Zachary Paikin
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Apr 13 2026
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The Nationwide Curiosity: Politics After Globalization
By Philip Cunliffe
Polity, 2025
For the majority of the post-Chilly Warfare interval, centrist liberals had been related to financial globalization, multilateral establishments and cosmopolitanism. Liberals might have been aligned with nationalists towards the conservative empires of the nineteenth century and the communist ones of the twentieth. However within the twenty first century, mainstream Western politicians have insisted that nationalist demagogues pose a menace to liberal democracy. Then, one thing weird occurred with Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: nationalism made a comeback within the West, however solely in a restricted manner. Populist political forces continued to be related to chauvinism and xenophobia by the category of bien pensants. However on the similar time, regardless of its historic affiliation with a darker historic undercurrent of Ukrainian nationalism, it turned completely acceptable for Western liberal politicians to chant Slava Ukraini! In different phrases, Western nationalism, unhealthy; Ukrainian nationalism, good (pp.119-22).
This is only one instance of a number of that Philip Cunliffe covers in his latest e book The Nationwide Curiosity: Politics After Globalization, exhibiting Western nations ongoing incapability to place their international insurance policies on coherent conceptual footing. Cunliffe argues for a return to a politics based mostly on the nationwide curiosity after a long time of rising postwar transnationalism and that such a world has the potential to be extra peaceable than a world of competing summary rules (2025, p.54).
After the Chilly Warfare and the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal rules emerged unchallenged of their skill to seize modernity and hegemonic of their skill to form it. But, liberalism has a protracted historical past of malleability, at occasions defending cultural pluralism and at others, uncompromisingly selling liberal beliefs. With the conflict in Ukraine, now we have witnessed one other transformation, away from the triumphalism of the tip of historical past and again towards Wilsonian idealism and the defence of nationwide self-determination. Not praising interdependence as the muse of perpetual peace, liberals now champion Ukraines proper to decide on and now warn of the dangers of weaponized interdependence.
But, regardless of liberalisms skill to defend opposing concepts at totally different historic junctures, one factor didn’t change: help for transnational establishments akin to NATO. Lately, the problem to liberalisms monopoly over worldwide time period setting has not led Western elites to query the foundations of the liberal order and rediscover the nationwide curiosity. Quite, they’ve doubled down on the established order.
Cunliffe traces transnationalisms rise to not the delivery of neoliberalism, however relatively to the Second World Warfare, when democratic enfranchisement was peaking. This aligns with Ian Clarks assertion that the Chilly Warfare was a prerequisite for unleashing the forces of globalization, even previous to the neoliberal period (Clark, pp.199-201). In Cunliffes telling, political elites fled rising pressures for accountability on the nationwide stage by in search of refuge in a transnational hinterland, with the West and the free world superseding the nationwide curiosity. This shift has confirmed remarkably sturdy, with NATO surviving lengthy sufficient to defeat after which step by step reinvigorate the Russian menace. The endurance of inflexible alliance methods has come on the expense of a extra versatile international coverage based mostly on what Lord Palmerston referred to as everlasting pursuits, fostering the event of a nationwide safety state and eroding democratic discourse by putting sure matters exterior the bounds of professional dialogue.
After the Chilly Warfare, Western international coverage has been performed in latest a long time on largely ideological grounds. The liberal worldwide order envisioned a world transformation, with the West adopting some form of tutelary relationship with the remainder of the world (Sakwa, p.42). However the army campaigns waged within the liberal orders title failed to attain their desired outcomes. As Cunliffe (p.30) notes, the technocrats sagely discussing state capability in Western states right now are the heirs of the worldwide technocrats who didn’t construct state capability in nations akin to Mali, Iraq, Congo and Afghanistan throughout the early 2000s.
The abandonment of an interests-based international coverage has produced coverage disasters which have made it a lot more durable to say that the choice to the Wests most well-liked final result in Ukraine is the legislation of the jungle. The jungle, in actuality, had by no means fairly disappeared. Very often, the West itself was the jungles principal progenitor, solely in faraway lands the place its impression couldn’t be instantly felt. Actually, the pursuit of impossible-to-achieve ideological targets (akin to ending tyranny) ensured that the decline of the nationwide curiosity can be accompanied by limitless conflict relatively than utopia.
