What Would the Consequences of the Liberal International Order Collapsing Into Sovereigntist Nation States Be? A LibCon2025 Panel Discussion
Human rights, peaceful co-existence, and robust commerce might be casualties
Last month, on Aug. 14 and 15, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), The UnPopulist’s publisher, hosted its second annual, ”Liberalism for the 21st Century“ conference—or LibCon2025, for short—at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. This event, which brought together many shades of liberal intellectuals, journalists, advocates, dissidents, and activists from all over the world, was by every metric a great success.
We have been publishing select portions of LibCon2025 here on The UnPopulist so that its memorable addresses and panel discussions can reach a wider audience. We have also released the conference panels as full videos on our YouTube page, which you should subscribe to if you don’t already!
Today, we bring to you, “Perils of a World of ‘Sovereigntist’ Nation States,” featuring Rutgers’ , Stanford’s , Tufts’ , and deftly moderated by Syracuse’s Nayyera Haq. In a world that has seemingly moved beyond the post-Cold War international order, under which various countries agreed to respect universally-recognized human rights within their own borders and pursued their mutual interests through multilateral institutions, the panel’s participants consider together what might come to replace it. Will it be the aggressive form of nationalism that is currently ascendant that prioritizes national sovereignty over mutually-beneficial goals and universal values? If so, what are the implications for world peace, commerce, and culture?
What follows is the full video and transcript of the panel—including a fantastic Q&A section with the audience toward the end—lightly edited for flow and clarity. We hope you find this discussion very useful.
Nayyera Haq: Let’s start with some basic level-setting definitions. Frank, do you have a quick definition of sovereigntism from your discipline?
Francis Fukuyama: The sovereign is whoever gets the last word in making a decision. Therefore, sovereigntism really has to do with the unit that makes decisions in international affairs, which, generally speaking, is a nation state.
Daniel Drezner: I did my dissertation at Stanford, and my advisor was a guy named Steve Krasner, who wrote a whole book about this. He held that there were four different ways to think about sovereignty: There’s domestic sovereignty—the highest decision-maker within a single political unit; there’s interdependent sovereignty—how much an actor could guard against foreign intrusions; there’s international legal sovereignty—the extent to which other actors in the world recognize that you exist; and then there’s what he called Westphalian sovereignty—the ability of that actor to resist entreaties by others to concede things, in terms of their own sovereignty. So it can mean a lot of different things.
But Krasner’s book on sovereignty was subtitled: Organized Hypocrisy. So the other thing that should be recognized is that while sovereignty, as a concept, says that the state is absolute and that we don’t have to have any intrusion, in point of fact, if you look at the history of sovereignty, that has never been the case.
Jennifer Mittelstadt: I’ll build on what Dan was saying and concede that historians are totally heterodox and magpies, in terms of grabbing theory from here and there. The best way for me to think about it is to pull back even further from what Dan was talking about. It’s really a formation of politics that is organized largely around law, governance, and jurisdiction of people and territories. It takes different forms at different times. That’s just to say what historians say all the time: it’s historically contingent. The sovereignty politics of a mid-level manager of the British Empire in 19th century Indian subcontinent is going to be super different from the sovereignty politics exhibited by an advocate for independence in 1960s Puerto Rico, for example.
“The left’s criticism of internationalism and the post-war international order, and liberal self-criticism of that order, were not criticisms of international governance per se. They stipulated that the way it was conducted might be unfair, or that it might preserve certain inequalities within it—perhaps legacy inequalities coming out of colonialism or informal imperialism. But they didn’t stipulate that there was no such thing as a legitimate world government. In fact, they relied on it either as an extension—for liberals—of their own sovereignty project to extend American power through international orders, or to rectify—for the left—problems with international capital, imperialism, etc. It strikes me that, in the United States, the right’s criticism of liberal internationalism is almost a per se criticism, that it is on its face illegitimate to have international governance.” — Jennifer Mittelstadt
The other thing I would say is that I do think that they’re externally and internally related, so it has to do with international affairs but also very much with domestic politics. When I think about this iteration of sovereigntist politics that we’re going to talk about today, I take us to be thinking about the development, in the U.S., of a particular brand of right-wing sovereignty politics that defined itself against the creation of internationalism in the 20th century. It’s a historically contingent form of politics, internal and external.
Haq: I’ll throw in the Merriam-Webster definition: sovereign as in very good or effective—i.e., “a sovereign remedy for all ills.” And then my personal favorite: “a former British gold coin worth one pound sterling, now only minted for commemorative purposes.” But I take that to set up the question of—and, Jennifer, if you want to start with the history of sovereigntist movements in the United States—can we separate the idea of sovereignty and sovereigntist movements from colonial and imperial ambitions?
Mittelstadt: That is a good question. I want to start by just stipulating that it feels strange, in a way, to come up here and talk about sovereigntism, and the history of it in the United States, as some kind of an expert. I happened upon the politics of sovereignty in the U.S. by accident. I set out to study grassroots right-wing Americans and their interest in U.S. foreign policy in local conservative organizations, National Conservative organizations, churches. And I felt like I was guided by the existing literature, which is really about conservative foreign policy at the highest levels. And so, I thought to keep my eyes peeled for what I know is probably there: a good deal of powerful anti-communism, a good deal of support for robust national defense. And of course, I found those things. But as I went through the papers of all these people in these different organizations—both their private and organizational papers—what I found was this deep and abiding expression of anti-internationalism, which they then redefined as a defense of sovereignty.
