avatarHarold De Gauche

Summary

Megaloliberalism, the American-led world order characterized by the aggressive promotion of liberal values, is critiqued as a distortion of true liberalism that threatens global stability and should be abandoned in favor of a multipolar balance of power.

Abstract

The concept of megaloliberalism, as detailed in the provided text, refers to the United States' doctrine of asserting liberal values such as rights, freedoms, and democracy on a global scale. This approach, which has been particularly prominent since the fall of the Soviet Union, is seen as a perversion of liberalism's core principles. The author argues that megaloliberalism, by prioritizing dominance and control over equality and recognition, has led to international policies that are often counterproductive and destructive, as evidenced by the outcomes in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The text suggests that the era of uncontested US hegemony is over, with the rise of competitors like China and Russia, necessitating a return to a balance of power system to prevent the escalation towards a potential World War III. The author emphasizes the importance of diplomacy, negotiation, and moral compromise over the absolutist and interventionist policies of megaloliberalism.

Opinions

  • Megaloliberalism is seen as a deviation from the true spirit of liberalism, which emphasizes rights, freedoms, and pluralism, instead turning it into a tool for global dominance.
  • The author believes that the US-led liberal hegemony, as described by political scientists like John Mearsheimer, has been detrimental to international order and stability.
  • The text criticizes the idea that liberal democracy can be universally imposed, arguing that it disregards the importance of national sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural identity.
  • The author posits that the era of US dominance is ending, and a multipolar world order is emerging, which requires a shift from moral absolutism to moral compromise and effective diplomacy.
  • The critique extends to the failure of megaloliberal policies in practice, citing the chaos and suffering resulting from US interventions in various countries.
  • The text calls for a reevaluation of foreign policy, advocating for a conservative approach to international relations that focuses on preserving liberal democracy at home rather than exporting it abroad.

Megaloliberalism — The American Doctrine of World Order

What it is and why it needs to die

Photo by Jacob Morrison on Unsplash

I talk a lot about megalo-liberalism in my work, so I think it is only fair for me to explain a little more about the term itself and the phenomenon that the term describes.

The concept of megalo-liberalism features heavily in my two-part article deconstructing the two narratives, hegemonic and anti-hegemonic, which seek to capture the reasons for the Russo-Ukrainian War. It also gets some airing in my recent piece dissecting Western propaganda and is investigated at some length in ‘The Power and Powerlessness of the USA’.

Suffice it to say that the Big M gets around in my work, particularly with regard to anything I write about international relations and/or liberalism.

I’m pretty aware that it’s a bit of a mouthful and doesn’t exactly slide off the tongue. There is, however, a reason I chose it specifically, which I will presently divulge. It’s also not really ‘my’ concept, but rather an elaboration of someone else’s, which I will also explain.

The term

The term owes its existence to two sources, one conceptual, and one conceptual and linguistic.

Let’s take the conceptual and linguistic first.

The hugely knowledgeable yet oft-mistaken political philosopher Francis Fukuyama has a concept he calls ‘megalothymia’. This concept stems from the Ancient Greek idea of thymos or thumos which relates to our innate self-worth, our spiritedness, and our sense of dignity and justice. The thymos also speaks to our desire for recognition, our thirst for glory, and our need to right wrongs. I draw on the thymotic need for acceptance and acclaim in my article on the four reasons why humanity cannot solve climate change.

Fukuyama focuses on this second aspect in his The End Of History And The Last Man and sees this need to gain the respect and recognition of one’s peers as both innate to the human animal and one of the drivers of history. Crucially, this primal urge manifests not only in the individual but also in the nation.

Fukuyama makes a distinction between the isothymia and the megalothymia. The former is the will to equality, the struggle to be the same and have the same, and the burning need to be on the same level as one’s peers. The latter is a far darker beast whereby the will towards equal recognition and fair treatment is sublimated to become the will towards dominion and control; the need not to be the same as others but to be superior to them.

Predominantly, however, my conceptual debt is to the work of political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Mearsheimer uses the term ‘liberal hegemony’ to describe the dominant US-led international order that asserts the primacy of liberal ideas — rights, freedoms, democracy — over all else, and that, owing to the inherent superiority of these values and ideas, the world will be a better, more peaceful and more prosperous place as these values spread around the globe. The forced conversion of weak illiberal states to liberal democracies and aggressive confrontation with stronger illiberal states is not only inevitable under such an order but wholly justified.

Megaloliberalism tears out the noble heart of liberalism — rights, freedoms, pluralism — only to reanimate it as some Frankensteinian monster to hit the world over the head with.

