The syncopated history of the liberal international order

Introduction

In the epigraph to After Victory, John Ikenberry quotes William Paley, an 18th-century theologian who ventured that he would not think twice if he saw a stone on the ground, but quickly would become inquisitive if he discovered a watch. We expect to encounter stones, but do not anticipate watches interrupting our path. As the Cold War came to its sudden end, Ikenberry saw watches. For decades before 1989, the discipline of international relations (IR) had associated certain things with particular realities. Like stones on the ground, international politics and the pursuit of relative power went together, and peace settlements among great powers together with victor’s justice. But after an unexpected and peaceful end to the Cold War, there was no unbridled pursuit of power. Instead, as Ikenberry details, the victorious power was restrained in its pursuits and sought to incorporate the vanquished into a dense fabric of existing international institutions.

Ikenberry’s watch moment marked the beginnings of a bold reinterpretation of IR in the 20th century. The international system had arrived at a place where great powers found the ‘returns from institutions’ greater than the ‘returns from power’. Grounded in historical institutionalism, After Victory advances an argument about the cumulative effects of institutions and argues that rules and norms that states constructed in the course of the 20th century gradually transformed great power behaviour. That transformation entailed strengthened commitments to economic openness, collective security, and universal human rights, and thus progressively reinforced the liberal international order that was established after 1945.

Ikenberry’s watch moment occurred when he worked in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning (1991–1992). There Dennis Ross (a senior US diplomat) tasked him with preparing a memorandum on what had happened to international systems after other major wars had come to an end. In surveying the post-war settlements of 1648, 1713, 1815, 1919, and 1945, and comparing them to the period after 1989, Ikenberry discovered different patterns of state behaviour and diverse types of international order. He observed that over time a different logic of IR had prevailed than those associated with realist and liberal interpretations. The foundations of Ikenberry’s thesis about IR after 1989 are found in a variant of ‘new institutionalist’ theory known as historical institutionalism. ¹ After Victory is the first IR monograph explicitly to associate itself with this tradition (Ikenberry, 2001: 16–17; see also Ikenberry, 2017, 2018: 6). At the time of its writing, historical institutionalism was thriving in comparative and American politics, but it had yet to define debates in IR (Fioretos, 2011). This picture gradually changed with After Victory.

After Victory reoriented discussions of the role of international institutions in determining the nature of great power politics, including the character, rise, and fall of international order. From Ikenberry’s perspective, international institutions are not temporary arrangements with ‘false promise’ and little impact on the behaviour of states. Nor are they narrowly related to solving functional problems and preventing overtly opportunistic behaviour by states. They may have lasting consequences and may even reconstitute the interests of states through a variety of endogenously produced feedback effects. International institutions thus have the potential to alter the path of history, not simply by prescribing new behaviour but by altering the interests of states in ways that reinforce their support for a rule-based or ‘constitutionalised’ international order.

In puzzling through the sources behind a constitutionalised international order, Ikenberry crafted a volume that matched the best Swiss timepiece. But when After Victory appears in a new edition, it faces one of its toughest tests yet. In the United States, populist and anti-internationalist sentiments have targeted core features of the liberal international order and observers are writing the order’s obituary (see Haass, 2018).

This contribution explores the foundations of Ikenberry’s historical institutionalism and how a wider consultation of this tradition’s analytical toolbox provides means to analyse what Peter Hall (2016: 38) calls the ‘syncopated’ nature of history – the ebb and flow, one may say, of political orders. A conclusion speaks to the importance of keeping an eye out for what after William Paley we may term watch moments; that is, unexpected empirical developments that spur analytical refinements, which in turn provide means to better understand patterns of continuity and change in IR.

Ikenberry’s institutionalism

The central claim in After Victory is that the returns from institutions associated with the liberal international order became greater in the course of the 20th century than those from unbridled exercises of power. According to Ikenberry, powerful industrialised states, led by the United States, opted to stay within the bounds of the expectations prescribed by post-1945 designs in their pursuit of political objectives. They did so even when presented with the opportunity radically to improve their relative power vis-à-vis other states. From the perspective of Cold War IR theory, this statement was a bold one. For Ikenberry, it was not distributions of power that gave the world its stability after 1989, but a reality in which the powerful reasoned that there was more to gain from strategic restraint and observing the rules and norms of existing institutions than there was from a wholesale remaking of international order. The stability of the international order after 1989 was reinforced as a growing number of states, including former and potential rivals of the United States, concluded that they too stood to benefit more from joining the liberal international order than in mobilising coalitions to overturn it. The coalition for economic openness, an essential and defining feature of the liberal international order, grew stronger and larger after 1989 and provided the foundations for unprecedented levels of globalisation.

