Rest in Peace Liberal World Order

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

What depresses Western globalist intellectuals?

Last March, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas published a landmark article, Rest in Peace, Liberal World Order, in which he states, paraphrasing Voltaire, that the fading liberal world order is no longer liberal, world, or even order.

In the mouth of 66-year-old Richard Haas, this is a serious statement. He has been president of the Council on Foreign Relations for 15 years. Previously, he headed the political planning service at the US Department of State, worked at the Pentagon, was special envoy for the Northern Ireland settlement, coordinator for Afghanistan, special assistant to George W. Bush, senior director for the Middle East and South Asia at the National Security Council, political consultant during conducting operations in Iraq "Desert Storm" and "Desert Shield". He is the author of numerous books on foreign policy and governance, professor, and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“Liberalism is in retreat. Democracy is feeling the effects of growing populism. Parties of political extremes have won positions in Europe. The vote in the United Kingdom in favor of leaving the EU signals the loss of elite influence. Even the United States is experiencing unprecedented attacks from its own president on the country's media, courts and law enforcement agencies. Authoritarian systems, including China, Russia and Turkey, have become even more powerful. Countries like Hungary and Poland are not interested in the fate of their young democracies. We see the emergence of regional orders … Attempts to establish a global framework have failed,”writes Richard Haas. He has made alarmist statements in the past, but this time between the lines of one of the leading globalist intellectuals, one reads dejection.

The head of the American Council on Foreign Relations is disheartened by the fact that Washington is unilaterally changing the rules of the game, not at all interested in the opinions of its allies, partners and clients. “America's decision to abandon a role it has played for more than seven decades was a turning point. A liberal world order cannot survive on its own when there is neither interest nor the means to maintain it. The result will be a world less free, less prosperous, and less secure for both Americans and others.”

In such a view of the world, Richard Haas is not alone. His CFR colleague Stuart Patrick agrees with the assertion that the United States itself is burying the international liberal order and is doing it with China. If earlier in the United States they hoped that the processes of globalization would gradually transform China, then the transformation did not happen at all as expected in America. China has undergone modernization without Westernization, and now it is expanding its influence in Eurasia. For the United States, these processes are painful.

“China's long-term goal is to dismantle the US system of alliances in Asia, replacing it with a softer (from Beijing’s point of view) regional security order … China's Belt and Road Initiative is an integral part of these efforts … outrageous legal claims across nearly all of the South China Sea, where he continues his island-building activities and is also involved in provocative actions against Japan in the East China Sea,”writes Stuart Patrick. He calls the United States "an emaciated titan no longer willing to shoulder the burden of global leadership," resulting in a "ragged liberal international order with no champion willing to invest in the system itself."

Both Richard Haas and Stuart Patrick blame Donald Trump for this state of affairs in the world, but here we need to look deeper.

Stein Ringer, a Norwegian statesman with experience in international organizations, in the book “The People of Devils. Democratic Leaders and the Problem of Obedience”noted that“today the exceptionalism of American democracy is determined by a system that is dysfunctional in everything that is necessary to ensure social agreement and loyalty … An orgy of out-of-control has led to the fact that capitalism plunged into crisis. Money interferes with politics and undermines the foundations of democracy itself … American politics no longer depends on the power of the average voter, if it ever depended on him at all … American politicians realize that they are bogged down in a quagmire of moral decay, but there is nothing they can do."

Trump is a reflection of the dysfunctional nature of the American system. This is the American Gorbachev, who started perestroika at the wrong time. He tries to support the national body with palliative means, but the disease is so serious that radical measures cannot be avoided.

The situation extends to Europe as well. Stein Ringer continues: “Transnational financial institutions have monopolized the political agendas of individual countries in the absence of any global political force to control them. The European Union, this largest experiment in building a supranational democratic union, is collapsing …"

It is characteristic that in non-Western systems that used the recipes of liberalism, for example in Latin America or Southeast Asia, there is no such panic. Probably, the reason is the fundamental difference between civilizations. The French philosopher Lucien Goldman argued about this in his 1955 work "The Secret God": in Western culture, he wrote, "neither in space, nor in community, the individual finds no norm, no direction that could guide his actions. ". And since liberalism by its nature continues to mechanistically "liberate" the individual from all and all kinds of restrictions (class, religious, family, etc.), a crisis in the West along this path is inevitable. The powerful rise of populist movements, protectionism, conservatism is just a natural instinct for the self-preservation of peoples. The upheavals experienced by the West are immanent in the Western project. And the ideological void that the West is experiencing will inevitably be filled with other socio-political projects.

The likelihood that the decline of the liberal world order marks the end of the globalist mirage is indeed high.