Chris Borgen over at Opinio Juris has a couple of engaging posts on international institutions and the building of a global liberal order. He argues that Clinton was more successful at promoting a desirable world order because of his support for international institutions, and his greater preference than the White House’s current occupant for treaty-making.

I think Clinton does deserve a fair amount of credit for promoting global freedom, but I disagree with Borgen over his use of the term “liberal order” to the extent that he identifies it with international institutions which do little to nothing to promote democratization and are actually quite illiberal to the extent that they attempt to undermine national sovereignty.

To follow the debate, first see Borgen’s initial post, Ikenberry on Democracy and International Order, then his response to another reader’s comments, It Takes a Progressive to have a Realistic Foreign Policy. My response was contained in the comments to the more recent post, and for convenient reading I have copied my response below.

This may seem to be partially a semantic issue, but my primary disagreement with Borgen’s argument has to do with his use of the phrase “liberal order.” Borgen seems to identify the liberal order with multinational institutions, some of which are quite illiberal, since they aim to undermine national sovereignty, and thus freedom, since a free nation expresses its will through its sovereignty.

A sovereign nation may of course bind itself through treaties, but it may just as surely refuse to do so. If the U.S. promotes national and economic freedom and underwrites the global liberal order by protecting the shipping lanes and resource access necessary for industrialized economies, then it is fulfilling its mission, however many or few treaties it signs.

Moreover, some of the institutions Borgen mentions are positively defective, and therefore cannot be used as evidence for the success of Clinton’s foreign policy. I would point primarily at the United Nations and its security system, which takes the inherent defects of any collective security system and makes them worse by giving illiberal, authoritarian states a veto. The IMF and the World Bank are also widely criticized, and not just by the far right and far left.

If one wishes to criticize the Bush Administration on its failure to build a liberal global order, that case can be made, but on a different front – trade. It’s record on free trade has been pathetic. This administration has maintained and protected subsidized industries (e.g. sugar, ethanol), erected trade barriers on steel which merely transferred wealth from steel consumers (lots of U.S. industries) to steel producers (one industry) while introducing inefficiency into the market, has unduly blamed China’s growing trade for American economic problems, real and imagined, and has probably done as much harm as good with the bilateral free trade treaties that it has signed. Bush is now trying to make up for it with CAFTA, but a lack of focus on the long-term national interest in Congress has made even this difficult to pass.

The importance of global economic freedom to democratization is difficult to overemphasize. Not only does international trade help build an educated and propertied middle class which gives leverage to democracy movements, but the economic and technological aspects of globalization directly impact political reform in numerous ways (e.g. opposition blogs).

I don’t think that Borgen would necessarily disagree with this latter point, given his positive references to the WTO and NAFTA, but I would make a different distinction than he does, between multinational arrangements which promote freedom, and those which do not.

Contributed by Kirk H. Sowell at Window on the Arab World, and More!