Professor John Ikenberry - Does the Liberal International Order have a Future?

[Music] welcome i'm delighted to welcome you all here today for this seminar asking does the liberal international order have a future with our guest today professor john eichenberry my name is ben tanra and i'm professor of international relations at the school of politics and international relations here at university college dublin just a couple of housekeeping details to note before we kick off please note the event is being recorded and is on the record professor eichenberry will speak for about 20 minutes and the remainder of the hour will be devoted to our discussion based on your comments and questions which you can submit at any time through the q a function on zoom please just don't forget to identify yourself and your professional affiliation when you submit your question or comment you're also most welcome to share our conversation on social media using the at double iea handle uh it is a real pleasure and honor for me today to uh to welcome and introduce professor eikenberry he is the albert g milbank professor of politics and international affairs at princeton university and as a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences he's the author of eight books most recently a world safe for democracy liberal internationalism in the making of the modern world order sorry which was uh published in 2020 by yale university press this was a book which was deservedly judged as best of the year by the foreign policy magazine in that text he's asked some tough questions about the relationship between global order democracy and unfettered economic globalization and their potential reconciliation and a couple of those themes i hope he hits on today john is a world-renowned theorist of international relations and perhaps the theorist on the nature and future of the liberal order he's also that rare breed of scholar who moves seamlessly between advanced scholarship and public policy his public policy service is extensive having worked at the state department's policy planning staff and at a number of the us's leading think tanks from the carnegie endowment the woodrow wilson center the brookings institute and now currently with the council on foreign relations john you are very welcome to our virtual double iea in dublin we're really looking forward to your contribution the floor is yours thank you ben and to the iea just uh thank you so much for hosting me it's a real pleasure to to be here here being virtual uh un unfortunately but uh uh uh saving uh in-person meeting for another time it's it's at least great to see uh see you on the screen and to have this chance to talk about world order uh liberal uh the liberal world order and uh its future um let me start really by uh the observation that many of us share that that the world itself is um in transition that the the old order that we've we've seen over the last 75 years clearly is under stress breaking down in crisis different ways of looking at it more broadly across the world in the shadow of the pandemic and the shadow of global warming there seems to be a more general lost uh confidence in collective solutions to collective problems the the multilateral mindset the the liberal international internationalist mindset seems to to be uh uh on its back heels a sense that we aren't really performing at the level that we were in earlier eras and there's a sense of a kind of world historical moment uh not least by what's happened in the last uh year uh the the the growing uh antagonism with great powers that are are clearly ill liberal that do not wish the western oriented liberal-oriented uh order well russia uh and uh china to to start but iran and north korea is making itself known again so there's a kind of encirclement of this troubled order basic questions are being asked as i try to pursue in my new book about what are the sources of order can liberal democracy make a comeback can capitalism and democracy be brought back into balance in the context of inequality and dysfunction and dislocation and what is the future of liberal internationalism as a as a as a mode of organizing the world a cooperative organization of the global system uh and so that that really is the the set of questions that we're we're debating today in my in my work uh this recent work i've i've tried to take the long view to kind of go back and try to put moment to moment the tick tock of today in in broader historical context and in doing so uh drawing the observation that the the liberal international order did not begin in 1989 nor really in 1945 it's been a longer struggle by by liberal democratic states and uh partners over at least 200 years to to work towards building a a global order that would be congenial for for these emerging polities liberal liberal democracies there have been extraordinary moments of of of good times and bad times golden eras and crises uh close run things uh think of the 1930s and in many ways if you look over the longer period 1989 and the 90s the the unipolar liberal moment looks more anomalous that the longer period is one of of great contestation a kind of uh agonistic uh a story uh of challenge of conflict uh of adaptation uh think about the 1930s and 40s which i have gone back to in my current uh uh focus uh the last time there was this great disruption disruption or this disjuncture in the global system uh uh in the in the sense that uh liberal democracy as a way of life was was was really at a kind of extinction moment think about the generation of 1945 in their own uh professional