Ikenberry’s institutional theory diverges from multiple strands of IR theory. Most pointedly, it departs from realist narratives in the discipline, including statements in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War that characterised international institutions as ‘false promises’ (see Mearsheimer, 1990). With their emphasis on states’ supposedly timeless pursuit of relative gains and expectations that shifting distributions of power will alter the character of international orders, realism was particularly poorly equipped to explain why an increasing number of states chose to join the focal organisations of the post-war system. After Victory is careful not to dispute the role of material power in shaping the path of IR. It nevertheless reflects scepticism that distributions of material resources and capabilities matter in equal terms across time. If states find ways of binding themselves to each other through a set of common institutions, Ikenberry (2001: 29–32) argues, then they can escape anarchy and enjoy the returns of an international order with ‘constitutional’ qualities.

After Victory also diverged from other institutional approaches at the time of its writing, when the predominant mode of theorising was a neoliberal institutional paradigm grounded in rational choice theory (see Keohane, 1984). Institutions were viewed as functional means that help states resolve coordination and collaboration problems and help them overcome the fear that partners will cheat on their commitments to joint pursuits. In this tradition, institutions are conceived of as focal points around which states coordinate their behaviour and rules that prescribe behaviour states observe in the name of securing absolute gains from international interaction. By contrast to the realist perspective that expected international institutions to decline in importance after 1989, institutionalists expected great degrees of continuity (Keohane, 1993). From Ikenberry’s perspective, however, the rationalist variety of institutionalism

misses the fundamental feature of the prevailing order among the advanced industrial countries: the structure of relations are so deep and pervasive that the kind of cheating that these theories worry about either cannot happen, or if it does it will not really matter because cooperation and institutions are not fragile but profoundly robust. (Ikenberry, 2001: 17)

Ikenberry sought to account for why institutions remain ‘robust’ or ‘sticky’ long after their original rationale was gone and after global balances of power had shifted. He turned to concepts like path dependence, which suggest that once an international system heads down one track, alternatives became ever less likely to emerge. But Ikenberry knew that not all paths are sustainable. The post-1919 order, for example, proved durable only for a short period of time before collapsing. The U.S. government was unable to secure domestic support for membership in the League of Nations. By the time of the 1933 World Economic Conference, the United States had turned inward, embraced protectionism, and declined to exercise international leadership. For Ikenberry, therefore, explaining why the post-1945 order was resilient, including why its membership grew after 1989, required a theory of stickiness that went beyond the determinism associated with strong versions of path dependence. It also required modification of coarse characterisations of the League as a temporary organisation and a failure. The 1919 settlement represented the emergence of a liberal international system defined by commitments to international law, multilateralism, economic openness, and collective security. Lessons from its construction and its demise greatly influenced post–1945 international institutions.

In articulating his theory of why liberal international institutions became durable after 1945 and remained so after 1989, Ikenberry deepened his engagement with the analytical toolbox of historical institutionalism. He notes that historical institutionalism ‘offers a more sticky theory of institutions than the rationalist account, but unlike constructivism, it locates institutional stickiness in the practical interaction between actors and formal and informal organizations, rules, and routines’ (Ikenberry, 2001: 16–17). To come to terms with the effects of these interactions, within formal and informal structures, Ikenberry continued his already long engagement with historical institutionalism to explore the mechanisms that linked national and international politics. In his work on foreign economic policy, variations in national political institutions had been leveraged to explain why governments held diverse preferences over economic policy and made different policy choices (Ikenberry, 1988a). Ikenberry’s analysis of the oil crisis of the 1970s foregrounded the historical origins of the state and how they impacted the American response much later (Ikenberry, 1988b). His engagements with historical institutionalism are also apparent in collaborative work with Theda Skocpol (see Ikenberry and Skocpol, 1987; Skocpol and Ikenberry, 1983). And it features in work on the Bretton Woods system where he points to the role of political ideas and elite discourse in crafting a liberal post-war order (Ikenberry, 1992).

But it is in After Victory that Ikenberry (2001: 23) puts historical institutionalism in the service of central themes in IR theory, specifically the question of order. International order refers to the ‘governing arrangements among a group of states, including its fundamental rules, principles, and institutions’. Notions of institutional returns and policy feedback are central to Ikenberry’s argument for why a ‘liberal international’ order prevailed after 1989. He theorises that institutions provided their supporters with benefits that could not be reaped in their absence and that the value attached to them grew with time. By contrast to standard models of investment and consumption in economics in which returns are diminishing over time, situations of ‘increasing returns’ prevail when actors attach a larger value to extant arrangements as time passes. These returns may be particularly substantial when institutions work in complementary ways to form an aggregated order. In a different context, Ikenberry (2017: 67) quotes Douglass North (1990) to make the point: ‘the interdependent web of an institutional matrix produces massive increasing returns’.

