On Learning, Progress and Global Order: Reflections on International Politics in the ‘Long’ Twentieth Century

We are currently witnessing not just a temporary accumulation of crises or merely superficial challenges to the rule-based world order that was founded but never completed during what I call the ‘long’ twentieth century (1860–2022). Rather, we are confronting a much deeper rupture. The mainstays of this order – successively forged after 1945 and only insufficiently amended after 1989–91 – now risk disintegrating and could potentially give way to a new ‘disorder’ characterised by fragmentation and competing hyper-empires. Yet the very depth of this rupture might also open up new possibilities to renew global order. For it is during periods of profound crisis that entrenched misconceptions and ideological fallacies come to the fore, are shaken up, and should become the subject of serious debate. More fundamentally, they can also become a ‘time of turning’ in which deeper and ultimately more constructive learning processes can gain momentum.

Learning and drawing lessons have always been cardinal themes in the history of international politics, from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War to Paul W. Schroeder’s magisterial Transformation of European Politics, 1763 – 1848. Yet international politics itself – not only its shortcomings but also its achievements – can and should indeed be viewed as a highly significant and consequential sphere of learning. And it can indeed be highlighted as a sphere in which substantial, often multi-facetted learning processes occurred, and in which, for all setbacks and relapses – such as those we currently confront – real, tangible advances have been made under ever more complex and demanding conditions. The following will illustrate this with a short tour de force focusing on crucial transformative developments in what was not only age of catastrophic extremes but also, indeed, a century of unprecedented, though constantly contested learning and even progress in international politics.

Crucial Reordering and Learning Processes of the ‘Long’ Twentieth Century

In my recent book The New Atlantic Order I argue that the transformation of international politics in the ‘long’ twentieth century, and the imperfectly created architecture of order, can be understood as the outgrowth of such complex, long-term learning processes. In my interpretation, these processes began in the 1860s when the globalisation of imperialism and power politics recast the world with unparalleled force. They unfolded in three formative periods – periods when increasingly intense global competition, crises and wars made more comprehensive global learning and reordering not only necessary but also possible.

At the epicentre of the first of these formative periods lay the First World War, and it culminated after 1918. At the epicentre of the second lay the transformative transition between the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, and it culminated after 1947. And at the epicentre of the third lay the defining crises of the globalising Cold War, notably the Berlin and the Cuban Missile crises of the 1960s and then the ruptures of 1989-91, with two culmination phases, one beginning in 1961, the other in 1989.

Yet it is essential to realise that all of these more fundamental learning and reordering processes were arduous and prolonged. Decisive advances towards stable and legitimate new orders could never be made in the immediate aftermath of the great crises, wars and caesurae; they took years of sustained learning and substantial reorientation. And this was also due to a fundamental challenge posed by modern order- and peace-making: the need to conceive and negotiate principles, rules and agreements that can not only find support among all the relevant inter- and transnational actors, but also gain legitimacy in ever more demanding, and overall democratising, domestic-political force-fields. In view of such daunting complexities, it is hardly surprising that both learning processes and subsequent pursuits of global order in the long twentieth century have remained essentially unfinished. They thus constitute an ongoing, ever renewed task for the often invoked but as often so deplorably divided ‘international community.’

Lessons from the Disintegration of the Imperialist ‘World System’ and the Creation of a Modern Global Order

In the formative first decades of the long twentieth century, key decision-makers and wider publics did not sleepwalk into the First World War. Rather, this war broke out after decades of increasingly unlimited ‘high imperialism’ and in an international system that, despite efforts to ‘civilise’ it through international law – notably the Hague Conventions, was essentially dominated by militarised and unfettered power politics. And when the July Crisis erupted in 1914, it soon became apparent that Europe’s political leaders had unlearned how to prevent its escalation to an all-out war. Focusing on victory in war rather than preserving a deeper peace, they no longer had either the instruments or the mindsets that had made the earlier Concert of Europe such an effective mechanism for just this purpose. The critical lesson here, then, is that it is vital to strengthen and further develop a system before it corrodes to the point of de facto disintegration.

After the First World War ended in Western Europe (while raging on in the east and the collapsing Ottoman Empire), there were high, indeed illusory expectations that now the time had come to create a peace order ‘to end all wars’. But those who became the protagonists of the most complex peace-making and reordering process in history – the democratically accountable leaders of the main victors, Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George – could not even begin to fulfil such far-reaching expectations. Operating amidst an unprecedented array of governmental and non-governmental actors, they achieved some remarkable feats in accommodating their vastly different peace agendas.

But they largely failed to meet the more fundamental requirements of peace and order in the wake of the First World War. Crucially, they could not lay a robust groundwork for a new, truly global architecture of order. What they indeed concentrated on, in a strikingly hierarchical manner, was the priority of forging a new Atlantic order of the victors – which initially excluded both the vanquished Germany and Bolshevik Russia – and of course also all those who, despite demands for ‘self-determination,’ remained under colonial rule or neo-imperialist domination through the League’s mandate system.

