Crisis of the Old Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 10

Liberal International Order
Over the last two hundred years, international order has been profoundly influenced by the
rise of liberal democratic states. This liberal ascendancy has been manifest in the rise in the
power, influence, and global reach of liberal great powers—and in the international order
that they have built. Through the Victorian era and into the twentieth century, the fortunes of
liberal democratic states flourished—and with the growth and expansion of this liberal core
of states and its organizing principles, world politics increasingly took a liberal internation-
alist cast. This liberal ascendancy took a dramatic jump forward in the hands of the United
States after World War II, when the United States built postwar order within the Western
world—and extending outward—on liberal ideas and principles. 16
The liberal ascendancy has moved through two great historical eras dominated, respect-
ively, by Great Britain and the United States. Each emerged as the leading power of its day
and pushed and pulled other states in a liberal direction, looking after the overall stability
and openness of the system. In the nineteenth century, Great Britain led in giving shape to
an international order marked by great power, imperial, and liberal arrangements. In the dec-
ades following the Napoleonic war, the major states of Europe agreed on a set of rules and
expectations that guided great-power relations. Great Britain and the other major states also
pursued empire in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. At the same time, Great Bri-
tain—beginning with its famous repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846—oversaw the expansion of
a global system of commerce organized around open trade, the gold standard, and freedom
of the seas. 17
In the twentieth century, liberal order building became more explicit and ambitious. At
different moments over these decades, the United States made efforts to create or expand the
architecture of an open and rule-based order. Woodrow Wilson brought a vision of a liberal
world order to the post-World War I settlement, anchored in the proposal for a League of Na-
tions, although it failed to take hold. When the United States found itself again in a position
to build international order in the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman extended and
ultimately reinvented the liberal international project. During the postwar decades, this order
itself evolved as the United States and the other Western liberal states waged the Cold War,
modernized their societies, and rebuilt and expanded economic and security relations across
the democratic capitalist world. After the Cold War, America's international liberal project
evolved yet again. The bipolar world order gave way to a global system dominated by the
Western capitalist states. If liberal order was built after World War II primarily within the
West, the end of the Cold War turned that order into a sprawling global system. States in all
the regions of the world made democratic transitions and pursued market strategies of eco-
nomic development. Trade and investment expanded across the international system. 18