Cunliffes polemic in defence of the nationwide curiosity subsequently seems at an acceptable juncture. Within the leadup to the conflict in Ukraine, transnational establishments have been a big a part of the issue. All too typically, the quantity of power expended in coordinating frequent positions amongst EU or NATO members left little area for substantive negotiations with Moscow. Statements of symbolic unity ended up changing a extra sturdy mannequin for European safety wherein no main stakeholder is excluded (Paikin, 2022). Self-congratulatory pats on the again that Europe was changing into a geopolitical actor have inspired disparaging assaults towards member states which have lent their voice to the reason for peace.
On the similar time, transnational establishments have grow to be entrenched to the purpose the place they’re additionally an unavoidable a part of the answer. Persuading Kyiv that peace is preferable to conflict for so long as it takes would require the EU to vow it a reputable path to financial reconstruction and eventual membership. Furthermore, whereas the norms that worldwide establishments codify shouldn’t be interpreted so inflexibly as to be cited at each other formulaically and accusatorily, they nonetheless supply a vocabulary for frequent aspirations and a way of shared legitimacy that’s foundational to any worldwide order.
What Cunliffe calls transnational establishments are considered in English Faculty idea as secondary establishments, whose goal is to supply a tangible manifestation of the deeper main establishments of worldwide society akin to sovereignty, nationalism and the steadiness of energy (Knudsen, 2022). On this sense, the nationwide curiosity needn’t be posited towards secondary establishments in zero-sum trend. Quite, particular secondary establishments might have come to be in rigidity with these main establishments whose guiding logic has not been completely outdated by the appearance of a so-called rules-based worldwide order. The diploma to which secondary establishments could be introduced into realignment with worldwide societys shared targets and, certainly, the extent to which such targets nonetheless exist stay germane questions.
Nonetheless, Cunliffes name for a course correction is lengthy overdue and captures a vital aspect of what’s lacking amid todays rising world dysfunction. He not solely diagnoses the issue but additionally gives a manner ahead. Recapturing the nationwide curiosity might not, by itself, fill the hole of what plagues worldwide society right now. However on condition that Cunliffe (p.113) argues that Western populists have additionally didn’t depart meaningfully from the transnational buildings which have marked the previous a number of a long time, his e book serves to reminds us that any transition towards a extra steady and fewer contested worldwide order is just simply starting.
References
Clark, I. (1997). Globalization and Fragmentation: Worldwide Relations within the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford College Press.
Cunliffe, P. (2025). The Nationwide Curiosity: Politics After Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press Ltd.
Knudsen, T.B. (2022). The Relationship Between Major and Secondary Establishments: Theorizing Institutional Change, in Flockhart T. and Paikin Z. (eds.), Rebooting International Worldwide Society: Change, Contestation and Resilience. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 79-105.
Paikin, Z. (2022). Europes unity for the sake of unity towards Russia is misguided, Accountable Statecraft. Obtainable at:https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/02/24/europes-unity-for-the-sake-of-unity-against-russia-is-misguided/(Accessed: 5/1/2026)
Sakwa, R. (2017). Russia Towards the Relaxation: The Submit-Chilly Warfare Disaster of World Order. Cambridge: Cambridge College Press.
Additional Studying on E-Worldwide Relations
- Assessment Function The Drivers of Russian Imperialism and Warfare Towards Ukraine
- Assessment In Their Personal Phrases
- Assessment The Frontline
- Assessment The Russo-Ukrainian Warfare
- Interview Function North Azovian Greeks in Warfare and Transition
- Considering International Podcast Philip Cunliffe
About The Writer(s)
Zachary Paikin is Deputy Director of the Higher Order Undertaking on the Quincy Institute for Accountable Statecraft and co-editor (with Trine Flockhart) ofRebooting International Worldwide Society: Change, Contestation and Resilience(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Editorial Credit score(s)
Lakmalie Wijesinghe
Tags
International PolicyGlobalizationInternational InstitutionsNational InterestRussiaUkraineWar
