Rethinking the 1990s: Liberal World Order-Building in the Aftermath of the Cold War

The decade after the end of the Cold War—the 1990s—was a world-historical turning point: the Western industrial democracies stood triumphant, and a dynamic and expansive liberal international order emerged as the organizing logic of world order. Today, three and a half decades after the end of the Cold War, the excitement and anticipation that marked this global transition have vanished. The 1990s look like a different era. The liberal international order has weakened and is unravelling. Great power competition has returned. Talk of a new Cold War between the West and Russia and China is rife. From today’s vantage point, the 1990s look less like a great triumph for liberal democracy and Western modernity than a decade in which post–Cold War optimism and designs obscured a slowly gathering global storm. This volume brings together a group of scholars who look back on the 1990s to identify choices and pathways that have brought the world to this unsettled moment. Authors explore whether the United States and other countries could have made different choices in the 1990s to garner greater “buy-in” internationally and place the world order then envisioned by Western policymakers on a firmer foundation. The volume shows that the decade of the 1990s was important not only because it presented an “opportunity” for the reordering of global relations but also because it reveals how contingent grand international designs ultimately are on the practical realities of domestic politics.