Fragile victory : the making and unmaking of liberal order

How the history of liberal order and democratic politics since the 1930s explains ongoing threats to democracy and international order The liberal democratic order that seemed so stable in North America and Western Europe has become precarious. James E. Cronin argues that liberalism has never been secure and that since the 1930s the international order has had to be crafted, redeployed, and extended in response to both victories and setbacks. Beginning with the German and Japanese efforts in the 1930s to establish a system based on empire, race, economic protectionism, and militant nationalism, Cronin shows how the postwar system, established out of a revulsion at the ideas of fascism, repeatedly reinvented itself in the face of the Cold War, anticolonial insurgencies, the economic and political crises of the 1970s, the collapse of communism, the rise of globalization, and the financial crisis of 2008. Cronin emphasizes the links between internal and external politics in sustaining liberal order internationally and the domestic origins and correlates of present difficulties. Fragile Victory provides the context necessary to understand such diverse challenges as the triumph of Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of populism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contents 7 Note to Readers: The Invasion of Ukraine and Liberal Order 9 Introduction: Liberal Order and Its Troubled History 19 One An Illiberal World of Rival “Orders” 35 Two Defining the Enemy, Crafting Strategy, Imagining a New World 65 Three Toward a Cold War World Order 94 Four In Search of Stability and Prosperity 122 Five Political Stability: Preconditions and Discontents 153 Six Liberalism and Liberal Order, Modified 179 Seven The End of the Cold War and the Expansion of Liberal Order 205 Eight The Center Ceases to Hold 233 Nine Challenges to Liberal Order, at Home and Abroad 261 Conclusion: Fragmentation, Democracy, and Liberal Order 301 Notes 321 Acknowledgments 349 Index 353