LIO Collapse is existential

Even accounts that seek to separate any necessary connection between American power and leadership and the perpetuation of Liberal International Order still tend to make arguments along similar lines, such that liberal institutions come to be seen as inherently adaptive, and hence resilient. On this view, even the very notion of the ‘Liberal International Order’ is misleading since it ‘. . .creates the impression we are referring to a static entity, rather than mutating and shifting ways of ordering regions and domains of world politics’.130 Once again, then, the Liberal International Order’s crisis ‘. . .articulates the very limits of the political’131 on the presumption that there is, ultimately, no ‘exit from liberalism’. Though, Cooley and Nexon, for example, concede that there might be ‘new ordering projects’ underway led in particular by China and Russia, these at most are argued to offer only ‘exits’ from ‘political liberalism’, while economic and institutional liberalism remain predominant.132

In the end we might come back to questions of what work crisis is doing in such debates, and how it orders the world in the process: not least in in terms of how the story of Liberal International Order is told in terms of crisis management, and the alternative conceptions of crisis that those narratives tend to either marginalise or exclude. Insofar as CLIO debates often tend to revolve around – and sometimes be resolved in terms of – the suitability of liberal institutions for managing the ‘violent storms of modernity’,133 wider and fundamental questions and issues open up as to how modernity is being understood in such conceptions. Those grappling with the implications of the ‘crisis of the Anthropocene’ for IR, by way of contrast, suggest that in the context of a ‘planetary emergency’ characterised by existential threats of climate change and species extinction, the underpinnings of modern IR are thrown into crisis precisely because the discipline has so often tended to assume a human/nature separation as both essential to the progress and flourishing of human societies and as a ‘boundary condition’ of the discipline as a field of knowledge.134 The conditions, ‘storms’, and ‘crises’ of ‘modernity’ are understood there in radically different terms. Questions and issues of race and racial hierarchy also tend to be either marginal to or absent from CLIO debates, with the notable exceptions to that highlighting the extent to which practices of Liberal International Ordering have been central to ‘embedding’ regimes of ‘racism and antiracism’ in ways that mainstream IR, not just scholarship on Liberal International Order, has been insufficiently attentive to.135 When situated in that wider context, and in the event that Crisis of the Liberal International Order debates might have continue to run on and recur, the proposition that the way to manage crisis is ‘more liberal order’ is at the very least worthy of being weighed up carefully: in terms of how ‘crisis’ is used to frame the problems of, and solutions assumed to endure within, practices of liberal international ordering.