I didn’t expect to find the language. I didn’t expect it to be so pervasive. I had no idea that something like world government was an animating feature of right-wing politics extending throughout different levels and all the way back in time. So it’s useful to think about its origination in the U.S, which for me is in 1919. And here is where colonialism and imperialism come in, because 1919 is this totally dramatic moment—the end of World War I. There are these referenda on the table, on what we do about globalization and what we think of it. It had reached a high point before the war, with countries integrated as they never had been before, and that comes to a halt.
Then there’s this other thing that’s happening, which is the question of who rules, who governs? Empires fall, new nations are created, and colonized people ask for independence. Within nations, people who did not have the franchise extended to them, who did not have civil rights, demanded civil rights. What would happen?
On top of all of this comes this new proposal, the most real proposal that had ever been floated, for a supranational governance: the League of Nations. That really becomes a kind of defining moment for answering all these questions. Some people are thrilled, mostly the people who like self-governance, whether within their nation or within an empire. They would like a world government. They would like a League of Nations that would allow them the possibility not only for greater peace but for self-determination.
But for others in the U.S. on the right, sovereignty emerges as a way to combat the idea of the dangers of international governance to their own sense of how they govern themselves and their territory, their nation, their states, their families, their communities. It really is, in part, a rejection of what I would think of as the colonial aspirations, or the kind of internal aspirations of other people, for access to power. They seek to preserve their own by rejecting the threat of international governance. And it takes various forms at different times: it’s born in 1919, but it persists and evolves. And maybe we can talk a little bit about the other times it pops up, and in what contexts.
Haq: Frank, bring us forward from World War I a little bit, past World War II, where we do have the establishment of a liberal world order that brings promise to many communities and we now stand with the United Nations that has more than 170 countries that have ostensibly signed and agreed to a set of norms and standards for human rights. How has that developed in the context of protecting nation-state identities?
Fukuyama: I want to make a modest defense of a certain version of sovereigntism, because it actually extends further back in history. The debate really arises in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, where you had a struggle between the Parliament and the king over sovereignty. Who is the final decision-maker in the English political system? Parliament said it should be Parliament, because Parliament represents the nation. It didn’t, not by our democratic standards today, but they had a better claim to it than a Stuart king. From that point on, sovereignty was really associated with democracy in a certain sense, because the Parliament was legitimate in a way that the king wasn’t. And therefore, any diminution of Parliament’s sovereignty was a diminution of the ability of the English people to rule themselves.
There’s an element of that argument that is still a part of right-wing discourse. This explains why America has been unwilling to join a lot of international pacts and agreements over the years compared to other European countries. For example, Americans really bridle if they are being criticized by an international human rights body that’s made up of Iran, Syria, Cuba, and so forth. Americans rightly say, “Why the hell do we have to listen to this international group that is not democratically legitimate, that is criticizing us, who really do have legitimate democratic institutions?” That has been a consistent theme.
It certainly was a big theme with Britain, where the first time that the sovereignty of Parliament was really broken was when they entered the European Union. I think that’s the deep reason why many conservative Brits really did not like being in the European Union—it was a diminution of the authority of a democratic Parliament. There’s something of that in American thinking as well.
However, you have to distinguish between different kinds of assertions of sovereignty. Bridling under the international dictates of less legitimate governments is one thing; the voluntary giving-up, or delegating, of authority to an international body because you believe it is in your national self-interest to do so is perfectly legitimate. That’s actually an exercise of sovereignty. Joining NATO, or the WTO, or any of these international pacts, is not really delegating any kind of permanent authority to an international body. It’s just saying that we Americans think our national interests are better served by this kind of international cooperation. That’s where the current right gets into trouble, because they bridle against any form of international cooperation, even if you can show very clearly that it is in the national interest of the United States.
Haq: It’s very interesting that you mentioned [1688], because as we move forward, we still have the British Commonwealth, and parliaments that are started and opened in the name of a sovereign—it’s the King of England right now. And so that connection is still intellectually there in a way that it is not for the United States.
Dan, if you’d like to jump in, Jennifer and Frank spoke about the right-wing versions of sovereigntist movements, but the anti-WTO movement was a very left-wing movement here in the United States.
Drezner: In terms of the progressive opposition, it really does start with the Uruguay Round of GATT, the creation of the World Trade Organization, the protests that you see at Seattle. I think the deeper way of thinking about it—Dani Rodrik once referred to it as a governance trilemma—is that you can only have two of three things: You have functional global governance, democratic rule, and hyper-globalization, and you have to give up one of those three. So if you have a hyper-globalized economy and you try to do it with global governance, you have to give up democracy to some extent. That was the protest that a lot of the progressives had.
“Here’s a fun question: when was the last time the United States actually declared war on a country? It was World War II. The beginning of this different way of the U.S. going to war was the Korean War, in which the United States did not go to Congress. It went to the U.N. Security Council, and it was the U.N. Security Council that authorized the “police action” in Korea. Now, to be fair, presidents have also used military force without the U.N. But there was a period, particularly in the 1990s, where very often the first move of a president was to go to the U.N. Security Council rather than Congress, as a way of bypassing what Congress might have wanted.” — Daniel Drezner
The other thing that progressives tended to rail against was the idea that a hyper-globalized economy would lead to a race to the bottom in terms of regulatory standards, and that you were essentially shifting the balance of power from labor to capital because capital would be more mobile than labor. To be fair to the progressives, that wound up having at least a grain of truth. A lot of their hysteria over the 1990s was wildly off in terms of the effects of NAFTA, or the previous rounds of trade liberalization. But what they wound up being right about, in retrospect, was the China shock, in the sense that the opening to China really did devastate certain communities in the United States. Even if, from a national welfare perspective, you could argue it was a net gain, it also widened inequality in the United States, and that’s one of the reasons why you had such a progressive backlash to globalization. Even now, when you have Trump putting troops in streets, you have a strain of the left that thinks he had a point, in terms of why he won in 2016 or in 2024.
