Orders of Exclusion by Kyle M. Lascurettes;

Author:Kyle M. Lascurettes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Birthing the Liberal International Order

for many observers of history, the liberal order forged after the Second World War appears to be fundamentally distinct from international orders of the past. Policymakers and scholars often attribute this break to a simple, single development: the United States of America becoming the first truly liberal hegemonic actor in history. A “distinctive type of international order was constructed after World War II,” argues John Ikenberry. At this moment of opportunity, “the United States engaged in the most ambitious and far-reaching liberal order building the world had yet seen” to create “a hierarchical system that was built on both American power dominance and liberal principles of governance.” While America would hold some privileges as its natural leader, “its power advantages were muted and mediated by an array of postwar rules, institutions, and reciprocal political processes” where, for the first time, “weaker and secondary states were given institutionalized access to the exercise of [the hegemon’s] power.”1 Many prominent American politicians and foreign policy practitioners—as well as a good number of IR scholars2—agree with this sentiment, which has practically been embraced as conventional wisdom. When it comes to international order building, this consensus suggests, the United States of America simply “does it differently.”

One of the many elements that make this case unique is the fact that there were actually multiple layers of order built after World War II. More specifically, there was a universalist global order vision—manifested in the United Nations system—and a smaller Western order vision—comprised of the Bretton Woods economic and NATO security systems. Observers often posit that these layers were complementary, representing an evolving but not contradictory strategy by the United States to build a multilayered institutional order that would preserve world peace and enhance global prosperity. For instance, Ikenberry conceives of the Western vision as an inner layer, a “Western core of the order . . . built among democratic societies and organized around layers of institutions” that would gradually allow the thicker principles of that core to diffuse outward to other regions of the world.3

On both of these points reflecting the conventional wisdom, I beg to differ. Against the first point, I argue that the order changes advocated by American leaders after the Second World War—while they were certainly the most far-reaching and complex the world has ever known—can nonetheless still be best explained by the logic of excluding threats. That makes American motives for order construction unexceptional compared to those of prior order builders. Against the second point, I argue that the Western order was never intended to fit within the global one. Instead, Western order emerged as an alternative to global order only when that system unexpectedly failed to deliver on what its founders had envisioned. The story of order building after World War II, I posit, is the extraordinary transition away from a vision of global order to a more circumscribed and exclusive Western vision of order.

Bringing both of these points together, I argue in this chapter that this transition

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