lifetimes they were trying to make sense of a world that had just seen the great depression the rise of total war the rise of fascism the rise of totalitarianism the holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb all within a very small part of world history and yet and yet that generation of liberals uh ira katz nelson's brilliant book desolation and enlightenment tells the story of this generation of policy liberals who who wanted to rebuild open societies that was their their task and indeed they did it and so we can take some uh lesson drawing from that period a usable past from the way liberal democracies have struggled in the past and found solutions my book really tries to do a number of different things that i want to talk about very briefly uh uh in the next while um first of all to to try to convince you uh that there is something called liberal internationalism as a way of thinking about the world ideas and and projects and a history secondly to to be honest about its successes and failures it has been a mixed record uh uh for certain and there's a lot of criticism that's well deserved uh and then thirdly to try to chart a path to how can we go forward and they're all in my remarks really saying a few words about the biden administration which in many ways is the embodiment of what a an earnest well-meaning american administration that that wishes the liberal order well what it's doing so we can draw some diagnostic conclusions from how it's going but what is liberal internationalism well the first move in my book really is to try to re-orient what that means uh the the most famous phrase to embody that that idea is is wilson's woodrow wilson's a world for democracy and it's typically meant and it's been passed down as a as a kind of slogan that entails a a pro program of spreading democracy worldwide and what i argue in my book is that's not the best reading that in fact you can read that phrase literally as to make the world safe for liberal democracy to survive so safety is the is the key word to create a kind of environment an ecosystem uh a geopolitical setting for liberal democracies to to do things to survive and and that is my major intellectual contribution i i think to to think about the the global order as not the global order as a whole but as a a subset of of that order which is a kind of ecosystem in which liberal democracies and various kinds of hybrid regimes are working to create rules and institutions to manage their mutual vulnerabilities liberal democracies are incredibly complicated uh in some sense designed to misfunction uh think about liberal democracies as as being built around principles that are inconsistent liberty and equality um individualism and community uh uh sovereignty and interdependence it's it's it's a it's the the the the flaws are built into the the system and indeed celebrated because we we want we want multiple things that are in some sense intention and part of the liberal order is creating an environment an ecosystem where uh these polities can can get engaged in that never-ending balancing and trade-off exercise and to aggregate their power for uh dealing with larger environmental crises geopolitical and otherwise in their their periphery so i try to recast liberal internationalism as a pragmatic opportunistic problem-solving tradition and and then think more specifically about what this means and let me just say that the next point i want to make is really that i acknowledge the the difficult times that those of us who who fly the banner of liberal internationalism who think this is there's something here that shouldn't be shouldn't be uh ignored um there's a sense that there has been a troubled recent period and i i would identify three uh moments or or or events you might say that that have put liberal internationalism on the defensive uh raise questions about its its viability one is the iraq war which uh in many ways was uh a war that came out of uh liberal unipolar america uh and and so uh the the failure of that war uh uh in many ways discredited at least part of the internationalist elites in in in washington uh uh certainly on the the the the republican side the 2008 financial crisis in many ways did the same for uh internationalist elites on the democratic side uh a kind of twin crises that that's that weaken the ability of our leaders to stand up and say we should think of our national interest in global in internationalist terms and then the the liberal bet on china that we could use liberal strategies of inclusion incorporation inviting and indeed welcoming china into the liberal order and and by doing so we would we would uh see china make this transition it didn't happen and so we have uh before us a mixed record i i spend a lot of time uh trying to say okay what has worked uh what has been the record is there something here that we should we should um learn from and preserve and i think there is we i think that the liberal order uh has been a a great world historical success a creating over decades with states across the atlantic and then even further afield across the pacific around the world creating a kind of coalitional order a kind of platform with lots of layers lots of institutions economic security political environmental and creating capacities for problem solving through integration and various kinds of collaboration i have my big six the sixth great accomplishments of the liberal order uh the reopening the world economy after world war ii creating a framework for germany and and japan to to reorient their great power status as civilian great