David Lake, Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse, eds, Challenges to the Liberal International Order: International Organization at 75 (International Organization, 75, Special Issue 2), 2021.
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This special issue of International Organization, guest-edited by David Lake, Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the journal, is an EU-US collaboration that originated in workshops at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 6–18 September 2018, and the Freie Universität Berlin, 12–14 June 2019. Two introductory articles are followed by seven on ‘internal political challenges’ to the Liberal International Order (LIO), four on ‘internal economic challenges’, and three on ‘external challenges’, across 440 pages in all. It is a significant publication – more so than its editors intend: billed as reflecting on collective blind spots in IR’s approach to the LIO, it reveals rather more than they suppose. In avoiding as it must the specific blind spot around which liberal institutionalism is constructed, it re-creates a fundamentally ideological and deeply contradictory account of the liberal approach to global capitalism. Nothing recognisable as IR survives.
Four of the sixteen articles contribute relatively little to the project of identifying blind spots, so I deal with them briefly first. In the second introductory article Tourinho, according to the editors, ‘deconstructs the myth of US leadership in the construction of the postwar LIO, arguing that even middle powers, and especially Latin American states, played a key role in the formulation of the Westphalian and liberal international orders’ (Lake 2021, 252). On Tourinho’s account, the LIO was not a settlement between the ‘Great Powers’, but one in which the US relied on Latin American allies and the inter-American system to shape the new world order to its liking – a point worth making, but not exactly new, and entirely consistent with the idea of hegemonic leadership on the part of the US. In the last article on internal political challenges, Búzás argues that the commitment to racial equality in the LIO is still thin, formal, and fundamentally limited by the doctrine of domestic jurisdiction in Article 2(7) of the UN Charter (Búzás 2021, 451), and that ‘traditional’ (white supremacist) and ‘transformative’ coalitions are equally dissatisfied with it but deadlocked. True enough, but rather skimming the surface – as Búzás himself acknowledges, he barely engages with a wealth of recent critical work (for example, Anievas et al 2015, Vitalis 2015, Hanchard 2018). On external challenges, Colgan, Green and Hale propose that the politics of climate change is best understood not in terms of collective action problems, but through a ‘dynamic’ analysis of asset de/revaluation as sectors dependent on fossil fuel lose out and those who benefit from its elimination gain. To me, they don’t attend sufficiently to the fact that fossil fuel producers and users are among those investing most heavily in alternative technologies, but anyway this is not a blind spot, and they don’t use the term. And closing the same section and the volume, Weiss and Wallace suggest that the extent to which China involves itself with international issues varies from case to case, depending (positively) on how far the issue concerned seems to affect its survival prospects (‘centrality’), and (negatively) on how far there is domestic division and contestation over the issue concerned (heterogeneity). Their conclusion, that China will be ‘more likely to show flexibility on issues that are less central’ (Weiss and Wallace 2021, 659), didn’t take my breath away and again is tangential to the main theme of the special issue.
On blind spots, then, I would start with the set of articles on ‘internal economic challenges’ to the liberal order. They depict hostility to ‘globalisation’ on the part of labour and the working poor in the United States in particular as perfectly rational, given the experience of abandonment, economic stasis and decline resulting from the policy choices of governing elites over decades. Goldstein and Gulotty argue convincingly that the US trade regime from its post-WWII origins gave priority to exporting interests, disrupting the organizational opportunities and voice of import-competing groups, and failing to provide remedies for workers and firms who faced competition and dislocation from foreign goods, because ‘decision makers felt the need to undercut the voice of certain groups in order to lead the world economy’ (Goldstein and Gulotty 2021, 525-6). Where the rights of workers were raised in negotiation, they were generally traded away at a later stage, while the limited adjustment programme set up under the 1962 Trade Assistance Act had ‘no effect on education or other more permanent determinants of long-run success’ for the minority of displaced workers that it supported (ibid, 546). In short, ‘there was insufficient attention to the domestic consequences of deep market liberalization and the growth of inequality’, in part due to the conviction that adjustment would take place automatically and smoothly (ibid, 547, 554). Flaherty and Rogowski (2021, 497) complement this analysis, finding that any ‘backlash against shocks from immigration and imports is conditional on high inequality, disappearing where inequality is low’: ‘Rising immigration, it seems, poses a populist threat to the LIO only when paired with an income distribution that is, or has become, highly unequal’ (ibid, 510). They conclude that ‘the Left’s failure to enact adequate redistribution has pushed many of its own voters to support right-wing parties, whose protectionist policies offer a plausible alternative to redistribution’ (ibid, 516). Mansfield and Rudra contribute an account of the divisive effects of digital technologies, arguing that ‘digital advances in information and communication technology (ICT) precipitated the spread of global supply chains and greatly enhanced the ability of multinational corporations (MNCs) to link capital in advanced industrialized countries with labor in less developed countries (LDCs)’: ‘digital ICT has harmed low-skilled workers in developed economies – where EL [embedded liberalism] thrived during the initial decades of the Bretton Woods era – by fueling the premium that employers place on skills, training, and education, and allowing firms to replace them with cheaper labor in the developing world’. Although their focus is too time-limited and narrowly monocausal, their insistence that technological change has contributed significantly to the ‘erosion of support for multilateralism and the liberal international economic order in the advanced industrial world’ (Mansfield and Rudra 2021, 559-60) at least places front and centre the dynamics of global capitalist development (or the expansion of the world market) and the implications for capital and labour. In the other paper in this set, Broz, Frieden and Weymouth present detailed original empirical analysis (for which Sophie Hill gets credit, if only in small print) documenting the community-level association between long-term economic and social decline in the United States and Europe and electoral support for populist and nationalist parties. ‘Populism,’ they state bluntly, has its roots in the stark geographic inequalities in prosperity and opportunity over past decades’ (Broz 2021, 476). But in a twist, they first rebrand more than a generation of material economic decline as a more subjective ‘economic anxiety’ and ‘loss of status’ (ibid, 478), then shift the blame: ‘Populist politicians have successfully built on economic distress to direct hostility toward existing political institutions and socioeconomic and political elites’ (ibid, 479). This leads to a bombastic call to ‘confront the populist assault’ (ibid, 487), and a sinister recommendation that research should prioritise closer surveillance of the behaviour of the victims of long-term decline (ibid, 490).
