By Hilary Parker

We are living in the midst of what Woodrow Wilson School Professor G. John Ikenberry calls "liberal internationalism 2.0," a world order characterized by the post-World War II preeminence of the United States, but the viability of this system is in question.

“There’s been a confluence of long-term shifts that give the current order its crisis and fluidity - the end of the Cold War, the shifting character of violence and security, the decaying of old global institutions and the rise of new non-Western states,” he says. “Together it is a remarkable set of dynamic changes that are putting stress on old ways of doing world politics.”

Ikenberry, the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs, is one of the foremost scholars on liberal internationalism - a policy doctrine first set forth by Woodrow Wilson that calls on liberal states to build a non-violent and collaborative world order based on capitalism and democracy. 

The defining question of Ikenberry’s work now considers the future of the liberal international order, or liberal internationalism 3.0 - the time after “the end of the American century.” The co-director of the Princeton Project on National Security, he is currently working on a book on the subject, “Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System.”

Indeed, Ikenberry investigates the shifting world order in two recently published articles in the journals World Politics and Foreign Affairs.

America's Unipolar Moment?

In his introduction to the January 2009 issue of World Politics, Ikenberry explores “Unipolarity, State Behavior, and Systemic Consequences.” The piece, co-written by Dartmouth professors Michael Mastanduno and William Wohlforth, considers America’s current role as an unrivaled power and the implications of this status for the future.

“We currently live in a one superpower world, a circumstance unprecedented in the modern era,” they write.

In modern history, advantages in capabilities - be they military, economic, geographic or technological - have been distributed among two or more states, such as between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  But America’s rise since the end of the Cold War has established a new world order, with the United States as a unipolar power, possessing an unrivaled proportion of capabilities.

For instance, in 2006 the United States accounted for 25 percent of global productivity and half of the productivity of the recognized great powers, including China, Japan, Germany, Russia, France and Britain.  In addition, the United States spends more on national defense than the rest of the world combined.

The authors argue that the ways in which unipolarity in general, and American unipolarity in particular, might influence the behavior of states are many and, at times, conflicting.  For example, the superpower might be satisfied with the international status quo and strive to maintain it.  On the contrary, however, there might also exist incentives, including the lack of a strong opposing power or a fear of losing preeminence, that drive the unipole to effect change in the international order.  Similarly, the authors present numerous ways a unipolar world order might guide the actions of secondary states, perhaps by pushing them to ally with the unipole or, alternately, to form alliances with one another in an attempt to balance global power.

As to whether a unipolar world will tend toward peace or even persist, Ikenberry and his co-authors find no easy answers.  There are no historical precedents to serve as comparison, they note, and the era of unipolarity is ongoing. Their investigation does, however, lead them toward new questions to ponder as the international order evolves, such as whether unipolarity in its current incarnation is contingent upon the characteristics of the American state.

Liberal Democracy and the Myth of the Autocratic Revival

Further, in "The Myth of the Autocratic Revival: Why Liberal Democracy Will Prevail,” published in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, Ikenberry and Johns Hopkins University Professor Daniel Deudney systematically argue against the emerging view that autocracies, such as those in China and Russia, are undergoing a revival and will present a viable alternative to liberal democracy.

They acknowledge recent developments that support this hypothesis, including the rapid economic growth and modernization of China under the Communist Party’s dictatorship and the strengthening of certain autocratic regimes by the energy crisis and rising oil prices.

Yet, Ikenberry and Deudney argue that “deep contradictions” exist between authoritatian political regimes and capitalist economic systems, such as the increased demand for political participation that follows from increased wealth as well as the tendency of economic development to create diverse socioeconomic interests leading to calls for elections among differing political parties.

While the authors contend that political transformation of these autocracies is likely to occur, the question of when such a shift will take place is unknown.

“…There is nothing in the liberal vision that specifies the exact timing of political opening as a part of the socioeconomic transformation,” they write.  “Capitalism creates the conditions for liberal democracy, but the trigger for actual political change is entirely unpredictable.”

Ikenberry and Deudney go on to refute the claims put forth by autocratic revival theorists that the 21st century will see increased power divides and the development of dangerous rivalries between autocratic and democratic states. Instead, they contend that economic globalization and shared problems in the current world order provide “a set of constraints and opportunities—of pushes and pulls—that reduce the likelihood of severe conflict while creating strong imperatives for cooperative problem solving.”

For the liberal world order to succeed, they argue, democratic states must address the fears rising states have of democracy and include autocracies in international institutions.  By encouraging global cooperation and problem-solving in these ways, democracies will be able to increase the stake that autocratic states have in the international order and ultimately help them along the path toward liberal democracy.

The Crisis in American Foreign Policy

Ikenberry is also a co-author of a new book, The Crisis in American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century, (Princeton University Press, 2009), which explores whether George W. Bush is the true heir of Woodrow Wilson, the architect of liberal internationalism. Written with Southern Methodist University professor Thomas Knock, political scientist Tony Smith of Tufts University, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Professor of Politics and International Affairs currently on public service leave from the School at the U.S. State Department, Ikenberry and Slaughter were recently interviewed for a video feature by the School's Office of External Affairs about the book, and the future of liberal internationalim in U.S. foreign policy. (An edited transcript follows below.)

G. John Ikenberry (GJI): Well, the book was written as a way of exploring the relationship between the Bush administration as controversial foreign policy, most importantly the Iraq War, and the broader issue of how it connects to Wilsonianism and liberal internationalism, to what extent is Bush the heir of Woodrow Wilson.

Woodrow Wilson School (WWS): What is the crisis of American foreign policy?