The concept of policy feedback is closely related, but concerns the creation and maintenance of political constituencies. Many policies create constituencies that come to resist departures from valued arrangements, especially if they are associated with increasing returns. From this perspective, path dependence is not an inevitable outcome. The stickiness of institutions is fostered by voluntarist behaviour; it is borne out of the actions and calculations of self-interested actors. Thus, for example, the international institutions governing the international monetary and trade systems created deep and widening support within the commercial sector, which subsequently generated broader political coalitions that favoured economic openness. In combination with domestic programmes that eased burdens of adjustment of global competition, the post–1945 international economic order gained wide support, especially within the political and economic elites who steered policy. In this way, After Victory conceptually and empirically bridges comparative and international politics to provide an integrated understanding of the generative role of institutions in the evolution of 20th-century politics.

After populism

The year 2016 was a watch moment. The strengthening of populist and sovereigntist political platforms that promise to overturn domestic and international establishments represents one of the strongest tests to the thesis in After Victory. Isolationist sentiments that decry international institutions helped propel a presidential candidate in the United States from political obscurity to the helm of the world’s largest economy. In echoes of isolationist predecessors, supporters of the Trump administration have explicitly attacked core features of the liberal international order (see Patrick, 2017; Peterson, 2018). For many observers, the sources of the hegemon’s retreat are found in the discontent of US voters who conclude that the international liberal order is an arrangement characterised by diminishing returns. From this vantage point, economic openness in combination with job insecurity, stagnant real wages, and increasing inequality created – gradually – a coalition for economic closure. When the governing elite reaches similar conclusions, even seasoned observers and former foreign policy officials declare the international liberal order a thing of the past (Haass, 2018).

Ikenberry’s thinking on the role of institutions has been refined with time. He has conceded that his first statements on the sources of continuity after 1989 were ‘too strong’, maybe perilously close to assuming that history is linear (Ikenberry, 2019). Were After Victory written in 2018, we may surmise that the populist surge would have directed attention to the conditions under which institutions become self-undermining and foster political processes that undermine rather than reinforce an international order. In such a pursuit, Ikenberry would have had reason to consider additional implements in the analytical toolbox of historical institutionalism.

Historical institutionalism approaches the study of international politics with long-time horizons. This perspective mitigates post hoc ergo propter hoc (‘after this, because of this’) reasoning in which proximate factors are seen as the source behind major developments, when in fact these factors are expressions of deeper, perhaps structural, forces (Goldstein and Gulotty, 2017: 197–198). Studies suggest that the sources of the discontent that pushed the populism of Donald Trump to the fore are found in the two decades before his election, and in the diminishing returns the electorate associated with the state of US economic affairs (Rodrik, 2018). Such sentiments dovetail with sovereigntist voices, which have long been present in the Republican Party and have gradually acquired a stronger voice in shaping policy (see Patrick, 2017; Spiro, 2000).

A majority of Trump supporters argue that the United States does too much for the world; 69% of Americans think that the United States should ‘not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems’; and only 17% think that foreign policy should be a priority (Pew Research Centre, 2016). Sentiments such as these foster dynamics in which institutions may become self-undermining. These situations are when the parameters under which institutions generate support become fewer with time and the size of coalitions supporting continuity declines (see Greif and Laitin, 2004). When such conditions prevail in the perceived hegemonic state, then, according to conventional wisdom, permissive conditions are amply present for a transformative rupture in the international order. Whether the productive conditions – those that substantively transform a political arrangement – are present in the contemporary world it is too early to say. But this uncertainty should not distract from inquiry into what may have brought the international liberal order to this point of potential rupture.

The year 2016 may be understood as one step in a longer sequence of events that historical institutionalists call path-dependent reactive sequences (Mahoney, 2000). Unlike the classic theory of path dependence in which each step along a path serves to reinforce extant arrangements and make it less likely that alternatives emerge, dynamics may be unleashed that create tightly coupled action–reaction sequences in which each step makes it more likely that institutions unravel. In this scenario, US withdrawal from major trade treaties, a weakening of the WTO, and tariff wars that impose heavy costs are a product of opposition to previous, now-rejected commitments that open up room for protectionism and isolationism to gain adherence. This chain of causation serves to decrease the legitimacy of economic openness and multilateralism, and may ultimately undermine the international liberal order.

The world has witnessed path-dependent reactive sequences in the past, including in the period preceding the collapse of 1919 international order. Circumstances were different in the interwar period, but the dynamics of the period underscore that political orders have ebbs and flows. Rather than only serving to strengthen the coalition in favour of an international order, time may have the opposite effect and create intense contestation (Zürn, 2018). Analytically, therefore, attention should be paid to both conditions under which domestic and international political actors associate institutions with increasing and diminishing returns. Even if the latter type of institutional returns is absent or negligible, as Ikenberry implicitly argues in After Victory, they merit analysis.Without an explanation of their weakness, we privilege theories of political development that focus on the flow of political order.

