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The author would like to acknowledge comments and suggestions by Michael Doyle, Andrew Hurrell, Miles Kahler, Jeff Legro, Andrew Moravcsik, Daniel Nexon, Alan Alexandroff, and members of the Princeton University workshop on rising states and global governance.
Over the past century, the liberal international "project" has evolved and periodically reinvented itself. The liberal international ideas championed by Woodrow Wilson were extended and reworked by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Today's liberal internationalist agenda is evolving yet again. The actual orders themselves, built after the two world wars and in the aftermath of the Cold War, have also differed in their logic and character. Liberal international order--both its ideas and real-world political formations--is not embodied in a fixed set of principles or practices. Open markets, international institutions, cooperative security, democratic community, progressive change, collective problem solving, shared sovereignty, the rule of law--these are aspects of the liberal vision that have made appearances in various combinations and changing ways over the decades.
In grand historical perspective, this makes sense. The most important macro-transformation in world politics unfolding over the last two centuries has been what might be called the "liberal ascendency." This has involved the extraordinary rise of the liberal democratic states from weakness and obscurity in the late eighteenth century into the world's most powerful and wealthy states, propelling the West and the liberal capitalist system of economics and politics to world preeminence. All of this occurred in fits and starts in the twentieth century amidst world war and economic upheaval. At historical junctures along the way, liberal states have pursued various efforts to establish rules and institutions of international governance. Adaptation and innovation, necessity and choice, success and failure--all of these are aspects of liberal internationalism's movement along its twentieth century pathway.
It is possible to identify three major versions or models of liberal international order--call these versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. The first is associated with the ideas that Woodrow Wilson and Anglo-American liberals brought to the post-World War I international settlement; the second is the Cold War liberal internationalism of the post-1945 decades; and the third version is a sort of post-hegemonic liberal internationalism that has only partially appeared and whose full shape and logic is still...