Public Governance and Global Politics after COVID-19, COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation – with Hahrie Han – eds. Hal Brand and Francis J. Gavin

The COVID-19 crisis is a major shock to the existing complex of global rules sometimes described as the “liberal international order.” This order heavily emphasized global openness in trade and information flows, and it favored the presumptive liberalization of non-democratic societies that would naturally emerge from it. Yet the liberal order fell short of its promise to create enduring liberal governments in countries such as Egypt during the Arab Spring and China. The long-standing liberal democracies at the core of the order have become less enamored of openness than they used to be. The limitations of the current version of the liberal international order had begun to emerge even before the COVID-19 pandemic. In part, these fractures resulted from a mismatch between the international order’s objectives and its assumptions about democratic publics. While policy makers assumed that international rule systems were in the interests of democratic publics, in practice those systems were insulated from them and sometimes even forcibly repressed them.This constrained democracy at the national level, as controversial decisions were kicked upstairs to less directly responsive global institutions.

Henry Farrell and Hahrie Han, “Public Governance and Global Politics after COVID-19,” COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation, eds. Hal Brand and Francis J. Gavin (Johns Hopkins University 2020).

Access the full text here.

Other Writing:

Essay

Joe Biden’s Foreign Foray is All About Shoring Up Democracy – In the US

During his first trip abroad as US president last week, Joe Biden kept telling Europe that “the US is back”. Before the G7 meeting, Biden signed a new Atlantic charter with Boris Johnson that agreed to protect democracy and open societies. After Cornwall, he went on to more meetings in Brussels with the European Union, ...
Read Article
Essay

Saving Democratic Institutions from Corrupting Markets

Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’ essay – and the book that lies behind it – are part of a broader liberaltarian challenge. Liberaltarianism, as I understand it, looks to use classical liberalism as a set of foundations for a very different understanding of market and state than libertarianism. Rather than starting from the market order ...
Read Article