Meetings
Rethinking the 1990s: Liberal World Order-Building in the Post-Cold War Era
June 9-11 2022
The LSE-Princeton Conference was held at LSE from June 9th to 11th 2022, and brought together two dozen historians and political scientists to reconsider the 1990s and its impact on world politics in the ensuing decades.
Has the post-Cold War era ended? Will the global response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine renew democracies’ commitment to the liberal order after years of international discord and domestic backsliding? How did we arrive at this singular moment? This project is predicated on the assumption that there is much to be gained by reflecting on the assumptions, preconceptions, and judgments that informed and guided Western leaders’ efforts to set the liberal order on a new course a quarter of a century ago. It was a time when great hopes were pinned on the new European Union’s communitarian spirit; the promise of a more open, integrated world order that included China, the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and other emerging economies; and America’s capacity to consolidate, protect, and extend democracy and markets across the globe. If Western prognosticators significantly underestimated the staying power of autocracy and statist economies, then they also greatly overestimated the extent to which Western publics would back their governments’ efforts to globalize the liberal franchise.
At a time when the problems of great power rivalry, spheres of influence, and reactionary nationalism have resurfaced, we brought together a group of leading historians and political scientists to reconsider the 1990s and its impact on world politics in the ensuing decades. Looking back, what do the foreign policy choices that political leaders in liberal and illiberal nations made in the post-Cold War era tell us about the pressures and cross-pressures fracturing the world today? Where did our understandings and predictions about the liberal order’s future go wrong, and why? Were there other international order-building strategies available to Western policy makers at the time and if so, why were they set aside, marginalized, or ignored? How might global politics, and indeed liberal democracies themselves, look today if Western leaders had not bet so heavily on globalization, multilateralism, and democratization? Were the judgments about how China, Eastern Europe, and other emerging economies would integrate into the liberal order hopelessly naïve, or reasonable given the novelty of the moment? To what extent can Russia’s invasion of Ukraine be traced back to efforts by Western leaders to expand the liberal franchise eastward?
Public event - The Future of the Liberal World Order - 9 June 2022
In this hybrid event, Professor G. John Ikenberry (Princeton University), Professor Mary Kaldor (LSE), Professor Charles A. Kupchan (Georgetown University) and Professor Ayşe Zarakol (University of Cambridge) discussed the future of the liberal world order, in light of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and years of international discord.
Hosted by the Phelan United States Centre as part of the Wenger Distinguished Lectures.
Watch a video recording of the event