Liberal international order

Based on Wikipedia: Liberal international order

Picture the world in 1945. Europe lies in ruins. Fifty million people are dead. The great powers that had dominated global politics for centuries—Britain, France, Germany—are exhausted, bankrupt, or occupied. Into this vacuum steps the United States, now possessing half the world's industrial capacity and the only nuclear weapons on Earth. What does it do with this unprecedented power?

Here's where the story gets interesting. Instead of simply conquering or extracting tribute—the traditional spoils of victory—American planners attempted something genuinely novel. They built a system.

The Architecture of Cooperation

This system goes by many names. Scholars call it the liberal international order, or the rules-based order. Critics call it American hegemony with better marketing. Supporters call it the foundation of the most peaceful and prosperous era in human history. All of them are partially right.

At its core, the liberal international order rests on three pillars. First, political liberalism: the idea that individuals have inherent rights, that the rule of law should constrain power, and that states—regardless of size—possess equal sovereignty. Second, economic liberalism: open markets, free trade, and the free movement of capital across borders. Third, liberal internationalism: the belief that countries should solve problems collectively through institutions rather than through force alone.

These abstract principles became embodied in a alphabet soup of organizations that would reshape global politics. The United Nations, founded in 1945, gave every nation a voice in collective security discussions. The International Monetary Fund stabilized currencies and provided emergency lending to countries in financial crisis. The World Bank channeled capital to developing nations. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—later becoming the World Trade Organization—gradually lowered barriers to commerce between nations.

None of these institutions were charities. They served American interests by creating a stable environment for trade, preventing the kind of economic nationalism that had contributed to the Great Depression and ultimately to war. But here's the paradox at the heart of this order: by institutionalizing its power rather than exercising it nakedly, the United States gave other countries a stake in the system and a voice in its operation.

The Geometry of Power

The political scientist John Ikenberry, one of the most influential theorists of this order, describes what he calls "constitutional" international politics. Just as domestic constitutions limit what governments can do to their own citizens, the liberal international order created rules that limited—in theory, at least—what the most powerful states could do to weaker ones.

This is a subtle but profound idea. In traditional balance-of-power politics, smaller states survive by playing great powers against each other. Under the liberal order, they gain protection from rules and institutions that even the hegemon—the dominant power—has agreed to respect.

The arrangement was never as selfless as its architects sometimes claimed. American companies benefited enormously from open markets abroad. American military bases, nominally protecting allies, also projected American power around the globe. The dollar's role as the world's reserve currency gave the United States extraordinary financial privileges.

Yet the order was also never as purely self-serving as its critics sometimes suggest. Germany and Japan, the defeated enemies of 1945, were rebuilt and welcomed as partners rather than subjugated as colonies. Their economic miracles became showcases for the system's benefits. The security umbrella provided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO—in Europe and bilateral alliances in Asia allowed these countries to invest in economic growth rather than massive military establishments.

This was, as the historian Geir Lundestad memorably called it, "empire by invitation." Countries chose to participate because membership offered real benefits.

The Cold War Complication

There's a significant debate among scholars about when the liberal international order actually began and what it really encompassed. Some trace its origins to wartime planning, particularly the Atlantic Charter of 1941, in which Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill articulated principles of self-determination and free trade. Others point to 1945 and the creation of the United Nations. The realist scholar John Mearsheimer argues provocatively that the liberal order only truly emerged after 1991, when the Cold War ended.

This isn't just academic hairsplitting. The question matters because during the Cold War, the "liberal" order coexisted awkwardly with some distinctly illiberal practices. The United States overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. It supported authoritarian regimes across the developing world. It fought brutal wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Defenders of the order argue that these were Cold War necessities, departures from liberal principles driven by the existential threat of Soviet communism. Critics counter that the liberal rhetoric always masked more traditional great power behavior. The truth probably lies somewhere in between: the order was genuinely liberal in some dimensions—particularly in relations among the wealthy democracies of North America, Western Europe, and Japan—while remaining quite conventional in its treatment of the rest of the world.

What the Order Actually Ordered

Let's be concrete about what the liberal international order actually accomplished.

Trade exploded. Global exports as a share of world economic output roughly tripled between 1950 and 2000. Hundreds of millions of people climbed out of poverty, particularly in East Asia. Countries that participated most fully in the trading system—South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore—transformed from agricultural backwaters into wealthy industrial economies within a single generation.

War between great powers essentially ceased. This is perhaps the most remarkable fact of the postwar era and one we now take for granted. Between 1914 and 1945, the great powers fought two apocalyptic conflicts that killed roughly a hundred million people. Since 1945, despite countless proxy wars and regional conflicts, the major powers have not directly fought each other. Nuclear weapons deserve significant credit for this "long peace," but so does the dense web of institutions and interdependencies that make war between, say, France and Germany, simply unthinkable today.

