Description
The ‘crisis’ of the Liberal International Order (LIO) is widely discussed, yet contributions to the literature frequently decouple the LIO’s vulnerabilities from global capitalism's structural dynamics. Whilst some scholars acknowledge that the LIO sustains capitalism through ideological legitimation, the mechanism linking ideological management to capitalism's structural preconditions remains undertheorised. We argue that the LIO’s primary function is managing the tension between capitalism's reliance on expropriation and liberalism's promise of universal inclusion. The current crisis represents this management strategy’s inevitable failure.
Many existing attempts at explaining the crisis are robust but siloed. The economic transformation thesis emphasises how neoliberal hyper-globalisation undermined domestic social contracts, fuelling populist backlash (Flaherty and Rogowski 2021). The ideological exposure thesis highlights the “hypocrisy charge” between meritocratic promises and hierarchical practices (Lawson and Zarakol 2023). The institutional evolution thesis shows how intrusive post-Cold War governance generates legitimacy problems (Börzel and Zürn 2021). This article extends these perspectives by demonstrating how the crisis is endogenous to the LIO’s operating logic.
Building on Nancy Fraser’s work, we understand capitalism as requiring both exploitation (extracting surplus value from wage labour) and expropriation (confiscating capacities from racialised, gendered, and colonised populations). The LIO managed this contradiction through promising universal inclusion whilst ensuring accumulation-necessary hierarchies. This operated through two phases: embedded liberalism (1945-1970s), securing working-class stability in the core through colonial expropriation (Sabaratnam and Laffey 2023); and progressive neoliberalism (1980s-2010s), legitimising marketisation through an inclusion discourse. The crisis manifests as financialised capitalism's material severity—extreme inequality, ecological degradation, democratic erosion—overwhelming ideological management and exposing the LIO as an imperial project whose contradictions have become unmanageable. As the LIO fragments, we argue, post-liberal attempts at saving capitalism emerge. We illustrate this through examining the contemporary far right in the liberal core and the role of ‘illiberal’ actors beyond the core.