In the constellation the first truly global war had left behind, it was simply not possible to create a radical ‘new world order’ anchored in a League of Nations with far-reaching authority. Nor, however, was the pivotal task to establish a new, viable global balance of power by imposing restrictive terms on the defeated powers. Rather, the only realistic path towards sustainable postwar order lay in advancing an inclusive negotiating and reordering process.

For only such a process, sustained over time, could generate mutually acceptable new ground-rules for international politics and lay the groundwork for what was most vital: a reformed, integrative peace order. This order needed to be negotiated on terms that reconciled, as much as possible, the interests and expectations of all relevant actors, ensuring its legitimacy not just for the victors. In 1919, the primary systemic task was to construct a novel Atlantic concert of democratic states at the core of a new global system and the nascent League. To be effective, this concert had to include not only the United States, Britain and France but also the fledgling Weimar Republic. Over time, it could be extended to Japan and other key powers, while the future of the Bolshevik regime remained unpredictable at this stage. However, this could not be achieved – and it was not even attempted – at the Paris Peace Conference.

But the flawed victors’ peace of Paris did not inevitably lead to the rise of Hitler, the destruction of international order in the 1930s, and ultimately another world war. And it is as important to emphasise that the 1920s became, not a ‘decade of illusions’ but a remarkable period of progress and learning in transatlantic and global politics. During this period, those who followed the peacemakers of Paris learned from their shortcomings and advanced stabilising reforms of the Versailles system. These reforms mainly found expression in the Washington Conference’s agreements on naval arms control, a more forward-looking East Asian status quo in 1922, and most notably, the Locarno security pact. Locarno indeed fostered a reconfigured Euro-Atlantic concert that included Weimar Germany. Unfortunately, though, these advances could not be made sufficiently robust to withstand the shockwaves of the World Economic Crisis and then cope not only with Stalin but also the onslaughts of Mussolini, Japan’s hyper-militarist-imperialist regime and above all Hitler in the 1930s.

Crucial Learning Processes in the Transformative Aftermath of the Second World War

The ‘long’ twentieth century’s second and most far-reaching process of learning and reorientation began in the abysmal 1930s, with the crucible being the Second World War. This period gave rise to the hitherto most ambitious bids to create a new international order – first through the order of ‘one world’ premised on the fledgling United Nations system and the institutions of Bretton Woods, which was soon superseded by a fundamentally bipolar Cold War international system that eventually morphed into a globally differentiated configuration. Crucially, it was within this system – and under the impact of the escalating confrontation with the Soviet Union and ‘global communism’ – that an unprecedented Pax Atlantica was created. This novel peace order, was built on two core pillars – the European Recovery Program and the North Atlantic Alliance – and relied on unprecedentedly comprehensive cooperation between a newly hegemonic United States and the states of Western Europe, including Western Germany. It was eventually complemented by America’s alliance system in East Asia.

What Roosevelt and the architects of the United Nations and the institutions of the Bretton Woods system envisaged was a comprehensive new political, strategic, financial, economic and legal architecture of institutions, rules, and agreements for the world as a whole to cope with the massive consequences of the Second World War – a remarkable outgrowth of decades of learning about the pre-requirements for a durable modern global order. This vision went beyond post-1918 aspirations but proved overly ambitious in assuming that it would be possible to integrate all the main global actors and maintain a basic hegemonic cooperation between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union.

When all of this became clear, a most consequential transformation occurred roughly between 1947 and the late 1950s. The making of what I have called the novel Atlantic Peace and the fledgling Atlantic community, built on the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was of course massively influenced by the escalating confrontation between the American and Soviet superpowers. But its underpinnings, ground-rules and political culture were, on a deeper level, the outgrowth of longer-term learning processes – processes that gave rise to new, different approaches to collective security, peace preservation and inter- and transnational efforts to renew liberal democracy and social-liberal capitalism. Similar, though less pronounced, advances could be made within America’s East Asian alliance system, contrasting with US conduct the self-proclaimed Latin American sphere of influence.

It can hardly be overstated what global significance the making of this unprecedented Atlantic – and East Asian – peace system of the post-Second World War era had. It became the critical constitutive nucleus of a rule-based global peace order. This system depended on the United States’ willingness and ability to assume the role of a benevolent hegemon, to become and remain a constructive ‘first among equals’ in the evolving global architecture of peace and order. Despite instances of egregious overreach and violations of the standards and norms invoked on its behalf, this system gained a remarkable degree of stability and legitimacy, holding the potential to provide the framework of a modern world order – if its principles and rules could be applied fairly and consistently on a global scale.

