Learning from Global Democratic Challenges and Innovations Mini-Conference II: Author Meets Critics on "Geopolitics and Democracy: The Western Liberal Order from Foundation to Fracture"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Part of Mini-Conference

• Learning from Global Democratic Challenges and Innovations Mini-Conference II

Session Description

Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon’s Geopolitics and Democracy: The Western Liberal Order from Foundation to Fracture (Oxford 2023) argues that the current anti-globalist backlash against the Western-led liberal international order can be traced to the 1990s, when Western governments encouraged globalization at the expense of social and economic protections at home. Drawing on a wide variety of cross-national data, they find that this combination of policies succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order’s reach, but at the cost of generating popular discontent and division in one democracy after another. Arguing that Western governments cannot close this “democratic legitimacy gap” with their voters by retrenching and turning inward or by replaying the Cold War, Geopolitics and Democracy challenges us to consider how today’s leaders might strike a new balance between international openness and economic security. This authors-meet-critics roundtable brings together leading experts of international and comparative politics to evaluate Trubowitz and Burgoon’s arguments about the international and domestic causes of today’s anti-globalist backlash, and the possibilities for renewing popular support for liberal internationalism in Western democracies going forward.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Cosponsor

• Division 43: International History and Politics

Chair

• G. John Ikenberry Princeton University

Presenters

• Brian Burgoon University of Amsterdam

• Catherine E. De Vries Bocconi University

• Jeffry A. Frieden Harvard University

• Liesbet Hooghe UNC - Chapel Hill

• Daniel H. Nexon Georgetown University

• Kori Schake American Enterprise Institute

• Peter Trubowitz London School of Economics