Haq: Jennifer, is part of this that the promise of the international system, or the promise of liberal democracy, fell prey to political cronyism and political decay?
Mittelstadt: Certainly there were problems with the post-war liberal order. It would be useful to make a distinction between right, liberal, and left. The left’s criticisms of internationalism and the post-war international order, and liberal self-criticism of that order, were not criticisms of international governance per se. They stipulated that the way it was conducted might be unfair, or that it might preserve certain inequalities within it—perhaps legacy inequalities coming out of colonialism or informal imperialism. But they didn’t stipulate that there was no such thing as a legitimate world government. In fact, they relied on it either as an extension—for liberals—of their own sovereignty project to extend American power through international orders, or to rectify—for the left—problems with international capital, imperialism, etc. It strikes me that, in the United States, the right’s criticism of liberal internationalism is almost a per se criticism, that it is on its face illegitimate to have international governance.
To situate the critique within history, the arguments in 1919 for not joining the League of Nations were rooted in three things. First, the assumption that liberal international governance would replace or usurp the U.S. Constitution. Second, that adherence to international principles would somehow trample or hide the unique history and culture of the United States, which should be celebrated. But above all, that it would allow non-white, non-Christian people, who were perceived as uncivilized, to have a say over the United States and the people within the United States. And that skepticism about it, which was not rooted in our critique of authoritarianism but was based purely on racial and social hierarchies, pervaded the sovereigntist right-wing movement throughout the 20th century. When the U.N. was created, they were appalled that it would be dominated by what they called the “Afro-Asian bloc,” which would allow what they thought were essentially unqualified people to have a say in international affairs. And it correlated quite clearly with their own hold on domestic politics at home. What would signing the Human Rights Convention do? It would threaten desegregation in the United States.
Draining the right-wing critique of sovereignty of that legacy, and of its per se criticism of the establishment of international governance, doesn’t allow us to see clearly the spectrum on which international governance is debated from right to liberal to left.
Drezner: This sounds weird, but to be fair, that right-wing critique had some validity to it. Here’s a fun question: When was the last time the United States actually declared war on a country? It was World War II. The beginning of this different way of the U.S. going to war was the Korean War, in which the United States did not go to Congress. It went to the U.N. Security Council, and it was the U.N. Security Council that authorized the “police action” in Korea.
Now, to be fair, presidents have also used military force without the U.N. But there was a period, particularly in the 1990s, where very often the first move of a president was to go to the U.N. Security Council rather than Congress, as a way of bypassing what Congress might have wanted.
Now we’re in a world where Trump thinks that he can do whatever he wants, and that he doesn’t need Congress or the U.N. Security Council. But if we trace the history of it, there was a valid concern that—and this is a logic that political scientists and international relations scholars have talked about—very often heads of state, if there is a strata of global governance and a strata of domestic governance, can play one off the other as a means of getting what they want no matter what. And the leader of the United States can go to Congress and argue that the U.N. really wants to do this, or the G20 really wants to do this. It’s a means through which they can at least provide some patina of legitimacy to what they’re doing.
Haq: I don’t want to lose the thread that Jennifer doubled down on, the idea of “us” and “them,” and who gets legitimacy in these systems. But in terms of the modern challenges to the promise of democracy, the promise of international agreements that will mutually benefit everybody, we’re seeing this de-linking of capitalism and democracy particularly in places like China and Singapore. Is that part of the failure of liberal democracy?
Fukuyama: It’s complicated. One of the important distinctions about people who use the word “sovereignty” is that the one country that insists constantly on the need for national sovereignty? It’s China—a non-democracy, an authoritarian state. Their use of the word sovereignty de-links the idea of sovereignty from any value-concept, like democracy or liberalism. Every country gets to determine its own form of government, which can be authoritarian and can violate supposedly universal standards of human rights.
What’s interesting about the right-wingers that Jennifer is studying is that they could have argued that the reason we want sovereignty is because of democracy, that we are uniquely legitimate in our democratic decision-making system and we don’t want anyone to impinge on that. But the contemporary right-wing sovereigntists are also willing to say, “Well, we don’t give a shit about what China does, or Russia. They have the right to their own form of government as long as we get to make our decisions.” They de-link the idea of sovereignty from the idea of democratic legitimacy.
Drezner: Can I push back on that? One of the legitimately fascinating things about the current administration, when it comes to these arguments about sovereignty, is that on the one hand you’re absolutely right, whenever the conversation comes up about why they’re not criticizing what’s going on in China or what’s going on in Russia, their argument is, “We don’t care about the domestic politics of those countries.” But they care deeply about the domestic politics of Brazil, of Germany, of France, of the U.K. This is a movement that will simultaneously declare, “It’s an authoritarian country, but we don’t care, we just have to do business with them, it’s fine. Sovereignty, so on and so forth.” But if the other country is a democracy, they are way more interventionist than the most liberal Democrat that’s ever been elected. You have JD Vance giving that speech in Munich, or you have the U.S. employing blatantly illegal sanctions against Brazil because of that country’s prosecution of Bolsonaro.