Turn at this point to the first six contributions on internal political challenges, and you find that the trick pulled by Broz, Frieden and Weymouth echoes their principal theme. Their focus is only occasionally on the political economy of globalisation, but opposition to globalisation in general is depicted as irrational, and driven by unscrupulous and self-serving politicians. Börzel and Zürn see a shift in the LIO in the 1990s from liberal multilateralism (LIO I) to postnational liberalism (LIO II), in which international institutions are increasingly intrusive in their promotion of liberal values, while contestation takes the forms of pushback, reform, withdrawal, or dissidence, depending upon the preferences and power of states affected. They have nothing to say about economic issues, seeing contestation in terms of ‘civilizational, religious, and ethno-nationalist claims’ that converge on ‘the critique of a universal understanding of individual rights backed by strong institutions’ (Börzel and Zürn, 2). Their case studies are on the challenge to the UN-based international security regime complex, and conflicts over international refugee law in the European migration crisis. De Vries, Hobolt and Walter, who do address economic liberalism, offer an ideologically slanted perspective, describing the whole package of the opening of borders to flows of goods, services, capital, persons and specific international institutions as exemplary of international cooperation, and addressing the ‘popular backlash’ reflected in isolationism, nationalism and protectionism. Liberal elites are assumed to seek to further the general good; ‘mass publics’ are politicised if public discontent is mobilised by political entrepreneurs; and serious challenges emerge if ‘political opportunity structures’ are available to channel it into concrete demands (De Vries et al, 3). This, we are told, is because international cooperation ‘is often opaque and difficult for ordinary citizens to grasp’ (ibid, 5). There is a truth in this, patronising though it sounds: as ordinary citizens themselves, they clearly don’t grasp that this is cooperation in support of global capital. Farrell and Newman address the liberal international information order (LIIO) in similarly skewed terms, arguing that initial expectations that the internet would strengthen liberal and undermine illiberal states were confounded by developments endogenous to this order itself: ‘Illiberal states converted openness into a vector of attack, redeploying domestic insulation tactics to target democratic states, while private actors [in liberal states] allowed governance structures to drift away from their objectives’ (Farrell and Newman 2021, 334). They record that liberal states too have practised disinformation (ibid, 345), but maintain the primary contrast between liberal and illiberal states regardless in making, summarising, and concluding their argument (ibid, 351), so producing a handy but false dichotomy. Adler and Drieschova then address the ‘supply side of populism’ (2021, 361), describing ‘truth-subversion practices’ (including ‘false speak (deliberate and obvious lying with the aim of subverting the concept of facts), double speak (intentional internal contradictions in speech eroding the notion of reason), and flooding (the emission of many different messages into the public domain to create confusion’) as forms of power aimed at undermining liberal norms and institutions for the sake of political domination. Like Farrell and Newman, they offer a simple dichotomy in which a ‘core foundation’ of the LIO is its notion of truth as an ideal: liberal communication is characterised by appeal to facts and reasoned consensus, whereas populist communication is ‘emotional and antiscientific’ (ibid, 360). Contradictorily, though, they also ‘remain agnostic about what truth really is’, declaring an interest in ‘what people collectively think truth is and how they establish truth claims through shared practices’ (ibid, 362). In short, they just want the societally shared notion of truth to coincide with liberal ideology, as otherwise the functionality of its international order will be lost. Simmons and Goemans, ostensibly addressing the issue of borders, identify a tension between the values of integrated markets, universal rights, and aggregate welfare in liberal internationalism and the fact that human attachments ‘tend to be local, discriminating, and spatial’. In doing so, they extend the concept of the border from formal divisions between sovereign states to issues of local identity to suggest that ‘spatial perspectives – our block, our neighbourhood, our country – fundamentally affect preferences and behavior’ (Simmons and Goemans 2021, 387-8). While their account of bounded territoriality as the basis of the ‘Sovereign Territorial Order’ and its recent manifestations focuses entirely on national borders (ibid, 389-99), their ‘empirical agenda’ abruptly invokes the contrast between ‘international elite socialization and identities’ and ‘local identities that might resist sociological shifts’ (ibid, 400), moving by degrees to varieties of populism that are largely ‘anti-establishment, anti-elite, and crucially anti-globalization’, and national politicians who ‘still find it convenient to mobilize fearful groups around calls for economic barriers, anti-immigrant policies, and border walls’ (ibid, 404-5). Finally in this set, Goodman and Pepinsky grant that the LIO rested on exclusionary foundations, in that migrants were politically excluded by virtue of restrictions on their democratic and social rights, giving ‘guest workers’ in Germany and ‘post-colonial citizen stratification’ in the UK as examples. But they are unable to recognise this as a strategy adopted primarily in the interests of capital, suggesting instead that restrictions on citizenship and social rights for migrants were ‘part of the domestic bargain that compensated [the native working class] for economic openness’ (Goodman and Pepinsky 2021, 415). This opens the way to argue that in ‘secur[ing] international liberalism through domestic illiberalism’ these states were promoting ‘the interests of an imagined national community’, and, perversely, to conclude with a diatribe against the ‘exclusionary populism’ prompted by subsequent extension of citizenship (ibid, 432-3).
The polar contrast between the accounts of internal economic and political challenges respectively presents us with a puzzle. The contributors must all be aware, after two successive workshops, that policies directly associated with globalisation, pursued equally by the Right and the ‘Left’ (in this context, Clinton Democrats and their European equivalents) systematically discriminated against the working class and the poor. But the accounts of internal political challenges depict opposition as irrational and explain it in terms of primordial identities exploited by ‘populists’. The interest of the volume turns, then, on the way in which the editors deal with this blatant contradiction. The way they do reveals the thoroughly ideological character of the liberal [institutionalist] perspective, arising from its principal blind spot, which is its inability to recognise that capitalism is not a cooperative enterprise from which all benefit, but an antagonistic system premised upon the exploitation of one class by another, on a tendentially global scale.
Lake, Martin and Risse present the LIO as a single composite entity embracing liberal democratic polities and economies, the free movement of goods and capital, human equality (in terms of freedom, the rule of law and human rights), multilateralism (including the pooling and delegating of sovereignty), and collective security. It is underpinned by a belief in the universal equality of individuals that ‘posits freedom as well as individual and collective self-determination as the highest human aspirations’, while representative democracy and the rule of law ‘guarantee individual freedom while subjecting it to certain limits in the interest of the collective good’ (Lake et al 2021, 229). Whereas in the post-World War Two order liberalism was selective, ‘embedded’ in social contracts to which state-provided welfare was central, in the present century it more nearly reflects classical liberal policies dating back to the nineteenth century, including market-capitalist rule within and free trade between countries, international capital mobility, and national treatment for foreign direct investment; with the exception of the European Union, though, it does not yet extend to the free movement of peoples across national borders (ibid, 230-1). At the same time, ‘illiberal’ states have sought and have been granted entry to the institutions of the LIO. Neither economic liberalism nor liberal internationalism necessarily contradicts the Westphalian system, the editors say. However, ‘the more neoliberalism prescribes particular domestic economic policies (such as independent central banks, privatization and deregulation, or pressures on welfare-state systems), the more the tension with the Westphalian order increases’, while tensions arise ‘when multilateral institutions encompass provisions regarding the pooling and delegating of authority to supranational organizations, from majority voting in international organizations (IOs) and regional organizations to supranational dispute settlement systems and international or regional courts’ (ibid, 231-2).
