Liberal Internationalism, Feminism, and the Suppression of Critique: Contemporary Approaches to Global Order in the United States

摘要

I have been asked to reflect on the significance of the range of new visions of global public order now circulating in the United States, and to consider, in particular, what has happened to the liberal consensus of twenty years ago. There are, of course, many directions that a response might take. One could question whether there really was a liberal consensus twenty years ago and, if there was a seeming consensus, what underlying concerns and tensions it attempted to mediate. One could focus on political science, economics, history, critical theory, postcolonial theory, or feminist theory and discuss how one or all of those has played a role in various challenges to liberal legal internationalism inside the United States. One could attempt to understand liberal legal internationalism in relationship to U.S. foreign relations and question the extent to which it emerged and coalesced around a particular view of the United States' role in the global order. One might consider what, if any, causal relationship exists between the dissolution of the apparent consensus and the rise of what many consider to be a new American excep-tionalism. And one might even consider whether liberal legal internationalism has unwittingly participated in constructing a new American exceptionalism.