It’s hypocrisy, where on the one hand the rhetoric you’re talking about is there, but on the other hand, when it comes to dealing with other democracies, they’ll intrude like nobody’s business.
Mittelstadt: I actually think they’re not hypocrites. The historical record of the groups that I’m looking at over time—which extends from the Daughters and Sons of the American Revolution and the American Legion in the early period, up through groups you might be more familiar with like the John Birch Society—they’re not democrats. They stand for a constitutional republic, and they’re quite anti-democratic in the extension of the suffrage and the extension of civil rights. They make no bones about it. They might be populist, but that’s not the same thing. So there’s not as much of a contradiction there, and interfering in other people’s democracies in order to make them less democratic seems to be part of the current iteration of a sovereigntist agenda on the right.
Haq: That brings us to the modern moment. Are we looking in the wrong place by looking exclusively at fixing international agreements, whether it be the WTO, the World Health Organization, or the U.N. system? Has that system baked into it, already, some of these inequities? I’ll add this data point: the United States is a multiracial, ethnically diverse country, and as a “mature democracy,” we were meant to have equality and inclusion as part of our system. And we see where that has led us right now: it has not continued to evolve in that direction. So where should we be looking if not an international regime?
Drezner: There’s a couple things going on here. The first is a valid critique of the liberal international order, which is that one of the problems with the liberal international order is that it’s really tough to kill an international institution. International institutions rarely die. They’re good at ossifying, but it’s tough to kill them. This creates a problem, because whenever you want to say that the current system is broken and we should create something new, people say, “No, we’ve already got this institution. What are we going to do?” What sometimes happens is that you create a whole bevy of international institutions—but it turns out that if you have an increasing number of international institutions, it looks more Hobbesian, because then states can engage in forum-shopping.
Another thing that’s worth pointing out, which drives the right-wing belief about sovereignty, is that “nation-state” is one of these terms that we throw around—but, as you pointed out, the U.S. is not a nation-state. We are a state where, presumably, becoming an American is based on adherence to creed more than anything else. JD Vance would disagree, but that’s in some ways what’s going on: The right-wing goal is to create a nation-state—and, just to be clear, that nation-state is super white.
Haq: ... And [their goal is also] to argue that that was the origin of the Constitution of the United States to begin with. It’s a return to sovereigntist principles, hence the challenge to birthright citizenship. But that’s what’s made the United States unique in this democratic order. I cannot show up tomorrow and identify culturally as British. My parents moved here, and I can identify as American.
Drezner: The third thing that’s worth pointing out is that one of the things we are all learning, when we talk about sovereignty, is that we tend to assume this is about international law. International law is codified, there are texts and we can interpret it. But it turns out that an awful lot of international relations runs on norms and not laws. And as Jack Goldsmith said, “Put Donald Trump in a room with a norm and he’s going to violate it.” It’s guaranteed to happen. What we’re seeing is norm decay. We took a lot of things for granted as the way things work, but it turns out that was only true if everyone accepted that as given. We no longer accept it as given, so we are migrating to a world where they’re trying to write new norms. I’m not sure they’re going to last, but it’s a truly Hobbesian world out there at this point.
Haq: Frank, India is the world’s largest democracy and it is ruled by bureaucratic paperwork and a system of laws that is very difficult for the average person to understand and navigate. It’s also ruled by deep cronyism. Where does that lead us in terms of solutions for a democratic or international order?
Fukuyama: Well, there’s a lot packed into that. I think that, first of all, you’ve got to start by fixing the United States. Americans are used to lecturing other countries around the world about their democratic systems. I was on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy for 18 years and that’s a lot of what we did, these annual human rights reports and so forth.
Haq: To the resentment, as you mentioned, of many, many other countries.
Fukuyama: Yes. The last few years have forced a big rethinking of all of that. It is true that the United States is extraordinarily powerful, not just in hard power but also in the soft power of the model that it represents to other countries. That’s been one of the biggest sources of our power. But that soft power has been severely damaged by the kinds of internal deviations from democracy and especially from the rule of law that we’ve experienced over the last few years, and greatly accelerated since Jan. 20.
“You have to distinguish between different kinds of assertions of sovereignty. Bridling under the international dictates of less legitimate governments is one thing; the voluntary giving-up, or delegating, of authority to an international body because you believe it is in your national self-interest to do so is perfectly legitimate. That’s actually an exercise of sovereignty. Joining NATO, or the WTO, or any of these international pacts, is not really delegating any kind of permanent authority to an international body. It’s just saying that we Americans think our national interests are better served by this kind of international cooperation. That’s where the current right gets into trouble, because they bridle against any form of international cooperation, even if you can show very clearly that it is in the national interest of the United States.” — Francis Fukuyama
I find it hard to see how you’re going to correct the international side of this problem if you don’t get your own institutions in better order, because the moral authority with which the United States can deal with other countries has really deteriorated.
Mittelstadt: I think this is a really interesting question: Do you seek to restore the liberal international order, and preserve what can be preserved? Certainly, there are countries all around the world who are super invested in its successful functioning for things that they need. Presumably, they will continue to use it even if the U.S. pulls out, or disparages it and defunds it. At some level it will sort of go on, as you said.
Haq: We see that right now with the European Union and its engagement vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine and the United States that they are solidifying as a more active block.
Mittelstadt: Yes. At the same time, if you pull out to 30,000 feet, it seems evident from the historical creation of things like nation-states and liberalism that these things have life courses. There are pressures on them, and it seems to me we’re at a moment of enormous pressure on states, nation-states, and, of course, the liberal international order.
