The National Interest: Politics After Globalization
By Philip Cunliffe
Polity, 160 pages, $19.95
The Collapse of Global Liberalism
By Philip Pilkington
Polity, 224 pages, $22.95
Following the Second World War, the United States and its allies built an international order based upon principles of economic openness, multilateral institutions, and liberal-democratic values. Emerging from the war largely unscathed, America used its unrivaled power to establish a network of institutions designed to govern interactions among states and to embed its vision of liberal modernity in global politics. Two eminent scholars would later give this system a name: the “liberal international order,” a phrase that has since come to define how we understand the postwar century. “Pax Americana” or the “American Century” was founded upon this hegemonic system. Now, it is engulfed in crises that many consider to be terminal.
Two recent books take up the challenge of theorizing international politics after liberalism: Philip Pilkington’s The Collapse of Global Liberalism and Philip Cunliffe’s The National Interest, both from Polity Press. Pilkington focuses on flaws within liberalism as an ideology, warning that Western civilization is crumbling from within. Cunliffe focuses his intervention on how supranational institutions and culture of global liberalism have undermined democratic representation within states. Taken together, the two books offer a foundation for a postliberal theory of international order.
Pilkington defines liberalism as “the Enlightenment ideology par excellence that sought to level and ‘rationalize’ social and political relationships.” He devotes the first half of the book to a theoretical critique, treating liberal ideology as a system of ideas that intermediates all relationships, whether political, social, economic, or moral. As an Enlightenment ideology, he argues, liberalism requires the rationalization of the “good life”: Everything related to the human experience must be measurable, mutable, contractual, subject to maximization, reducible to an equivalency, and above all, individualist in ontology. To deliver liberalism’s ideal of individual freedom, Pilkington argues, liberalism in its purest form seeks the liquidation of all hierarchical relationships. He distinguishes between a “soft liberalism” that accepts natural limits on its expansion and a “hard liberalism” that sees its leveling mission as the engine of universal moral progress.
“Soft liberalism lacks novelty.”
A reader may wonder why Pilkington dismisses the prospects of maintaining “soft liberalism,” suggesting it is incoherent in the abstract while being prone in practice to ideological purification into the hard variety. His answer is that soft liberalism lacks novelty. What is so liberal about liberalism, he asks, if our legal, traditional, and cultural practices are in large part derivative of a classical tradition? This mode of criticism mirrors one of the problems he identifies in liberalism: that it prioritizes abstract processes over practical outcomes. If soft liberalism is a fusion of “good hierarchies” in law and nature that imposes constraints on personalistic regimes, why should we care about this inconsistency at the theoretical level? While liberalism without universalism may not be ideologically clean, it seems better in practice than the known alternatives. Pilkington himself does not offer any grand theory to replace it.
Cunliffe offers a more prescriptive intervention. Asserting from the outset that “the age of globalism is over,” he argues that “we should replace the political, legal and infrastructural legacy of hyperglobalization—or globalism—with a new international order, based around the national interests of individual nation-states.” Those national interests, Cunliffe claims, were abandoned in favor of supranational liberalism. The National Interest reads as an Adam Curtis documentary adapted to the mode of an academic monograph, indicting globalization, financialization, and supranational integration as “means by which ruling elites sought to retreat from the democratic pressure of the nation.” Cunliffe makes a compelling case that technocratic elitism and populist nihilism are both downstream of a crisis of political legitimacy that can only be remedied through a restoration of national identity, associational life, and democratic representation.
Fundamental to both books is their shared historical narrative of the postwar era. The liberal international order is a longue durée project, with its component institutions creating conditions that shape the international system over time rather than acting as a 911 hotline that can solve emergencies. Cunliffe and Pilkington take this component of the liberal project seriously, something that escapes many academic critics of the liberal international order. They neither deny the existence of a liberal order nor claim that international institutions have no power—those exercises in windmill tilting are left to the academic realists. Instead, both books accept that an American-led international order took shape in the postwar period, reached its zenith in the 1990s, and is now in terminal crisis.
While mainstream narratives of the 20th century treat the neoliberal turn of the 1970s as a distinct break from postwar social democracy, Cunliffe and Pilkington both argue that the ills of the neoliberal era were a logical evolution of this earlier project. For Pilkington, such evolution is inherent to liberal thought. He frames neoliberalism and Marxism both as variants of “hard liberalism” in that both centralize control of the economy while atomizing the citizenry. While this comparison is likely to lose some academic readers, it works for the point Pilkington is making. Neoliberalism’s flavor of hard liberalism involves the technocratic management of interest rates and wages, while the free-flowing international trade and capital serves the Darwinian elevation of “competition” in liberal thought. The “disembedding” of social purpose from markets was, Pilkington argues, a purer manifestation of liberal ideas than postwar social democracy.
