Crisis of the Old Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 22

conflicts of the twentieth century.” Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the
Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2. William McNeill observes that the rise of the
modern liberal West was propelled by twin revolutions beginning in the late eighteenth century: the industrial and
democratic revolutions. “Taken together, the result was to raise the power and wealth of the Western style of life so
far above those familiar to other civilizations as to make resistance to Western encroachment no longer possible.”
William H. McNeill, A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 411.
17 It is important not to exaggerate nineteenth-century British liberal internationalism. The British orientation to-
ward international order was both liberal and illiberal. It was liberal in its support for global free trade, although
even this commitment coexisted with imperial preferences. The British empire—which encompassed almost half
the world—was decidedly illiberal, being composed of colonies and other dependencies, none of which were demo-
cracies or run liberally. As Gary Bass observes, there was a “monstrous disconnect between the growing liberalism
in Britain and the brute authoritarianism in the British Empire.” Nonetheless, in his study of British and European
nineteenth-century humanitarian interventions, Bass does find liberal impulses behind British military operations to
stop atrocities in troubled areas such as Greece, Syria, and Bulgaria. Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Hu-
manitarian Intervention (New York: Random House, 2008), quote at 343-44.
18 For explorations of the rise and spread of Anglo-American liberal internationalism, see Mark R. Brawley, Lib-
eral Leadership: Great Powers and Their Challengers in Peace and War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1993); Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twenti-
eth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas that Conquered the
World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002); Walter
Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007);
and David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
19 For a depiction of this “great contest” that emphasizes the contingent character of the Western liberal triumph,
see Azar Gat, Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How It Is Still Imperiled
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
20 For a survey of types of international orders, including nonliberal varieties, see essays in Greg Fry and Jocinta
O'Hagan, eds., Contending Images of World Politics (New York: St. Martin's/Macmillan, 2000).
21 See Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in Americ-
an Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave, 2002); and John Milton Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World:
Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
22 These various dimensions of liberal order are explored in G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal Internationalism 3.0:
America and the Dilemmas of Liberal World Order,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 1 (March 2009), 71-87.
23 On the society-of-states approach to international order, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society . A more de-
tailed survey of these ideas is presented in chapter 2.
24 For a discussion of principles of great-power restraint and accommodation as they were manifest in the Cold
War settlement, see Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “The Unraveling of the Cold War Settlement,” Survival
(December/January 2009-10).
25 Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2006).
26 For surveys of these waves of empire debate, see Michael Cox, “Empire in Denial? Debating U.S. Power,” Se-
curity Dialogue 35, no. 2 (2004), 228-36; and Cox, “The Empire's Back in Town—Or America's Imperial Tempta-
tion—Again,” Millennium 32, no. 1 (2003), 1-27.
27 Harold Laski., quoted in Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York:
Penguin, 2004), 68.