Democracy spread. In 1945, there were perhaps a dozen genuine democracies in the world. By the early 2000s, there were over a hundred. The collapse of fascism in Southern Europe in the 1970s, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, and the democratic transitions across Latin America, East Asia, and Africa in subsequent decades transformed the global political landscape.

The correlation between these developments and the liberal order is clear. The causation is more contested. Did countries democratize because of American pressure and the incentives of the liberal system? Or did they democratize for internal reasons, with the international environment simply being permissive rather than determinative?

The View from Elsewhere

The liberal international order looks rather different depending on where you're standing.

From Washington, it appears as a remarkable achievement of enlightened statecraft—a system in which American power was exercised through institutions rather than coercion, benefiting everyone while maintaining peace. From Brussels or Tokyo, it has been a security umbrella that allowed economic development to flourish under American protection, occasionally chafing at American dominance but fundamentally accepting it as the price of stability.

From the Global South—the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the picture is more complicated. The scholar Amitav Acharya argues that many countries outside the West perceive the liberal order as a narrow system promoting Western interests, culture, and values at the expense of local traditions and identities.

This perception has historical roots. Many of the institutions created after 1945 were built by colonial powers even as they were maintaining or only gradually dissolving their empires. The rhetoric of self-determination coexisted with the reality of imperial rule. The Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—often imposed conditions on developing countries that served Western financial interests.

Yet the picture is not simply one of Western imposition. Scholars have increasingly recognized that weaker states helped shape the order, not just accept it. Latin American jurists contributed foundational ideas to international law. African and Asian nations used the United Nations as a platform to advance decolonization. The push for human rights often came from smaller states, not just from the major powers.

The scholar Marcos Tourinho identifies three strategies that weak states used to influence the construction of the order: resistance to American dominance, building community among themselves, and invoking norms that even the hegemon felt compelled to acknowledge. The liberal order was never simply dictated from Washington; it was negotiated, contested, and shaped by actors with very different interests and capabilities.

Cracks in the Foundation

Something has shifted in recent years. The confident expansion of the liberal order in the 1990s and 2000s has given way to anxiety about its future. The challenges come from both outside and inside the system.

Externally, rising powers—particularly China and Russia—increasingly contest core elements of the order. China has built its own development bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and launched the massive Belt and Road Initiative to finance infrastructure across Eurasia. These projects aren't necessarily in opposition to the existing order, but they do create alternatives to it. Russia has been more explicitly hostile, annexing Crimea in 2014, interfering in Western elections, and promoting authoritarian governance as a legitimate alternative to liberal democracy.

The scholar Thomas Ambrosio argues that organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation serve partly to insulate member states from pressure to democratize, creating a kind of authoritarian mutual support network.

But China's relationship with the order is more complex than simple opposition. China has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of the open trading system. Its manufacturing exports grew exponentially precisely because markets in the United States and Europe were open to Chinese goods. Why, as the scholar Björn Jerdén Rühlig asks, would China seek to overthrow a system from which it profits so enormously?

The answer may be that China doesn't want to destroy the order so much as reshape it to accommodate its own political system and expand its influence within it. Chinese leaders bristle at American efforts to promote democracy and human rights, seeing them as threats to the Communist Party's rule. They want an international system that protects national sovereignty—meaning, in practice, the right of governments to treat their citizens as they see fit without external interference.

China also accuses the United States of hypocrisy. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, conducted without United Nations authorization on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction that proved false, remains Exhibit A in this indictment. If the United States can bypass international law when it finds it inconvenient, critics ask, why should other countries treat that law as binding?

The Enemy Within

Perhaps more troubling for defenders of the liberal order are the challenges arising within liberal democracies themselves.

Populist movements on both the left and right have questioned fundamental elements of the order. Free trade, once celebrated as an unambiguous good, now faces criticism for hollowing out manufacturing communities in wealthy countries. Immigration, a natural consequence of an interconnected world, has provoked backlash in countries from the United States to Hungary to the United Kingdom. International institutions are attacked as undemocratic impositions that override the will of national electorates.

The economist Karl Polanyi, writing in 1944, warned that markets left to operate without social protections would generate political backlash. He called this the "double movement": the expansion of markets inevitably produces demands for society to protect itself from market forces. Some scholars argue that the current populist wave represents exactly this kind of backlash against hyperglobalization—an economy that became too integrated too fast, without adequate attention to those who were harmed.

The concept of "embedded liberalism" describes the postwar compromise in which open international markets were combined with domestic welfare states that cushioned citizens against economic disruption. As long as the gains from trade were widely shared and the losers were compensated, political support for openness could be maintained. Some scholars argue that this embedded liberalism has been eroded—that the benefits of globalization have accrued to elites while the costs have fallen on working and middle classes—and that this erosion explains the current backlash.

Rules for Whom?

There's a deeper philosophical question lurking here. The legal scholar John Dugard has argued that the very concept of a "rules-based international order" operates in tension with international law itself.

