Are liberal orders self-defeating? 

Contestation of liberal orders today is commonplace. Not only is the liberal democratic model of domestic order under pressure of more or less openly authoritarian opponents, but also the so-called liberal international order (LIO) seems in decline.

Much commentary has cast the crisis of the LIO as caused by exogenous factors and due to actors outside the order. In contrast, the argument in this talk is that much of today’s contestation of liberal orders stems from the inside and is in fact ‘homemade.’ Concretely, it focuses on features and processes inherent to liberal orders that spur and escalate contestation endogenously.

A key contention is that the more an international order approximates the liberal ideal-type, the greater its problems. Hence, the response to the crisis of the LIO should not consist in ‘defending’ or ‘reinforcing’ liberal orders, but in more fundamentally rethinking the ways in which global ordering is done.

Christian Kreuder-Sonnen is Jean Monnet Fellow at European University Institute in Florence and a Junior Professor of Political Science and International Organizations at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He received his PhD in International Relations from Free University Berlin, worked at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center as a postdoctoral research fellow, and held visiting positions at Harvard (Center for European Studies) and Oxford University (Nuffield College).

His book “Emergency Powers of International Organizations” (OUP, 2019) received the Chadwick Alger Prize of the International Studies Association. His articles have appeared in outlets such as European Journal of International Relations, International Theory, and Journal of European Public Policy.