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In this efficient and informed study, James Cronin interweaves international and local events and accounts, offering the reader a compact and intelligent narrative on a ubiquitous and overused phrase. He takes in his remit the different challenges of the Second World War and the postwar settlement, the Cold War and the emerging and increasingly fragmented multipolar world of the past forty years. ‘Liberal order’, shorn of its definite or indefinite articles, thus eschews both the allure of conclusivity and the intimation of plurality. For the author it is a political and—crucially—economic rule-based system crafted since the 1940s by the victors of the war.
The guiding argument behind Cronin's investigation is that the international liberal order is the necessary product of domestic liberal democracy, underpinned by booming markets and the prosperity they introduced. In parallel, the stability accordingly generated for some thirty years was bolstered by an anticommunism concentrating Western minds on their geopolitical commonalities while ostensibly sidelining their differences. The negativity of anticommunism was the driving force that kept an assertive version of liberal order on the road, assisted internally by banning parties at both extremes of the political spectrum.
Concurrently, its universalist and ideational intent faltered, and its powerful ethical vision was largely invisible. Cronin is at his probing best when he raises doubts about the viability of liberal practices both domestically and internationally. The ‘unmaking’ of the order he investigates is hence doubly fragile, for its ‘liberalism’ itself turns out to be culturally and ideologically contested, proffering flawed and partial renderings of its full range. Bereft of solidity to begin with, liberalism was retrospectively reduced to an ‘aspiration’ mired in the ‘messy reality’ of institutional political arrangements and the unpredictable conduct of key individuals.
Part of the problem in referring to the liberal order is that Cronin's chief case studies, running through the book, are the USA and the UK, but the interpretative paradigm imposed on the two is unmistakenly and, above all, American. Cronin prefers—understandably—to employ readings and methodological preferences that prevail in American scholarship and in its public life. One such instance is the predominance of crude binaries, so central to the exclusionary dualism characterising the American political scene, but notably different from the British experience, in which tripartism as well as secondary diversities operate alongside the major groupings, inviting a far more nuanced analysis both from commentators and scholars.
Furthermore, the substantive binary taxonomy utilises different ideational divides. ‘Capitalism versus socialism’ bestrides Cronin's analysis, but is and was far less pronounced in UK political discourse, representing an infrequent theme among its liberal programmes and ideas. That, in turn, leads to the disparate ranking of values under the rubric of liberal order, a ranking that highlights the ideological divides obscured by the promoters of liberal order. The 1941 Atlantic Charter epitomised what Churchill and Roosevelt had in mind: a clarion call for freedom of speech and religion, both well-established in liberal thought; a more radical, but unspecific, demand for freedom from want; and a freedom from fear brought on by overwhelming current experiences of autocracy and repression. To those were added self-determination, with its dual democratic and nationalist appeal, cross-global economic cooperation and unhindered trade. But those elements are insufficient to carry the weight and subtlety of various liberalisms, not least in the domestic arena of the UK, America's postwar co-partner, and certainly not as the century passed its mid-point. Apart from its binary sparseness, capitalism is far too general a category to account for the salient shades it hosts or bisects: social democracy, market socialism, or compassionate conservatism, to name but a few.
In the UK, ‘liberal order’ was effectively the Conservative agenda, sidestepping the fact that British liberalism had advanced an impressive, well thought-out and highly influential response to ‘capitalism’ through an emphasis on redistribution, social justice, community, individual development and state responsibility that presaged the welfare state ideology and was subsequently taken over by the Labour Party. These latter features claimed higher priority than found in the American equivalent. Democracy was never just an institutional phenomenon in recent British liberal thought and practice, but contained a humanist culture of mutual fairness, respect and support, as well as a faith in international courts and treaties believed to advocate similar principles.
The USA did not advance the kind of progressive social liberalism as a national programme outside the writings of notable exceptions such as John Dewey, though it endorsed social security measures, fostered modest forms of public socioeconomic intervention and decisively advanced the civil rights of African Americans in the face of the widespread and persistent scourge of racism. True, Cronin is quite right in pointing out that liberalism always contains features patently central to other ideologies, many of which, moreover, could be described as illiberal. True also that, while Cronin broadly accepts a narrative that bases liberalism on the pillars of capitalism and political democracy, he is critical about its implementation. Yet liberal order's internationalist agenda—despite idealist promises of global peace, unity and socioeconomic betterment—reflected poorly the growing potential of liberal sophistication at a national level. The American concern lay primarily in ‘redesigning the world economic order to ensure that the conditions that had produced war would be eliminated’, in the course of which a ‘golden age’ of capitalism was ushered in.
Since the 1970s, liberal economics have discarded the Keynesian aim of full employment in favour of price stability. The flirtation with neoliberalism abandoned the liberal humanist orbit, etymology aside, locating it within a narrow and emotionally lacklustre neoconservative ethos of competitive individualism, privatisation and tax cuts that could not rival rising forms of populism. Ultimately, the liberal order undoubtedly had modest successes, but they were offset by its most striking international failure: its inability to push beyond a limited Western ambit.
Cronin masters those intricacies well. Multiple national and regional logics came to corrode an order whose waning was further exacerbated through the slipping away of American hegemony. Even within Europe, the ‘liberated’ countries released from the yoke of the Iron Curtain prioritised the pursuit of economic salvation and a modicum of civil rights over the deepening of human growth, cultural tolerance and mutual aid. Within western Europe, liberalism was as a rule more centrist than its British counterpart and—in a domain moulded by Christian democracy and a watered-down socialism—far less self-aware of any liberal credentials it might have flaunted. Although in the international arena some European countries have displayed their liberal side in generous refugee and asylum policies, those have spawned local backlashes. As the twentieth century has disappeared over the temporal horizon, the resurgence of illiberal currents within the most prominent Western states has shaken previous cultural and political conventions and, in the American case, has recently threatened to swamp public standards and courtesies in a brutal insistence on ‘alternative facts’, buying into the language of a fake epistemological pluralism. This sense of foreboding, alongside the earlier ebullience of the would-be crafters of world history—however sparsely underpinned—is excellently conveyed in this book.
Fragile Victory. The Making and Unmaking of Liberal Order, by James E. Cronin. Yale University Press. 346 pp. £30