One of the elephants in the room is unfettered global capitalism and its ability to elude the restraints of states and also international governance. That has put enormous pressure on the international system, and on states in particular. I think we’re in for a quite—I don’t know if I’d call it Hobbesian—an unruly period of international relations. It’s not clear to me that some of these things won’t be captured and re-formed 100 years from now in utterly different formations.
Haq: On the issue of moral authority, there is a sense of humility that had worked in recognizing the United States having challenges similar to other countries, but that sense of humility does not lead to a strong feeling of sovereignty or a strong feeling of national identity. And unfortunately, the capitalist oligarch does bring people a sense of pride on the world stage.
Drezner: Just to be provocative, I want to speak in praise of unfettered global capitalism for just a second. It’s worth pointing out that unfettered global capitalism has led to the most dramatic reduction in global poverty in world history. From 1995 to now, the percentage of the world’s population that lives in ...
Haq: ... Wait, unfettered global capitalism or regulated capitalism?
Daniel: I’m going to say unfettered, to some extent. But—and there’s obviously a “but”—what it did do, also, was create disadvantaged groups. There were losers as well. It created distributional winners and losers, and the losers were primarily working-class populations in the developed world. When you ask why the United States is where it is now, you do have to acknowledge that point.
It’s in style to say that we now know that globalization was a mistake, or that hyper-globalization was a mistake. I do want to push back strongly on that point, to say that the mistake was not in opening borders to more trade and exchange. The mistake was, you could argue, that the state failed to have the proper compensatory mechanisms in place to compensate the losers.
Haq: And the state also failed to uphold its own values where it was doing business elsewhere. That’s the moral authority challenge.
Drezner: Right, and this does lead to the other valid criticism, which is that we’ve had unfettered globalization and now China, it turns out, controls an awful lot of what everyone else needs. And that’s the valid international relations point.
Haq: And there is a progressive, lefty universe that has combined in the anti-China space, centered on the idea of unfair labor practices, which is not just an issue of today, as you rewind back to when we were exploring these international trade agreements.
With that, I think we’ve tossed out enough food for thought for our audience. We’d love to open it to questions.
Question (): To take this back to Dani Rodrik’s trilemma, there’s a reason he called the system that we’re in now “the golden handcuffs.” I’m wondering what you think about arguments that this system has enabled unbalanced global trade. And that, not through tariffs but through restrictions on the capital account and on the international flow of capital, you can return to a balanced global economy which might be better for the American working class and might also cut down on some of these excesses of global capital that people have been talking about. I’m wondering what you think about these kinds of proposals.
Drezner: Mostly, I think it’s a crock. I am extremely skeptical that you can actually restrict global capital mobility. The evidence I would point to is the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia since 2022, which have not stopped capital from going in or out of Russia. I get the impulse behind it, and I understand it, but never underestimate the ability of capital to work around a rule. This is not because I’m trying to praise capital—I’m trying to say capital is devious and you’re not necessarily going to be able to pull that off. I think there were probably better ways to do it.
“One of the legitimately fascinating things about the current administration, when it comes to these arguments about sovereignty, is that on the one hand you’re absolutely right. Whenever the conversation comes up about why they’re not criticizing what’s going on in China or what’s going on in Russia, their argument is, ‘We don’t care about the domestic politics of those countries.’ But they care deeply about the domestic politics of Brazil, of Germany, of France, of the U.K. This is a movement that will simultaneously declare, ‘It’s an authoritarian country, but we don’t care, we just have to do business with them, it’s fine. Sovereignty, so on and so forth.’ But if the other country is a democracy, they are way more interventionist than the most liberal Democrat that’s ever been elected.” — Daniel Drezner
I don’t even necessarily disagree with Rodrik on the idea of industrial policy, that subsidies rather than tariffs might be the more appropriate way of going about this. If anything, you can argue that the Biden years are evidence of this, because the Inflation Reduction Act did lead to a surge of investment in the United States in green technology, which was what it was designed to do. I agree with Rodrik on the idea that there should be more policy autonomy, but the idea that if we impose capital restrictions, that’ll rebalance stuff—I don’t think that. Towards that way also lies madness, and I have to admit, intellectually, I am enjoying Dani squirming just a little bit at the fact that the Trump folks have taken some of his critiques and done the absolute worst policy imaginable as a result. That’s one of the things I always worry about, that providing the justification for these sorts of things then leads to Liberation Day. That winds up being the outcome that you have to guard against.
Question (Sabina Ćudić): There seems to be this pervasive idea, particularly among Democrats in Congress but also some liberal thinkers in the United States, that the priority should be to sort out things at home before having any foreign policy ambition in the short- and medium-term, considering the level of crisis in the United States. However, knowing that the vacuum never remains a vacuum, and that that vacuum will be filled by other actors such as China, Russia, Iran, at least in my part of the world, the question is: If we assume that this process is going to take four to six years at best, will the world be the same once the United States reemerges on the international scene? What will it mean for the United States internally, and whether there would be a possibility to simply move on rather than deal with the consequences of isolationism of the past four to six years?
Fukuyama: I’m not saying that we should give up on trying to fix the world. To the extent that we still actually have people in the government that are interested in, for example, calling out human rights abuses, we should continue to do that and intervene. Even the Trump administration has done modest things, they just did this thing with Azerbaijan and Armenia which has gone kind of under the radar. We should continue to try to fix things as we can. I just think that it’s very hard to really make a strong effort in that direction when you are doing things like having the State Department issue its annual human rights report that blames Germany more severely for human rights violations than El Salvador. In the past, what we should have been doing is condemning Bukele’s treatment of prisoners and the complete contempt for the rule of law in that country, and instead we blame one of the most successful liberal democracies in the world.You’ve got to fix that stuff, you’ve got to get back to a foreign policy that actually takes democracy and human rights seriously.