In light of this, four ‘blind spots’ in IO’s and IR’s understanding of the LIO are eventually identified. First, ‘orders are clubs that include as well as exclude’: ‘The challenges to the LIO … suggest that it may … have been intentionally exclusionary in ways that generated a backlash to that order’; second, ‘international orders are not neutral but embody a set of material, ideational and normative interests congealed into institutions and practices’: ‘Perhaps our own liberal blinders as mostly Western scholars publishing in IO led to a tendency to think of cooperation and norms as inherently good—ends in themselves—without recognizing that the sets of policies and practices that constitute cooperation and normative practices will almost always have unequal consequences for different countries and for groups within those countries’ (24); third, ‘institutions are social constructs that rest on social foundations’, and social interests are dynamic, so ‘institutions are robust only so long as they retain, on practical or normative grounds, the support of powerful groups in society’; and fourth, ‘domestic politics matter for the LIO’: ‘Most studies in IR have never considered the possibility that domestic forces in core states would fundamentally challenge the LIO’ (26).
These points will strike you as obvious, and an indictment of IR as a discipline if it did not see them to start with, but there we are. They seem to foreshadow a critique of the ‘liberal blinders’ that posit ‘cooperation’ and norms around ‘globalization’ as inherently good, and a serious engagement with its social and political consequences. But this road is not taken. Instead, in what looks at first like a paradox, Lake, Martin and Risse cling all the more tightly to liberalism as a doctrine, even while accepting that the LIO is illiberal in crucial respects. The logic of the argument unfolds as follows: the LIO is a composite, to which both economic and political liberalism (‘market capitalism’ and liberal democracy) are central. But it is the need to uphold and develop the liberal economic order that takes precedence. Since the demise of the ‘embedded liberal’ compromise it has taken precedence not only over the sovereignty of the states included within it, but also over individual choice and preference, while outsider states seeking entry have been obliged to commit to the trade regime upheld by the WTO, but not to make any move towards liberal democracy. The truth is that the LIO is a liberal economic order, in which liberal democracy is an optional extra, so there is no contradiction in the fact that ‘illiberal’ states have been admitted.
When the ‘philosophy’ of liberalism is taken into account, we have the argument in full:
It is only this syllogism that makes it possible to depict opponents of the illiberal limits placed upon representative democracy by a ‘rational’ global economic liberal elite bent on enforcing the logic of market capitalism as irrational authoritarians. It enables the editors to accept the empirical findings of economic analysis, but to rely on a higher reason at the same time. So, ‘liberalism, particularly in its neoliberal form, exacerbates who wins and who loses from global liberalization’, whether through the effects of free trade and economic openness at community level, or through unequal returns on talent that magnify the disruptions of globalisation and widen income inequality: ‘though the connections and processes are subtle (sic), economic liberalism itself contributes to the backlash against globalization and to nationalist-populist movements’ (ibid, 236). This is because the ‘very political openness of [democratic] liberalism creates avenues for the subversion of [economic] liberalism’: ‘Liberalism is based, in part, on a particular conception of truth developed during the Enlightenment and founded on reason. Political liberalism opens the door, however, to those who would challenge this conception of truth by appeals to belief and emotion’ (ibid, 237). So ‘liberalism contains contradictions within its own program. Most importantly, for liberalism to construct itself it had to be in some ways illiberal, which in turn rendered it less responsive to citizens’ (emphasis mine): the insulation of free trade and supranational authority from contestation prompted domestic opposition to IOs, so here, ‘in an almost dialectical fashion, liberalism contains the seeds of its own challenges’. Further, ‘liberalism in both its economic and political forms challenges notions of national identity’, both in relation to the “repatriation of sovereignty” and to openness to immigration (ibid).
One final move completes the operation. In the definitions that explicate ‘growing nationalist-populist opposition to the LIO … in the West and in other places around the world’, the link to the enforcement of economic liberal discipline is dropped. Nationalism is defined out of this specific context as ‘the promotion of the interests of a particular state at the expense of others,’ which in its more extreme forms, ‘asserts the superiority of a certain national identity over other identities’; populism is ‘the promotion of the interests of “the people” as opposed to the views of elites,’ and ‘entails a rejection of the elite consensus and an assumption of a homogeneous “will of the people” that rejects pluralism and is often defined in exclusionary nationalist terms’; and authoritarianism is ‘the rejection of core elements of liberal political orders, such as fair and free elections, freedom of the press, and an independent judiciary’ (ibid, 238). Note that ‘market capitalism’ is omitted from this list. As if by magic, the over-riding of ‘core elements of liberal political orders’ in order to ensure core elements of the liberal economic order is turned on its head, to make the supranational elite that imposes it, through its own unaccountable judiciary in key areas, the embodiment of democracy and reason. The editors direct our attention away from liberalism’s biggest blind spot, which is that it takes economic liberalism or market capitalism to be the fundamental source of human freedom. As they must, because this assumption is constitutive of their approach.
This technique is known in stage magic as misdirection, and it works best when it becomes second nature to the performer. Penn and Teller’s online masterclass on it is to the point. As summarised, ‘misdirection is not mere distraction, pointing one way and performing an action while the audience looks away. … The key to misdirection is that the audience is unaware of it, and feels that its attention was precisely where it wanted it to be throughout the performance—oftentimes studying the magician, looking for their sleight of hand. ... As Teller … likes to say, “the strongest lie is the lie that the audience tells itself”’ (https://www.masterclass.com/ articles/what-is-misdirection-in-magic-learn-about-types-of-misdirection-used-in-magic-and-5-tips-for-using-misdirection#how-is-misdirection-used-in-magic).
At the top of the bill here are not the editors, though, but Adler-Nissen and Zarakol, in the last contribution to the collection but one. They argue that ‘two distinct forms of opposition to the LIO are in fact working in tandem to undermine it from within. These are “populist” politicians and their voters in the core, and recently anti-liberal or illiberal governments on the semiperiphery (yet often technically inside)’. Further, ‘the root causes of discontent with the LIO lie beyond pure economics, and are largely driven by dissatisfaction with it as a recognition order. The discontented are frustrated with their perceived positions in the recognition hierarchy created by the LIO’ (Adler-Nissen and Zarakol 2021, 612). In a neat and unobtrusive touch, a footnote (ft. 10) after ‘pure economics’ helpfully hints: ‘The political economy articles in this special issue also conclude that the social dimensions of grievance in world politics have been overlooked’. Well, yes, they do, if by that you mean that whole social classes have experienced decades of marginalisation and economic decline, but the prompt here is to look away from such vulgar material evidence. Instead, their guiding concept is resentment, on the part of states in the semiperiphery, and ‘certain Western demographic groups once privileged in the twentieth century’ (ibid, 613, 616). Adler-Nissen and Zarakol are in no mood to compromise: these are dangerous countries and dangerous classes, and they need to be defeated. So in concluding they first propose to put IR on a ‘new war’ footing:
‘In terms of data and methods, this has fundamental implications for what becomes relevant for IR scholarship: along with the study of national security and strategy, we should also examine social media interactions by ordinary citizens’ (ibid: 627).
