The End of the Liberal Order?

by Niall Ferguson

‘No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.’–Niall Ferguson‘We do not need to invent the world anew. The international order established by the United States after World War II is in need of expansion and repair, but not reconception.’–Fareed ZakariaFears of a globalized world are rampant. Across the West, borders are being reasserted and old alliances tested to their limits. Could this be the end of the liberal order or will the major crises of the twenty-first century strengthen our resolve?

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

Kindle Edition

Published November 2, 2017

About the author

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC.

The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which--Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist--was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg.

Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).

(Source: Amazon)

Reviews

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Globalisation v Nationalism.
A Munk Debate (Canada) in 2017. Ferguson argued for the motion, Zakaria against it. Chaired by Rudyard Griffiths. Interesting. They both debate well. A useful little book.

[PolicemanPrawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a transcript of a 2017 Munk Debate regarding whether the liberal international order is over, but it seems they were equally discussing whether they thought the liberal international order is good or bad; the moderator had to remind them a few times. Ferguson, in the ‘far’ camp, points to the troubles of the EU, how the main beneficiary of the liberal order is China, and how globalisation is whittling away the liberal order. Zakaria, echoing Steven Pinker, argues we’ve seen a decrease in violence, war, death, etc. He says many countries have liberalised their economies and political systems, and sought to integrate themselves with the wider world to ensure peace, pointing to the European Union as a prime example.

These debates are fun to listen to and read, but aren’t so effective for getting to the truth of the issues. It is a bit like a more cerebral and polite Jeremy Kyle Show. Ferguson strikes me as a neo-imperialist, and seems obsessed with the idea that the liberal order benefitted China; these political pundit types always seem to view developments in terms of whether their side or the enemy benefited more (observe the recent analysis regarding the Trump meeting with Kim, and the difference between the western and South Korean views). Zakaria is an intellectual-yet-idiot who is credentialed but gets everything wrong. (Funnily enough, just as I finished this book, I saw Nassim Taleb retweet somebody saying Zakaria is "a fake "expert" who pays no price for being wrong".) Zakaria seems to believe that the liberal order 'civilised' China, not realising there is often little connection between how a state conducts its internal business and its external affairs.

[Ugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two intellectual heavyweights debating whether liberal international order is on the wane. Ferguson argues it has been for about a century, whereas Zakaria argues it's still going strong and worth fighting for. At times the question seems academic: while Ferguson argues that globalisation has increased inequality, he doesn't dispute Zakaria's point that it has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - which made me think: if something's working, does it matter what?

But actually, it's important for deciding where we should direct our efforts and resources to further global peace and prosperity: into things like the UN and EU, or into beneficent, cooperative nation states.

It's an interesting debate, but the downside of a debate is that it doesn't come to a tidy conclusion like a typical book, but rather leaves the audience or reader to decide which argument won out. Yet with a typical book you can choose to disagree, whereas here I was left agreeing and disagreeing with both debaters on certain points, and essentially just wanting more.

But still, a decent way to spend two hours.

[Kyaw Zayar Lwin]