There are numerous implications of this but those are the bones of the doctrine.

My megalo-liberalism is much the same as Mearsheimer’s liberal hegemony, however, I feel the latter emphasizes the expansion and instrumentalization of liberalism and de-emphasizes somewhat the deep perversion of the ideology.

Megaloliberalism tears out the noble heart of liberalism — rights, freedoms, pluralism — only to reanimate it as some Frankensteinian monster to hit the world over the head with. We are not merely talking about an increase in size and scale but also a shift in substance. We have here a hyper-species of liberal thought that is as much a threat to the order it purports to defend as it is to liberalism itself.

Features of megaloliberalism

Birth and a brief history of international order

ML came into its full ascendency as the dominant force in international politics with the fall of the Soviet Union. It was also the dominant force prior to this, but with the demise of the Soviets, the USA was truly the last man standing and wholly free to impose its will on the rest of the town; on those who believed in its tenets and stood to benefit — Europe and Australasia — and on the rest of the world that very much had more mixed feelings about the new order.

Taking the last 500 years of European and then world history, it is rather unusual for a single state to come to dominate.

The British Empire came to be the global hegemonic power during what is known as Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914. This, however, is not the usual state of affairs.

The Treaties of Westphalia brought the hugely destructive Thirty Years’ War to a close in 1648. This gave birth to the balance of power system on a grand scale, wherein powerful states work together to prevent any one state from becoming so powerful that it could come to dominate the others and essentially do as it wished.

This system was eminently successful at warding off war on a massive scale until the arrival of Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars which ripped Europe apart and tore the balance of power system asunder. This was succeeded by the advent of the aforementioned Pax Britannica, which was generally peaceful for Europe but brought untold and unfathomable devastation for much of the rest as it was either colonized or, having been colonized earlier, was already under the yoke of colonizers.

Then we have the first half of the twentieth century.

Next, we have the bipolarity of the US/USSR period where the two vied for supremacy but also reached a certain kind of balance, albeit not quite a balance of power system that requires a minimum of three.

So, we have periods where a balance of power logic between multiple states is achieved, periods of some sort of balance between two states, single-state dominant periods, and then times when the tectonic forces of humankind come to the fore to split everything apart.

Megaloliberalism is a single-state dominant model for international order. Of course, there is the UN, international law, and a thousand different treaties and agreements, but when it comes to the crunch the USA is the judge, jury, and executioner that both breaks and enforces the rules.

Next, let’s take a look at the liberalism of megalo-liberalism.

The liberalism of megalo-liberalism

There are three aspects of liberalism that are of primary importance here.

The first is that liberal democracy is a domestic system, not an international one, for the reason that it requires that a state has both the strength to enforce the rules of the game and the legitimacy for society to accept this game as preferable in broad terms.

The second is that there are two sides of liberalism that pull in different directions and can come into conflict with one another — these are called positive and negative liberty.

The third is that liberalism is often invested by its more fanatical believers with a strong sense of superiority.

1. Liberalism as a domestic political ideology/system

I am a liberal in terms of domestic politics in that I believe the best system we have for governing should be based on inviolable rights, democracy, accountable government, open channels of information, and a strong rule of law to safeguard the preceding.

The most important element for this system to work is a strong self-limiting and legitimate state.

It must be strong enough to ensure the rules are enforced and cannot be broken (in reality rules are of course bent and broken by the powerful).

It must be self-limiting because if not, the whole thing will fall down.

And it must have enough legitimacy for citizens to accept the state ruling over them in broad terms.

Until a world state arrives on the scene of human history, there will be no group of countries strong enough, self-limiting enough, and legitimate enough in the eyes of the many to run international politics like a liberal state.

As such, the megalo-liberal order is already a deep perversion of liberalism.

2. The positive and negative

The second element of importance here is that liberalism consists of two sides, two faces as I call them — the positive and negative.

Ground zero for this discussion is Isaiah Berlin’s seminal ‘Two Concepts Of Liberty’ essay. I also investigate the duality of liberalism here.

The negative face is all about the fundamental rights that protect individuals from each other and the state. These basic liberties are written in the negative, hence negative liberty: ‘Nobody has the right to .. ‘ ‘you cannot … ‘no one can … ‘. And they are written in the negative because, from this side of the coin, it’s all about keeping others out of the ‘protective bubble’ of each individual.

Berlin succinctly described negative freedom as ‘I am a slave to no man’ (p8).

Whilst positive liberty is heavily intertwined with its negative cousin and there is huge overlap, it is quite another animal.

