I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of liberalism, both as a philosophical school and a method of governance. What follows is the first of what I hope to be a multi part series of reflections on the nature of liberalism and the current illiberal moment we appear to be living in. What is the future of liberalism globally and domestically?
Liberal values like the rule of law, the value of the individual to society, and civil liberties and rights can be sources of hope, and advancement for many.
However, while liberalism as a philosophy may be attractive to individuals, global liberalism – a movement to promote liberal values internationally – as a method for global governance and diplomacy seems to be waning. Why is this?
Flirting with Kant
Before I can propose an answer to that question, it’d be helpful to define ‘global liberalism.’
By “global liberalism,” I mean that school of thought in international relations that sees liberalism (political and economic) as the organizing philosophy for global diplomacy and economic organization.
Global liberalism generally looks to Kant’s classic essay of Perpetual Peace as a guide for its philosophy and goal. As I’ve noted on this blog in the past, this can be a problematic organizing principle, though aspirationaly attractive.
I’m critical of global liberalism because of its homogenized set of assumptions. It tends to downplay the role of culture in politics among other things. However, the end of the Cold War and the start of the Information Age seemed to herald the unfolding of such a world.
BUT…
Then came global terrorism, the 2008 economic depression, and resurgent illiberal powers.
We now have a multipolar world with regional powers, like Russia, who generally don’t share the objectives of global liberalism.
Within these global regions, domestic religious movements and illiberal politics at odds with global liberalism have arisen.
Unlike global liberalism, a multipolar world emphasizes locality, in which domestic political movements derive their legitimacy via culture, religion, resistance and illiberal authoritarianism.
These movements and their regional power sponsors have the potential to disrupt global liberal norms. In fact, some have already begun to do so in places like Ukraine, the South China Sea, and Syria.
Why can’t global liberalism succeed?
Many academics in the international relations field emphasize the complexity of the global environment as being one reason why liberalism struggles to gain ground.
While this “complexity argument” makes intuitive sense, it has a certain arrogance implicit in it: “The world is complicated, but we’ll figure it out and fix it.” If you don’t believe me, you can pick up any edition of Foreign Affairs and read the argument in its many variations. After paying lip service to complexity, the writer will invariably suggest several steps that can be taken to manage, fix, or control said complexity.
(Full disclosure, I LOVE Foreign Affairs so I don’t make the above observation as a criticism of that publication, but of many of its contributors.)
The purveyors of this “complexity argument” of international relations rarely discuss three crucial caveats:
A multipolar world order emphasizes locality, which inevitably derives legitimacy via culture and resistance.
In China, the government is conducting an ongoing revival of sorts with China’s Confucian traditions. Russia, couches its opposition to the West in terms of cultural distinctives, which include a different Christian tradition (Orthodoxy as opposed to Catholicism and Protestantism).
Al-Qaeda, ISIS and similar groups seek to coopt Islamic narratives in promoting their violence, which is fairly well known. What is less well known are the narratives these terrorist groups level at the governments of Muslim countries. These narratives seek to undermine the legitimacy of ruling regimes by painting them as not truly Muslim. By striking at their religious legitimacy, the hope is to undermine political legitimacy and justify resistance.
Liberalism has limits.
Some don’t like to acknowledge this, while others gleefully accept it. However, in a non-partisan sense, let’s acknowledge that like any human creation, the philosophy of liberalism is limited. Though it posits universal truths and rights, liberalism also embraces limits. These limits include limits on government coercion, limits on the type and breadth of legislation, and limits on the exercise of individual freedom.
These limits are in place because liberalism emphasizes the value, and freedoms of the individual. They are a feature of the philosophy, not a flaw.
However, those limits come with consequences. Because there are limits on acceptable government coercion, we must learn to tolerate social and political gadflies, and accept legislation built around compromise between parties. Liberalism’s belief in individual freedom requires that we must also accept the idea of civil rights and liberties that protect the individual from abuse by groups.
Because liberalism has limits, the concept of a global liberalism as political norm is slightly misleading and should be critiqued. This isn’t to say that liberalism’s ideas are not universal, but I am suggesting that those ideas grow and mature over long periods of time, thus rendering it’s universal application uneven and providing liberalism’s critics with ample anecdotal evidence with which to attack it.
Global liberalism stretches those limits to exhaustion making liberalism appear weak.
You can look in every area of human activity. When limitations are not recognized and respected, overstretch occurs. If militaries overreach, they lose battles and wars. Should businesses over expand they face financial ruin. When governments seek ever increasing amounts of power, they eventually face resistance and removal.
This principle of recognizing limits is critical to understanding the apparent weakness besetting liberalism. As a philosophy, liberalism remains strong and vibrant. However, taking a philosophy focused on the individual and trying to apply it globally and uniformly means stepping beyond the limits of the idea. The result is an illiberal backlash that builds its legitimacy around a narrative of liberal hypocrisy.
Conclusion
The interaction of these three elements (limits, overstretch and multipolarity) practically doom the global liberal experiment at the outset. At least, it seems to do so in terms of practical governance. With close to 200 countries in the world (plus disputed regions), it becomes increasingly difficult for liberalism to adapt. As regions continue to trend towards more localized expressions of politics and culture, the global system of liberal governance become more tenuous.
So what are we to do? For those living in liberal countries, it becomes increasingly important to develop cultural communicativeness. Not just cultural awareness, but the ability to engage and communicate cross-culturally.
Global governance requires more work to be done in order to understand the abilities and limits of institutions like the UN.
The world of 2018 can be diverse without being divisive. However, it will require recognizing the limits of favored philosophies and constructing meaningful ways of relating across cultural divides.