This might sound paradoxical—isn't international law exactly the kind of rules that the order is supposed to be based on? But Dugard's point is subtle and important. When American officials invoke the rules-based order, they often mean tacit agreements among Western states that were never endorsed by the broader international community. The amorphous nature of these "rules" makes it easier for powerful countries to claim compliance while violating formal international law.

The United States, for instance, champions the law of the sea as a cornerstone of the international order—while refusing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It promotes human rights abroad while exempting itself from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. It invokes rules against territorial conquest—while conducting military operations without United Nations authorization.

This is the "double standards" critique that developing countries frequently level at the liberal order. The rules seem to apply differently to those who wrote them than to everyone else. And when the rules become inconvenient, the most powerful actors simply ignore them.

Legitimacy and Its Discontents

Order, whether domestic or international, ultimately depends on legitimacy—the widespread perception that it is rightful, proper, and worth defending. A political system maintained purely by force is unstable and expensive; one accepted as legitimate requires far less coercion to sustain.

The scholars Gellwitzki and Moulton argue that the liberal order endures partly through "institutionalized political myths"—shared narratives about liberal values, sovereignty, and Western leadership that confer legitimacy and guide how states behave. These myths are genuinely influential in the West, where they align with domestic political cultures. But they have less purchase elsewhere, where the narratives of Western benevolence seem to conflict with histories of colonialism, intervention, and economic exploitation.

This matters because an order perceived as illegitimate by much of the world is inherently fragile. It may persist as long as the dominant power remains strong enough to enforce it, but it will face constant resistance and will collapse when that power weakens.

The Realist Objection

Not everyone agrees that the liberal order is even a useful concept for understanding world politics. Realist scholars, who emphasize the importance of power and self-interest over institutions and ideas, have mounted a sustained critique.

John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent realist critic, argues that the liberal order was always bound to fail. Liberal democracies, he contends, cannot resist the temptation to spread their values abroad, which inevitably provokes resistance from countries that don't share those values. The attempt to promote democracy and liberal economics worldwide—especially after the Cold War, when no rival superpower constrained American ambitions—overextended the order and generated the backlash we now observe.

Charles Glaser has questioned whether the concept of the liberal order has any analytical value at all. It's so broad and vague, he argues, that almost any international situation qualifies—as long as states recognize each other's sovereignty and interact through some kind of rules. Traditional theories of balance of power and bargaining, he suggests, better explain how states actually behave.

Patrick Porter goes further, arguing that the order was never really liberal at all—it was a coercive system dressed up in appealing language. The countries that chose to participate did so because they had no alternative, not because they genuinely embraced liberal values.

Aaron McKeil of the London School of Economics offers a different perspective. He finds these realist critiques insufficient because the alternative policies they recommend—restraint and offshore balancing—would likely produce more proxy wars and would lack the institutional frameworks needed to manage great power competition. In other words, whatever the flaws of the liberal order, the alternatives might be worse.

The Order's Order

So what is the liberal international order, really?

It is, as Ikenberry notes, not one thing but many things—a layered accumulation of rules, institutions, agreements, and norms built up over decades. Some elements reflect the naked interests of powerful states. Others represent genuine compromises negotiated among many actors. Some have weathered challenges and remain robust. Others are fraying or have already collapsed.

It is also, inescapably, a contested concept. Different scholars define it differently, emphasize different elements, and reach different conclusions about its nature, origins, and prospects. Minimalist definitions characterize it simply as an open, rules-based system. Maximalist definitions include democracy promotion, human rights, and specific decision-making procedures.

Perhaps the most honest assessment is that the liberal international order is an ideal type—a conceptual model that no real-world arrangement perfectly matches but that illuminates important features of post-1945 international politics. Like all ideal types, it clarifies some things while obscuring others. It highlights the cooperative and institutional dimensions of world politics while downplaying the coercive and conflictual dimensions that never went away.

An Uncertain Future

Where does the liberal order go from here? Predictions are hazardous, but a few observations seem warranted.

First, the order is unlikely to disappear entirely. The institutions built since 1945 are deeply embedded in the fabric of international life. Countries have organized their economies, militaries, and diplomacies around participation in these institutions. Unwinding them would be enormously costly and disruptive.

Second, the order will probably become less liberal and less American. As power shifts toward Asia, as China seeks greater voice in international institutions, and as developing countries assert their interests more forcefully, the rules and norms that govern international life will inevitably evolve. The question is whether this evolution can occur peacefully, through negotiation and accommodation, or whether it will require conflict.

Third, the order's future depends significantly on what happens within its core member states. If populist movements succeed in pulling the United States and European countries away from international cooperation, the order will weaken regardless of external pressures. If these countries recommit to international institutions—while addressing the legitimate grievances that populism reflects—the order may prove more resilient than current anxieties suggest.

The liberal international order is, in the end, a human construction. It was built by deliberate choices and can be sustained or abandoned by deliberate choices. It has never fully lived up to its ideals, but those ideals—human dignity, open exchange, peaceful resolution of disputes, collective action on shared problems—remain worth striving for. The question is not whether the order will change, but what it will become.