Conclusion: The Durability of Liberal International Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 238

ending. Still, if the liberal order is not in crisis, its governance is. Yet, given the fundamental
weakness of the past international orders—brought down by world wars and great econom-
ic upheavals—the challenges of reforming and renegotiating liberal world order are, if any-
thing, welcome ones.
The authority crisis of the liberal order is not a crisis that fulfills the predictions of past
critics of liberal order—that it would be an idealist enterprise that simply could not take hold
in the actual world of anarchy and power politics. The crisis of liberal order today is precisely
the opposite of this classic charge. It is because the world has become less realist than liberals
anticipated that its problems ensue. That is, the liberal project has succeeded all too well. The
international system under conditions of liberal hegemonic rule has boomed, expanding and
integrating on a global scale, creating economic and security interdependencies well beyond
the imagination of its postwar architects.
In effect, this is not an “E. H. Carr moment”—that is, a moment when realists can step
forward and say that liberal idealists had it all wrong and that the return of anarchy and war
reveals the enduring truths of world politics as a struggle for power and advantage. 1 This was
E. H. Carr's famous indictment of Woodrow Wilson and the liberal peacemakers of 1919.
Carr was right that the conditions were not right for Wilson's liberal-order-building moment.
But he was wrong in the sense that Wilson and other liberals did, in fact, offer a coherent vis-
ion of how open markets, collective security, and international rules could operate in a world
dominated by war-weary democracies. It was not a project built on dreams; it was built on a
theory about the way the world worked and how it could be made to work. In thinking that
he was witnessing a worldwide democratic revolution that would provide the foundation for
a new system of stable peace, Wilson was simply ahead of his times. Later generations of
American and European order builders picked up this liberal agenda.
Regardless of the validity of Carr's claims, today's crisis is not a crisis of the sort he iden-
tified. Today's problems cannot be explained or solved by a return to realist thinking and ac-
tion. Today, the crisis of liberal international order is more of a “Karl Polanyi moment”—that
is, the liberal governance system is troubled because of dilemmas and long-term shifts in that
order that can only be solved by rethinking, rebuilding, and extending it. 2 Polanyi understood
the problems of the nineteenth-century Western order in these terms. Indeed, he saw deeper
contradictions and problems in the organization of market society than exist today. What is
similar about the two eras, as Polanyi would no doubt argue, is the way in which the geo-
political and institutional foundations that facilitated an open system of markets and societal
exchange outgrew and overran those foundations, triggering instabilities and conflict. In oth-
er words, liberal order has generated the seeds of its own unmaking, which can be averted
only by more liberal order—reformed, updated, and outfitted with a new foundation.