Yet, any real advances in this direction made it necessary to confront anew a pivotal question of the long twentieth century, which resurfaced with renewed urgency after 1989: how could a viable and legitimate global peace order not only be conceived but also realistically created? Arguably, this critical and daunting task has not fundamentally changed. It is still imperative not only to define and negotiate truly universal ground-rules and practices for such an order but also to abide by and enforce them. And it is crucial to widen the global legitimacy of such rules and practices, and the norms underpinning them, by proving time and again that they can indeed be effective in meeting the most cardinal challenges – above all the world’s perennial security problems, yet also the structural task of reining in neoliberal-capitalist globalisation and ensuring more equitable global development prospects after 1989.

What Was (Not) Learned after the Watershed of 1989

After the watershed of 1989–91, a cardinal twofold learning problem emerged. First, it became imperative not to become complacent and to resist the conclusion that the Western, liberal side had triumphed, and that history had come to an end. The vital task was not simply to remake the formerly communist or non-aligned world in the West’s image. Instead, building on the advances and rules of the Western system, one had to realise that there was now a much bigger and harder challenge to grapple with: the challenge of constructing a truly global system – one that provided both effective and legitimate rules, norms, and mechanisms to handle conflicts and unprecedentedly dynamic globalisation process that gained momentum after 1989.

Second, it was precisely because of the way the Cold War had ended – so differently from the previous global wars – that the underlying assumptions and lessons shaping not only Western but also non-Western postwar approaches in crucial respects impeded more substantial learning. And this in turn decisively limited progress towards a more durable global system. Particularly counterproductive here were rather facile and self-serving assumptions about the inexorable global expansion of Western modes and rules of political, economic and social order, and culture, presumed to benefit everyone of what actually was a highly asymmetrical playing-field of world politics. During the de facto very fleeting ‘unipolar phase’ after 1989, serious debates about alternative scenarios or the deeper global challenges following the postulated ‘victory of Western liberalism’ were largely absent. This clearly stymied deeper learning processes that would have been required at that stage, especially among those who shaped US hegemonic policies. While demanding that all others learn from the West and adapt to Western modes and rules, leading decision-makers and wider publics in the West did not engage in anything approaching a self-critical re-evaluation of what they could learn from the East European revolutionaries, from other members of the ‘international community,’ and from the past. This oversight, in turn, clearly thwarted more far-reaching efforts to work towards a more balanced and legitimate global order.

There was never a realistic prospect of establishing a durable ‘unipolar world order’ under US auspices. However, the American superpower and its allies were now called upon to assume hegemonic responsibilities, particularly in fostering global acceptance of liberal-democratic domestic and international rules. New policies had to be developed to meet the crucial challenge of accommodating a struggling post-Soviet Russia, recognising that this would be a drawn-out process with limitations if there was no political will within Russia to face up critically to the past and redefine its role in the new international order. Similar challenges arose, though on quite different premises, with a newly assertive China after the watershed of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. More broadly, what emerged was not a new ‘clash of civilisations,’ but deeper political fault lines that became apparent when the Cold War’s structural strictures had disappeared and the new dynamics of neo-capitalist globalisation and political-cum ideological rivalry brought both accelerated growth and novel pressures.

Nonetheless, significant achievements during this period should be acknowledged. Most noteworthy were the Euro-Atlantic process of German reunification as well as the seminal, if overly ambitious eastward expansion of the European Union. No less significant were the strengthening of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) through the Paris Charter of 1990 and the creation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 1994 – important advances that built on the Helsinki process of the 1970s, whose broader significance for the ‘long’ twentieth century must be underscored. Efforts to reinvigorate NATO and to extend it to East European states eager to join it were also critical; and so was the much harder and more frustrating attempt to create, through the NATO-Russia Founding Act and subsequent agreements, a new framework for relations with post-Soviet Russia.

It is probably fair to say that in the formative years between 1991 and 2014 not enough attention was paid to the latter task. Especially two key questions were neglected: how to offer Russia realistic incentives for a longer-term strategic cooperation, and how to deal appropriately with a former superpower undergoing painful internal changes and nursing resentment and feelings of humiliation. But any meaningful progress toward a new cooperative framework for Russia’s ‘integration’ into a broader post-Cold War order obviously depended on the willingness of both sides to take substantive steps in this direction. Yet, after a brief window of opportunity, there was no real political will to pursue a constructive relationship on the Russian side, especially once Putin consolidated and radicalised his regime. There was no longer a realistic possibility of somehow accommodating his oligarchic-imperialist aspirations within a rule-based order.