Historical institutional theory also raises the prospect of a different scenario in which the openness coalition prevails and the liberal international order is resilient. Even if it is a different version of its previous self – perhaps what Ikenberry may have termed the 4.0 version of liberal international order (see Ikenberry, 2009) – the period after 2016 may have more in common with the period after 1989 than, say, after 1930 when the Smoot–Hawley tariffs were introduced. In the contemporary setting, this scenario rests on there being strong international support for openness. Here, Ikenberry’s analysis in After Victory is a crucial reference for it underscores that a growing number of countries come to embrace the institutional core of the liberal order (see also Ikenberry, 2011). For example, there is today no significant economy, with the potential exception of the United States, that aims to unwind the WTO. Indeed, because of gridlock within the WTO, states have embraced a panoply of other regional and mega-regional institutions that are designed to promote greater economic openness. In the country that most frequently is compared to the political sentiments found in the United States – the United Kingdom under the Conservative Party after the Brexit referendum – and where sovereigntism and the rejection of ambitious international arrangements has been the starkest, the preferred alternative of hardline Brexiteers is the ‘WTO option’. At the same time, China, the main perceived economic rival of the United States, announced that it is committed to being a leader in sustaining an open global economy (Jinping, 2017). To be sure, China’s preferences will vary from other members of the G20 on several dimensions of the liberal order. But Ikenberry’s (2008) argument that China’s returns from the liberal international order have grown is borne out in recent developments: China appears more committed than before to assume burdens to sustain essential features of the liberal international order.

Our next watch moment may be the recognition that the United States is not an indispensable power in the mould of hegemonic stability theory. Members of the G20 may not be in total agreement on all economic matters, but other than possibly the United States, there is extensive support for a rule-based international system organised around economic openness. To be sure, US relative power has declined, but it still retains resources to provide public goods. Whether it remains willing to provide that leadership is the open question, and much fear has been expressed on this score. It is worth recalling, however, that smaller groups of states, even if they do not have harmonious interests, can provide the public goods that make openness possible (Snidal, 1985). In the event of full-fledged US retrenchment, the likelihood that such a scenario will undermine the liberal international order appears more remote than at many previous points. The reason, as anticipated in After Victory, is that the world’s major economies became and remain strongly supportive of maintaining economic openness because of the returns they associate with membership in the international organisations most closely associated with the liberal international order.

Conclusion

Ikenberry’s After Victory is a landmark contribution to IR. As scholars mobilise to study what will soon be the past, they have much to learn from Ikenberry’s engagement with institutional theory. The book’s deployment of historical institutionalism underscores the value of identifying the mechanisms that serve to strengthen support for international institutions. It locates the sources of such dynamics within international institutions themselves, which is to say that it advances an endogenous theory of political development. While After Victory has remained largely silent on the topic of resistance to the liberal international order and the prospect that it may endogenously generate opposition, a broader engagement with the toolbox of historical institutionalism makes it a relatively straightforward affair to address this omission. Such engagement makes it possible to consider when international institutions become associated with increasing and when with diminishing returns. This way it is possible to account for why a logic of institutional reinforcement prevails in one period or place, but not other ones, and similarly why institutions are self-undermining under some but not other conditions. In this manner, fuller explanations can be obtained of the flow as well as the ebb of support for a rule-based and open international political order.

While the notion of a liberal international order is frequently represented as a cohesive entity formed at one moment in time, it is best understood as ‘an aggregation of various sorts of ordering rules and institutions’ (Ikenberry, 2018: 1). As studies come to terms with the post-2016 period, this diversity is important to recognise for it pushes IR theorists to acknowledge from the onset that the direction, speed, and nature of institutional change are bound to vary within the constitutive elements of an order. As an order ages, it is to be expected that some parts will gain greater adherence, as Ikenberry observed in After Victory, but also that some parts will lose support, as evident after 2016. A fuller account of the contemporary state of the liberal international order, whether it is robust or fragile, will depend upon the way in which studies disaggregate that order.

After Victory also reminds us to keep an eye on unexpected events, or what after William Paley we may term watch moments. The populism of 2016 is not equivalent to the sort of momentous ‘earthquake’ events that preceded the 1919, 1945, and 1989 settlements. It is nevertheless a watch moment, an unexpected event that revealed that the path of the liberal international order is not a predictable one paved by ever flatter stones. It is one with occasional obstacles, roadblocks, and perhaps even reversals. Observing such moments means recognising that history is syncopated and reinforces the importance of harnessing theory to account for the flow as well as ebb of support for any given international political orders.