Then they sign off with an explicit call to mobilise a global alliance against the enemies of the liberal order, and cast them into outer darkness:
‘abandoning the LIO, as demanded by populist and anti-liberal challengers, would not remove the underlying recognition problems inherent in politics. Disruptive liminal states and populist Western voters are not advocating a more equal world, but rather their own hierarchical visions of the international (and domestic) order. Finally, it is important to remember that there are many more actors than just the proponents and the discontented of the LIO; the great majority outside the West perhaps fall on neither side while sympathizing with aspects of each camp. The fate of the LIO lies with this majority. Those who want to salvage the LIO need to ask what the LIO can do to recognize them, and to do so before alternatives emerge’ (ibid).
Like the editors of this volume, Adler-Nissen and Zarakol clearly do not themselves understand their belligerent liberalism as an all-out defence of a global capitalist order, as they fully inhabit the ideology in which it is encased. But this is a new Cold War crusade all the same. It is of course more than regrettable that the relentless drive of governing and managerial elites centred on Europe and the United States and in such institutions as the OECD, the European Commission and the World Bank to promote capitalism on a global scale over the last forty years and more has succeeded to the extent that social democrats have lined up to drive the programme forward, and socialist alternatives have been marginalised. Equally so, that too many have proved susceptible to the proliferating ethnic nationalist counter-narratives to which the uneven course of development of the world market has given rise.
The editors are baffled by these developments, finding ‘no easy answers to the questions of why and why now? (Lake 2021, 240). Perhaps I can help them. On their own account, the LIO had to be exclusive, despite its aspiration to universalism, while challenges came from the left, a number of countries around the world rejected market capitalism, and the core countries that constituted the LIO were countering left opposition at home with the compromise of welfare-state ‘embedded’ liberalism. However, as the logic of the capitalist world market gradually imposed itself, driven by the immanent laws of capitalist competition and guided by the liberal nostrums of the OECD and the World Bank in particular (Cammack forthcoming), anti-capitalist regimes capitulated, leftist forces in the capitalist core were defeated, and economic liberalism could aspire to universal hegemony. The hallmark of the new regime was that it prioritised ‘market capitalism’ over representative liberal democracy, and over all forms of social identity that challenged a politics of universal competitiveness; and at a discursive level, it relied upon the association of (economic) liberalism with ‘reason’ and human freedom to characterise all forms of opposition to the politics of competitiveness as emotional and irrational, and embodied in ‘nationalist’, ‘populist’, and ‘authoritarian’ impulses. Lake, Martin and Risse cannot see this, so they identify as blind spots what are in fact fundamental constituent features of the LIO, and conclude forlornly that ‘the history of the LIO as well as our theories of international politics will – once again – need to be re-examined and possibly rewritten’ (Lake 2021, 251).
On the evidence of this special issue, ‘the premier IR journal’ (ibid) has abandoned all the tenets of IR as an academic discipline and regressed instead to the central tropes of the doctrine for political development as it took shape in its first decade, in the early years of the Cold War (Cammack 1997, Chapter 2) – the emotional bonds between leader and follower in the ‘non-Western political process’ (Pye 1958, 483) and the mainsprings of opposition to the global liberal project that constituted, in a different context, the ‘appeals of Communism’:
‘Among the interpretations offered to account for the appeal of Communism it is possible to distinguish at least five types of emphasis. First, it has been argued that poverty without hope of betterment, negative changes in economic status resulting from depression and unemployment, occupational obsolescence owing to technological change, or striking inequalities in wealth, income, and opportunity, may create susceptibility among the groups and individuals so affected. Second, there are sociological interpretations which suggest that susceptibility to Communism is related to social disorganization—that is, to the creation of situations in which established loyalties and social relationships are undermined. These situations give rise to feelings of isolation, vulnerability, and resentment which may be relieved through affiliation with the Communist movement. While the sociological view often includes religious ties among the relationships whose impairment creates susceptibility, there is a third view which treats Communism as a secular or “political” religion that provides substitute satisfactions for those who have broken from traditional religious orientations, or that fulfills some deeply rooted human need. A fourth approach emphasizes psychological factors—attitudes, feeling tones, developmental patterns—as creating susceptibility. This view is rarely elaborated in “purely” psychological terms. More often it is advanced in combination with sociological factors. A fifth view, more characteristic of traditional political analysis, stresses institutional patterns and structures which facilitate the appeal of Communism. Here it is argued that certain types of political social structures—authoritarian and narrow right-wing regimes, colonial areas dominated by imperialist nations, or regimes marked by political stalemate and incapacity to arrive at urgent social decisions—build up pressures among the disadvantaged elite and other groupings which may be mobilized in support of the Communist movement’ (Almond 1954, 183-4).
On my reckoning, a full house. The re-issue of The Appeals of Communism in 2019 in Princeton University Press’s ‘Legacy Library’ rounds off the story nicely.
References
Adler, Emanuel and Alena Drieschova. 2021. ‘The Epistemological Challenge of Truth Subversion to the Liberal International Order’, International Organization, 75, 2, 359-86.
Adler-Nissen, Rebecca and Ayşe Zarakol. 2021. ‘Struggles for Recognition: The Liberal International Order and the Merger of Its Discontents’, International Organization, 75, 2, 611-34.
Almond, Gabriel. 1954. Reprinted 2019. The Appeals of Communism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Anievas, Alexander, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, eds. 2015. Race and Racism in International Relations. London: Routledge.
Börzel, Tanya and Michael Zürn. 2021. ‘Contestations of the Liberal International Order: From Liberal Multilateralism to Postnational Liberalism’, International Organization, 75, 2, 282-305.
Broz, J. Lawrence, Jeffry Frieden, and Stephen Weymouth. 2021. ‘Populism in Place: The Economic Geography of the Globalization Backlash’, International Organization, 75, 2, 464-94.
Búzás, Zoltán. 2021. ‘Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order’, International Organization, 75, 2, 440-63.
Cammack, Paul. 1997. Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World: The Doctrine for Political Development, London and Washington: Leicester University Press.
Cammack, Paul. Forthcoming 2022. The Politics of Global Competitiveness. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Colgan, Jeff D., Jessica F. Green, and Thomas N. Hale. 2021. ‘Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change’, International Organization, 75, 2, 586-610.