လစ်ဘရယ်စနစ်ကျဆုံးပီလားတဲ့။
၂၀၁၃ခုနှစ်မှာ ပြင်သစ်က အမျိုးသားရေးဝါဒီစာရေးဆရာတဦးဖြစ်တဲ့ dominique vennerဟာ ကိုယ့်ကိုယ်ကိုယ် သေနတ်နဲ့ပစ်ကာ အဆုံးစီရင်သွားတယ်။
ရိုးရာဓလေ့တွေ ပျက်သုံးလာခြင်း၊လူမျိုးပေါင်းစုံစီးဝင်လာခြင်းစတဲ့ လစ်ဘရယ်အယူအဆတွေအပေါ် အသက်ပေးကာ အာခံပြလိုက်ခြင်း ဖြစ်တယ်။
အဲဒီနော်တာဒိန်းဘုရားကျောင်းမှာပဲ အမျိုးသမီးဝါဒီတွေက အဝတ်ဗလာနဲ့ ဖက်ဆစ်စနစ်ကျဆုံးပါစေဆိုတဲ့ စာကိုရေးကာ ကိုယ့်ကိုယ်ကိုယ်အဆုံးစီရင်ပုံကို ဟာသလုပ်သရော်ကန့်ကွက်ဆန္ဒပြတယ်။
လစ်ဘရယ်အစီအစဉ်ရဲ့ ပဋိပက္ခဟာ အတွင်းကပဲ လာနေတယ်။
ရုရှားနဲ့ တရုတ်တို့ရဲ့ သဘောတရားအယူအဆတွေဟာ ကောင်းမကောင်းဆိုတာထက် အခြားကမ္ဘာနေရာကလူတွေကို ဆွဲဆောင်စေတာကတော့ အနောက်လစ်ဘရယ်အရွေ့ကို ဆန့်ကျင်တာဆိုတဲ့ အကြောင်းပြချက်တခုတည်းကြောင့်ပါပဲ။
Alexander Durinရဲ့ အနောက်လစ်ဘရယ်ဆန့်ကျင်တဲ့ သဘောတရားအယူအဆတွေဟာ တကမ္ဘာလုံးက လူတွေနဲ့ အံဝင်ပီး လွှမ်းမိုးနိုင်တာမျိုး မတွေ့ဘူး။
ဘုံရန်သူတူနေတာလောက်သာရှိတာမျိုး။
နေးလ်ဖာဂူဆန်ကတော့ လစ်ဘရယ်ဝါဒရဲ့ တကယ့်အကျိုးအမြတ်ကို ခံစားနေရတာက တရုတ်လိုအပိတ်နိုင်ငံတွေပါတဲ့။
လစ်ဘရယ်အစီအစဉ်တွေကို နိုင်ငံရေးသဘောအရ တခုမှ မလိုက်နာတဲ့ တရုတ်ကို ပံ့ပိုးဆွဲဆောင်နေရတာကိုကြည့်ရင်ပဲ ကျရှုံးမှုက မြင်သာပါတယ်တဲ့။
နေးလ်ဖာဂူဆန်ကကြ လစ်ဘရယ်အစီအစဉ်ကျရှုံးတယ်ဆိုတာကို အခြားနိုင်ငံတွေနဲ့ ဆက်စပ်ပီး သုံးသပ်သွားတာ။
စီးပွါးရေးဖွံ့ဖြိုးအောင် လုပ်ပေးနိုင်ရင် လစ်ဘရယ်ဆီ လမ်းရွေ့လာမယ်ဆိုတာလည်း မမှန်ခဲ့ဘူး။
စီးပွါးရေးပိတ်ဆို့ပီး လစ်ဘရယ်ကို အတင်းအကျပ်ရွေးခိုင်းခဲ့တာ မအောင်မြင်တာလည်း မျက်မြင်ပဲ။
အခုဆို ဩဇာအာဏာကျဆင်းမှုတွေနဲ့အတူ လူမျိုး၊ဘာသာအမှတ်သရုပ်တွေကြောင့် လစ်ဘရယ်တွေအတွက် စိုးရိမ်စရာလက္ခဏာတွေချည်းပါပဲ။
ဇာကာရီးယားကတော့ အနောက်နိုင်ငံတွေကို ဥပမာပေးကြည့်ပီးပဲ လစ်ဘရယ်စနစ်ဟာ မကျရှုံးဘူးလို့ဆိုတယ်။
လူ့အခွင့်အရေးကို သိလာကြတယ်။
တန်းတူညီမျှမှုဆီ ရွေ့ရကောင်းမှန်း နားလည်လာတယ်။လစ်ဘရယ်အစီအစဉ်ကြောင့် ပြောင်းလဲခဲ့တာတွေ အများကြီးလို့ ဆိုချင်ပုံပါပဲ။

