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“In this tour de force, Trubowitz and Burgoon offer a new and compelling
portrait of the shifting and fraught domestic foundations of Western de-
mocracy and its postwar leadership of the liberal world order. Beautifully
written and deeply researched, Geopolitics and Democracy chronicles the
decades-in-the-making erosion of support for liberal internationalism in
Western societies—and points to ways in which liberal democracies might
once again bring their ambitions and capacities back into line.”
—G. John Ikenberry, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and
International Affairs, Princeton University
P E T E R T RU B OW I T Z A N D B R IA N BU R G O O N
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197535400.001.0001
List of Figures xi
Preface and Acknowledgments xv
Appendices 139
Notes 183
References 207
Index 233
Figures
War has given Western democracies a renewed sense of unity and purpose.
In response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Western governments
have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, sent weapons and aid
to Kyiv, ratcheted up military spending, strengthened their security ties,
and thrown open their doors to millions of Ukrainian refugees. The speed,
breadth, and vigor of the West’s response have raised hopes that Putin’s brutal
war marks a turning point for a liberal international order whose rules and
norms have been badly battered and weakened by the forces of autocracy and
nationalism. Whether the liberal order gains a new lease on life will depend
on more than Western democracies’ resolve in the current international
crisis, however. The liberal order’s future will be determined by the push and
pull of domestic politics as well as by geopolitics.
Geopolitics and Democracy is about how international and domestic pol-
itics have shaped and reshaped the liberal world order from its postwar
origins through the height of the Cold War to the present era. For decades,
the liberal order’s political foundations were sturdy and strong. Geopolitics
and social democracy were self-reinforcing, the one buttressing and forti-
fying the other. Today, the liberal order’s foundations are fractured, riven by
anti-globalist and populist insurgencies and democratic backsliding. We ex-
plain how this happened and consider what might be done to restore do-
mestic support for the liberal order. In telling this story, we draw on ideas and
concepts that will be familiar to scholars of international relations, compara-
tive politics, and political economy, combining and testing them in new ways.
What emerges is an account that traces today’s disorder and discontent
back to choices and missteps that Western leaders made at the height of
liberal triumphalism after the Cold War. Chief among them was Western
governments’ failure to balance the pressures to rapidly globalize markets
and pool national sovereignty at the supranational level against the demands
for greater social protections and economic security at home. Western
democracies succeeded in expanding the liberal order, but the resulting im-
balance between foreign and domestic policy came at the cost of mounting
public disillusionment and political division at home. In short, Western
xvi Preface and Acknowledgments
governments’ efforts to globalize the liberal order exceeded what their do-
mestic politics would allow.
Closing this gap will be critical if Western leaders hope to put the liberal
order on solid domestic footing again in their nations. In one democracy after
another, the turn to globalism has weakened the political center and fueled
ideological extremism. As we show, this has proven costly internationally as
well as domestically. As Western democracies have become more internally
fragmented, the pace of globalization and international institution-building
they have long set has slowed. Meanwhile, Western party democracy, once
a source of Western attraction, has lost much of its international luster and
appeal. If Western democracies hope to reverse these international trends,
understanding how they got themselves into this political fix is an essential
first step. In writing Geopolitics and Democracy, we have tried to keep this
goal front and center.
We began this collaborative journey in 2015 as part of the Dahrendorf
Forum on Europe’s future, a joint initiative by the Hertie School in Berlin and
the London School of Economics and Political Science, funded by Stiftung
Mercator. After co-authoring a couple of articles on the erosion of domestic
support for the liberal order in the US, European, and other Western democ-
racies, we decided to deepen and expand the argument in a book. We began
working on the project in earnest shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic
struck, traveling back and forth between Amsterdam and London and
then, like so many others, meeting over Zoom. For both of us, it was a labor
of love as the book engages issues that touch core themes of our research
interests. It was also an opportunity to rekindle and deepen an old friendship
forged many years before when teaching and studying at UCSD in La Jolla,
California.
At various stages of the project, we have benefited from the comments,
suggestions, and insights of colleagues and friends at LSE and the University
of Amsterdam, as well as from seminars and conferences at Columbia
University, the Hertie School, Princeton University, Université de Genève,
the University of Konstanz, and the University of Tokyo where we have
presented parts of the argument and analysis. We are especially grateful to
Catherine Boone, Alexander Trubowitz, Wolfgang Wagner, and three anon-
ymous reviewers for extremely helpful suggestions on how to improve the
book. At Oxford University Press, we wish to thank Dave McBride for his
sound advice and encouragement. The book has also benefited from Alexcee
Bechthold’s attention to detail during the production process. We would also
Preface and Acknowledgments xvii
like to thank Stella Canessa and Beatriz Da Silva for their expert research
assistance.
