Promotion of the LIO is an imperial tool that attempts to impart racial-civilizational ways of thinking onto marginalized bodies – the racial institutions are the reason why the LIO can never solve anything

Inderjeet Parmar, “The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?”, International Affairs 94, 2018,

The United States has a record of exporting economists and transplanting economic thinking and ideas to transform states, although China is a qualitatively different ‘project’ when set against the activities of the ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile and the so-called ‘Beautiful Berkeley Boys’ in Indonesia.106 The latter were both relatively weak, dependent states compared to China.107 However, the key point here is the willingness of Chinese party elites to invite American (and other foreign) ideas and methods, duly adapted. China sought transformative ideas, training and strategies, and has transformed its economy as a result; and it was dependence on the global market and the US-rules based system that enabled that transformation.108

Ford Foundation investments in China yielded major dividends through students and scholars who had studied modern economics abroad. In particular, the ‘Ford class’ programme of exchange masters and doctoral research—led by influential economists such as Lawrence Klein, Gregory Chow and others— graduated over 500 students in micro- and macroeconomics, econometrics, development economics, international finance and other disciplines.109 Ford’s grants helped China’s think-tanks to gain access to relevant experience and expertise through collaborative research and training in applied economics, helping to build independent policy research institutes like the China Center for Economic Research and the China Center for Agricultural Policy, combining the best internationally trained Chinese analysts with domestic scholars. The entire complex of programmes was designed to ‘build a field’; once this had been successfully achieved, Ford support focused on specific policy research projects and institutions that expanded other ongoing Foundation work in China.110

Equally interesting, even if change in this sector appears slower than in the economy, are the initiatives by US agencies to build ‘civil society’ in China, with funding running to over US$500 million from, among others, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. Since 2002, a further US$400 million has been invested from US sources into civil society programmes. The core purpose of this exercise—derided by critics as the building of ‘government-organized non-governmental organizations’ (Gongos)—is to strengthen stability by experimentally releasing the tight grip of overstretched state institutions (local, regional and national) behind a programme of ‘small government, big society’.111 The aim is to help the state to better manage social and political change, not to build a fully functioning independent civil society. And in that regard there are some interesting similarities with the United States’ own historical development. In the US, state-building private elite organizations promoted the formation of official state agencies and departments at federal level to manage a rapidly changing and increasingly complex society with few nationally oriented institutions, as opposed to locally oriented ones that reflected the prevailing parochialism.112 Collectively, the nascent federal agencies and their state-oriented private elites effectively constituted the new American state of the twentieth century, nourished by war and economic crisis and emerging as a superpower after the Second World War.

China’s fundamental problem is how to manage change with an overstretched state; it is using the banner of ‘small government, big society’ to release new energies that can be harnessed to the stability project. American foundations have been vital to this programme, hence the criticism. The Gramsci–Kautsky formulation can explain this project well.

The activities in the United States of various private organizations interested in China (such as the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China) and within China itself were effectively authorized by successive American administrations.113 They were formally ‘independent of the government and yet operated with its support’, including that of the CIA and other agencies. In effect, China’s stable development is an American vital interest—or at least it was assumed to be until the advent of President Trump’s (rhetorically) disruptive administration. The above activities, then, constituted a process of broadening the basis of China’s state legitimacy, funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars from mainly private American sources. According to Spires, over 95 per cent of all Ford Foundation funds for civil society building went to Chinese state-licensed organizations.114

The ‘new type of Great Power relationship’ is being tested by the (rhetorically) unpredictable and transactional approach to global politics of the Trump administration.115 Although we have already seen disruption of the atmospherics of liberal hegemonic culture, President Trump remains under pressure to retain the international security structures of the US-led order as well as its international trading regimes, notwithstanding the rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (which was also opposed by other presidential candidates in 2016, including Hillary Clinton). A correction, in other words, was politically viable. It remains to be seen, however, whether Trump’s economic nationalism, as further indicated by withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, is merely recalibrating the system or represents a fundamental rejection of it. Up to now, it looks more like the former than the latter, but only because of virtually unremitting pressure from establishment figures within and beyond the administration.116

Conclusion

The foundational values, interests and institutions of the (Anglo-)US liberal international order, with due respect for important but not fundamental recalibrations and corrections along the way, are the sources of its current crises or at least challenges. The mentalities and power structures of the LIO’s leaders are constructed by hierarchical, imperial and racial–civilizational ways of thinking, albeit in most cases subliminally embedded to the point of being unconscious deep structures themselves.117 The American white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Wasp) establishment built and maintained the liberal order in a ‘competitively cooperative’ alliance with their British counterparts,118 whose own imperial and racial mentalities were hardly in conflict with those of their American cousins.119 Whatever changes occurred or were forced on US elites over time, those underlying and mainly subliminal values have remained significant in decision-making, including when nurturing new states and powers such as South Korea and China.

As a result, liberal internationalism as a ‘theory’ or approach to world order, eliding and skirting matters of hierarchy, race and class just as it does in its outline understandings of American democracy, misses a critical part of the picture—of the dynamics of international power as well as the dynamics of domestic power. Because of that elision, that failure to see, I suggest it is a legitimating ideology of the American ruling elite. I have argued above that the LIO is better understood as a system of hierarchy and inequality, and as what Persaud calls a ‘racio-civilizational’ phenomenon. What does that mean? It means that this system and its leaders cannot yet comprehend an order that encompasses on the basis of something approaching equality the broad mass of people—citizens—at home, let alone the non-western peoples of the global South, or even their elites. The tweet from Donald Tusk quoted above is revealing and instructive because it was addressed to President Trump in simple and stark terms, worth repeating here: ‘Euro-Atlanticism means the free world cooperating to prevent post-West world order’—so, please ‘do not touch’. International alliances of elites, including those of the emerging powers such as China, are in large part attempts to manage and channel change to prevent radical power shifts, to sustain a world order that serves elites and masses, in West and East, in starkly unequal ways. A Gramscian–Kautskyian synthesis combines consideration of domestic and international class-based imperial hegemonies and offers a good explanation of the existing order. However, it also offers a way out, in theory, and provides ways to assess the likelihood of avenues towards egalitarianism being taken by ruling elites. The prognosis is not positive at present, although the bases of ways forward appear to be coming into view as political strife and electoral shocks challenge the status quo.120