the group. “We have the capacity to push back – we just need to understand the pushback needs to start occurring.”
Globalists share a realisation that the order is at risk, and along with it the seven decades of relative growth, prosperity and peace it provided. Nationalism and populism are ascendant in the United States and Europe. Authoritarianism led by Russia and China is on the march around the world.
The West assumed after the Cold War that worldwide acceptance of liberal values was inevitable, but alas, history did not end. Geopolitical competition resumed. The negative effects of globalisation drove discontent with the liberal open-society model. Adversaries took advantage. Then came the duel shocks of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.
Some say liberal democracy simply didn’t address the needs and desires of its populations. Others say the liberal globalist order was never truly liberal, global or orderly. The mission to defend it must include acknowledging and addressing those shortcomings.
But the first task is simply to “keep it alive”, US Senator Chris Murphy told the forum. Active US government leadership will be impossible so long as Trump is president because he doesn’t support things such as projecting liberal values into other countries, trade liberalisation or multilateral institutions.
Therefore, the task at hand for defenders of the liberal international order is to “build new alliances within our societies and between our societies”, Murphy said.
Bannon’s project is to unite nationalists on the left and right against the system. In reaction, globalist Democrats and Republicans are renewing their alliance to fight back. US Representative Michael Turner told me that connecting the mission back to the American people was crucial.
“Democracies lead by their electorates coming along and supporting the agenda and the direction of the Western structure,” he said. “That’s what had been missing for a while.”
The trans-Atlantic alliance must also recognise the failure of its decades-long effort to court Russia and China to join the rules-based order. Democracies must once again stand up to and resist authoritarian efforts to undermine Western institutions and values.
Russia is attacking democracies and seeking to undermine the liberal order on a constant basis. China’s leadership is touting its program of state-controlled modernisation as a model for the developing world, while it works to reset global norms in its own interest.
“From the very beginning, this was a Western project and Western-centred,” said Wang Dong, an international relations professor at Peking University. “This concept of liber- al international order is insufficient and inaccurate in terms of describing what kind of order we are in.”
Even if proponents are successful in defending the Western system from internal and external attack, it will be forever changed. We can no longer expect that the principles of liberal democracy will expand across the globe. We can no longer assume the United States will carry the bulk of the burden.
But the system the Atlantic community built has a halfcentury head start on its challengers. Shoring up its foundations by reforming multilateral institutions, addressing the grievances of those left behind economically, defending the independence and integrity of the free media, and protecting the mechanics of democracies – such as elections – are a good start.
The liberal international order is far from perfect, but it is preferable to the alternative, an international system ruled by naked self-interest and tyranny of the powerful. The new alliance to defend it is mobilising now. The stakes couldn’t be higher.