Description
What was Germany's role in the creation of the Western postwar order, generally referred to as the 'Liberal International Order' (LIO)? Engaging with scholarship on alliance formation and theories on the LIO, this paper argues that the West German state performed an ideological role that was central for the emergence of the emerging European postwar settlement. Germany's Christian Democratic leadership espoused a civilisational worldview that conceptualised the 'West' as a religious community of fate, a position that was shared by US administrations of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Safeguarding and reconstructing Germany was therefore constructed as a civilisational imperative that was akin to saving Western civilisation from the atheist threat of communism as a whole. The paper therefore contributes to recent scholarship that has begun problematising the liberal underpinnings of the LIO at its creation by showing the more complicated origins of the LIO.