De Vries, Catherine E., Sara B. Hobolt and Stefanie Walter. 2021. ‘Politicizing International Cooperation: The Mass Public, Political Entrepreneurs, and Political Opportunity Structures’, International Organization, 75, 2, 306-32.
Farrell, Henry and Abraham L. Newman. 2021. ‘The Janus Face of the Liberal International Information Order: When Global Institutions Are Self-Undermining’, International Organization, 75, 2.
Flaherty, Thomas M. and Ronald Rogowski. 2021. ‘Rising Inequality as a Threat to the Liberal International Order’, International Organization, 75, 2, 333-58.
Goldstein, Judith and Robert Gulotty. 2021. ‘America and the Trade Regime: What Went Wrong?’, International Organization, 75, 2, 524-57.
Goodman, Sara Wallace and Thomas B. Pepinsky. 2021. ‘The Exclusionary Foundations of Embedded Liberalism’, International Organization, 75, 2, 411-39.
Hanchard, Michael. 2018. The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lake, David A., Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse. 2021. ‘Challenges to Liberal Order: Reflections on International Organization, International Organization, 75, 2, 225-57.
Mansfield, Edward and Nita Rudra. 2021. ‘Embedded Liberalism in the Digital Era’, International Organization, 75, 2, 558-85.
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Simmons, Beth A. and Hein Goemans. 2021. ‘Built on Borders: Tensions with the Institution Liberalism (Thought It) Left Behind’, International Organization, 75, 2, 387-410.
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Weiss, Jessica Chen and Jeremy L. Wallace. 2021. ‘Domestic Politics, China's Rise, and the Future of the Liberal International Order’, International Organization, 75, 2, 635-64.
Vitalis, Robert. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Four of the sixteen articles contribute relatively little to the project of identifying blind spots, so I deal with them briefly first. In the second introductory article Tourinho, according to the editors, ‘deconstructs the myth of US leadership in the construction of the postwar LIO, arguing that even middle powers, and especially Latin American states, played a key role in the formulation of the Westphalian and liberal international orders’ (Lake 2021, 252). On Tourinho’s account, the LIO was not a settlement between the ‘Great Powers’, but one in which the US relied on Latin American allies and the inter-American system to shape the new world order to its liking – a point worth making, but not exactly new, and entirely consistent with the idea of hegemonic leadership on the part of the US. In the last article on internal political challenges, Búzás argues that the commitment to racial equality in the LIO is still thin, formal, and fundamentally limited by the doctrine of domestic jurisdiction in Article 2(7) of the UN Charter (Búzás 2021, 451), and that ‘traditional’ (white supremacist) and ‘transformative’ coalitions are equally dissatisfied with it but deadlocked. True enough, but rather skimming the surface – as Búzás himself acknowledges, he barely engages with a wealth of recent critical work (for example, Anievas et al 2015, Vitalis 2015, Hanchard 2018). On external challenges, Colgan, Green and Hale propose that the politics of climate change is best understood not in terms of collective action problems, but through a ‘dynamic’ analysis of asset de/revaluation as sectors dependent on fossil fuel lose out and those who benefit from its elimination gain. To me, they don’t attend sufficiently to the fact that fossil fuel producers and users are among those investing most heavily in alternative technologies, but anyway this is not a blind spot, and they don’t use the term. And closing the same section and the volume, Weiss and Wallace suggest that the extent to which China involves itself with international issues varies from case to case, depending (positively) on how far the issue concerned seems to affect its survival prospects (‘centrality’), and (negatively) on how far there is domestic division and contestation over the issue concerned (heterogeneity). Their conclusion, that China will be ‘more likely to show flexibility on issues that are less central’ (Weiss and Wallace 2021, 659), didn’t take my breath away and again is tangential to the main theme of the special issue.
On blind spots, then, I would start with the set of articles on ‘internal economic challenges’ to the liberal order. They depict hostility to ‘globalisation’ on the part of labour and the working poor in the United States in particular as perfectly rational, given the experience of abandonment, economic stasis and decline resulting from the policy choices of governing elites over decades. Goldstein and Gulotty argue convincingly that the US trade regime from its post-WWII origins gave priority to exporting interests, disrupting the organizational opportunities and voice of import-competing groups, and failing to provide remedies for workers and firms who faced competition and dislocation from foreign goods, because ‘decision makers felt the need to undercut the voice of certain groups in order to lead the world economy’ (Goldstein and Gulotty 2021, 525-6). Where the rights of workers were raised in negotiation, they were generally traded away at a later stage, while the limited adjustment programme set up under the 1962 Trade Assistance Act had ‘no effect on education or other more permanent determinants of long-run success’ for the minority of displaced workers that it supported (ibid, 546). In short, ‘there was insufficient attention to the domestic consequences of deep market liberalization and the growth of inequality’, in part due to the conviction that adjustment would take place automatically and smoothly (ibid, 547, 554). Flaherty and Rogowski (2021, 497) complement this analysis, finding that any ‘backlash against shocks from immigration and imports is conditional on high inequality, disappearing where inequality is low’: ‘Rising immigration, it seems, poses a populist threat to the LIO only when paired with an income distribution that is, or has become, highly unequal’ (ibid, 510). They conclude that ‘the Left’s failure to enact adequate redistribution has pushed many of its own voters to support right-wing parties, whose protectionist policies offer a plausible alternative to redistribution’ (ibid, 516). Mansfield and Rudra contribute an account of the divisive effects of digital technologies, arguing that ‘digital advances in information and communication technology (ICT) precipitated the spread of global supply chains and greatly enhanced the ability of multinational corporations (MNCs) to link capital in advanced industrialized countries with labor in less developed countries (LDCs)’: ‘digital ICT has harmed low-skilled workers in developed economies – where EL [embedded liberalism] thrived during the initial decades of the Bretton Woods era – by fueling the premium that employers place on skills, training, and education, and allowing firms to replace them with cheaper labor in the developing world’. Although their focus is too time-limited and narrowly monocausal, their insistence that technological change has contributed significantly to the ‘erosion of support for multilateralism and the liberal international economic order in the advanced industrial world’ (Mansfield and Rudra 2021, 559-60) at least places front and centre the dynamics of global capitalist development (or the expansion of the world market) and the implications for capital and labour. In the other paper in this set, Broz, Frieden and Weymouth present detailed original empirical analysis (for which Sophie Hill gets credit, if only in small print) documenting the community-level association between long-term economic and social decline in the United States and Europe and electoral support for populist and nationalist parties. ‘Populism,’ they state bluntly, has its roots in the stark geographic inequalities in prosperity and opportunity over past decades’ (Broz 2021, 476). But in a twist, they first rebrand more than a generation of material economic decline as a more subjective ‘economic anxiety’ and ‘loss of status’ (ibid, 478), then shift the blame: ‘Populist politicians have successfully built on economic distress to direct hostility toward existing political institutions and socioeconomic and political elites’ (ibid, 479). This leads to a bombastic call to ‘confront the populist assault’ (ibid, 487), and a sinister recommendation that research should prioritise closer surveillance of the behaviour of the victims of long-term decline (ibid, 490).