We have accumulated many debts in writing this book, but none is greater
than the ones we owe to our respective families. They have been a source of
inspiration and support, especially in the face of the many challenges that
COVID-19 presented for work and family life while this book was being
researched and drafted. Peter thanks Catherine, Joshua, and Alexander for
their constant encouragement and many insights about this research and the
immense challenges facing liberal democracies today. Brian thanks Nicole,
Max, and David for their support and wisdom on the project (and on life out-
side the project). We dedicate this book to them.
1
The Solvency Gap
Geopolitics and Democracy. Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197535400.003.0001
2 Geopolitics and Democracy
countries. This too is part of the Western-led liberal order’s long trajectory
stretching from the postwar era to the present.
We are also mindful that there is a long arc of writings about the West’s
woes. Like the greatly exaggerated reports of Mark Twain’s demise,
historians, political scientists, and commentators have been predicting the
West’s death since Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West after
World War I.8 Geopolitics and Democracy is not another monograph about
the West’s inexorable decline. Our purpose is different. In the pages that
follow, we argue that Western democracies’ foreign policies have overrun
their political foundations, but that it is within their power to bring inter-
national ends and domestic means back into balance. To do so, a necessary
first step is to correctly diagnose how the West got itself into this fix. As we
show, today’s anti-globalist pressures in Western democracies owe more to
the breakdown of their commitment to social democracy at home than the
headlong pursuit of democracy promotion abroad, however checkered the
history of the latter. It is here, in Western efforts to build an open, institu-
tionalized order, that the gap between international ambition and domestic
politics is greatest. If Western leaders hope to rebuild domestic support for
international engagement, this is where they must concentrate their efforts,
and their governments’ resources.
In the rest of this introductory chapter, we sketch out the theoretical
framework, research design, and methods we use to track Western democ-
racies’ foreign policies, and domestic support for them, over the past
seventy-five years. We begin by developing a typology that distinguishes
between four basic foreign policy strategies: globalism, liberal internation-
alism, isolationism, and nationalism. We then provide an overview of our
argument about how Western governments’ foreign policies changed in the
1990s, and why they overran their domestic foundations. We turn next to
how we develop and test our argument empirically, and describe how our
argument differs from other explanations for the rise of anti-globalism and
the causes of Western overreach. Finally, we summarize the book’s three
empirical chapters, along with the book’s concluding chapter on possible
strategies for bringing international ends and domestic means back into bal-
ance. Our principal aim in this book is to explain the widening gap between
Western governments and their publics over foreign policy. Yet our analysis
of Western foreign policy does point to a number of “dos” and “don’ts” for
those hoping to bridge the gap and make the liberal order more solvent.
6 Geopolitics and Democracy
VARIETIES OF STATECRAFT
In making these and related arguments about the Western liberal system’s evolu-
tion since World War II, we model Western statecraft along two separate foreign
policy dimensions that we call “power” and “partnership.” These are depicted in
Figure 1.1. By power, we mean military power, one of statecraft’s oldest tools and
a key indicator of a foreign policy strategy’s ambition and cost. International re-
lations scholars and defense analysts measure military power in different ways,
though most agree that the percentage of GDP a country invests in building up
and maintaining its military power is a good barometer of how much weight or
value its leaders and citizens attach to military might and defense preparedness
as part of their nation’s overall foreign policy strategy.10 Nations that are located
on the right end of the horizontal axis strongly favor investing in building up
national militaries and national defense capabilities and maintaining military
preparedness. Those located at the opposite end of the horizontal axis strongly
oppose investing a large share of gross domestic product.
The Solvency Gap 7
More international
partnership
More
military
power
Where states lie on this continuum thus tells us something about the rel-
ative weight they attach to military strength, balance of power, and power
projection in foreign policy. There is an extensive literature by international
relations scholars on how, why, and when states come to occupy different
points or positions on this power continuum. Motivations can vary from
protecting national sovereignty, to checking the expansionist ambitions of
other states in the international system, to establishing spheres of influence.
Where states land on this continuum also depends on pressures within states,
from economic interests (e.g., industrialists, merchants) seeking private gain
from militarism and war-making, to peace movements that seek to reduce
the impetus toward war through disarmament, collective security, or inter-
national federation.11
The position of each state on the power continuum also offers a rough
sense of their international and domestic spending priorities.12 This is be-
cause states’ resources are limited. As the American strategist Bernard Brodie
famously put it, “Strategy wears a dollar sign.”13 Political leaders must decide
how much military power is enough to meet their foreign policy objectives,
and whether to favor foreign policy strategies that make fewer demands on
the government’s resources and national wealth.14 Political leaders must also
consider whether and how those decisions might affect what they hope to
8 Geopolitics and Democracy
More international
partnership
Support for economic integration
and institutionalized cooperation
Globalism
Liberal inter-
nationalism
More
military
power
Nationalism
Isolationism