One of the great dramas of world politics over the last two hundred years has been the rise of liberal democratic states to global dominance. This liberal ascendancy has involved the extraordinary growth of the Western democracies from weakness and minority status in the late eighteenth century to wealth and predominance in the late twentieth century. This rise occurred in fits and starts over the course of the modern era. In the nineteenth century, Great Britain was the vanguard of the liberal ascendancy, becoming the leading industrial and naval power of its day. In the twentieth century, the United States was transformed from inwardness and isolation into the dominant world power. During these decades, world wars and geopolitical struggles pitted the liberal democracies against rival autocratic, fascist, and totalitarian great powers. The Cold War was a grand struggle between alternative ideologies of rule and pathways to modern development. With the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the liberal ascendancy reaches a worldwide crescendo. The United States and a far-flung alliance of liberal democracies stood at the center of world politics rich, powerful, and dominant. The Western democracies did not just grow powerful and rich. They also made repeated efforts to build liberal international order that is, order that is relatively open, rule-based, and progressive. Led by Great Britain and the United States, they championed free trade and took steps to create multilateral rules and institutions of various sorts. Open markets, international institutions, cooperative security, democratic community, progressive change, collective problem solving, shared sovereignty, the rule of law all are aspects of the liberal vision that have made appearances in various combinations and changing ways over the decades and centuries. In the decades after World War II, the United States engaged in the most ambitious and far reaching liberal order building the world had yet seen. It was a distinctive type of liberal international order a liberal hegemonic order. The United States did not just encourage open and rule based order. It became the hegemonic organizer and manager of that order. The rise of new power centers will come with new agendas for organizing the basic logic and principles of international order. China is the obvious protagonist in this emerging grand drama. Rather than becoming a stakeholder in the existing order, China will use its growing power to push world politics in an illiberal direction. It is the underlying openness and rule based character of international order that is in transition
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:21:09 +0000