Question (): We started with a dichotomy between the international order and sovereignty, and I want to push back on that. I’m seeing this through the lens of Ukraine, where sovereignty is very much at stake because they’re facing an imperial power. Sovereignty is maybe not such a bad thing when that’s the alternative. I think what we’re trying to get at is a way of saying that sovereignty is actually not opposed to the international order, but rather figuring out a way that independent nations can voluntarily and in their own interest cooperate with the international order. Is there a way to make that argument to people on the right that you’re seeing?
Mittelstadt: Part of what is happening is the tension between wanting to have some definable notion of what sovereignty is and what it means, and then the messy fact that it is used quite differently by different people to mean different things for different political purposes. One person’s sovereignty is another person’s repression. Historically, those on the right who call themselves sovereigntists, who think of themselves as opposed to international governance, have in fact acted internationally. They’re not isolationists. So it isn’t a question of whether they will engage with the world, it’s merely a question of how. For example, they’re quite in favor of private international law, of course, and the individual trade agreements.
In terms of international solidarities, there were real and meaningful ones that were created with Rhodesia and South Africa. We might see them as reprehensible and not as models, but they’re the kind of affinities that are not unlike the affinities that you see now between sovereigntists in the United States and those in Hungary, for example. There are possibilities for creating what Viktor Orbán has called a sovereigntist world order—he said this at the CPAC convention in Budapest in 2024 in April. They certainly imagine that there is some way of aligning that is nevertheless preserving their version of what governance and jurisdiction should look like in their own nations.
The wildest iteration of this that I saw, historically speaking, was a proposal in the 1950s by a group called the Federation for Constitutional Government (which was one of these sovereign constitutional groups in the 1950s) for a white U.N. It was a full-on proposal that that would be the solution, a white U.N. There are formations that they can imagine that are global at some level, but they’re certainly not in the liberal or left internationalist model.
Question (Charlie Cranmer): There are a lot of people in the United States, maybe the majority, who, if you ask them where American sovereignty comes from, they would say it derives from the will of God. And, consequently, compromise with foreign nations that have not been so blessed is inherently corrupting. I’m wondering what you think about the idea that there’s a religious aspect to a lot of what we’ve been talking about that is under the surface but isn’t always addressed specifically.
Mittelstadt: You’re exactly right. The fact that fundamentalist Protestants and very conservative Catholics were ardent sovereigntists in this vein—anti-internationalists, very wary of liberal internationalism in world government—speaks to this fact. And there are historians who’ve written about the kind of long-term anti-internationalism embedded in, for example, a kind of Calvinist fundamentalist Protestantism that really sees world government as apostasy. They actually define it as the antichrist; it’s really the folly of man in believing that man can solve problems like peace. And it’s an insult and an affront to what they see as something that only God has the ability to do, rooted in that Calvinist theology. There’s a famous theologian, Gresham Machen from Princeton Theological Seminary, who laid this out in the early 20th century United States as the reason to oppose the League of Nations and who was followed by many fundamentalist evangelical preachers.
There were also conservative Catholics who understood that the only legitimate world government was the Vatican, and that that was the proper realm of any world governance and anything else was not legitimate. I can’t speak to other countries, but I think you’re quite right.
Question (): One comment and then one question. The comment is picking up on what Dan said, making a little pitch for unfettered capitalism, that governments and the state can control many factors of production. They can certainly control labor, and you are seeing that right now. When you have a spasm of nativism in a country, nation-states can control their border and will go to extraordinary lengths to control their border. The one thing that can actually control the power of the state is unfettered capital. So I wake up in the morning and I never looked at my 401k. Now, when it goes down, I actually feel a little sigh of relief that there is some disciplining force against the protectionism that we are seeing right now. So, there is something to be said for some factor of production that’s not controlled by the state.
My question is that we—at least I—had been thinking that the worst thing that could happen in the United States is isolationism, that we retreat within a fortress, cut off external influences, labor, capital, cultural exchange. But then came sovereigntism. And sovereigntism is something even different. Maybe it’s scarier, maybe it’s less scary. But can you speak about the difference between isolationism and what I think we are seeing now, which is sovereigntism, and what it means for a “sphere of power” politics around the world?
Mittelstadt: Historians took the term isolationism from the era of World War II. They adopted the language of internationalists who were in favor of U.S. involvement in World War II, and who called those who were opposed “isolationists.” So it’s a historically grounded term, in that sense. Since then, historians’ studies of isolationism reveal—there’s a famous one by this historian Christopher Nichols—that there really was never any true isolationism. The question was never, would the U.S. engage, it was on what terms would it engage, what would be the priority when it engaged, what would be the rules of that engagement, and what would drive the engagement.
