A large and widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. Much of the debate over the weakening of the Western liberal order has focused on recent changes: Donald Trump's presidency, Britain's vote to leave the European Union, and the surge of nationalist sentiment in France, Germany, and other Western democracies. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West.
Combining a novel theoretical framework and empirical strategy, Trubowitz and Burgoon show that support for globalism has been receding for 30 years in Western parties and legislatures. They trace the anti-globalist backlash to foreign policy decisions that mainstream parties and party elites made after the end of the Cold War. These decisions sought to globalize markets and pool sovereignty at the supranational level while applying neoliberal reforms to social protections and guarantees at home--a combination of policies that succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order, but at the cost of mounting public discontent and political fragmentation.
At a time when problems of great power rivalry, spheres of influence, and reactionary nationalism have returned,
Geopolitics and Democracy reveals how domestic support for international engagement during the long East-West geopolitical contest was contingent upon social protections within Western democracies. In the absence of a renewed commitment to those social purposes, Western democracies will struggle to find a collective grand strategy that their domestic publics will support.
Peter Trubowitz is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Phelan United States Center at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. His research focuses on international security, domestic politics and foreign policy, and party politics. His published work includes Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft and Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy, which won the American Political Science Association's J. David Greenstone Prize for best book on politics and history.
Brian Burgoon is Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam, Director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES), and the former Academic Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). His research focuses on the politics of economic globalization, immigration, inequality, and welfare and labor-market policy. His work has been published in leading journals in political science, economics, sociology, European studies, and international relations.