Cunliffe also describes the neoliberal turn in terms of continuity rather than a rupture, focusing more on the institutions of international order than the ideas that shaped them. Like Pilkington, he points to the manipulation of interest rates by Paul Volcker, while also emphasizing the significance of the British Labour party’s defeat and eventual surrender to the European Economic Community. “The quid quo pro,” writes Cunliffe, “was helping to build an EU that constitutionalized neoliberalism, embedded in the so-called ‘Four Freedoms’ at the transnational level.” The free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across European borders meant that such movements were no longer the prerogative of states. The locus of authority shifted from the nation to a technocratic supranational institution. This shift, according to Cunliffe, fractured the ties between rulers and the ruled, a disconnect that would accelerate in the following decades.
This common historical narrative signals a rejection of an orthodoxy that sees the neoliberal turn as a departure from postwar liberalism. Understanding the 20th century as a continuous path from social democracy to neoliberalism implies that attempts to remedy a broken liberalism are futile. The present “crisis of liberal order,” by this account, is not the result of a divergence from liberal principles, but adherence to them.
Cunliffe and Pilkington then trace their narratives through the liberal triumphalism of the 1990s and the Western response to Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine. Pilkington, trained as a macroeconomist, traces this thread primarily through economic blunders in each period. Optimism about an economy increasingly dependent on the service sector while wage share declined and trade deficits exploded followed directly from the liberal worship of competition and progress. The liberal order has been in decline ever since, but sanctions and asset seizures in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine accelerated de-dollarization and revealed the weaknesses of the US-led economic system.
“The liberal order has been in decline ever since.”
Cunliffe’s approach places more emphasis on how liberal universalism has become the guiding principle of intervention and conflict. History’s end in the early 1990s meant a rapid dilution of the national interest. The fall of the Soviet Union, Cunliffe notes, accelerated “the sublimation of what had previously been the West or Free World into the ‘international community.’” He goes on to characterize the subsequent era of multilateral interventions as “a series of expeditionary operations justified in increasingly grandiloquent altruistic grounds,” or a privileging of the global interest over the national. Echoing Pilkington’s critique of liberalism prioritizing abstract fairness, Cunliffe demonstrates that the powerful were no longer serving the interests of their constituents, but rather claiming to be acting in the service of all humanity.
Particularly striking in Cunliffe’s account is his interpretation of how the national interest has been deployed in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Noting similarities with how the Habsburg Empire substituted folk nationalism in place of meaningful self-determination, he points out how prolific the national symbols of Ukraine have become among Western elites. In a particularly striking passage, Cunliffe observes that “all the ugly chauvinism associated with the peak nationalism of the 20th century was still present in Western society,” but restricted to domains exclusively of concern to the literati. Cancellation of Russian novelists, composers, and conductors did nothing for the Ukrainian cause, but it did allow consumers of highbrow culture feel as though they were on the front lines of civilizational conflict. But this strange national chauvinism by proxy was not deployed in service of Ukrainian national interests, but rather in favor of absorbing Ukraine into supranational structures. In short, national imagery has been reworked to encourage the abandonment of national representation. In the case of Ukraine, 19th century-style imperialism is being rejected in favor of a new and improved 21st century variety.
Pilkington and Cunliffe converge in their critiques of the atomized societies liberal individualism has produced. Poverty, human biology, material wealth, and the church are all hierarchical structures, and as such must be destroyed for liberalism to fulfill its mission. In Pilkington’s telling, social atomization is inherent to the liberal project itself. This approach is distinct from but compatible with the relational approach adopted by Cunliffe. Cunliffe describes the decline of associational life and meaningful political communities as a consequence of globalization but not necessarily as a core component of it. Both cosmopolitanism and populism are seen as byproducts of the hollowing out of representative institutions.
The postliberal corpus has not yet entered the mainstream of literature on international relations. These two works offer a foundation on which to build. Taking liberal order seriously and offering substantive disagreements does considerably more to advance both academic and policy discourse than the current intellectual strategy of denial. Moreover, postliberal critics of our current international order may share more with liberals seeking reforms than either camp would admit. For those looking to what might come after the liberal international order as well as those searching for how liberalism may be reformed, each of these books offer a vantage point that liberals and non-liberals alike would be remiss to ignore.