Anne-Marie Slaughter (AMS): This was an interesting book to be a part of because it was a book that took an active, live debate on a panel and turned it into a much more sustained argument among four scholars... and my contribution did two things: it started by rebutting Tony Smith’s attack on neo-liberals as he called them... he attacked the neo-liberal enabling of neo-conservatism, and in one word he has effectively said that liberal democrats who favored the use of force had more or less opened the door to the Iraq war, had enabled the entire neo-conservative movement. So the first thing my chapter did was refute that in no uncertain terms, and the second part of my contribution was to lay out my own vision of what Wilsonianism should look like, and what its principals have turned into in the 21st century.

GJI: Well, I try to frame the debate, but I also try to make the argument a little bit more complicated by saying that there are several different strands in the Wilsonian and liberal international tradition, that it’s not just about democracy. In fact, it’s about building order, and order has different components, rule of law, trade and openness, democratic community, partnership, multilateralism, security, cooperation, these are all features that fit together in a kind of liberal order. So, if we think of the Bush administration as focusing primarily on use of force to promote democracy in the Middle East, he is not really representing the full tradition in all of its full vision of liberal order.

WWS: Is George W. Bush the heir to Wilsonianism?

AMS: Bush was not the heir to Wilson, some of Bush’s ideas certainly resonated with Wilson’s ideas, indeed many of Wilson’s ideas have become the larger foreign policy consensus that shapes all American foreign policy. But Woodrow Wilson believed very strongly in multilateralism, indeed his presidency crashed on his failure to get the League of Nations approved by the U.S. Senate, so he would never have treated international institutions in the cavalier that the first George W. Bush administration did, he would have thought that the value of what he called “common counsel,” which is something he looked at local and state politics and also international politics was vital to world order.

So, in that regard George W. Bush was not Wilson’s heir, and similarly although both Wilson and Bush believed in democracy, Wilson really believed in self-determination, he believed that people should decide their own fate, and we would hope that they would choose a liberal democracy, but if they didn’t, he never thought that we should invade them and change their governments. So, at some very abstract level you could say yes, George W. Bush subscribed to Wilsonian principals, but the way he thought about implementing those principals, and really the way he even defined those principals I don’t think are things that Wilson would have recognized.

GJI: Well, yes and no... in many ways I think as time goes on we will see that this was a kind of experiment that didn’t work in that it wasn’t really about Wilsonianism because it really wasn’t about building a cooperative international order, it was about a very different experiment using American power to organize the world in a very kind of unipolar way. There was a great vision of how the U.S. could really run the world, and I think that failed, and we will come back to Wilsonianism and liberal internationalism, but it is really more of a argument about building cooperative institutionalized order, and so it really will be a return I think to a more traditional Wilsonian tradition.

WWS: What is the future of liberal internationalism?

AMS: I think that Wilsonian values in the 21st century really do have to be understood differently than when Wilson was president, so if you said “self-determination” today, which was really a rallying cry [during] World War I, many people certainly in the street would say, “self determination, what is that - does that mean Quebec gets to succeed from Canada?" Today what it means is that people should be able to choose their own governments - I’d flip that formulation and say the legitimacy of governments rests on their ability to provide for their people, in many different forms, but they have to provide basic services, satisfy the basic wants of their people, and if at some point their failure to provide for their people becomes so great as to really amount to an attack on those people, a gross failure to protect, then there is an international responsibility to act, and that’s the first way I think Wilsonianism really translates into the world we find ourselves in.

GJI: Well, there’s going to be a lot of soul searching and re-thinking because we’ve just been through a traumatic period and there has to be a process of, “what have we learned, what doesn’t work, what does work,” and I think there will be more skepticism of democracy promotion even if the Bush administration’s Iraq War was not really was about democracy, it was about something else, but nonetheless there’s a kind of sober appreciation for the complexities of trying to change societies. This is something America learns over and over, or learns and forgets over and over because of course Vietnam told us that as well, and other cases. But I think there will be a kind of sober more cautious view about how the U.S. can use its hard power, but probably a greater appreciation of how important it is to use its soft power, its ideals, its willingness to work through diplomacy.

WWS: Under what circumstances do liberal internationalists favor intervention?

AMS: Part of the heart of the argument between Tony Smith and me really goes to a "slippery slope" argument, so his argument says “look you liberal hawks, you neo-liberals who believe that there are cases for force” - Rwanda for instance, I certainly would have used force, I supported the use of force in Kosovo - “once you open that door to the violation of another country's sovereignty in cases of extreme human rights violations, there’s no way to stop, you will then slide down the slope to approving interventions to get rid of a government you don’t like.

My response is no, there is a legitimate line between cases of severe human rights violations, severe systematic, of genocidal proportions. We can say in those cases, the international community can decide to intervene without licensing any government, whether the U.S. government, or the Russian government, or any other, to simply go in and invade countries at will, and that distinction is a key distinction between the heirs of Wilson, the liberal internationalists’ multi-lateralists, and neo-conservatives who do believe in human rights and democracy, but who also believe in the military as their primary tool.

GJI: Wilsonianism is part of a broader tradition that runs through the 20th century in American foreign policy, really a tradition across both parties that argues that the U.S. can serve its own interests and the wider world through building institutions, building order around free trade, international law, and making common cause with democracies, and putting the United States really in a position of trying to crystallize a open rule based international order... the one version of the liberal argument is that the world is better when there are more democracies, and America with all of its power should be trying to both for normative reasons, that it’s good to have a world with democracies, but also because if you have democracies you have partners and peaceful states that are willing to operate within a kind of open rule based order, so it’s all good, the more the better for normative reasons and for practical security reasons too. Therefore it’s good to go about trying to help history move forward by perusing democratic promotion, and in this case through the use of force.