Abstract
Contestations of liberal values, norms, and principles; financial and economic stumbling; increasing populism, nationalism, and tribalism; global power shifts—lately all these phenomena have been turned into crisis narratives. This chapter explains how the present volume problematizes these current narratives of crisis from various thematic, theoretical, methodological, and geographical perspectives. These crisis narratives are then aggregated into two groups, which comprise the main themes for the book: the Internally Divided West, focusing on identities and liberalism, and the Western-led Liberal International Order, focusing on ordering principles, values, hegemony, and contestations. The chapter emphasizes the multiformity and contingency of the key concepts: liberal and the West, and the experienced and interpreted nature of crisis. Finally, it is proposed that the current sense of crisis is an opportunity to pause and revisit the persistent and intricate question of the relations between the West, world order, and liberal values and norms.
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Notes
- 1.
Tusk (2016).
- 2.
“Judy Asks: Is the Crisis of the Liberal Order Exaggerated?” 2017.
- 3.
Trump (2018).
- 4.
Quoted in Janjevic (2018).
- 5.
Lavrov (2017).
- 6.
Munich Security Report 2017: Post-Truth, Post-West, Post-Order?; Munich Security Report 2018: To the Brink—and Back?; and Munich Security Report 2019: International Order on the Brink?
- 7.
See for example the Foreign Affairs theme issue “Out of Order: The Future of the International System” 96 (1), 2017; and International Affairs issue “Ordering the world? Liberal internationalism in theory and practice,” 94 (1), 2018.
- 8.
See for example Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the 21st Century. 2018. Edited by R. Jervis, F. Gavin, J. Rovner, and D. Labrosse. New York: Columbia University Press; Kagan, Robert. 2018. The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- 9.
Democracy Index 2018 (2019).
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Morozov (2010).
- 13.
Coker (2010), 73–74.
- 14.
- 15.
Said (1978).
- 16.
Ifversen (2008), 240.
- 17.
Browning and Lehti (2010).
- 18.
Browning and Lehti (2010).
- 19.
Morozov (2010), 187–188.
- 20.
Coker (2010), 35, 75.
- 21.
Browning (2010), 222–223.
- 22.
See for example Heller (2006).
- 23.
Jackson (2010), 58.
- 24.
- 25.
See for example Heller (2006).
- 26.
Jackson (2010), 58.
- 27.
Tharoor (2017).
- 28.
Colgan and Keohane (2017).
- 29.
Stuenkel (2016), 184.
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Lehti, M., Pennanen, HR., Jouhki, J. (2020). Introduction. In: Lehti, M., Pennanen, HR., Jouhki, J. (eds) Contestations of Liberal Order. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22059-4_1
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