Many leading Western policymakers and analysts had long assumed that drawing China into neo-liberal, increasingly hyper-capitalist economic-cum-political globalisation processes  would promote a capitalist sea-change in the Chinese economy and foster liberal-democratic reforms. Yet such expectations were increasingly disappointed the more the communist leadership in Beijing managed to consolidate its power and chart its own path of combining capitalism with an authoritarian ‘communist’ political regime. Hence arose the still unresolved question of how to deal with a rising authoritarian Chinese economic and strategic superpower willing to challenge ‘Western rules,’ particularly concerning Taiwan and the future of the Asian-Pacific geopolitical order, and potentially the global order as a whole.

For all the advances of the post-Cold War era, it ultimately represented one of the most consequential periods of limited learning in the long twentieth century. This has made it far more difficult to negotiate a tenable position for Russia and China in a reformed global order. And it has made it harder to master the even more complex task we now face: that of initiating a serious process of not only reforming the United Nations but also defining new, non-hierarchical relations between the equally diverse ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South.’

What Do We Have to Learn to Overcome the Present Disorder? And What Can We Learn from the ‘Long’ Twentieth Century?

Two closely interlinked phenomena have overshadowed the end of the ‘long’ twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: first, the erosion of the post-Second World War international order and its core norms, rules, and rights; second, a regression into a new systemic competition with potentially far-reaching global implications. This newly polarising rivalry mainly pits a still US-led community of Western-orientated states against China’s authoritarian ‘communist’-capitalist model and, to a lesser extent, Russia’s retrograde-aggressive authoritarianism. This escalating rivalry has also significantly affected the ‘Global South’ at the very time – indeed an historical turning point – when a multiplicity of interconnected global challenges – from international security to equitable development, climate change, and migration – urgently require common global responses and effective common rules, principles and mechanisms in world politics.

But it is essential not to assume or accept that erosion of world order is inevitable and that we are inexorably headed towards a world newly divided between hyper-imperial spheres of influence, as seen before the outbreak of the First World War. Yet what can be done to halt a further slide into this abyss – or even reverse the current downward spiral? To begin with, it is both legitimate and essential for the United States, its NATO allies, and other like-minded states to support Ukraine as substantially as possible until Putin’s war of aggression ends with an unequivocal defeat. More fundamentally, they must contain the current Russian regime by all available means. In a wider global context, it is imperative to adopt concomitant policies and measures to counter any attempts by China’s current regime to undermine the ground-rules and foundations of a rule-based international order, both in East Asia and beyond.

What thus seems imperative is a whole range of efforts directed at reviving and reinforcing both the Euro-Atlantic community of states and trans-Pacific ties of collective security. These efforts should aim not only at effective collective safeguarding measures but also at creating the conditions for future cooperation and moderation of systemic rivalries from a position of strength, including those with Russia and China, even if this appears inconceivable without fundamental changes from within these latter powers. Achieving this will undoubtedly necessitate a deeper willingness to engage in harder learning processes and to recognise deeply entrenched patterns of complacency and self-serving ideologies and illusions, not just in the US and across Europe, especially in Germany. Notably, Germany’s malfunctioning coalition government and wider society have yet to ‘learn the lessons’ of the long twentieth century and actually pursue serious strategic renewal to implement the proclaimed Zeitenwende.

For both Germans and Americans – and indeed for the broader global community, the most fundamental task on the road towards a rule-based global order is to draw the deeper lessons from the salient reordering processes following the two world wars. The focus should be on building a renewed international concert. What I mean by this is a concert comprising and open to all those states and societies fundamentally willing to commit to principles and ground-rules of collective security, protection of the integrity of states, peaceful settlement of disputes, and rules of trade and economic relations that have been enshrined in both global and regional covenants. This also demands realistic bridge-building efforts toward the diverse countries of the ‘Global South.’ In the longer run, the goal should be to develop the nucleus of an integrative global concert for the twenty-first century – a system open to all states, including Russia and China, provided they respect its ground-rules. This framework could potentially encourage substantive political changes within these states, although one must acknowledge that such changes can neither be compelled nor significantly influenced from the outside.

In conclusion, the long twentieth century’s lessons demand more than minor tactical adjustments; they call for a veritable remaking of the international order to escape from the downward spiral of today’s disorder. This, in turn, necessitates deeper learning processes. It requires not only major efforts in the Euro-Atlantic world and beyond to place intergovernmental and transnational cooperation between liberal-democratic states on a much firmer footing. It also makes it imperative to address the root causes of political polarisation and erosion of democratic government. Moreover, it calls for effective measures and agreements to regulate a hyper-capitalist ‘disorder,’ which creates dangerous structural inequalities in ‘developed’ industrial, digital, and service economies,  and even greater chasms between them and ‘less developed’ countries and regions. Ultimately, what thus ought to be initiated is a new, more fundamental learning process – one that leads to a reconceptualised democratic and social-liberal New Deal for the World.

The views and opinions expressed in the CGO blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the programme and its partners.