“Part of what is happening is the tension between wanting to have some definable notion of what sovereignty is and what it means, and then the messy fact that it is used quite differently by different people to mean different things for different political purposes. One person’s sovereignty is another person’s repression. Historically, those on the right who call themselves sovereigntists, who think of themselves as opposed to international governance, have in fact acted internationally. They’re not isolationists. So it isn’t a question of whether they will engage with the world—it’s merely a question of how. For example, they’re quite in favor of private international law, of course, and the individual trade agreements. In terms of international solidarities, there were real and meaningful ones that were created with Rhodesia and South Africa. … There are possibilities for creating what Viktor Orbán has called a sovereigntist world order—he said this at the CPAC convention in Budapest in 2024 in April. … The wildest iteration of this that I saw, historically speaking, was a proposal in the 1950s by a group called the Federation for Constitutional Government (which was one of these sovereign constitutional groups in the 1950s) for a white U.N.” — Jennifer Mittelstadt
So, I’m sort of skeptical that there’s any isolationism per se, but had anyone thought for a moment that maybe Trump or some people in his administration were pure isolationists, we see now that that really wasn’t the case at all.
I’m not sure what sovereignty will bring, except for what is said out loud, which is a withdrawal from the current liberal international order. It is a skepticism of other groups that we aren’t even involved with. So, a skepticism about the E.U., for example. We’re not in the E.U., but we seek to undermine it under a sovereigntist Trump administration. Skepticism about NATO, which was always the target of sovereigntist anti-internationalists from the moment of its creation up through now. Trade agreements, IMF, World Bank—a receding from those. That’s stated in Project 2025, which says that they should not be renegotiated; they should be abandoned if they don’t work to U.S. ends. My eye goes to the growing alliance of leaders in countries that have a strong right, right now, that call themselves sovereigntist. Whatever will be hashed out among them is a possible version of that sovereigntist world order. To me it looks unruly and unpredictable, but I really don’t know what it is.
Fukuyama: Ever since Trump 2.0 came into power there’s been a big debate about the nature of the world order that we are entering into, but I think that’s a fool’s errand. I don’t think that there is a consistent set of principles by which you can understand the kind of world that’s emerging, because essentially Trump is driven by opportunism. If something looks like it’s going to benefit him and his prestige personally, then he’ll go for it. You see this with the bombing of Iran: it was clear that there was this underlying isolationist impulse not to get involved in any more Middle East wars, and a lot of MAGA types were really opposed to that. But then it turns out that if you drop one set of bombs one time, it solves a problem pretty definitively, so he just goes in a completely different direction. When you have this kind of opportunism in policy you can’t actually use something like sovereigntism to define what you expect the behavior of the United States to be, because it’s just going to be whatever comes into Donald Trump’s head at one particular moment.
Mittelstadt: Which then argues for the very, very early definition of a sovereign who makes the decisions.
Drezner: If you really want to tie this into political theory, it goes to Hobbes, because there’s two sides to Hobbes. Hobbes believed that the state of nature was a war of all against all, and that is exactly how Trump and most of his cronies describe the international environment. But the other thing that Hobbes talked about was that the sovereign should have no internal threats. There should be no internal sources of division. Was there a threat to the sovereign? Hobbes would say yes—the threat was alternative domestic sources of power. That is something that Trump absolutely embraces, in terms of how he’s thinking about running the country.
Question (): I want to pick up on what you mentioned at the end of the panel discussion about oligarchs and the role of money in determining the sovereign powers, and the role of money in the development of the post-war world order. In speaking about the nation-state, it occurred to me that no one brought up the evolution of the corporate state, and so I’m just wondering about your thoughts on that.
Fukuyama: I think that the comment that Shikha made, about the role of markets as a potential check against untrammeled executive power, is right. So that’s probably a good thing. But the nature of our capitalist system now isn’t just that you have these broad markets that push back against certain actions—you have individual oligarchs that have so much concentrated wealth that they can actually sway elections. Elon Musk donating a quarter of a billion dollars to Donald Trump in that election, it’s hard to see earlier precedents for that use of financial power, and translating that directly into political power.
I had a blog post a while ago entitled “Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization,” because I think that Berlusconi actually invented a form of oligarchy that is new. It’s very prevalent in Eastern Europe, a lot of former communist countries, where you have a rich person who then buys a media property, not because it’s valuable as a media property but because it’s politically valuable. He uses that to get political power, and then he uses political power to protect his business interests. And this is a pattern that we’re seeing repeated now in Ukraine, the Czech Republic. A lot of Eastern European countries have this particular form of oligarch problem, and now we’re seeing it develop in the United States, and I don’t think that’s very healthy for democracy.
Mittelstadt: Let’s not forget about the robber barons and the Gilded Age.
Fukuyama: But no robber barons actually did what Elon Musk has done. No individual robber barons succeeded in gaining that degree of individual political power.
Drezner: William Randolph Hearst, in the Spanish American war?
Mittelstadt: And the Rockefellers.
Haq: We just haven’t experienced it in our lifetime. That’s a big deal, we haven’t experienced it. It’s been history, we think it’s the past.
Question (): This is a question that relates to the theme of this entire conference, which is whether we can put together positive arguments for liberalism rather than just deploring the erosion under the current administration. So I’m going to throw out some arguments for a liberal international order and ask the panelists: Would you be willing to make these arguments for why the liberal international order compared to unfettered, unbridled sovereignty is a good thing?
One of them would be human rights, and my understanding is that some of the international institutions and agreements, such as the Declaration of Human Rights in the wake of World War II, came to deal with the argument that in prosecuting Nazi Germany after the war the Nazis could only be prosecuted for the genocide that they perpetrated on Polish and Romanian soil, that what they did within their own boundaries was no one else’s business. And so countries have full sovereignty, they could massacre their citizens and no one else gets to say anything about it. Contrary to that idea, international agreements like the Declaration of Human Rights says that sovereignty does stop when it comes to human rights, which are a global interest. That’s one argument.
