It is now obvious also to those who are not international relations scholars that the world order has been changing profoundly since 1945, with several symbolic moments of transition: the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989), the attack on the Twin Towers in New York (9 September 2001), followed by the US invasion of Afghanistan (October 2001) and later of Iraq (March 2003), the US withdrawal from Afghanistan (August 2021) and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (February 2022). Scholars have grasped and studied these diverse and radical transformations by developing a rich and significant literature up to the important volume of G. John Ikenberry (A World Safe for Democracy, 2020). Almost all, however, have moved in the wake of traditional international relations, which made a clear distinction between international and domestic politics, developing on this distinction a disciplinary identity of which one was proud. But precisely the transformations they analyzed should have made it clear that the distinction, always artificial, had become impossible to maintain. As Hirschmann would have said, it had become an obstacle to understanding reality. However, very few internationalists have understood that by now this field of studies had ended up in a dead end, that in an interdependent world to analyze the interweaving between international politics, comparative politics and, for certain aspects, European studies is inevitable if we are to try to understand those transformations, for which economic factors are also crucial. One of those few authors who have not been trapped in short-sighted academic networks and the ‘shirts of Nexus’ that prevent us from understanding is Vittorio Emanuele Parsi for years now, as can be seen, for example, already in The End of Equality (Mondadori, 2012).
In this new volume, with an original style and a frequent recourse to marine metaphors, trace of his personal experiences as a naval officer, the author first analyzes the liberal world order from 1945 to 1989, the replacement with a neoliberal order in the following decades, but with signs of crisis already in the sixties and seventies, which is today even more in deep crisis and change. That liberal world order was based on the balance between democracy and the market economy, with the democratic institutions correcting the excesses of the market in increasing inequalities and the market correcting the defects of democracy; and there is the shipwreck when that balance fails with the rise of neo-populist protest and the inability of democracies to coordinate internationally compound by the affirmation of a new illiberal project. The reasons for the shipwreck and the formation of a new unstable liberal order are the result of the clash with an iceberg characterized by four related factors: the crisis of the US world leadership complemented by the stabilization of authoritarian regimes in Russia and China, the war against international terrorism, the very internal transformation of American democracy and, finally, the democratic fatigue, evidenced by the various phenomena of discontent, also in other countries.
Since the years of US international hegemony in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, there has been a move to multipolarism, especially in the last decade, which has seen the growth of the international role of Russia and China, whose governments consolidated and formed alliances, as evident when looking at the present triangle among Moscow-Ankara-Teheran. To this the war against terrorism has to be added, with the justification of the use of violence for security reasons within the various countries, especially in the Middle East; and the transformation of the phenomenon of immigration into an issue where security still has priority, especially under the pressure of the Italian right. Indeed, third, the election of Trump, due to the interweaving of industrial and financial transformations as well as to the information revolution, created a climate of permanent conflict with an increased domestic polarization and a stronger international tension, consequent to the declared strategy of ‘America first’. Finally, the democratic malaise, not only in the United States, emerges in the populism and technocratic thrust that affects the other Western democracies, characterized by the oligarchic transformation of politics and economy, the decrease in social mobility and the increase in inequalities.
In a European perspective, the recovery of the liberal world order can only possible if the European Union will be able to relaunch its role, by taking advantage of the opportunities for action following the pandemic, combining economic growth and solidarity, and making the protection and defense of one's own borders an effectively shared task. In essence, to re-establish a stable liberal order, it will be necessary to reconnect the three basic elements of that order: revitalizing democracies by linking them profitably to the dynamics of the market, re-establishing a strong relationship between those democracies on both sides of the Atlantic – as indeed seems to be the case in 2022, however, for the ominous Russian invasion of Ukraine – and reviving values and interests by redefining the rules of the democratic game in an inclusive manner.
The structure of the volume is very linear. After an introductory chapter that presents the theoretical background and the arguments that are the main thread to the whole book, the volume is divided into three parts with nine chapters that deal with the crisis of the liberal order, the four factors that explain its transformation, and finally the possibilities of rebalancing and recovering it. The basic ideas are also very clear, which can be summarized as follows: it is necessary to re-establish a stable liberal order; this order can only be founded on a composition between democracy and the market that, internally, strengthens an inclusive welfare and, at the international level, is based on cooperation of the existing democracies, within the different international institutions and directly among themselves; in this refoundation of the liberal order, the European Union will have to play a fundamental role.
I would like to add that I share the author's analysis and, like him, I believe that especially in these years a path of international cooperation, the considerable strengthening of the European Union and the definitive transformation of our democracies into inclusive and protective regimes are the basic lines that will allow us to go through years that appear to be as difficult as those we have just experienced with the pandemic.
