The End of the Liberal Illusion

Professor G. John Ikenberry has spent decades of his academic life describing, defending and theorising the ‘liberal international order’. For contemporary society the concept has become a paradox: either we have grown so accustomed to it that peace, free trade and cooperation appear to be the natural course of history, or, conversely, we dismiss it as a dark conspiracy of global elites aimed at destroying the sovereignty of nation states.

Ikenberry, however, describes a far more pragmatic reality – a political project designed to protect vulnerable democracies in a harsh world. At its core lay a deliberate global expansion of the American vision of social order.

The United States promoted this particular worldview at a moment when much of the rest of the world had been fatally weakened by the First and Second World Wars, and it globalised the model fully after winning the Cold War.

Today Ikenberry is vindicated in a deeply ironic way: the strongest proof that the painstakingly constructed American order truly existed is the fact that it now appears to be collapsing before our eyes. One cannot destroy something that never existed.

What is the Liberal International Order?

At the most general level, G. John Ikenberry argues that after the Second World War the United States and its partners built an extensive system organised around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security cooperation and democratic solidarity. Crucially, the system offered a vision of sovereign states cooperating for mutual benefit within a global space loosely structured by rules.

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Ikenberry describes the order as resting on five pillars: openness, multilateralism based on permanent institutions, security cooperation, belief in the corrigibility of international relations and progressivism.

The last two pillars are particularly important for the present debate, as they point to a fundamental misunderstanding and to the sources of the current mood in much of Europe. Precisely those assumptions make it harder to read correctly both the domestic and the international situation.

Liberalism has gradually taken on the character of a secular faith – a utopian belief in a ‘better human being’ and in the idea that absolute good will triumph here on earth. There is nothing wrong with striving for a good life. Yet while Christianity links the final victory over evil and the achievement of a perfect world to the second coming of Jesus Christ, the pride of liberalism assumes that the political system itself will make us better people here and now.

The Utopia of Inevitable Progress

What holds true for human nature in private life applies even more strongly to political life. The idea that power politics can be permanently ‘tamed’ is dangerously naïve. In an international system without a global government – in other words, one characterised by anarchy – states will always compete for security and influence.

Similarly, belief in inevitable progress is central to the liberal international order. It is not merely a cultural appendage but a structural pillar. Accepting the order meant accepting the idea of progress and social solidarity. Yet, as Ikenberry himself acknowledges, common solidarity weakened after the end of the Cold War. What remained was an increasingly assertive form of progressivism.

On the international stage, the effort to spread liberal democracy at all costs contributed to a series of failed wars in the Middle East – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. What the West regarded as ‘moving states in a progressive direction’ was perceived by countries such as Russia and China as an aggressive intrusion into their sovereignty and an imposition of foreign values. What had originally been defensive solidarity thus evolved into an ideological crusade that antagonised other powers.

Yet the crusade did not stop at national borders. As the liberal international order gradually lost ground globally, attention shifted towards the struggle against an ‘internal enemy’. The increasingly forceful promotion of values within Western societies has therefore grown in proportion to the West’s declining influence on the international stage.

The King Is Dead, Long Live the King

The crisis of the liberal international order did not originate in the states that adopted it after the war – Western Europe or Japan. It came from the ‘first citizen’ of the system, as Ikenberry describes the United States.

This creates a historically curious paradox: those who were effectively incorporated into this American project have become its most determined defenders.

It is the American president himself who now tells us that the liberal international order is dead. For many Europeans that is difficult to accept and even harder to comprehend. The feeling of emptiness is not merely psychological – the void is real.

For Europe, however, no convincing alternatives have yet emerged. The Russian model, based on crude imperialism, Orthodox Christianity and autocracy, is unacceptable.

The Chinese model is even further removed. It is culturally distant and remains fundamentally collectivist, in the sense that the individual has little value when measured against the whole.

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The impulse for a new order must therefore come from the West itself. In that context the idea of the so-called ‘dark enlightenment’ occasionally comes to mind. There is no need to fear that such thinkers wish to plunge society back into darkness.

Their strongest contribution lies in their critical attitude towards the Enlightenment itself. Ikenberry traces the roots of the liberal order to the Enlightenment era, an age built on a powerful belief in reason, science and constant progress. If something new is to emerge, the West must first come to terms with that legacy. Not by returning to obscurantism, but by abandoning the illusion that Enlightenment rationality offers a universal remedy for human problems.

At the same time, however, ‘dark enlightenment’ cannot itself provide the answer. It represents a form of transitional thinking. Its proponents act as explorers of new intellectual terrain, challenging old certainties, dismantling inherited idols and subjecting the prevailing worldview to ruthless scrutiny.

In doing so, they merely prepare the ground and create space for the emergence of something far more significant and lasting. However, since we are still in this destructive preparatory phase, the birth of a truly new worldview may take generations.

The king is dead. But if a new order is to arise, it will not emerge from imperial nostalgia or foreign collectivism. It will come only through a painful and patient re-examination of the Enlightenment certainties that once gave the West its strength.