Dilemmas and Pathways of Liberal International Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 201

But where state sovereignty is eroded and states themselves are highly penetrated and
embedded in wider international networks, this statist impulse for capacity-enhancing rules
and institutions is lost. More than liberal internationalists might admit, the postwar system
of rules and institutions was embraced by political leaders in advanced industrializing states
because it strengthened the ability of governments to realize their liberal goals. When the lib-
eral internationalist agenda shifts its attention to the management of post-Westphalian global
relations, this underlying political support for rule-based order is not brought into play. 4 The
recent global financial crisis and economic downturn has exposed these destabilizing dangers
and revealed anew the tensions between the international openness and national stability. The
social bargain that was built into the foundation of liberal hegemonic arrangements has given
way to a more freewheeling, neoliberal world market system. 5 Under these more recent con-
ditions, liberal order—or at least the market features of this order—seems to undercut rather
than support the state's ability to make good on its domestic social and political responsibil-
ities.
If this argument is correct, the best pathway forward for liberal international order is, per-
haps ironically, to emphasize rules and institutions that strengthen the state. A rule-based in-
ternational order will be more stable if its rules enhance rather than erode the ability of states
to protect their borders and govern their economies and societies.
State Sovereignty and Universal Rights
Liberal internationalism has been a great champion of state sovereignty and self-determina-
tion. At the same time, it has also offered grand visions of a global order united by universal
rights and protections—universal principles that are potentially quite subversive of the legal
and political claims of state sovereignty. Therein lies the tension. Is liberal international order
fundamentally committed to the rights of nations and peoples to sovereign self-determina-
tion? Or it is committed to more transcendent political rights and aspirations that turn state
sovereignty into a more contingent and circumstantial arrangement? State sovereignty puts
legal-normative limits on the ability of the international community to intervene and interfere
inside other states. In contrast, universal rights and protections—lodged within the interna-
tional community—put limits on the claims of states to sovereign noninterference. A chal-
lenge for the liberal international project is to find ways to reconcile these divergent visions.
In the nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth century, liberal international-
ism was a body of ideas—and a political project—aimed at giving peoples around the world
the right of political independence and self-determination. At the end of World War I, liberal
internationalism embraced Westphalian state sovereignty. The nation-state was championed.
Ideas of progressive liberal order during this period were closely associated with anti-im-
perial movements and struggles for national self-determination. Woodrow Wilson and other