End of Cold War Spelled Trouble for Liberalism

By Yuichi Hosoya / Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun

11:00 JST, June 6, 2025

The world is in great turmoil. In the war in Ukraine, which began in February 2022, the brutal fighting continues to drag on, and in the United States, the Trump administration is causing concern among its allies. So what will the international order look like going forward?

Behind all this turmoil lurks an ideological climate that is critical of liberalism. In other words, the ideals of liberalism, which spread around the globe as universal ideals following the end of the Cold War, are now facing criticism and backlash around the world. In fact, criticism, dissatisfaction, anger and hostility toward liberalism have emerged as the driving force behind politics in some major countries.

From Russian President Vladimir Putin’s perspective, the spread of liberal and democratic thought and its arrival in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova is a national security threat to his country. This development can be seen as one side of a coin, the obverse side being an eastward expanding NATO and an expanding sphere of U.S. influence.

At the same time, the United States, which has embodied liberalism since its founding, has seen its own steady uptick in critiques of such thinking.

For instance, in his 2018 book “Why Liberalism Failed,” Prof. Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame, whose philosophy is close to that of the Trump administration and is close to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, argued that liberalism “has failed because it has succeeded.”

Deneen predicted that in response to the anger and fear felt by the public following the collapse of liberalism, a populist nationalist dictatorship or a military dictatorship would be highly likely.

After the end of the Cold War, paeans were made to the triumph of democracy and liberal economics over the communist system.

As can be seen in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay, published in 1989, there was a growing utopian belief that foresaw the inevitable spread of liberalism around the world.

However, history has not come to an end so easily.

John Gray, a former professor at the London School of Economics, was one of the first scholars who warned against such optimistic thinking and criticized it, and he published many papers on the history of liberal thought.

In his book “False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism” — published in 1998, or 20 years before Deneen’s own book critical of liberalism — Gray argued there was a rather strong possibility that the United States’ laissez-faire economics would implode as emerging economic powers challenged its hegemonic place in the world economy.

For 30 years after the end of the Cold War, we blindly believed in the utopian idea that liberal economics and democracy would expand across the world, and we have looked optimistically toward the future world order.

But now we are faced with Russia’s relentless aggression and violence against Ukraine. On top of that, we have witnessed the Trump administration pull back on international cooperation and challenge global norms time and time again.

Lessons from history

“The Counter-Enlightenment” is an essay written by British political theorist Isaiah Berlin, who was one of the most renowned thinkers in the second half of the 20th century and lectured at the University of Oxford for many years. It provides a useful guide to the dynamics of world politics.

In his essay, Berlin focuses on the spread of a backlash rooted in the culture, history and traditions of each region in response to the Enlightenment’s rationalism and faith in science, which spread throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

He warned that “Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself.” This way of thinking prompted many to believe that the uniqueness and culture of each nation and region should be preserved.

For instance, German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries, opposed the spread of Enlightenment ideals and acknowledged that “There is a plurality of incommensurable cultures.” He maintained that “To belong to a given community, to be connected with its members by indissoluble and impalpable ties of common language, historical memory, habit, tradition and feeling, is a basic human need.”

Berlin also focused on French conservative thinkers such as the Catholic Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre “held the Enlightenment to be one of the most foolish, as well as the most ruinous, forms of social thinking,” Berlin wrote, adding that, “The conception of man as naturally disposed to benevolence, cooperation and peace, or, at any rate, capable of being shaped in this direction by appropriate education or legislation, is for [de Maistre] shallow and false.” De Maistre, according to Berlin, believed nature to be “a field of unceasing slaughter” and that “Men are by nature aggressive and destructive; they rebel over trifles.”

Berlin saw the anti-Enlightenment movement in the 19th century as a reaction to the Enlightenment, and in the same way, we are now witnessing a reaction against the universalist, rationalistic liberalism of the post-Cold War period.

Taking a bird’s-eye view of the history of the past 150 years, a tendency appears that when you have the spread of utopianism based on the ideas of Enlightenment liberalism, there is a subsequent outburst of anti-Enlightenment thought or nationalism in reaction.

Russia, the United States and China are all seeing criticism of liberalism and a rise of nationalism, and the same can be said for many European countries where far-right forces are on the rise.

The anti-Enlightenment movement that began in the 19th century, the Romantic movement that defended each culture and tradition, and the rise of nationalism all culminated in World War I. Then, in the 1930s, the rise of fascism and Nazism as a critique of liberalism led to World War II. In our post-Cold War era, Russia is continuing a major war against Ukraine, but we are not yet in another world war.

What we can do now is reconcile these two modes of thinking — the liberal international order that is based on free trade and democracy, the very foundations of the post-World War II international order, and the anti-Enlightenment thought critical of liberalism that is flaring up in the world’s major countries.

In his 1939 book “The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939,” British historian E.H. Carr, who sought peace in the late 1930s, explored ways to optimally merge utopianism and realism.

After the “30 years’ crisis,” in which post-Cold War utopianism collapsed, the world remains plagued by crises, uncertainty and conflict. We must find a new balance.

Yuichi Hosoya

Yuichi Hosoya is a professor of international politics at Keio University and the author of numerous books on British, European and Japanese politics and foreign affairs, including “Security Politics in Japan: Legislation for a New Security Environment.”

The original article in Japanese appeared in the June 1 issue of The Yomiuri Shimbun.