Patrick Porter

The False Promise of Liberal Order


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authority. Unlike earlier orders, this was a truly international world system. It was founded primarily on rules. It opened up a once-closed world. It provided public goods like freedom of the seas, and stable monetary systems. Like all past hegemons, America regarded its settlement as not only legitimate, but sacred.3

      The apparent fall of this system is all the more distressing to its defenders, given that the ruin seems to come primarily from within. Rather than being conquered by an external aggressor, America’s order self-destructs. Western citizens lose faith in the project and fall prey to false consciousness. Demagogues, aided by sinister foreign powers, whip them up into a backlash. As Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, warned: ‘The rules-based international order is being challenged … not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor, the US.’4 Or, in the words of the idea’s principal theorist, G. John Ikenberry, it is as though the citizens of an unsubjugated Rome are tearing down their own city. An unsettling analogy for a supposedly non-imperial superpower.

      We can speak of an American-led order. But a liberal one? We should be wary. For every order, including America’s, has a shadow. It is one of hypocrisy and the threat of force well beyond the bounds of liberal norms, be that threat brazen or quiet, astute or naive. Hegemons will have their prerogatives, whether this means insisting that others open their markets while protecting their own, demanding that their sovereignty be respected while conducting raids into others’ backyards, or denouncing election meddling while practising it. Not for nothing did Hedley Bull define order as ‘imperialism with good manners’.5

      To be clear, the target here is not the minimal ‘baseline’ claim that an American-led order was better than the alternatives. It clearly was. It was better for the world that America became the dominant power, rather than its totalitarian competitors, even if the exercise of that dominance varied in its wisdom. As hegemonies go, America’s was the least bad by a decisive margin. It was a bulwark against twentieth-century totalitarianism; it won more than half the Nobel Laureate prizes, pioneered Jazz, helped rebuild Europe, invented the polio vaccine and took humanity to the moon. American hegemony was obviously less atrocious, and more constructive, than European colonial, Axis or communist empires. Some forget that America created this world through agonizing compromise. Its relative moral superiority, without power politics, cannot explain America’s rise. It cannot prevent its fall. And the belief in one’s indispensability can lead to the fall. Athenian primacy in the ancient Hellenic world was more open and free than Persian autocracy, but that did not prevent its selfdestruction. To confine ourselves to the comfort that, at least, the Pax Americana was better is like retelling the national story with frontier massacres and the Civil War left out.

      Even America’s most glorious achievements – with liberal ‘ends’ – were not clean pluses on a balance sheet, made by liberal ‘means’. They relied on a preponderance of power, a preponderance that had brutal foundations. America’s most beneficial achievements were partly wrought by illiberal means, through dark deals, harsh coercion and wars gone wrong that killed millions. No account of US statecraft is adequate without its range of activity. Coups, carpet bombings, blockades and ‘black sites’ were not separate lapses, but were part of the coercive ways of world-ordering. Prosperity generated pollution on an epic scale. Even today, when the USA is keener to limit its liability and is more reluctant to wade ashore into hostile lands, it bombs countries with almost routine frequency. And central to its repertoire are economic sanctions, a polite term for crippling economic punishment, at times even siege and ‘maximum pressure’, inflicted on whole populations and often not with liberating effects. Possibly one-third of the ‘open’ world’s people live in countries under economic warfare of some kind.8