National Interest
* Book: Philip Cunliffe. The National Interest.
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Review
Heather Penatzer:
"Cunliffe offers a more prescriptive intervention. Asserting from the outset that “the age of globalism is over,” he argues that “we should replace the political, legal and infrastructural legacy of hyperglobalization—or globalism—with a new international order, based around the national interests of individual nation-states.” Those national interests, Cunliffe claims, were abandoned in favor of supranational liberalism. The National Interest reads as an Adam Curtis documentary adapted to the mode of an academic monograph, indicting globalization, financialization, and supranational integration as “means by which ruling elites sought to retreat from the democratic pressure of the nation.” Cunliffe makes a compelling case that technocratic elitism and populist nihilism are both downstream of a crisis of political legitimacy that can only be remedied through a restoration of national identity, associational life, and democratic representation.
Fundamental to both books is their shared historical narrative of the postwar era. The liberal international order is a longue durée project, with its component institutions creating conditions that shape the international system over time rather than acting as a 911 hotline that can solve emergencies. Cunliffe and Pilkington take this component of the liberal project seriously, something that escapes many academic critics of the liberal international order. They neither deny the existence of a liberal order nor claim that international institutions have no power—those exercises in windmill tilting are left to the academic realists. Instead, both books accept that an American-led international order took shape in the postwar period, reached its zenith in the 1990s, and is now in terminal crisis.
While mainstream narratives of the 20th century treat the neoliberal turn of the 1970s as a distinct break from postwar social democracy, Cunliffe and Pilkington both argue that the ills of the neoliberal era were a logical evolution of this earlier project. For Pilkington, such evolution is inherent to liberal thought. He frames neoliberalism and Marxism both as variants of “hard liberalism” in that both centralize control of the economy while atomizing the citizenry. While this comparison is likely to lose some academic readers, it works for the point Pilkington is making. Neoliberalism’s flavor of hard liberalism involves the technocratic management of interest rates and wages, while the free-flowing international trade and capital serves the Darwinian elevation of “competition” in liberal thought. The “disembedding” of social purpose from markets was, Pilkington argues, a purer manifestation of liberal ideas than postwar social democracy.
Cunliffe also describes the neoliberal turn in terms of continuity rather than a rupture, focusing more on the institutions of international order than the ideas that shaped them. Like Pilkington, he points to the manipulation of interest rates by Paul Volcker, while also emphasizing the significance of the British Labour party’s defeat and eventual surrender to the European Economic Community. “The quid quo pro,” writes Cunliffe, “was helping to build an EU that constitutionalized neoliberalism, embedded in the so-called ‘Four Freedoms’ at the transnational level.” The free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across European borders meant that such movements were no longer the prerogative of states. The locus of authority shifted from the nation to a technocratic supranational institution. This shift, according to Cunliffe, fractured the ties between rulers and the ruled, a disconnect that would accelerate in the following decades.
This common historical narrative signals a rejection of an orthodoxy that sees the neoliberal turn as a departure from postwar liberalism. Understanding the 20th century as a continuous path from social democracy to neoliberalism implies that attempts to remedy a broken liberalism are futile. The present “crisis of liberal order,” by this account, is not the result of a divergence from liberal principles, but adherence to them."
(https://www.compactmag.com/article/after-the-liberal-international-order/)