Turn at this point to the first six contributions on internal political challenges, and you find that the trick pulled by Broz, Frieden and Weymouth echoes their principal theme. Their focus is only occasionally on the political economy of globalisation, but opposition to globalisation in general is depicted as irrational, and driven by unscrupulous and self-serving politicians. Börzel and Zürn see a shift in the LIO in the 1990s from liberal multilateralism (LIO I) to postnational liberalism (LIO II), in which international institutions are increasingly intrusive in their promotion of liberal values, while contestation takes the forms of pushback, reform, withdrawal, or dissidence, depending upon the preferences and power of states affected. They have nothing to say about economic issues, seeing contestation in terms of ‘civilizational, religious, and ethno-nationalist claims’ that converge on ‘the critique of a universal understanding of individual rights backed by strong institutions’ (Börzel and Zürn, 2). Their case studies are on the challenge to the UN-based international security regime complex, and conflicts over international refugee law in the European migration crisis. De Vries, Hobolt and Walter, who do address economic liberalism, offer an ideologically slanted perspective, describing the whole package of the opening of borders to flows of goods, services, capital, persons and specific international institutions as exemplary of international cooperation, and addressing the ‘popular backlash’ reflected in isolationism, nationalism and protectionism. Liberal elites are assumed to seek to further the general good; ‘mass publics’ are politicised if public discontent is mobilised by political entrepreneurs; and serious challenges emerge if ‘political opportunity structures’ are available to channel it into concrete demands (De Vries et al, 3). This, we are told, is because international cooperation ‘is often opaque and difficult for ordinary citizens to grasp’ (ibid, 5). There is a truth in this, patronising though it sounds: as ordinary citizens themselves, they clearly don’t grasp that this is cooperation in support of global capital. Farrell and Newman address the liberal international information order (LIIO) in similarly skewed terms, arguing that initial expectations that the internet would strengthen liberal and undermine illiberal states were confounded by developments endogenous to this order itself: ‘Illiberal states converted openness into a vector of attack, redeploying domestic insulation tactics to target democratic states, while private actors [in liberal states] allowed governance structures to drift away from their objectives’ (Farrell and Newman 2021, 334). They record that liberal states too have practised disinformation (ibid, 345), but maintain the primary contrast between liberal and illiberal states regardless in making, summarising, and concluding their argument (ibid, 351), so producing a handy but false dichotomy. Adler and Drieschova then address the ‘supply side of populism’ (2021, 361), describing ‘truth-subversion practices’ (including ‘false speak (deliberate and obvious lying with the aim of subverting the concept of facts), double speak (intentional internal contradictions in speech eroding the notion of reason), and flooding (the emission of many different messages into the public domain to create confusion’) as forms of power aimed at undermining liberal norms and institutions for the sake of political domination. Like Farrell and Newman, they offer a simple dichotomy in which a ‘core foundation’ of the LIO is its notion of truth as an ideal: liberal communication is characterised by appeal to facts and reasoned consensus, whereas populist communication is ‘emotional and antiscientific’ (ibid, 360). Contradictorily, though, they also ‘remain agnostic about what truth really is’, declaring an interest in ‘what people collectively think truth is and how they establish truth claims through shared practices’ (ibid, 362). In short, they just want the societally shared notion of truth to coincide with liberal ideology, as otherwise the functionality of its international order will be lost. Simmons and Goemans, ostensibly addressing the issue of borders, identify a tension between the values of integrated markets, universal rights, and aggregate welfare in liberal internationalism and the fact that human attachments ‘tend to be local, discriminating, and spatial’. In doing so, they extend the concept of the border from formal divisions between sovereign states to issues of local identity to suggest that ‘spatial perspectives – our block, our neighbourhood, our country – fundamentally affect preferences and behavior’ (Simmons and Goemans 2021, 387-8). While their account of bounded territoriality as the basis of the ‘Sovereign Territorial Order’ and its recent manifestations focuses entirely on national borders (ibid, 389-99), their ‘empirical agenda’ abruptly invokes the contrast between ‘international elite socialization and identities’ and ‘local identities that might resist sociological shifts’ (ibid, 400), moving by degrees to varieties of populism that are largely ‘anti-establishment, anti-elite, and crucially anti-globalization’, and national politicians who ‘still find it convenient to mobilize fearful groups around calls for economic barriers, anti-immigrant policies, and border walls’ (ibid, 404-5). Finally in this set, Goodman and Pepinsky grant that the LIO rested on exclusionary foundations, in that migrants were politically excluded by virtue of restrictions on their democratic and social rights, giving ‘guest workers’ in Germany and ‘post-colonial citizen stratification’ in the UK as examples. But they are unable to recognise this as a strategy adopted primarily in the interests of capital, suggesting instead that restrictions on citizenship and social rights for migrants were ‘part of the domestic bargain that compensated [the native working class] for economic openness’ (Goodman and Pepinsky 2021, 415). This opens the way to argue that in ‘secur[ing] international liberalism through domestic illiberalism’ these states were promoting ‘the interests of an imagined national community’, and, perversely, to conclude with a diatribe against the ‘exclusionary populism’ prompted by subsequent extension of citizenship (ibid, 432-3).
The polar contrast between the accounts of internal economic and political challenges respectively presents us with a puzzle. The contributors must all be aware, after two successive workshops, that policies directly associated with globalisation, pursued equally by the Right and the ‘Left’ (in this context, Clinton Democrats and their European equivalents) systematically discriminated against the working class and the poor. But the accounts of internal political challenges depict opposition as irrational and explain it in terms of primordial identities exploited by ‘populists’. The interest of the volume turns, then, on the way in which the editors deal with this blatant contradiction. The way they do reveals the thoroughly ideological character of the liberal [institutionalist] perspective, arising from its principal blind spot, which is its inability to recognise that capitalism is not a cooperative enterprise from which all benefit, but an antagonistic system premised upon the exploitation of one class by another, on a tendentially global scale.