powers even today germany is different uh than the other traditional great powers and so too japan that's good in many respects uh and it's only possible because of this framework that i've been describing germany and france were able to overcome their historic differences and starting with the the coal and steel community and and create a foundation for the launching of the european union trilateral cooperation took root uh during and after the cold war the so-called g7 countries and fifth the uh uh the the platform that i've been describing creating a kind of welcome home for uh states that are making transitions uh think of south korea think of other countries in east asia in east eastern europe central europe latin america southern europe countries that have over the course of the 80s and 90s the number of democracies doubled and they found a docking station they found a place to go where they could get assistance security economic and so forth and then finally china has had its best decades in two millennia under the auspices of what we used to call pax americana so even china uh in ways we may want to describe has seen this as as a framework that has lifted boats and created opportunity so what went wrong so very quickly moving to the the next kind of looking at the critique and then what happens uh going forward my own view is that it's a kind of uh failure of success or problems of success during the cold war we often forget that the liberal order uh the the free world as it used to be called was really a world a a subset a kind of club of countries that uh were inside of a bipolar order and that or ordering uh larger ordering environment created incentives and capacities within the the this coalition of states to do things uh it was kind of a mutual aid society uh it created uh opportunities uh capacities uh intergovernmental relations to manage interdependence obviously security for sure through the alliance system and so there was this kind of club club character to liberal order uh people the countries knew who was in and who was out and what it meant to be in and how to get in after the cold war ended that club started to break down and uh as i argue in the later part of my book uh uh the the liberal order became more like a shopping mall where you could wander in and go to the apple store or what have you and and do very specific things get things from the the complex of of institutions but not buy into what i would call a suite of rights and responsibilities and china of course is an example of this where and this is my international relations theory uh uh point for the day i i i've been fairly light on on theory the logic of conditionality the logic of conditionality i think is something that we have to reckon with as a feature that was part of the success of the liberal order and that logic of conditionality has has has broken down as countries can kind of come and go pick and choose a buffet of possibilities and so there isn't a kind of disciplining uh uh logic uh at work today so just to kind of move towards uh what next i i think what the burden of my argument is that um that we need to if the liberal order um as i've defined it is to survive and re reinvent itself for the next era it will some sort of club-like quality is going to have to be rebuilt and of course this is why i'm i'm actually quite bullish and happy to see biden uh talking about democracies thinking about the world in part as a as as as organized around a coalition of of liberal democracies that drive the reform agenda uh not anything blockish like the cold war but uh but the ability of countries to work together the the the the future of world order this will be my most sweeping statement today will be defined by which group of states can build coalitions partnerships alignments groupings that have a certain robustness to them and that can move move things uh if not mountains at least move uh move uh movements and politics in directions they want to go now i think that has to be at least a two level game you have to work to build uh relations with like-minded states while you simon simultaneously reach out to to other states including uh russia and china this is not a narrow zero-sum world it's a mixed-some world with lots of of fraught relations and things that have to be done together even if we don't agree on on values and so forth so let me just end by talking a little bit about about the the first year of the biden administration it's been a a very challenging year partly by uh because of missteps uh but but larger reasons as well uh russia poised for a military intervention in ukraine contesting the security order in europe iran breaking out of of a nuclear deal that the united states unfortunately walked away from very very bad mistake on america's part china growing growing aggressiveness uh intimidating taiwan cracking down on democracy in in hong kong the yogurts in the west it's it's not a it's not a a liberal story uh and it's one that we would have to worry about uh as the the potential potentially the largest economy in the world north korea of course is not going away either so their head the inbox you might say is full and getting full fuller and uh and indeed as some say the inbox may be on fire i do think that biden has has the in the instincts uh that uh are constructive from both an american and a global perspective uh returning to the paris accords uh rejoining the who putting arms control back on the agenda the u.s uh disastrously i think has walked away from from uh from arms control cold war arms control that that really