The Liberal World Order was once a realist idea

With the election of president Trump, the exit of Britain from the European Union, and the rising popularity of nationalist agendas across the West, headlines which foresee the ’End of the Liberal World’ and return of ’Geopolitical Realism’ have become standard fare. Yet the story of how a legally and morally coded structure of global governance came about in the second part of the twentieth century, is not one of blue-eyed liberals with naive faith in human reason. In a new book chapter, Senior Researcher at DIIS Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Canadian colleague Michael C. Williams argue that what is now hailed as the liberal world order was once a realist project, build by post war thinkers humbled and sobered by the horrors of two world wars, a holocaust and the prospects of potential nuclear annihilation. The chapter unpacks how and why these thinkers sought to prevent the oncome of a fear-driven, populist and Caesarian kind of mass politics in America – and why a narrowly nationalist, egoist or geopolitical foreign policy was to them the very opposite of ’realism’: of wisdom, caution, or long-term maintainance of self-interests. If we are to keep our heads clear in current debates about ‘realism’, ‘democracy’ or ‘the national interest’ the chapter concludes, we would do well to return to the period in which the concepts were forged – a period in which the absence of a 24/7-media-cycle scoped out more time to reflect upon important distinctions and potential implications.

The book chapter is part of Jean-Francios Drolet and James Dunkerley’s co-edited book American Foreign Policy: Studies in Intellectual History (2017). It is the overall point of the book, that if we want to understand the structures, norms and orders currently coming apart in world affairs, we need to understand the ideas which gave rise to them. The book, in other words, is a case for the claim that ideas and not just ’structure’ or ’capabilities’ matter in international politics.