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Introduction The first thing to say about liberal order is that it hasn’t been that liberal. Since the Second World War, the production of subjects obeisant to the rule of liberal institutions has depended on illiberal and authoritarian methods – not least on the periphery of the world system, where conversion to Western reason has been pursued with particularly millenarian zeal, and violence. The wishful idea of an ever more open and global market economy has been continuously undermined by its champions, with their subsidies
crises. Resistance aside for now, what’s often left out of this narrative is precisely how the organisation of violence takes considered financial and material investment to ensure its sustainability over time. Indeed, the very idea of a liberal peace that emerged through this progressive account of human cohabitation proved to be a complete misnomer, as it wilfully and violently destroyed illiberal forms of planetary life. Violence is the Result of Difference The idea of racial violence is part of a broader schematic that connects to competing claims to
challenged. The ground gained by so called ‘illiberal democracy’ is prodigious, not merely in terms of the number of countries where illiberal politics is alive and thriving, many of which are in the West (the US, much of the EU, the UK) but in terms of the creeping legitimacy that attends right-wing solutions to ongoing social and political problems. This is nowhere truer than in the major new power in the international system, China, where a version of state-controlled capitalism co-exists alongside a principled rejection of liberalism. The
illiberal directions. Today, many countries on both sides of the Atlantic are facing decisions about what kind of democracy they want. Is it liberal democracy, based on the North Atlantic Treaty’s value statement and the values articulated by the European Union? Or is it what has been called “electoral democracy,” and which one European leader proudly calls “illiberal democracy”? This seems to mean that elections are held, but the rule of law and individual liberties, like freedom of speech and the press, are limited. Decisions by NATO member states, including the United
have little choice. In addition, this move toward accommodation with Russia strengthens illiberal pro-Moscow parties throughout Europe and produces several national administrations that lean more toward fascist forms of governance than liberal democracy. Variants There are, of course, endless variants on the three scenarios. The continuity option could produce no forward movement and leave the alliance essentially where it was in 2020. Or, it could move more rapidly toward more radical positive change. The radical positive change scenario could, despite this
democracy and its Western moorings, the illiberal tendencies in many NATO/EU states, the decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (Brexit), and the persistent burden-sharing problem. All these issues persisted and were joined by a major crisis of confidence for the transatlantic alliance with the election in November 2016 of Donald J. Trump as the president of the United States. Turkey’s drift away from the West As one of the countries that have long-struggled with NATO’s value-driven preconditions, Turkey today is most in danger of violating them
This chapter investigates the reception of narratives about the rise of a multipolar order in Japan, a state once touted as a potential pole of power in a post-Cold War multipolar order in its own right. Instead, the chapter argues that the central framing of debates over multipolarity today in Tokyo is one of fear – fear of the end of unipolarity and the rise of multipolarity signalling an end to the assured peacefulness and prosperity of Northeast Asia, Japan’s immediate neighbourhood. It argues that there is a complex and important interaction between the explanatory and normative sides of the Japanese discourse on multipolarity. How the global distribution of power does and should manifest itself in polarity terms is often difficult to disentangle. Significantly, the chapter highlights the larger debates about order – in particular a specific conception of a liberal rules-based order – that Japanese decision-makers and analysts bring to bear on debates about a future multipolar distribution of power. This implies that the unipolar, US-led order is itself defined by a liberal outlook that needs to be preserved as the global order becomes increasingly multipolar. This chapter highlights the difficulties for Tokyo in holding on to this narrative through the Trump administration’s decidedly illiberal path in its foreign policy and its aftermath.
potential and the limits of the EU’s ability to be a provider of soft security for the EE states. The final section before the conclusion examines new threats to EU unity, and thus to its capacity to be a soft security provider, posed by the efforts of external powers like Russia, China, and the United States to divide and weaken the EU, and by the growth of illiberal nationalism within the EU and Eastern
This chapter is structured as follows. The second section will define and contextualise liberal internationalist principles. The third section will then turn to liberal internationalists’ constructions of an image of Germany as an inherently illiberal state during the First World War. They proceeded in a remarkably similar, tripartite manner and almost always began with postulating a causal connection between German philosophy and the unfolding of German militarism, which was then furthered by the illustration of the illiberal nature of the German state and finalised
’ (for example, delegative democracy, incomplete democracy, electoral democracy, illiberal democracy, and so on).7 In the period 2000–05, the Putin presidency has been engaged in a process of ‘state strengthening’, or centralisation, whereby the control of the Kremlin over many aspects of life has apparently been increased. The regions are now overseen both by presidential plenipotentiaries and heads of executives who owe their positions to presidential appointment. The national broadcasting media are under the control of the state, either directly or through state