nice post-WW2 system you have there, shame if something happened to it

March 27, 2019 10:39 AM

The Future Of The Liberal Order Is Conservative, Jennifer Lind and William C. Wohlforth [Foreign Affairs, Majalla]

The liberal world order is in peril. Seventy-five years after the United States helped found it, this global system of alliances, institutions, and norms is under attack like never before. From within, the order is contending with growing populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. Externally, it faces mounting pressure from a pugnacious Russia and a rising China. At stake is the survival of not just the order itself but also the unprecedented economic prosperity and peace it has nurtured. The order is clearly worth saving, but the question is how.

Daniel Nexon writes: ON AMERICAN HEGEMONY, PART I and ON AMERICAN HEGEMONY, PART II: LIBERAL ORDER, WHAT IS THE CONCEPT GOOD FOR?:

People have been handwringing about the impending demise of the liberal international order for over a decade. But, since 2016, that handwringing has given way, at least in some circles, to full-scale panic. First the British voted to leave the European Union. Then Donald Trump campaigned—and won—on a promise to renegotiate the basic terms of America’s relationship with the world. In the summer of 2018, Kori Schake, wrote in The New York Times that: “Decades from now, we may look back at the first weeks of June 2018 as a turning point in world history: the end of the liberal order.”
The primary purpose of the book is not to defend liberal order. Rather, it concern processes that unravel hegemonic orders short of war. Still, arguments about liberal order are inextricably intertwined with debates about the character of American hegemony. No discussion of American hegemony can avoid the subject of liberal order.

What, then, is ‘the liberal order’? Schake’s description provides a good starting point:

Beginning in the wreckage of World War II, America established a set of global norms that solidified its position atop a rules-based international system. These included promoting democracy, making enduring commitments to countries that share its values, protecting allies, advancing free trade and building institutions and patterns of behavior that legitimize American power by giving less powerful countries a say.

Most proponents of liberal order recognize this as a simplification—one that highlights the bright side of American hegemony.

Net Assesement: Can Conservatism Save The Liberal Order? And What Are We Conserving?
There’s Nothing Wrong With the Liberal Order That Can’t Be Fixed by What’s Right With It

So what is [was] the Liberal (International) Order? We're talking: UN, NATO, WTO, IMF, World Bank, Pax Americana, all that.
[The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order, Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry]
[The End Of The Liberal International Order[PDF] and Why The Liberal World Order Will Survive[PDF], Ikenberry]

Is (Was) it a myth? Is it more than a myth? Is it dying? Neither myth nor accident? Has it collapsed?

Paeans To The Postwar Order Won't Save Us from 'A Trans-Atlantic “Synergistic Downward Spiral”'
The Liberal Order Isn’t Coming Back: What Next?

That Post-Liberal International Order World: Some Core Characteristics. Is there A Place For American Power? Is The Return To Great Power Rivalry Inevitable? Is this A Good Thing?

posted by the man of twists and turns (40 comments total)

Adam Tooze: If Western elites understood how the postwar liberal system was created, they’d think twice about asking for its renewal.

The crisis goes deep. It is not surprising that there should be calls for a new institutional design. But we should be careful what we wish for. If history is anything to go by, that new order will not emerge from an enlightened act of collective leadership. Ideas and leadership matter. But to think that they by themselves found international order is to put the cart before the horse. What will resolve the current tension is a power grab by a new stakeholder determined to have its way. And the central question of the current moment is whether the West is ready for that. If not, we should get comfortable with the new disorder.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:53 AM on March 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

The Bretton Woods negotiators were government officials, not businessmen or bankers.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:02 AM on March 27, 2019 [22 favorites]

