Orders of Exclusion: 1919 and the Limits of Liberal IR Theory

Many scholars and policymakers argue today that the American-inspired international order is falling apart. While the United States is increasingly unwilling to act within the rule-based boundaries it helped forge after World War II, rising and resurgent powers like China and Russia have become progressively dissatisfied with a system they feel no longer adequately represents their interests. If order is indeed breaking down, the United States or its hegemonic successor will need to erect something new in its place. But what explains when and for what reasons powerful states seek to rework the foundational rules of international politics? This paper seeks to account for the origins of great power preferences for international order. I posit that when thinking about order, preponderant states look most to their greatest potential threats. International order is defined here as a set of established, foundational rules observed by a significant number of important actors. These ‘ordering principles’ broadly dictate the prevalence, power and profiles of important international institutions and agreements, the purposes for which interstate force can be used, and the degree of autonomy afforded to regimes within their borders. I argue that preponderant states attempt to enact foundational rules that they believe will best weaken their principal threat in the international system. To the extent that they are successful in doing so, they are able to create an order premised on weakening, opposing and above all excluding some threatening entity in world politics. In particular, I have identified a number of pathways through which statesmen have strategically manipulated ordering principles to adversely affect their greatest perceived threat. This argument both supports and challenges liberal international relations theory. It supports the liberal contention that even the most powerful states understand that ideas, institutions and rules matter, and these actors thus seek to shape international order accordingly. Yet it also challenges liberal explanations for why states act as they do. If my hypotheses are correct, it suggests that great powers advocate major changes in foundational ordering rules not to promote national values, demonstrate their benevolence, or overcome past sources of conflict as various liberal theories suggest, but instead for the purpose of standing against something, thus ultimately ‘ordering to exclude.’The paper further challenges liberal theory by taking on one of liberals’ self-professed strongest cases: the origins of America’s order building preferences after the First World War. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I posit that Woodrow Wilson’s overriding motivation for forging the kind of postwar order set out in the Fourteen Points was to respond to the radical alternative to liberal internationalism posed by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Specifically, he sought to create a comparatively conservative order that would stabilize the world without massive revolution and discredit the more radical version of modernity espoused by the Bolsheviks. The case thus fits a pattern explored in the larger research project, where I argue that America’s so-called ‘benevolent’ order in the twentieth century originated from the same stark geopolitical motivations that motivated the European statesmen of previous centuries.