Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II

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Leon Fink

Undoing the Liberal World Order

Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II

Leon Fink

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English

Columbia University Press
18 January 2022

Politics & government

In the decades following World War II, American liberals had a vision for the world. Their ambitions would not stop at the water's edge: progressive internationalism, they believed, could help peoples everywhere achieve democracy, prosperity, and freedom. Chastened in part by the failures of these grand aspirations, in recent years liberals and the Left have retreated from such idealism. Today, as a beleaguered United States confronts a series of crises, does the postwar liberal tradition offer any useful lessons for American engagement with the world?

The historian Leon Fink examines key cases of progressive influence on postwar U.S. foreign policy, tracing the tension between liberal aspirations and the political realities that stymie them. From the reconstruction of post-Nazi West Germany to the struggle against apartheid, he shows how American liberals joined global allies in pursuit of an expansive political, social, and economic vision. Even as liberal internationalism brought such successes to the world, it also stumbled against domestic politics or was blind to the contradictions in capitalist development and the power of competing nationalist identities. A diplomatic history that emphasizes the roles of social class, labor movements, race, and grassroots activism, Undoing the Liberal World Order suggests new directions for a progressive American foreign policy.

By: Leon Fink
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231202251
ISBN 10: 0231202253
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 18 January 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Leon Fink is distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and senior resident scholar at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. He is the editor of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, and his many books include, most recently, Labor Justice Across the Americas (2017).

Reviews for Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II

Offering a broad analysis of left-liberal approaches to foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century, this is a gripping book that manages to elicit a vision of postwar liberalism as a global project and to suggest some of the real difficulties that it encountered. -- Kimberly Phillips-Fein, author of <i>Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics</i> A bracing and thoroughly convincing account of the attempt by liberals and social democrats to create a world of economic abundance and social welfare during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. As Leon Fink makes clear, their failure should not obscure the value of their ambitions-or the scope of their limited but real successes. This is a highly original and provocative work of global history that deserves a wide audience. -- Michael Kazin, author of <i>What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party</i>