Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the growth of populism, democratic backsliding, and a resurgence of authoritarian bravado all have at least one common feature: they all reflect a growing dissatisfaction with the postwar liberal international order (LIO). This so-called LIO is founded on the promotion of democratic values, human rights, free trade, cooperation, and international organization. Nevertheless, after 75 years of relative stability, this order is currently facing grave challenges, and so the time is right to reflect on its successes and shortcomings. Dillon Stone Tatum provides a rich historical survey of liberalism. Brian Frederking presents empirical evidence of liberal principles guiding the UN Security Council. Both books contribute to our understanding of the origins and future of the liberal order.
Tatum’s Liberalism and Transformation: The Global Politics of Violence and Intervention is a sweeping survey of nearly two centuries of liberal international thought. Tatum focuses on one strand of liberal ideology that he calls emancipatory liberalism. He emphasizes the paternalistic aspects of emancipatory liberalism as a project requiring “the fortunate and enlightened to ‘save’ those who are in trouble”; this discourse justifies “institutions of war, interventions, and force” in the international system (p. 3). Liberalism “mobilizes nations to arms, and it (re)produces patterns and practices of conflict, violence, and intervention” (p. 137).
Tatum approaches the history of emancipatory liberalism from a discourse perspective. His narrative draws from scholars, intellectuals, activists, policy makers, novelists, and editorial writers. Jane Addams, Isaiah Berlin, Frederic Bastiat, George Orwell, and John Stuart Mill are but a few who contribute to this rich and engaging survey. Tatum marshals these eclectic figures to demonstrate the pervasiveness of emancipatory liberal thought. By focusing on how emancipatory liberal narratives justify violence, he seeks to cast doubt on “triumphal liberals” like Francis Fukuyama and others who have celebrated the peacefulness of the liberal order. Tatum is driven by the normative aspiration that a better understanding of the power of this flawed emancipatory narrative could help pivot liberal aspirations to a more humane and peaceful order. He concludes with a discussion of what he terms “minimalist liberalism,” which emphasizes agonistic and pragmatic politics with a robust pluralism, substituting the paternalistic certainties associated with emancipatory liberalism. This shift, Tatum argues, will reduce the violence, intervention, and war characterizing the current liberal order.
Taking a social constructivist approach to demonstrate how emancipatory liberal ideas forge a social reality and various policy outcomes, Tatum presents a wide variety of case studies. His first case explores how emancipatory liberal narratives shaped British policies in Burma in the mid-nineteenth century. Armed with a liberal civilizing mission, the British sought to wage war against the Burmese who “were holding up progress, trade, and the march of civilization” (p. 58). For the interwar period, Tatum explores the French intervention in Syria and the British interventions in Iraq. For his Cold War case, he presents the Dominican Crisis of 1965 and the American efforts to quell its violence. Finally, for his post–Cold War cases, Tatum addresses how liberal democracies responded to state failure and terrorism, elaborating on how emancipatory liberal thought helped justify the US-led war in Afghanistan. Tatum argues that these cases were informed, aided, and abetted by an emancipatory liberal narrative.
Liberal international thought is broad and often contradictory. Tatum’s exclusive emphasis on the emancipatory strain is at odds with more prominent versions. Immanuel Kant, the most widely cited early liberal theorist, would challenge Tatum’s liberalism. As part of the liberal disdain for using coercion to impose political settlements, Kant’s Perpetual Peace (originally published in 1795) emphasized non-intervention and the abolition of standing armies. A liberal debate over intervention and the deployment of military force to impose democracy can be traced to the eighteenth century. Tatum could have devoted more attention to these enduring tensions in the liberal internationalist tradition.
In addition, questions around convenient rhetoric, policy statements, and liberal emancipatory narrative could have been more critically engaged. Realists persistently argue that leaders in liberal democratic states will often rely on liberal rhetoric to justify realpolitik policies. In Tatum’s case studies, realist explanations may also be at play. For instance, Britain had oil interests in Iraq in the 1930s, and the United States feared “another Cuba” in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Finally, Tatum invites counterfactual analysis by asking whether these interventions “would have been configured in the way that they were without international liberalism providing the context of social action for states” (p. 2). In this regard, the US case in Afghanistan is telling. Without the post-9/11 security threat posed by the Taliban, it is safe to argue that no US-led intervention would have taken place; the emancipatory rhetoric was merely an add-on to the national security objectives. This example highlights how a particular policy often emerges from multiple narratives, at various times: thus, focusing solely on how emancipatory liberal rhetoric guides policy can provide only a partial explanation. Despite these concerns, Tatum’s Liberalism and Transformation exposes an understudied side of the liberal tradition in world politics.
