The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?

This article argues that the biggest challenges facing the post-1945 liberal international order are to genuinely embrace ethno-racial diversity and strategies to reduce class-based inequalities. However, this is problematic because the LIO’s core foundational principles, and principal underpinning “theory” (liberal internationalism), are Eurocentric, elitist, and resistant to change. Those core principles are subliminally racialized, elitist, and imperial, and embedded in post-1945 international institutions, elite mindsets, and in American foreign policy establishment institutions seeking to incorporate emerging powers’ elites, willingly, into the US-led order. As illustration, this article considers examples that bookend the US-led system: wartime elite planning for global leadership, and the role of the UN in Korea, 1945-53, which served as the primary instrument for the creation and incorporation of (South) Korea into the US-led order; and the role of several US-state-linked initiatives in China over the past several decades, including the Ford Foundation. The article compares the contemporary and historical evidence to liberal internationalists’ claims, and those implied by the work on “ultra-imperialism” by Karl Kautsky and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony. The article concludes that elite incorporation – by a combination of coercion, attraction, and socialisation – is the principal goal of the US-led order, not embracing diversity and moving towards genuine change felt at a mass level. Hence, we should expect domestic and international political crises to deepen

American Power and Philanthropic Warfare: From the War to End All Wars to the Democratic Peace

This article examines paradoxical and counter-intuitive linkages between the rise of American power, increasingly influential philanthropic foundations, and war, providing concrete evidence of “how power works”. In particular, the article shows the close inter-relations and complementarity between “soft” and “hard” power, between elite private foundations and the American state. Considering philanthropic foundations and war together shows the complex means and forms American power took in its rise to globalism, and indeed does today, in an era of “humanitarian” interventionism and the “democratic peace”. It is somewhat paradoxical that philanthropic foundations, uniformly committed to peace and peaceful means, not to mention the prosperity that they argue peace promotes, should also be strongly and consistently supportive in practice of military interventions and outright warfare to promote their objects. The major American foundations are committed to a strategy of waging war for “democracy” as the basis of global peace. The two inter-related case studies presented in this article furnish historical evidence of the role of foundations in bolstering the American state's rationalisations and activities in favour of war, during World War I and after the Cold War. The article shows how a relatively vaguely formulated idea in the early twentieth century, about a link between democracy, international trade and peace, and a consequent link between autocracy and war, and the inability of the two kinds of system to co-exist, became, after the Cold War's end and with strong foundation backing, a social-scientifically legitimated core of US military and civilian power strategies

Foundation Networks and American Hegemony

The major American foundations constructed and sustained the rich texture of cooperative social, intellectual and political relations between key actors and institutions supportive of specific modes of thought that promoted US hegemony. Foundations also fostered and developed the attractive power-knowledge networks that not only radiated intellectual influence but also attracted some of the most creative minds. Finally, liberal internationalist foundations fostered globalism even when the American state was ‘isolationist’, and when US influence abroad unwelcome. Their significance in American hegemony building lay in their sustained, long-term cooperative relationship with the American state through which they helped build national, international and global institutions and networks. The latter process evidences the most significant impact of US foundations – the building of the domestic and international infrastructure for liberal internationalism which has transformed into a kind of “social neoliberalism”. Theoretical conclusions follow from these claims: the sustained and deep cooperation between the state and foundations suggests that we must revise our views of “how power works” in the United States and therefore influences its foreign relations. Therefore, the article shows that elite networks, consisting of state officials and private citizens are powerful means by which foreign policy shifts may be prepared, elite and mass opinion primed and mobilised, new consensus built, ‘old’ forces marginalised, and US hegemony constructed

Global Power Shifts, Diversity, and Hierarchy in International Politics

Liberal internationalism is under the microscope as never before as the world experiences turbulence and anxiety. The spectre of right-wing authoritarianism and even fascism haunts western societies as struggles for recognition dominate domestic politics, while demands of (re)emerging states for international representation grow more compelling. Simultaneously, there is broader recognition of a growing legitimacy crisis of the American hegemon principally due to the mindsets and failures of its liberal hegemonic elites. Both developments are major advances in understanding how the West dominates ‘diversity regimes’ or co-opts discourses universal in origin and character, and of how the US foreign establishment has brought the world to the current conjuncture. Yet, there are limitations still. Although central, the concepts of diversity, hierarchy, and elites, need to be broadened out significantly, and rooted in corporate-class power, to fully comprehend the core crises of international order today

Transnational elite knowledge networks: Managing American hegemony in turbulent times

The liberal international order’s (LIO) own theory is as much in crisis as the institutional system whose virtues it champions. This is due first to theoretical shortcomings per se; and secondly, due to its misunderstanding or neglect of the role of elite knowledge networks and of socialisation in the development and perpetuation of American liberal hegemony. The article – which adds to recent interest in the dynamics of hegemonic order building and maintenance - argues that a neo-Gramscian-Kautskyian theoretical synthesis better explains the character and methods of the LIO. The article considers two cases through which to compare liberal internationalist and Gramscian-Kautskyian claims: the 1970s challenge of third world states under the banner of a new international economic order (NIEO) and the managed ‘opening’ of China; and the Trumpian challenge to the LIO. On that basis, the article concludes that the hegemonic LIO and its core states and elite networks are engaged in a titanic struggle against forces unleashed by a combination of its own successes, inadequacies and exclusions. Gramscian-Kautskyian theory, using the transnationally-extended ‘elite knowledge network’ concept, also suggests that, despite turbulence, the hegemonic LIO has significant powers of adaptation, co-optation, and resistance, and is likely to remain resilient, if turbulent and not unchanged, for the foreseeable future

The Legitimacy Crisis of the U.S. Elite and the Rise of Donald Trump

The American political elite’s legitimacy crisis is demonstrated by Trump’s rise by challenging Wall Street, both main parties’ leadership, and limited government. His challenge overlapped with Leftist Bernie Sanders’s who also focused on deep inequalities in the US. The crisis is rooted in the neoliberal political-economic model adopted in the 1970s to shore up American elite power but which generated major crises at home and challenges abroad. Such challenges demand a new ‘grand bargain’ that is unlikely to emerge without prolonged domestic political strife and resistance to American global power

China’s rise in a liberal world order in transition – introduction to the FORUM

In a time of great uncertainty about the future and resilience of the liberal world order this Forum focuses on China’s rise and interplay with the foundations of that liberal order. The key question is the extent to and variegated ways in which China - with its (re)ascendance to power and potential global leadership – is adapting to and perhaps even strengthening liberal institutions and rules of the game, confronting them, or developing alternative paths. In this introduction to the Forum we advance three key points based on the contributions. First, contrasting the orthodox binary scenarios of either inevitable conflict or co-optation offered in the mainstream IR debate, the Forum highlights the possibility of a third scenario of China’s interplay with the liberal world and its key actors, institutions, and rules. A hybrid and variegated scenario that entails both conflict and adaptation, differently entangled in different issue areas. Second, it stresses the need to conceptualize and empirically comprise the essentially interlinked nature of domestic state-society models and the global political economy. Third, we argue for a perspective that incorporates underlying economic and social structures and the power relations embedded therein