Lake, Martin and Risse present the LIO as a single composite entity embracing liberal democratic polities and economies, the free movement of goods and capital, human equality (in terms of freedom, the rule of law and human rights), multilateralism (including the pooling and delegating of sovereignty), and collective security. It is underpinned by a belief in the universal equality of individuals that ‘posits freedom as well as individual and collective self-determination as the highest human aspirations’, while representative democracy and the rule of law ‘guarantee individual freedom while subjecting it to certain limits in the interest of the collective good’ (Lake et al 2021, 229). Whereas in the post-World War Two order liberalism was selective, ‘embedded’ in social contracts to which state-provided welfare was central, in the present century it more nearly reflects classical liberal policies dating back to the nineteenth century, including market-capitalist rule within and free trade between countries, international capital mobility, and national treatment for foreign direct investment; with the exception of the European Union, though, it does not yet extend to the free movement of peoples across national borders (ibid, 230-1). At the same time, ‘illiberal’ states have sought and have been granted entry to the institutions of the LIO. Neither economic liberalism nor liberal internationalism necessarily contradicts the Westphalian system, the editors say. However, ‘the more neoliberalism prescribes particular domestic economic policies (such as independent central banks, privatization and deregulation, or pressures on welfare-state systems), the more the tension with the Westphalian order increases’, while tensions arise ‘when multilateral institutions encompass provisions regarding the pooling and delegating of authority to supranational organizations, from majority voting in international organizations (IOs) and regional organizations to supranational dispute settlement systems and international or regional courts’ (ibid, 231-2).
In light of this, four ‘blind spots’ in IO’s and IR’s understanding of the LIO are eventually identified. First, ‘orders are clubs that include as well as exclude’: ‘The challenges to the LIO … suggest that it may … have been intentionally exclusionary in ways that generated a backlash to that order’; second, ‘international orders are not neutral but embody a set of material, ideational and normative interests congealed into institutions and practices’: ‘Perhaps our own liberal blinders as mostly Western scholars publishing in IO led to a tendency to think of cooperation and norms as inherently good—ends in themselves—without recognizing that the sets of policies and practices that constitute cooperation and normative practices will almost always have unequal consequences for different countries and for groups within those countries’ (24); third, ‘institutions are social constructs that rest on social foundations’, and social interests are dynamic, so ‘institutions are robust only so long as they retain, on practical or normative grounds, the support of powerful groups in society’; and fourth, ‘domestic politics matter for the LIO’: ‘Most studies in IR have never considered the possibility that domestic forces in core states would fundamentally challenge the LIO’ (26).
These points will strike you as obvious, and an indictment of IR as a discipline if it did not see them to start with, but there we are. They seem to foreshadow a critique of the ‘liberal blinders’ that posit ‘cooperation’ and norms around ‘globalization’ as inherently good, and a serious engagement with its social and political consequences. But this road is not taken. Instead, in what looks at first like a paradox, Lake, Martin and Risse cling all the more tightly to liberalism as a doctrine, even while accepting that the LIO is illiberal in crucial respects. The logic of the argument unfolds as follows: the LIO is a composite, to which both economic and political liberalism (‘market capitalism’ and liberal democracy) are central. But it is the need to uphold and develop the liberal economic order that takes precedence. Since the demise of the ‘embedded liberal’ compromise it has taken precedence not only over the sovereignty of the states included within it, but also over individual choice and preference, while outsider states seeking entry have been obliged to commit to the trade regime upheld by the WTO, but not to make any move towards liberal democracy. The truth is that the LIO is a liberal economic order, in which liberal democracy is an optional extra, so there is no contradiction in the fact that ‘illiberal’ states have been admitted.
When the ‘philosophy’ of liberalism is taken into account, we have the argument in full:
- Economic liberalism is a fundamental source of freedom, founded on reason.
- Its construction on a global scale requires the imposition of free trade, secured by supranational authority.
- This in turn requires the insulation of these issues from contestation, with negative consequences for citizens’ preferences, national sovereignty, and notions of national identity.
- But such contestation defies reason, and is based upon belief and emotion, so may be over-ridden in the name of freedom.
It is only this syllogism that makes it possible to depict opponents of the illiberal limits placed upon representative democracy by a ‘rational’ global economic liberal elite bent on enforcing the logic of market capitalism as irrational authoritarians. It enables the editors to accept the empirical findings of economic analysis, but to rely on a higher reason at the same time. So, ‘liberalism, particularly in its neoliberal form, exacerbates who wins and who loses from global liberalization’, whether through the effects of free trade and economic openness at community level, or through unequal returns on talent that magnify the disruptions of globalisation and widen income inequality: ‘though the connections and processes are subtle (sic), economic liberalism itself contributes to the backlash against globalization and to nationalist-populist movements’ (ibid, 236). This is because the ‘very political openness of [democratic] liberalism creates avenues for the subversion of [economic] liberalism’: ‘Liberalism is based, in part, on a particular conception of truth developed during the Enlightenment and founded on reason. Political liberalism opens the door, however, to those who would challenge this conception of truth by appeals to belief and emotion’ (ibid, 237). So ‘liberalism contains contradictions within its own program. Most importantly, for liberalism to construct itself it had to be in some ways illiberal, which in turn rendered it less responsive to citizens’ (emphasis mine): the insulation of free trade and supranational authority from contestation prompted domestic opposition to IOs, so here, ‘in an almost dialectical fashion, liberalism contains the seeds of its own challenges’. Further, ‘liberalism in both its economic and political forms challenges notions of national identity’, both in relation to the “repatriation of sovereignty” and to openness to immigration (ibid).
One final move completes the operation. In the definitions that explicate ‘growing nationalist-populist opposition to the LIO … in the West and in other places around the world’, the link to the enforcement of economic liberal discipline is dropped. Nationalism is defined out of this specific context as ‘the promotion of the interests of a particular state at the expense of others,’ which in its more extreme forms, ‘asserts the superiority of a certain national identity over other identities’; populism is ‘the promotion of the interests of “the people” as opposed to the views of elites,’ and ‘entails a rejection of the elite consensus and an assumption of a homogeneous “will of the people” that rejects pluralism and is often defined in exclusionary nationalist terms’; and authoritarianism is ‘the rejection of core elements of liberal political orders, such as fair and free elections, freedom of the press, and an independent judiciary’ (ibid, 238). Note that ‘market capitalism’ is omitted from this list. As if by magic, the over-riding of ‘core elements of liberal political orders’ in order to ensure core elements of the liberal economic order is turned on its head, to make the supranational elite that imposes it, through its own unaccountable judiciary in key areas, the embodiment of democracy and reason. The editors direct our attention away from liberalism’s biggest blind spot, which is that it takes economic liberalism or market capitalism to be the fundamental source of human freedom. As they must, because this assumption is constitutive of their approach.
