Search

Liberalism has been the most successful political ideology during the past two centuries in withstanding challenges and adapting to new environments. The liberal international order, set up after the Second World War and strengthened at the end of the Cold War, is going through a series of crises, propelled by deglobalization pressures, and the rise of illiberal and populist leaders, all challenging the three pillars of the liberal order: democracy, economic interdependence and international institutions. Two critical reasons for the decline of the liberal order are internal in terms of income distribution and institutional malaise. The article argues that the demise of the liberal order is not inevitable provided liberal states take remedial measures and adapt to the new environment as they did in 1919, 1930s, the second half of the 1940s, 1960s and 1991. Reformed globalization, or re-globalization is essential for facing the geopolitical challenges emanating from China and other illiberal states. The inability of other systems to offer both prosperity and freedom that the liberal order can provide is its main attractiveness. The connection between internal reforms in liberal states to address deepening inequalities and wealth distribution, a by-product of intensified globalization, and the prospects of liberal order's success is highlighted. The need for a refined welfare state taking into account the new realities to tackle the internal challenges is proposed.

For decades, globalization and the liberal international order evolved side by side. Recently, however, deglobalizing forces have been on the rise and the liberal international order has come to be increasingly beleaguered. The special issue ‘Deglobalization? The future of the liberal international order’ examines the interconnectedness of globalization and deglobalization processes on the one hand and the trajectory of the liberal international order on the other. This introduction provides a conceptual frame for the articles to follow. It discusses globalization and deglobalization processes, compares how they have been intertwined with the liberal international order in the past and presently, and explores how these differences are likely to affect the future of world politics. The special issue makes three important contributions. First, we examine globalization and deglobalization processes systematically. Second, we break new ground in studying the future of international order. Third, we generate novel insights into epochal change.

The post-Cold War international system, dominated by the United States, has been shaken by the relative downturn of the US economy and the simultaneous rise of China. China is rapidly emerging as a serious contender for America’s dominance of the Indo-Pacific. What is noticeable is the absence of intense balance of power politics in the form of formal military alliances among the states in the region, unlike state behaviour during the Cold War era. Countries are still hedging as their strategic responses towards each other evolve. We argue that the key factor explaining the absence of intense hard balancing is the dearth of existential threat that either China or its potential adversaries feel up till now. The presence of two related critical factors largely precludes existential threats, and thus hard balancing military coalitions formed by or against China. The first is the deepened economic interdependence China has built with the potential balancers, in particular, the United States, Japan, and India, in the globalisation era. The second is the grand strategy of China, in particular, the peaceful rise/development, and infrastructure-oriented Belt and Road Initiative. Any radical changes in these two conditions leading to existential threats by the key states could propel the emergence of hard-balancing coalitions.

This article offers a discussion of nuclear doctrines and their significance for war, peace and stability between nuclear-armed states. The cases of India and Pakistan are analysed to show the challenges these states have faced in articulating and implementing a proper nuclear doctrine, and the implications of this for nuclear stability in the region. We argue that both the Indian and Pakistani doctrines and postures are problematic from a regional security perspective because they are either ambiguous about how to address crucial deterrence related issues, and/or demonstrate a severe mismatch between the security problems and goals they are designed to deal with, and the doctrines that conceptualize and operationalize the role of nuclear weapons in grand strategy. Consequently, as both India's and Pakistan's nuclear doctrines and postures evolve, the risks of a spiralling nuclear arms race in the subcontinent are likely to increase without a reassessment of doctrinal issues in New Delhi and Islamabad. A case is made for more clarity and less ambition from both sides in reconceptualizing their nuclear doctrines. We conclude, however, that owing to the contrasting barriers to doctrinal reorientation in each country, the likelihood of such changes being made—and the ease with which they can be made—is greater in India than in Pakistan.

A growing body of scholarly literature argues that globalization has weakened the national security state. In this essay, we examine the globalization school's main propositions by analyzing the national security strategies of four categories of states: (1) major powers, (2) states in stable regions, (3) states in regions of enduring rivalries, and (4) weak and failed states. We conclude that the globalizations school's claims are overstated given that states of all types pursue more traditional security policies than they would expect. To the extent that globalization has affected the pursuit of national security, it has done so unevenly. States in stable regions appear to have embraced the changes rendered by globalization the most, states in regions of enduring rivalries the least. Although the weak and failed states also show signs of having been affected by globalization, many of the “symptoms” they manifest have more to do with internal difficulties than external challenges.