Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of Liberal Order

The history of liberal order and democratic politics since the 1930s explains ongoing threats to democracy and international order, with James E. Cronin arguing that liberalism has never been secure and that the postwar system has repeatedly reinvented itself in response to various challenges. Fragile Victory provides the context necessary to understand these challenges.

Format: Hardback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 24 January 2023
Publisher: Yale University Press

The liberal democratic order that once seemed unshakable in North America and Western Europe has now become increasingly fragile. James E. Cronin contends that liberalism has never been a stable ideology, and since the 1930s, the international order has had to be constantly crafted, redeployed, and extended in response to both triumphs and setbacks.

Beginning with the German and Japanese efforts in the 1930s to establish a system based on empire, race, economic protectionism, and militant nationalism, Cronin demonstrates how the postwar system, established in the aftermath of fascism, repeatedly reinvented itself in the face of the Cold War, anticolonial insurgencies, the economic and political crises of the 1970s, the collapse of communism, the rise of globalization, and the financial crisis of 2008. Cronin emphasizes the interconnectedness of internal and external politics in sustaining liberal order on a global scale and the domestic origins and correlates of the present difficulties.

Fragile Victory offers the necessary backdrop to comprehend diverse challenges such as Brexit's triumph, Trump's election, the rise of populism, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780300247855