This technique is known in stage magic as misdirection, and it works best when it becomes second nature to the performer. Penn and Teller’s online masterclass on it is to the point. As summarised, ‘misdirection is not mere distraction, pointing one way and performing an action while the audience looks away. … The key to misdirection is that the audience is unaware of it, and feels that its attention was precisely where it wanted it to be throughout the performance—oftentimes studying the magician, looking for their sleight of hand. ... As Teller … likes to say, “the strongest lie is the lie that the audience tells itself”’ (https://www.masterclass.com/ articles/what-is-misdirection-in-magic-learn-about-types-of-misdirection-used-in-magic-and-5-tips-for-using-misdirection#how-is-misdirection-used-in-magic).
At the top of the bill here are not the editors, though, but Adler-Nissen and Zarakol, in the last contribution to the collection but one. They argue that ‘two distinct forms of opposition to the LIO are in fact working in tandem to undermine it from within. These are “populist” politicians and their voters in the core, and recently anti-liberal or illiberal governments on the semiperiphery (yet often technically inside)’. Further, ‘the root causes of discontent with the LIO lie beyond pure economics, and are largely driven by dissatisfaction with it as a recognition order. The discontented are frustrated with their perceived positions in the recognition hierarchy created by the LIO’ (Adler-Nissen and Zarakol 2021, 612). In a neat and unobtrusive touch, a footnote (ft. 10) after ‘pure economics’ helpfully hints: ‘The political economy articles in this special issue also conclude that the social dimensions of grievance in world politics have been overlooked’. Well, yes, they do, if by that you mean that whole social classes have experienced decades of marginalisation and economic decline, but the prompt here is to look away from such vulgar material evidence. Instead, their guiding concept is resentment, on the part of states in the semiperiphery, and ‘certain Western demographic groups once privileged in the twentieth century’ (ibid, 613, 616). Adler-Nissen and Zarakol are in no mood to compromise: these are dangerous countries and dangerous classes, and they need to be defeated. So in concluding they first propose to put IR on a ‘new war’ footing:
‘In terms of data and methods, this has fundamental implications for what becomes relevant for IR scholarship: along with the study of national security and strategy, we should also examine social media interactions by ordinary citizens’ (ibid: 627).
Then they sign off with an explicit call to mobilise a global alliance against the enemies of the liberal order, and cast them into outer darkness:
‘abandoning the LIO, as demanded by populist and anti-liberal challengers, would not remove the underlying recognition problems inherent in politics. Disruptive liminal states and populist Western voters are not advocating a more equal world, but rather their own hierarchical visions of the international (and domestic) order. Finally, it is important to remember that there are many more actors than just the proponents and the discontented of the LIO; the great majority outside the West perhaps fall on neither side while sympathizing with aspects of each camp. The fate of the LIO lies with this majority. Those who want to salvage the LIO need to ask what the LIO can do to recognize them, and to do so before alternatives emerge’ (ibid).
Like the editors of this volume, Adler-Nissen and Zarakol clearly do not themselves understand their belligerent liberalism as an all-out defence of a global capitalist order, as they fully inhabit the ideology in which it is encased. But this is a new Cold War crusade all the same. It is of course more than regrettable that the relentless drive of governing and managerial elites centred on Europe and the United States and in such institutions as the OECD, the European Commission and the World Bank to promote capitalism on a global scale over the last forty years and more has succeeded to the extent that social democrats have lined up to drive the programme forward, and socialist alternatives have been marginalised. Equally so, that too many have proved susceptible to the proliferating ethnic nationalist counter-narratives to which the uneven course of development of the world market has given rise.
The editors are baffled by these developments, finding ‘no easy answers to the questions of why and why now? (Lake 2021, 240). Perhaps I can help them. On their own account, the LIO had to be exclusive, despite its aspiration to universalism, while challenges came from the left, a number of countries around the world rejected market capitalism, and the core countries that constituted the LIO were countering left opposition at home with the compromise of welfare-state ‘embedded’ liberalism. However, as the logic of the capitalist world market gradually imposed itself, driven by the immanent laws of capitalist competition and guided by the liberal nostrums of the OECD and the World Bank in particular (Cammack forthcoming), anti-capitalist regimes capitulated, leftist forces in the capitalist core were defeated, and economic liberalism could aspire to universal hegemony. The hallmark of the new regime was that it prioritised ‘market capitalism’ over representative liberal democracy, and over all forms of social identity that challenged a politics of universal competitiveness; and at a discursive level, it relied upon the association of (economic) liberalism with ‘reason’ and human freedom to characterise all forms of opposition to the politics of competitiveness as emotional and irrational, and embodied in ‘nationalist’, ‘populist’, and ‘authoritarian’ impulses. Lake, Martin and Risse cannot see this, so they identify as blind spots what are in fact fundamental constituent features of the LIO, and conclude forlornly that ‘the history of the LIO as well as our theories of international politics will – once again – need to be re-examined and possibly rewritten’ (Lake 2021, 251).
On the evidence of this special issue, ‘the premier IR journal’ (ibid) has abandoned all the tenets of IR as an academic discipline and regressed instead to the central tropes of the doctrine for political development as it took shape in its first decade, in the early years of the Cold War (Cammack 1997, Chapter 2) – the emotional bonds between leader and follower in the ‘non-Western political process’ (Pye 1958, 483) and the mainsprings of opposition to the global liberal project that constituted, in a different context, the ‘appeals of Communism’:
‘Among the interpretations offered to account for the appeal of Communism it is possible to distinguish at least five types of emphasis. First, it has been argued that poverty without hope of betterment, negative changes in economic status resulting from depression and unemployment, occupational obsolescence owing to technological change, or striking inequalities in wealth, income, and opportunity, may create susceptibility among the groups and individuals so affected. Second, there are sociological interpretations which suggest that susceptibility to Communism is related to social disorganization—that is, to the creation of situations in which established loyalties and social relationships are undermined. These situations give rise to feelings of isolation, vulnerability, and resentment which may be relieved through affiliation with the Communist movement. While the sociological view often includes religious ties among the relationships whose impairment creates susceptibility, there is a third view which treats Communism as a secular or “political” religion that provides substitute satisfactions for those who have broken from traditional religious orientations, or that fulfills some deeply rooted human need. A fourth approach emphasizes psychological factors—attitudes, feeling tones, developmental patterns—as creating susceptibility. This view is rarely elaborated in “purely” psychological terms. More often it is advanced in combination with sociological factors. A fifth view, more characteristic of traditional political analysis, stresses institutional patterns and structures which facilitate the appeal of Communism. Here it is argued that certain types of political social structures—authoritarian and narrow right-wing regimes, colonial areas dominated by imperialist nations, or regimes marked by political stalemate and incapacity to arrive at urgent social decisions—build up pressures among the disadvantaged elite and other groupings which may be mobilized in support of the Communist movement’ (Almond 1954, 183-4).
On my reckoning, a full house. The re-issue of The Appeals of Communism in 2019 in Princeton University Press’s ‘Legacy Library’ rounds off the story nicely.
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