ကနဦးအစက ဥပမာကိုပဲ ပြန်ကြည့်မယ်ဆို လစ်ဘရယ်ရဲ့ အကျိုးအမြတ်ကို ရတာ တရုတ်တို့လို နိုင်ငံတွေဖြစ်သွားစေတဲ့အကြောင်းရင်းကို တွေ့ရမှာပါ။
တဖက်က အနိမ့်ဆုံးလုပ်ခ၊အလုပ်သမားတရားဥပဒေတွေနဲ့ ရွာလည်နေချိန်မှာ တဖက်ကတော့ စျေးချိုချိုနဲ့ ကမ္ဘာထုတ်လုပ်ရေးပါဝါကြီးဖြစ်နေပါတယ်။
တဖက်က ရွေ့ပြောင်းနေထိုင်သူတွေနဲ့ ရွာလည်နေချိန်မှာ တဖက်ကတော့ ဗဟိုချုပ်ကိုင်စနစ်နဲ့ အခွင့်ကောင်းယူနေပါတယ်။
သို့ပေမယ့် ရွေ့ပြောင်းနေထိုင်သူတွေကို လွတ်လပ်ခွင့်မပေးလို့၊ခွဲခြားဆက်ဆံလို့ အပြောခံရတာတွေက တဖက်၊
ရွေ့ပြောင်းနေထိုင်သူတွေကို အကန့်အသတ်မရှိ ခွင့်ပေးလို့ ကန့်ကွက်သူတွေက တဖက်နဲ့ ရွာလည်ကောင်းနေတုန်းပါ။
မြန်မာပြည်ရဲ့ အနောက်တံခါးဆိုပီး လူတွေရဲ့ လူမှုအရှိတရားကြား သိမှုတွေထဲက ပြဿနာတွေ၊ဒီမိုကရေစီနောက်ပြန်လန်ကျမှုတွေ၊အမျိုးသားရေးအမှတ်လက္ခဏာတွေကြား ဟန်ချက်မညီမှုတွေကိုပါ ခပ်ရေးရေးမြင်လာမိသလားရယ်ပါ။

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is just a transcript of a debate organized in 2017 by Munk Debates. It is about 70 pages, you can read it in one go. Niall Ferguson believes that the end of globalization has come, while his opponent Fareed Zakaria thinks that the world will remain as global and open as it is now. Both have strong arguments for the advantages and disadvantages of the global society we are currently living in. It is worth reading it because this is a very constructive debate with insightful comments and strong arguments. Some of the topics mentioned are Trump's election, Brexit, and the rapid economic growth of China.

[Martin Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very short book, literally one you read in the library while waiting for the kids to finalise their selection. This is the transcript of a debate between Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zaharia on whether the international liberal order has ended. As a result, it suffers from the nature of the debate - points made for effect rather than a carefully constructed set or arguments - and at the end it depends on what you thought the topic meant. You need to assume that an international liberal order existed for it to end - and at best it was an ambition that was only ever partially fulfilled.

[Liyana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um 5/5 because I enjoyed my experience with this book. I underlined and annotated argument structures and moderation techniques, noted how premises were being set up...how they each made cases based on different set of evidence and cases.

Moderator did an amazing job. I could learn from how he directed and focused the conversation. The debaters did not impress me with their content but rather disappointed me with their foolish personal attacks on each other.

Oh and I learned a little bit more about the pluralist and liberal POVs.

[Isobel Andrews · Rating 2 out of 5]

As the moderator implied a few times, the debaters largely failed to grapple with the question at hand and instead seemed to be arguing whether or not the Liberal International Order was/is good or not. There was maybe one interesting moment where they talked about young people ("demographics is destiny") but that was about it. And then I'm not sure about the value of publishing transcripts like this - I'm positive I would have gotten more out of seeing the live debate.

[Bill Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another challenging Munk Debate

Yet again the Munk debate throws up a wicked problem for discussion. I’m not sure if there is a future for our rules-based trade system. My conclusion is that to continue it needs to change, but I’m not sure if that can happen in meaningful timeframe given the current leaders of the main protagonists.

[LuckyBao · Rating 3 out of 5]

A transcript of a debate between two capable academics. It's easy enough to read in one sitting.

[Ian Major · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good debate.

[SY · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2.5 stars] Ferguson’s argument was monotonous and Zakaria came across as naive.

[Tom Leenders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting debat despite the year of writing (2017). Hopeful outlook despite current developments.

[charleah · Rating 3 out of 5]

informative