Unfortunately, in the current atmosphere, the first thing you should probably do to save the Liberal Order is to drop the word "Liberal" from the term. Otherwise, roughly half the nation is going to reflexively reject any notion of saving it, if not work against saving it, because it's "liberal."
posted by Thorzdad at 11:09 AM on March 27, 2019 [8 favorites]

i think the two main choices in political economy today are mercantilist-dictatorship or capitalist-republic. the latter has lost legitimacy due to a combination of the fact that big business and the mega-rich have undue influence on government, triggering stagnant wages and lack of economic opportunity for workers, which has stoked rising racial resentment and fractured the social fabric. the social welfare state has to massively expand to give these systems legitimacy again. i dont see a big problem with some retrenchment and conflict avoidance til that happens. but it won't happen at all unless big business stops lobbying against it.

the question is what business (capital) will decide. is it better for the bottom line to have a system run by the rule of law (massaged by lobbying) and with social welfare protections paid for by the wealthy to keep the average joe content and safe, or just skip all that, accede to dictatorship, and bribe all the right officials? i think the answer is clearly the former, but i dont trust capital to reach that conclusion, or to do so before it's too late.
posted by wibari at 11:31 AM on March 27, 2019 [7 favorites]

We're talking: UN, NATO, WTO, IMF, World Bank

I run into Ikenberry, et al all the time, and I'm still pretty skeptical of the last three, along with American Hegemony / Liberal Order in general.

Just because Western Europe and North America haven't had shooting wars at home in a while, doesn't mean "Liberal Order" hasn't been responsible for profound loss of life around the globe and enormous mismanagement of natural resources in the name of Free Trade. The West just off-shored conflict along with most of the other undesirable aspects of production.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:51 AM on March 27, 2019 [19 favorites]

It seems like a fundamental mistake to describe the Liberal Order has having existed since the end of World War II, when most of its institutions (except the UN, which has very little real power on its own) spent their first fifty years as a system for governing relations between the capitalist bloc of powers and the anti-Soviet alliance, rather than exercising hegemony over the entire world.

Since the end of the Cold War, it seems to that the only real accomplishment that the Liberal Order can point to are the huge strides that the world has made in economic growth over the past 30 years. Given that all of that growth has come at the cost of a negative externality that now seems increasingly likely to exterminate industrial civilization, if not vertebrates in general, and that the Order has proved itself absolutely incapable of addressing, what real value can the Order be said to have?

The Liberal Order is intended to be a system for addressing collective action problems, but its solution to most urgent such problem in human history is the Paris Agreement, which is a suicide pact. What exactly is worth salvaging from that? We can pay all the lip service we like to human rights, but what's going to left of human rights once the world hits its first 100 million climate refugees? Its first billion?
posted by strangely stunted trees at 11:51 AM on March 27, 2019 [16 favorites]

Beginning in the wreckage of World War II, America established a set of global norms that solidified its position atop a rules-based international system. These included promoting democracy, making enduring commitments to countries that share its values, protecting allies, advancing free trade and building institutions and patterns of behavior that legitimize American power by giving less powerful countries a say.

Aside, presumably, from all the democratically elected governments that the US (and allies) worked hard to overthrow. And all the dictatorships it propped up for decades. And the US's refusal to actually sign on to the several of the most important international treaties of the last 70 years.

The liberal order is an interesting idea. That it was ever yet been something other than an ill-disguised cover for brutal international empire and local oligarchy is hard to take seriously. This argument feels like listening to your childhood friends try to decide whether Batman could beat up Superman. (To be clear, I'm not attacking all the linked articles or the post, which seems thoughtful and nuanced. I look forward to working my way through the rest of them.)
posted by eotvos at 11:54 AM on March 27, 2019 [11 favorites]

If a pugnacious Russia and rising China were a problem this whole thing would have been over a long time ago.

