The Uncertain Legacy of Crisis: European Foreign Policy Faces the Future

6. Goodbye, Liberal World Order?

97 chapter 6 Goodbye, LiberaL WorLd order? T he long-term impact of the eurozone crisis makes it harder for the EU to retain a focus on normative political values within its foreign policies. Many would say it is largely futile and misplaced for the EU even to try to do so. European capabilities are diminished and, some argue, the liberal world order is in its death throes. EU foreign policy is caught between internal crisis and the rise of non-Western powers. Paraphrasing Horace’s reflection after Rome defeated the Greeks, the EU has an uphill task to tame its tamers. Building from chapter four’s look at the travails of economic liberalism, this chapter assesses the EU’s postcrisis commitment to the more political dimensions of the liberal world order. One strand of the EU’s response reflects a conviction that an enfeebled Europe today has even more incentive to shape the international agenda in favor of liberal values. A converse sentiment has also hardened, however, that the EU must more graciously accept that the core values of the liberal world order are now so besieged so as to make their defense a dissonant and reckless endeavor. The chapter finds that crisis-hit Europe is certainly a less proselytizing force, but that in areas of its foreign policies retains support for liberal values. While the EU is still a liberal power, it is more selectively so. But the challenge of molding geostrategy to a different kind of liberal order remains perilously unmet. 98 the UNcertaIN LeGacY OF crISIS ecLectic WorLd order(s) A legion of experts declares the demise of the liberal world order. It has become commonplace to assert that a zero-sum logic has returned to dominate international politics. What is termed “rise and fall realism” sees periods of adjustment to global power as being those least amenable to shared values and most susceptible to conflict. A by-product of the financial crisis is that the critique of economic liberalism increasingly spills over into a doubting of the creed’s political dimensions. The crisis places the focus of attention back on self-interested state behavior, with relative gains against other nations sought above multilateral rules.1 It has been interpreted as another step away from the original hopes of a politically driven liberal governance of global institutions—a trend that was already under way thanks to the subordination of political to economic interests, and the distortion of liberal interventionism by Western security interests.2 Ian Bremmer argues that the world is set for an uneasy interregnum between the U.S.-run liberal order and a still-pending new order; this indeterminate state will necessarily be characterized by fierce self-help state strategies.3 Mark Leonard judges that “rather than being transformed by their membership of the [international] institutions, the rising powers are dramatically changing the nature of the institutions themselves.”4 Charles Kupchan opines that the West’s norms have little global appeal and that as its material dominance wanes, it will not be able to browbeat others to accept them. Interdependence will magnify tensions, not temper them. It is impossible that power can shift without norms mutating, too. China has not challenged the liberal order more fully only because it is not yet strong enough to do so. In this line of reasoning, the West must attach less priority to global multilateral rules and accept that problems will be managed by regional organizations without outside interference.5 Martin Jacques insists that a powerful China will bring with it a sure-footed economic diplomacy that others will be obliged to adopt and a completely different type of universalism based on “harmonious and humane authority.”6 Some writers believe that in practice the liberal order has only ever taken root in a very limited manner anyway, making its slide toward irrelevance even more inevitable and the need for more limited and pragmatic alliances more natural.7 Others insist that climate change is an additional and potentially GOODBYe, LIBeraL WOrLD OrDer? 99 defining factor pushing against liberal interdependence and toward more zero-sum realpolitik.8 The most prominent strand of academic opinion has been in favor of “thinner” forms of universalism.9 Progressives now commonly argue that liberal multilateralism should give way to a genuine competition over new ideas for international order.10 Prominent experts conclude that trends disadvantage democracy’s fortunes and that authoritarian resilience...