Liberalism
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‘twentieth-century liberalism’) came to be associated with welfare provision and economic management. As a result, some commentators argued that liberalism was an incoherent ideology, embracing contradictory beliefs, notably about the desirable role of the state . The Cold War period (1945–90) witnessed the consolidation of liberalism within the US-led capitalist West, even though its global ambitions were firmly resisted within the Soviet-led communist East and across much of what became known as the Third World. This consolidation was evident in two ways. The first was the spread of Western liberal democracy (see p. 44). A wave of democratization (see p. 18) occurred between 1943 and 1962, and involved countries such as West Germany, Italy, Japan and India; with a further wave of democratization starting in 1974, and affecting Greece, Portugal, Spain and much of Latin America. The second way in which liberalism was consolidated was through the ‘silent revolution’, which, beginning in the 1960s and affecting advanced industrialized countries in particular, saw the seemingly irresistible spread of liberal values in areas ranging from gender relations, homosexuality and religious observance to capital punishment and cultural diversity. The end of the ColdWar had yet more significant implications for liberalism, encouraging some to declare that it amounted to the ‘liberal moment’ in world affairs. The overthrow of communist regimes across Eastern Europe sparked a new and more dramatic process of democratization, with the formation of governments through multiparty elections and the adoption of market-based economic reforms becoming substantially more common. This created a situation in which, whereas in 1973 only 45 out of the 151 states then comprising the world community exhibited some of the key features of liberal-democratic governance, by 2003, 63 per cent of states, accounting for more than 70 per cent of the world’s population, displayed these characteristics. In this context, ‘end of history’ theorists, such as Francis Fukuyama (see p. 17), proclaimed that liberal democracy had established itself as the final form of human government. Such a view,
in effect, implies that liberal democracy is the ‘default position’ for human societies. The end of the Cold War also injected significantly greater impetus into the process of economic globalization. This made it possible, for the first time, to conceive of the world economy as a single, interlocking entity, built on liberal – or, more accurately, neoliberal – lines (economic liberalism is discussed at greater length later in the chapter).
State: A political association that establishes sovereign jurisdiction over a defined territorial area, usually possessing a monopoly of coercive power.
KEY CONCEPT GLOBALIZATION
globalization is the process through which national economies have, to a greater or lesser extent, been absorbed into a single global economy. Cultural globalization is the process whereby information, commodities and images produced in one part of the world have entered into a global flow that tends to ‘flatten out’ cultural differences worldwide. Political globalization is the process through which policy- making responsibilities have been passed from national governments to international organizations.
Globalization is the emergence of a web of interconnectedness which means that our lives are shaped increasingly by events that occur, and decisions that are made, at a great distance from us, thus giving rise to ‘supraterritorial’ connections between people. However, globalization is a complex process that has a range ofmanifestations. Economic
However, the early decades of the twenty-first century have brought with them evidence of the retreat of liberalism.This has been particularly apparent in the fact that, since reaching its high-watermark in2006–08, the spreadofWestern liberal democracyhas been reversed, with
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