Question: would this article have had any traction during the recent eight year surge in U.S. policies or is it just a bunch of handwringing based on a couple of years of backlash?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:11 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

it is almost as if the liberal order that started in the postwar period, that achieved global hegemony in the 1990s, and that fukuyama declared to be the end of history wasn’t the end of history at all but instead a long weird pause in the real struggle between socialism and barbarism.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:23 PM on March 27, 2019 [20 favorites]

i mean shoot that would suck if that were true though, if liberalism were unavoidably unstable, doomed to collapse when the forces of wealth concentration inherent within economic decisionmaking through “free” market exchange inevitably produces the dismantlement of democracy and the establishment of rule by a vicious stupid barbarous oligarchy. because that would mean we must fight by all means necessary for the end of decisionmaking through capitalist markets and the establishment of genuine economic democracy. that would super super suck.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:28 PM on March 27, 2019 [23 favorites]

We're looking at much the same thing that happened with the material infrastructure in the USA.

It cost a great deal to build the current planetary political infrastructure, and it's worked so well [1] for so long that some of the more careless and thoughtless people have gotten into the habit of imagining that the current no shooting wars between major powers situation is natural and inevitable rather than being the result of a lot of effort and resources expended.

So they look at that effort and the expenditure of resources involved and say to themselves "this is a waste, we can save money by dropping all this useless and expensive stuff!"

With physical infrastructure we get increased power failures, bridges collapsing, water systems failing and delivering toxic sludge rather than clean water, etc.

With the political infrastructure failing we're going to get shooting wars between major powers. Major powers who all have nukes. We survived the first half century of atomic weapons just barely, and with that political infrastructure firmly in place and strong, and with vastly fewer powers having nukes.

Today? I'm not sure what's going to happen, but it's terrifying.

[1] Relatively speaking. Certainly better than the pre-WWII planetary political infrastructure did. Though also certainly not nearly so well from the standpoint of people in areas designated as OK to oppress and invade.
posted by sotonohito at 1:39 PM on March 27, 2019 [17 favorites]

We can pay all the lip service we like to human rights, but what's going to left of human rights once the world hits its first 100 million climate refugees? Its first billion?

Honestly, that's going to be the deciding factor as the decades progress. There will be nations/regions of nations that are comparatively prepared to address the realities of climate change (both physical and sociological) and the radical population shifts resulting from it, and there will be nations that are not. There will be nations that will crumble from these realities, and nations that will find ways to prosper and dominate. There will be nations that will extend a helping hand and open arms, and nations that will become overwhelmed by FuckYouGotMine-ism. Some, FuckYouGotMineGonnaTakeYours-ism.

The key to maintaining some semblance of representative democracy in the Western world will be to convince a sufficient percentage of each populace that The Camp of the Saints was not a documentary and its events are not playing out in real time.
posted by delfin at 2:13 PM on March 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

“Conservative” also has an unusual meaning here, as it means destroy the fuck out of everything.
posted by Artw at 2:35 PM on March 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

The order is clearly worth saving

o rly?
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:52 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

it's worth saving if what we have when it breaks is fascism. it's not worth saving if what we have when it breaks is socialism. it's worth saving for a little while if saving it for a little while makes it more likely that what we'll have when it breaks is socialism rather than fascism.

it's not worth saving if it's already dead and therefore impossible to save, which might be the situation right now.

it was never easy to unconditionally wish for the death of the liberal capitalist pax americana, even though the liberal capitalist pax americana was a total load of crap.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 4:09 PM on March 27, 2019 [9 favorites]

i mean, look around you. think about basically every news story from the last four years. that's what the breakdown of a global order feels like. it feels bad.

it feels super, super bad. it feels bad even when the global order that's breaking down was itself bad.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 4:14 PM on March 27, 2019 [21 favorites]

Given that all of that growth has come at the cost of a negative externality that now seems increasingly likely to exterminate industrial civilization, if not vertebrates in general...

Exactly. Not to mention the cost to peripheral economies treated as capital extraction pumps.