Another one would be, getting back to the Hobbesian construction of international anarchy, that just as in becoming a citizen of a country we agree to sacrifice a certain amount of our own autonomy, our own sovereignty. In order to be free of the depredations of others—that’s the basic social contract—I sacrifice my freedom to lie, to cheat, to rob, to steal, to murder; because on average I’m better off if everyone else sacrifices their right to rob, steal, cheat, murder, and so on. Therefore it’s in the interests of sovereign states to sacrifice some of their sovereignty if everyone else agrees to sacrifice it as well, for the benefit of the entire community of nation states.
A third one, and this was raised by Daniel, is that if you ask the question of what the effect of globalization has been on inequality, it has massively reduced it at the international level. The Gini index across countries, and probably the Gini index for the world as a whole, has gone way down, simply because poor countries have gotten richer faster than rich countries. As Daniel pointed out, that’s probably to the detriment of some factory workers in rich countries, but if all human lives are equal then maybe several hundred million people being better off is worth the price of several hundred thousand people having to find new jobs. That would be a third argument. I’m not, by the way, making these arguments so much as asking if they would be viable ways of defending a liberal international order.
And finally, the fourth one would just be the empirical record that since World War II, the world has been better off in terms of massively increased affluence—including, especially, at the low end: the decline of extreme poverty to less than 8% of the world’s population. Also the fact that great power wars and interstate wars in general have declined, notwithstanding the invasion of Ukraine, which is in many ways anachronistic. But the great powers have not fought a war since the Korean War, in contrast to millennia of human history where the great powers were constantly at each other’s throats. So the international liberal order has worked in the sense that the world’s gotten richer and more peaceful on average. Anyway, those are four arguments. Are we prepared to make them?
Mittelstadt: Those are the arguments that liberals made for why to have the order in the first place. The question is why those arguments seem not to work right now. If you look at the U.S. population, there was a time when Americans were in favor of internationalism. My sense is that that was always very soft support, and that it hasn’t been able to hold up under critiques, failings, mobilized movements on the right and some—less successful—on the left. It seems that there are things that will need to be added to that, and there will be components of internationalism that liberals will have to think about.
It’s not enough to say globalization overall did this. It freed capital but not labor; it did not control environmental degradation. Adding things to the list of what liberalism now proposes that it could do would be important. Also, connecting more to real social movements. That’s what’s made the sovereignty movement successful over time. It’s not abstract arguments, it’s not political high ground, it’s mobilization of everyday people and their fears. Trying to mobilize, at the grassroots level, people to feel connection to a reason to support internationalism that benefits people in the way that you say, but in additional ways as well, is probably necessary. I don’t know how to do that.
Haq: Or, as we experience here in the United States, even the idea of democracy does not resonate in a similar way when it comes to organizing and mobilizing.
Drezner: I’d say three things in response. The first is that, sure, I can be a cheerleader for the Kantian triad. If for no other reason, just for the Churchillian argument that even if you think it’s not a great system, it’s so much better than any of the alternatives. So, I’m perfectly willing to embrace that point.
“We should continue to try to fix things as we can. I just think that it’s very hard to really make a strong effort in that direction when you are doing things like having the State Department issue its annual human rights report that blames Germany more severely for human rights violations than El Salvador. In the past, what we should have been doing is condemning Bukele’s treatment of prisoners and the complete contempt for the rule of law in that country, and instead we blame one of the most successful liberal democracies in the world.” — Francis Fukuyama
But I will close on two downbeat notes. The first is, to push back on your argument that the world is actually pretty peaceful, take a look at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. We are experiencing the most interstate and intrastate conflicts since 1945. Whatever arguments were made about the elimination or the reduction of interstate conflict, that was true in 2010 but it’s not true now. The order is not working.
And the final point is that the real problem, and the best argument that the sovereigntists or others would make about critiquing the liberal international order, is why Russia and China have turned out the way they have. The basic argument was that if you engaged with them, they were going to get richer; they would then become more democratic and more like us. And that didn’t happen.
Now, the Kantian response would be that maybe what we need is a more exclusive system that cuts out China and cuts out Russia until they’re ready to join. But that creates the awkward situation, in the global economy, of how exactly you cut China out of it. Because I don’t think you can do it right now, and that creates real problems.
Haq: I’d also say we have a tendency to ignore conflicts in the global south as legitimate conflicts or being recognized at all.
Fukuyama: One argument you could make in favor of giving up sovereignty in certain key areas has to do with nuclear weapons, that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantee of sovereignty. We’ve had a peaceful world order since 1945 because two very powerful countries—Germany and Japan—essentially gave away their sovereignty and put it in the safekeeping of the United States. If you’re moving towards a world in which that guarantee of sovereignty across borders is not working, then everybody’s got a much greater incentive to get nuclear weapons. I think the lessons of Iran and Iraq are not that it’s really dangerous to do that—it’s that you better do it really quickly and get those weapons before anyone can take you out. So that’s also a general argument for the old world; the trouble is it doesn’t have any political force because all these threats are very theoretical. But at some point something really bad is going to happen, and I think we’re going to regret going into a sovereigntist world where nuclear weapons become really central to state security.
One last thing (well, two last things) …
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I would just like to point out relative to Franck’s first discussion of sovereignty, that the appeal to sovereignty (from the right or from the left) to reject a supranational entity is very widespread. For instance, it was one argument in the Brexit discussions and it is a recurring argument in the (mostly) right or extreme- right political parties’ attacks on EU in Europe…