The positive face of liberalism is all about social adjustments on the part of the state in order to iron out, or free people from, some of the inequities of life. Otherwise, the rights enshrined by negative liberty become something like empty abstracts.

For instance, if nobody has a right to take your property or prevent you from accessing education, but you have next to no property and can’t afford higher-level education, then these rights, though extremely nice in theory, are a little meaningless in practice. The positive face attempts to soften those things — poverty, crime, violence, discrimination — that affect some far more than others.

Berlin characterized positive liberty as ‘I am my own master.’

In practice, all liberal states contain a negative core cocooned in a great many layers of the positive.

Imagine a parent, even an eminently well-meaning one, attempting to discipline and correct the behaviour of your child?

Positive liberty and the sort of state interference it sanctions to balance out and correct society can again only work in a domestic political setting. Otherwise, interference by one state in another will run headlong into a list of extremely powerful forces that render it illegal, illegitimate, and extremely unlikely to achieve anything good in the long run — territorial integrity, sovereignty, nationalism, cultural values, geographical distance, and self-determination.

Imagine a parent, even an eminently well-meaning one, attempting to discipline and correct the behavior of your child. Never going to fly. And this deep aversion is written on a grand scale in world politics with many more forces at play.

Megaloliberalism is positive liberty applied to the world by a US-led West, perhaps for noble reasons on rare occasions but most often for anything but eminently well-meaning motivations.

Megaloliberal doctrine not only goes against forces like sovereignty, self-determination, nationalism and cultural identity which wholly invalidate it, it also simply doesn’t work because of these very forces.

If we look at the hegemonic liberal order’s attempts at correcting countries, Iraq and Libya are far worse off now and Afghanistan just went back to what it was doing after America’s third most expensive war. Added to this is the devastating destruction of life. Living under tyranny is one thing; living under anarchy is Hell on Earth.

Megaloliberal doctrine not only goes against forces like sovereignty, self-determination, nationalism, and cultural identity which wholly invalidate it, it also simply doesn’t work because of these very forces.

3. A sense of superiority

Lastly, liberalism tends to engender a sense of superiority. This is true for dogmatism in general and also applies to fanatical conservatives. Regardless, there does seem to be some inherent feeling of superiority when it comes to devout liberals.

We see this hubris in John Rawls (who I highly recommend reading) and his notion of ‘decent societies’, which are seen to be not so bad but of course lesser than liberal societies. This feeling is whipped up to fever pitch in figures such as Madeleine Albright and her wild talk of the US as that ‘indispensable nation … that sees further than other countries.

Megaloliberalism is moral absolutism in a world where moral compromise is key.

The reason why this sense of superiority is just so problematic is because megalo-liberalism is an international political doctrine where compromise and concession are the name of the game, good diplomacy is of the utmost importance and parties must be willing to bend and yield.

Hegemonic liberalism, however, sees international relations in terms of black and white with liberal countries (with the US top of the pile) inherently good and illiberal countries inherently bad. This means the former is always right and the latter is always wrong. When you think like this, negotiation, diplomacy, and any will to meet in the middle are impossible. This is evidenced by all the years of refusing to listen to anything Russia had to say and the ever-building tensions with China and Taiwan.

Megaloliberalism is moral absolutism in a world where moral compromise is key.

The death of megalo-liberalism

The megalo-liberal doctrine endured, to the benefit of the US and the EU and not much of the rest of the world, while America had no real competitors and international politics could be said to be unipolar.

That time has passed. The US is no longer the lone dog in the yard with China barking and baring its teeth and Russia biting back. The world is once again a multipolar political ecosystem that gives rise to a number of truths.

The first is that moral compromise must supplant moral absolutism as the linchpin of the international order. We must return to the balance of power system that lasted for so long during periods of Modern European history. Otherwise, we will move inexorably toward World War III.

Secondly, the sort of highly aggressive foreign policy the US adopted during its megalo-liberal years must be reined in favor of a more conservative international approach. Liberal democracy is a wonderful and noble system for those countries where it arose naturally. We should maintain and nurture it, and fight to protect it at home at all costs. This means giving up the mad and dangerous dream of spreading it across the globe, however. The worst thing we can do for liberalism is to continue to try and aggressively impose it on other societies. This only multiplies the enemies of liberalism, both inside and out. Megaloliberalism is no friend of liberalism.

Lastly, the lost arts of diplomacy and negotiation must be rekindled in order to prevent conflicts from happening in the first place and to stop them when they do.

USA
Politics
Philosophy
War
Society
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