The syncopated history of the liberal international order
| Author | Orfeo Fioretos |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148118791415 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Breakthrough Commentaries |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118791415
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2019, Vol. 21(1) 20 –28
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148118791415
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The syncopated history of
the liberal international order
Orfeo Fioretos
Keywords
historical institutionalism, increasing returns, liberal international order, path dependence, policy
feedback
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 interna-
tional 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 unex-
pected 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 uni-
versal 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 differ-
ent patterns of state behaviour and diverse types of international order. He observed that
Department of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Corresponding author:
Orfeo Fioretos, Department of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Email: fioretos@temple.edu
791415BPI0010.1177/1369148118791415The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsFioretos
research-article2018
Breakthrough Commentary
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