Covenant

The extension of the liberal order from the West hemisphere to the rest of the world after 1989 coincided with a “new world disorder” of genocide, ethnic cleansing, resurgent nationalism and the violent redrawing of borders (for example, in Yugoslavia), which liberal policies often exacerbated. ¹ The liberal philosopher Michael Ignatieff described the violence in the Balkans and elsewhere as a barbaric force threatening what he calls “liberal civilization”, but this forgets the increasingly illiberal turn of liberals. ² Their aggressive promotion of democracy in the name of supposedly universal – but in reality narrowly liberal, individualistic – human rights ended up producing illegitimate wars and new dividing lines in the former Yugoslavia and across the post-Soviet space. Far from defending a vision of peace based on reconciliation between former foes (as in the post-war era), late modern liberalism became debased and associated with triumphalism and victors’ justice, as in Serbia, Iraq and Libya. Ignatieff and his fellow advocates of “liberal civilization” fail to acknowledge the closing of the liberal mind, to adapt the title of Allan Bloom’s book, ³ and the mutation of liberalism into an imperialist creed.