When I think of those fretting over the liberal order, I am reminded of a quote from a great philosopher: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
posted by likethemagician at 4:17 PM on March 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of my pending research project, to work out exactly what happened in the 70s that made neoliberalism and the End of History such an obvious choice for the 80s that even left-wing movements gave up on socialism. I am uncomfortable with advocating for a solution that was soundly rejected a generation ago, because I can't tell whether it's the right idea for the right time, or it's only favoured by people who forgot what happened last time (or are just generally not with it).

A key factor in the collapse of the Breton Woods agreement was the undermining, and then open dismantlement, of controls against free movement of capital. I talked to someone who worked in a shadow bank in the 60s and 70s - these were organisations that facilitated people moving their wealth around. They'd put money in this 'shadow bank' in one country, and then withdraw it in another country. One bank managed to work out a loophole around the Breton Woods rules that allowed them to move money around.

It's a key piece of the puzzle, I think, and it's not one I hear people talking about much. The link towards the rich having vast amounts of wealth in international tax havens is pretty clear, but I'm not sure how much this explains globalised sweatshops - most of them were before the 80s - and I don't know exactly how this system was dismantled, only that it was undermined. I don't even really understand how much tax havens were a part of the global economy in the Breton Woods days.
posted by Merus at 4:24 PM on March 27, 2019 [11 favorites]

So, in the future, aside from food security and adequate housing and socialized medicine, I just wanna know where I can legally get my porn & drugs, be an atheist (or theist but the fuck if I'm praying five times a day or going to church at 8am on a Sunday or paying a bald man for incense or wearing sidelocks or like inconvenient weird religious stuff), get gay married, and yell at the internet without fear of being pointlessly imprisoned or executed. If I can keep that stuff, and if we're not randomly killing brown people for no reason, and I don't choke on the air, I'm actually kinda down for whatever.

In other words, I support a liberal order that doesn't suck, or a replacement order that doesn't suck, and I oppose them if they suck.
posted by saysthis at 4:26 PM on March 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

Given that all of that growth has come at the cost of a negative externality that now seems increasingly likely to exterminate industrial civilization, if not vertebrates in general, and that the Order has proved itself absolutely incapable of addressing, what real value can the Order be said to have?

Always relevant cartoon is always relevant
posted by lalochezia at 4:45 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think that World Systems Analysis (~marxism using terms and concepts from dynamical systems theory) is pretty relevant to this discussion. Because "the demise of the post-war liberal order" in that theoretical framework is but a facet of the structural crisis of the world system, a hegemonic crisis. And this is leading to some form of global societal phase transition.
Here's Immanuel Wallerstein, in 2002, as the first cracks in the world system were becoming obvious, stating a point he has been making since the 80s at least, somewhat prophetically:

"If, as I have argued elsewhere, the modern world-system is in structural crisis, and we have entered an ‘age of transition’—a period of bifurcation and chaos—then it is clear that the issues confronting antisystemic movements pose themselves in a very different fashion than those of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. The two-step, state-oriented strategy has become irrelevant, which explains the discomfort of most existing descendants of erstwhile antisystemic organizations in putting forward either long-term or immediate sets of political objectives. Those few who try meet with skepticism from their hoped-for followers; or, worse, with indifference.

Such a period of transition has two characteristics that dominate the very idea of an antisystemic strategy. The first is that those in power will no longer be trying to preserve the existing system (doomed as it is to self-destruction); rather, they will try to ensure that the transition leads to the construction of a new system that will replicate the worst features of the existing one—its hierarchy, privilege and inequalities. They may not yet be using language that reflects the demise of existing structures, but they are implementing a strategy based on such assumptions. Of course, their camp is not united, as is demonstrated by the conflict between the so-called centre-right ‘traditionalists’ and the ultra-right, militarist hawks. But they are working hard to build backing for changes that will not be changes, a new system as bad as—or worse than—the present one. The second fundamental characteristic is that a period of systemic transition is one of deep uncertainty, in which it is impossible to know what the outcome will be. History is on no one’s side. Each of us can affect the future, but we do not and cannot know how others will act to affect it, too. "

