UCLA School of Law

The international order favored by Western powers since World War II has been primarily rules-based, organized around the principles of open markets, liberal democracy, and human rights, and defended by a web of military alliances and security guarantees—but it has not been static in form, depth, or geographic breadth. It has evolved as postwar geopolitical structure has shifted. During the Cold War, embedded liberalism characterized an international order limited largely to the West. In the unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War, the rules-based order globalized and became hyperliberal. In today’s multipolar world, the global liberal order is in decline: power has dispersed, revisionist states disfavor liberalism, and Western governments face political blowback from the distributive consequences of the freer movement of goods, services, and people that was a product of hyperliberalism. While reviving the global liberal order of the recent past is impossible, it would be possible to reconstitute a fundamentally liberal rules-based order, subject to an updated social contract, covering much of the world.