provided a kind of architecture of restraint um the afghan withdrawal was a was clearly a mistake or at least the methodology of withdrawal was a mistake but i would say that the there is the good news is there really is a vision here i do think that that biden uh has a at least a game game planned if not a grand strategy um and i think uh it's a three-fold uh three-fold uh game plan uh one is to rebuild the the political capital of the united states uh creating partnerships and capacities to deal with global problems in some sense capacity building creating social capacity come what may in other words it's the creating partnerships and working relations without regard to what the specific problems are just re-weaving the the the relationship so that we can put ourselves on a firmer footing to deal with whatever comes down the road diplomacy george schultz one of my favorite american secretaries of state who i he's a princetonian undergraduate and i i met him several times back when he was at stanford in his last years he he talked about diplomacy as gardening and others have done that as well that metaphor is widely used biden is a gardener i think uh not always a droid but i think tony blinken feels that even more so he he was during the obama years uh deeply involved in creating partnerships on on afghanistan and other thorny issues so building a rolodex and and needing it's not surprising that biden in his u.n speech in early october mentioned the term partnership 16 times and alliance uh eight times so that's the the language i think and it reflects a strategy of of of of building uh this this this coalition secondly i think there's a deeply felt felt sense that liberal democracy really is in trouble that and not least in the united states that we could see uh a real retrogression that we've already seen a a preview of happen again and a trump restoration or or something that would lead to to an even more kind of dysfunctional and uh quasi-authoritarian system i think there's a a great deal of worry and a sense that we've got to show that democracy works before uh the the the opposite forces gather their that regather their strength so democracy is is integral to the success of the international order uh in that sense we really are like the period of fdr franklin roosevelt when uh everything was tied together the struggle against uh what fdr called the gangster regimes uh that were uh at war uh in the 40s was in part to bring like-minded states together to secure our own beloved institutions that we feel deeply deeply passionate about open societies with the rights and freedoms that i don't know how we get to the end of the 21st century if there isn't some modicum of those kind of constitutional rights and protections uh of open information free free association uh so that's number two and then finally there is a kind of focus on china uh uh uh whether you call it a hawkish policy towards china it is a a policy of of of strategic competition uh uh seen china as a strategic rival or what what some would call and indeed some europeans have been calling a systemic rival because it's not just a military competition indeed it's not primarily a military competition it's a comprehensive uh uh competition of ideas uh of of what what what i would call modernity projects um uh uh uh certainly uh um also a competition for for technology supremacy whether our regimes and institutions will be friendly to liberal democracy or friendly to autocracy in the ccp uh multilateralism and institutions are not value neutral they're not value neutral so it there is a struggle over it doesn't sound as heroic as world war ii but it's a struggle over principles and rules for next generation technology for for these sorts of issues and it matters if you have coalition partners because it matters if you have critical mass if you have platforms if you're a first mover if you can establish network externalities that create advantages so this is the world we're in and i think it's ironically good for the liberal democracies to see that there is something else out there that could replace them uh it's a kind of sobering moment so in an ironic way china is doing a favor to the liberal democracies by by articulating uh a different path uh that uh while um uh the contest goes on we can clarify our own choices in that context so i i don't think we're it's inevitable that uh that we will uh re re-enter a cold war but i do because i think we're so much more interdependent than the us and the soviets were in that earlier period and we do need to to ultimately find a way to work on global warming which will uh sink all of us literally uh if we don't find a common solution and and pandemics are not going to go away even if this one does so there is a global agenda that has to be pursued while simon simultaneously uh we find ways to preserve our institutions that are so important to us uh so i think that's the that's the message of my book i think uh there's there's a lot of uh uh there's a there's actually a kind of uh possibility for an optimistic uh ending to this story but but we're going to have to work hard and roll up our sleeves if we're going to move in that direction so ben that's that's what i'll say for today and look forward to questions and comments [Music] you

Channel: IIEA

Views: 7,455

Keywords: Democracy, Liberal International Order, Multilateralism, Liberal Democracy, China, Russia, Illiberalism, Politics, Ireland, Europe, USA, International Politics, IIEA

Id: ZLIkpNGDejw

Length: 27min 39sec (1659 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022