Wallerstein has theorized that we have been for some time now living through this structural crisis of the capitalist world system, which leads to a bifurcation point with two possible successor pathways, what he calls Davos vs Porto Allegre, but he might as well have called Socialism vs Barbarism.
posted by talos at 5:09 PM on March 27, 2019 [8 favorites]

i mean, look around you. think about basically every news story from the last four years. that's what the breakdown of a global order feels like. it feels bad.

it feels super, super bad. it feels bad even when the global order that's breaking down was itself bad.

You're assuming that the breakdown of the global order is somehow not the necessary result of that global order's flaws.
posted by Saxon Kane at 5:34 PM on March 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

oh, i am well aware of that. liberalism is a crock. but say what you will about crocks, at least you can make red beans and rice in them.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 5:44 PM on March 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

the real struggle between socialism and barbarism

or like kurds vs. everyone?* (anacyclosis: can anyone break the wheel?)
posted by kliuless at 8:44 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

(while noting that “crock” is a euphemistic shortening of “crock of shit”, which you can also make beans in, but they won’t taste very good)

god damnit i just overthought a crock of beans
posted by murphy slaw at 8:54 PM on March 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

well, tbf you’ve overthought a crock of beans and/or shit.

the liberal order is a quantum superposition of a crock of beans and a crock of shit? is that a good metaphor?
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:39 PM on March 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'd be down for the collapse of many of these institutions if Putin wasn't ready to fill the voids they leave behind with destabilizing chaos.
posted by benzenedream at 9:42 PM on March 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

Exactly. Arab Spring looked like the hopeful overthrow of authoritarian regimes but the extremist/Islamist right-wing was better positioned to fill the power vacuum. The white supremecist right wing in the Western world is prepping, too.

Say what you will about the liberal order, there are plenty of evils to talk about, but in 30 years we’ve cut extreme poverty in half, doubled the number of kids receiving basic education, doubled the number of women in worldwide governance, and moved a little closer toward evidence-based and community-based decision making (One of the big buzzwords in the Bretton Woods orgs is “devolution.”) and we have nearly beat some of the world’s worst killers like malaria.

I’m seeing a lot of socialist posturing from my friends and acquantances who are late millenials and Gen Z but if you’re just recycling the old ideas of socialist rhetoric, you’re going to be overtaken by the bad actors. New bad actors will adapt to whatever socio-economic system you create. New 1%ers will emerge unless you design barriers to entry for the business of corruption. A corrupt co-op can do just as much damage as a corrupt corporation.

The real progressive radicalism is in radical anti-corruption and radical compliance, but nobody is going to attend the extreme banking regulation and ethics rally that I want to plan.
posted by Skwirl at 12:02 AM on March 28, 2019 [20 favorites]

One thing to keep in mind is that, as a rule, the right will **ALWAYS** be more prepared to move into a power vacuum. Because they're organized in a hierarchical pattern with clear leaders and authorities who can command and have at least a reasonable expectation of being obeyed.

While the left is more non-hierarchical, and as a result less able to quickly move to fill a power vacuum.

Obviously the right/hierarchical systems can be brittle and moribund, and the left/flat systems can often flow and seep into existing structures, so it's not inevitable that a power vacuum will be filled by the right.

But it is more likely.

There's a reason why, historically, revolutions tend to produce right wing, non-power sharing, outcomes and why more equitable forms of government tend to happen via evolution and change from within rather than revolution. Never forget that the USA is the product of an incredibly bizarre and rare circumstance: a revolution that produced a more equal government than previously existed.