In Renegotiating the Liberal Order, Brian Frederking concentrates on the words and deeds of the UN Security Council. If there is a decline in the LIO, one would expect to find diminishing liberal practices authorized by the Security Council. Frederking rigorously analyzes Security Council speeches and resolutions from 1990–2020. The data collection alone is impressive, yielding many insights on how this leading liberal institution navigated the past three decades. Frederking supplements the data with extensive case studies of the most vexing cases faced by the Security Council over the period studied. He also analyzes its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which falls outside the temporal domain of his data (though it is worth noting that the Ukraine case still reflects claims supported in the data).
Frederking shows that assertions of a declining LIO are not supported by his data. Based on Security Council practices, Frederking reports robust findings indicating a “greater resiliency of the liberal order” than he expected (p. ix). Frederking casts the debates within the Council as a dialogue between a “hegemonic bargain” and a “charter bargain,” with the former reflecting American hegemony and its willingness to provide public goods in exchange for a degree of loyalty to the liberal order. The charter bargain emphasizes adherence to the UN Charter, procedures, and fairness achieved through international deliberation. These distinct approaches “created many tensions within the liberal order. The Charter bargain obligated the P5 to provide for global security, and the hegemonic bargain obligated the United States to do so” (p. 10). Although these two liberal bargains often reinforce one another, much can be learned from cases where they are in conflict, such as in the context of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Somewhat surprisingly, Frederking shows how the widespread critiques leveled against the US invasion were predominantly liberal in orientation.
Frederking’s data-making effort is nothing short of stakhanovite in nature. Through careful analysis of Security Council practices, he coded “whether states have invoked realist rules of rivalry, critical theory rules of empire, or liberal rules of collective security and capacity building” (p. 15). Based on 6,124 Security Council meetings from 1990 to 2020, he reports that liberal practices have increased significantly over the period, declining slightly after 2016 (pp. 73–75). He then turns to speech acts by examining “every speech of a Security Council member justifying an abstention or a no vote” (p. 78). He finds that when states leveled critiques of resolutions, they relied on liberal logics 57% of the time (p. 88). Overall, liberal visions have shaped Security Council practices.
Despite the general trend in the data, Frederking points to several issues undermining the liberal orientation in the Security Council. Not surprisingly, US leadership and legitimacy are key. In addition to the usual concerns with rising illiberal populism associated with Donald Trump, the US invasion of Iraq, human rights violations associated with the war on terror, and the US failure to join the ICC, Frederking also notes that US vetoes to protect Israel may also undermine its liberal legitimacy: “Resolutions targeting Israel were only 0.7 % of all Security Council resolutions, but they represent 77% of all US vetoes” (p. 165). Finally, Chinese and Russian opposition to many liberal practices has grown over the past few years. Although the tail end of the data reflects this, it may become more pronounced in the future.
As with any large dataset, Frederking’s Collective Security Data has blind spots. The Security Council may never take up the most contentious issues. Similarly, although the nature of debate is important, compliance and outcomes on the ground are generally much more consequential. Like Tatum’s work, liberal rhetoric has limits because it may be deployed to mask realpolitik motivations. Some speeches in the Security Council serve as prime examples of this dynamic; for instance, Russian liberal claims that they sought to liberate the oppressed Ukrainians (p. 151). Finally, and perhaps most unfairly, some data from the Cold War period would have provided a useful comparison. Even five years of data from the Cold War would have helped us better understand variations in the Security Council’s practices over time.
These are books for our time. Both represent the types of thinking needed for renegotiating the liberal order. Tatum’s historical overview deepens our vision of liberalism, its troubling drift into paternalism and arrogance, and its future possibilities. Frederking’s rigorous data-making effort produces concrete, social-scientific understandings of how liberal institutions have worked in the past. Both theoretical vision and systematic evidence will prove essential in addressing the shortcomings of the current liberal international order.
