A brief thread on the genealogy of the concept of a “Liberal International Order.” 1/10
The term LIO these days usually denotes the system of multilateral institutions that emerged in the wake of WWII & that cemented & underpinned US postwar consensual hegemony in the West. And indeed, the first reference to an LIO on jstor is from 1943: jstor.org/stable/26441808 2/10
However, after that first use, the term LIO is not used again in any formal way, so far as I can tell, until economist Wilhelm Röpke uses it in this 1959 article — the first usage I’ve found that more or less denotes what we mean by the term nowadays link.springer.com/chapter/10.100… 3/10
Now, that’s interesting because of course Röpke has recently been resuscitated in the Anglophone literature by @zeithistoriker’s GLOBALISTS as the intellectual leader of the “Geneva School” of... you guessed it, neoliberalism. 4/10
But after Röpke’s initial usage, the term again fades from view, only getting picked up again in the late 1960s. But even then, for the next decade, there’s only a smattering of references. The term is just plodding along, not yet a “concept to conjure with.” 5/10
In fact, the real inflection point (takeoff) in usage of the term “Liberal International Order” appears to be in the late 1970s. books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c… 6/10
Reading through the articles that use the term in those years, it becomes clear that the real reason for the “breakthrough” of the LIO terminology is because of how it gets deployed as counterpoint to the G-77’s proposed “New International Economic Order.” 7/10
In response to (and in order to neutralize) the NIEO, liberals in the global north needed you develop an explicit defense of the existing system of international power. This included giving it a pleasant-sounding name, as well as a particular historical genealogy. 8/10
This conjuncture of the LIO & neoliberalism is interesting because the backlash against the NIEO is an essential signal of and catalyst for the emergence of neoliberalism. I wrote about this particular here a couple years ago. 9/10 muse.jhu.edu/article/576922…
In other words, it seems as if “Liberal International Order”-as-terminology and neoliberalism-as-practice are conceptual siblings, perhaps even twins (albeit perhaps with separate amniotic sacks). 10/fin