Not to buy into right wing memes, but the left really does tend to win by subversion of existing structures, and the right really does tend to win by kicking things apart and making new structures.
posted by sotonohito at 5:32 AM on March 28, 2019 [15 favorites]

Sotonohito, I think that's an incredible insight.
posted by xammerboy at 7:49 AM on March 28, 2019

Not original to me, but I can't remember where I stole it from so I can't give credit.
posted by sotonohito at 7:55 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

"the USA is the product of an incredibly bizarre and rare circumstance: a revolution that produced a more equal government than previously existed"
Most national liberation struggles / revolutions had the same outcome. Most any government is more equal than colonialism. Algeria, Mexico, Haiti, all of South America, Greece, Serbia, Italy, Denmark, Ireland etc etc - even the French revolution had as an end result the abolition of absolute monarchy.
I would also argue that the Tunisian Spring uprising led to a more democratic Tunisia.
So I don't think the American revolution was an exception
posted by talos at 8:42 AM on March 28, 2019 [6 favorites]

"Those who are accustomed to govern themselves are easy to conquer, but difficult to rule, while those who are accustomed to being governed are difficult to conquer, but easy to rule." (italics mine, not Machiavelli's)
posted by Mogur at 8:56 AM on March 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

The real progressive radicalism is in radical anti-corruption and radical compliance, but nobody is going to attend the extreme banking regulation and ethics rally that I want to plan.

Sign me up.
posted by breakin' the law at 10:25 AM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

You guys are going to have the best rallies in the refugee detention center.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 11:03 AM on March 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

but in 30 years we’ve cut extreme poverty in half,

I long for the day we take this World Bank/American mega-billionaire propaganda and blast it into the sun.

Global poverty only appears to have significantly decreased if you use the arbitrary cutoff of $1.90 a day, which still means massive malnutrition and high infant mortality rates are present. Even a cutoff of $7.40 a day (which is still obscenely low) shows poverty has at best decreased from 71 to 58 percent, with 4.2 billion still in extreme poverty today.

But however you dice the numbers is not nearly as important as talking about who "we" is when talking about even that poverty reduction. Even the modest gains at erasing poverty globally over the last 30 years have overwhelmingly been made by one country: China.

While you can certainly debate whether China's turn to Dengism is capitalism or "socialism with Chinese characteristics," it's not uncontroversial at all to claim that China - either during Mao or after him - is decidedly not the post-WWII Western liberal order. Unlike the rest of the developing world, China's developmental gains since WWII have not been largely captured by elite Western powers (or for that matter, Japan.) And they were thus spared the fate of regions on the brunt end of the liberal order, places like South America* and Africa where poverty has either flatlined or in some regions actually increased.

*big surprise, the major exceptions to this trend were the anti-imperialist Pink Tide countries
posted by joechip at 2:05 PM on March 28, 2019 [16 favorites]

at least you can make red beans and rice in them

seasoned with OPPRESSION!
posted by Saxon Kane at 8:31 PM on March 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

The End Of "The End Of History"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:41 PM on March 28, 2019

if you read that like a meta-essay in the dying earth its elegiac tone is heightened :P

or, i guess like neal stephenson once remarked:

To the extent that they tolerate progress at all, it's on a 'what have you done for me lately' sort of basis.

So through the first part of the 20th century, we were able to keep them off balance with spectacular advances that couldn't really be argued with.

Here's an airplane. Argue with that.

I just saved your kid's life with penicillin. Argue with that.

Here's a mushroom cloud.

Polio vaccine.

A guy walking around on the moon.

Argue with those.

But when those inarguable triumphs stop coming, the anti-science people come back and begin making inroads to a degree that educated people can't even comprehend, for example, by denying that the moon landings ever happened. So it's entirely plausible that 100 years from now, it may be believed by 99% of all the people in the world that the moon landings were a hoax. And the idea that they actually happened may have the status of a totally marginalized conspiracy theory. That is a totally achievable result. And there are people who are actively working to make that kind of thing happen.

posted by kliuless at 12:21 AM on March 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

The End of the American Order - At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

The Geoeconomic World Order
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:00 PM on April 18, 2019