In the first of an eight-part series, political theorist John Keane examines the effect of disruptions to the world order on democracy and its future.
Our world is passing through a moment of mounting political nervousness and confusion about the breakdown of the post-1945 rules-based international order. Some spectators speak of its terminally catastrophic breakdown. Others say we are returning to an era of ‘sovereign’ nation state rivalry or instead predict its replacement by a new world order variously described as ‘multi-polar’, ‘heteropolar’ or as a form of ‘new medievalism’.
There is general agreement that in fields such as cross-border investment and trade, migration, environmental protection and nuclear policy, states and regions need resilient and predictable rules of the game. On the other hand, there is a surplus of conflicting opinion about how to define the old order, why and to what extent it is nowadays crumbling, and whether a new and more desirable world order is on the horizon.
How to make sense of the global order has become a profoundly political matter. The struggles among IR scholars and pundits about how to categorise the world are perplexing. Especially bothersome is their silence about the impact of the crumbling global order on the spirit and substance of democracy.
That’s why the following notes aim to make better sense of chaotic trends around the globe by focussing on questions about democracy and its future. This is an unfamiliar interpretation, a perspective so far largely missing from the commentaries offered by public intellectuals, journalists, think tank reports and government documents.
The broad thesis is that our world is witnessing the breakdown of an empire that once played the key role in building and securing the complex of global rules-based institutions – where some, mostly rich, white and privileged, liberal democracies flourished. The weakening global grip of the United States is one of those epochal moments when a clutch of cross-border institutions, built and backed by an empire, lose their legitimacy. They become seen as biassed or hopelessly ineffective. In their place, bullying and fear of destructive lawlessness flourish.
The notes further suggest that the breakup of the American-led global order is impacting heavily on democracy in territorial states. A victim of the imperial boomerang effect, democracy is not only facing degradation and breakdown within the United States. Many (mostly Atlantic region) democracies depended heavily on the old global order in matters such as economic growth, cross border trade and investment, diplomacy, political stability and military security. The current trends are brash reminders that outlier democracies have relied upon their imperial masters for their survival and flourishing. When empires begin to crumble and fall, outlier democracies experience confusion and paralysis and are even confronted by life-and-death survival.
Democracies in Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, Greece, Australia and New Zealand are struggling to make sense of the decline of the American empire and the global rules it once enforced. Pushed hither and thither, they are being forced to adjust to a new reality of turbulence and confusion. The notes conclude with an assessment of what these democracies can do to decolonise themselves: to protect and nurture their own democratic institutions and ways of life against the shocks gnawing away at their coherence, morale, stability and future resilience.
What was the post-1945 American-led liberal democratic world order? It is often spoken about – misleadingly – as if it was a homogeneous period. But historians, economists and international relations scholars remind us that this post-Second World War geopolitical order, centred in the Atlantic region, came in two connected phases.
There was the so-named ‘golden era’ of welfare state-regulated capitalism founded at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference and later shaped by a clutch of new institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the United Nations and NATO. This was also the period of the unregulated spread of nuclear weapons and chronic military tensions with the Soviet Union.
Hallmarks of the golden era were free trade, controlled inflation, fixed rate currency exchanges, progressive tax rates, strong labour unions, reduced barriers to corporate investment, and the sanctification of private property in ‘social market’ form. There were celebrations of ‘liberal democracy’, an oxymoronic phrase that had first begun to flourish only during the 1930s, along with the proliferation of popular works on democracy by mainstream liberal thinkers such as Robert Dahl, Seymour Martin Lipset, Karl Popper and Joseph Schumpeter.
For three decades, emboldened by leaders’ commitments to ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty’ (John F Kennedy), talk of a ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ international order flourished. But democracy was only for the loyal friends of America; it was mainly a white-skinned affair. The flipside of peaceful cooperation with (say) subservient British governments were cocktails of dirty tricks, assassinations, torture, disappearances, economic sanctions and military interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Brazil, Chile, Granada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
The stagflation and exchange rate crises of the 1970s brought this global ‘liberal democratic order’ episode to an end. There followed a radical reshaping of the Bretton Woods arrangements into what came commonly to be called the age of ‘neoliberalism’. The United States still played the role of master dramaturg and protector-manager of the ‘free world’. Under the nuclear-tipped dome, in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, terms still used interchangeably, there were more than a hundred US military interventions and untold numbers of engineered coups d’états, CIA-led assassinations and covert operations. This period also saw dramatic policy shifts in favour of anti-democratic, market-based freedoms championed by neo-liberals.
Intellectuals, policy advisors and politicians openly insisted that inflation, fiscal problems, political instability and the shrinking authority of ‘overloaded’ government were caused by an ‘excess of democracy’ (Michel Crozier, Samuel P Huntington and Joji Watanuki). Currency speculation, hot money flows, and the opening of markets to foreign investment were normalised. Corporate tax rates were lowered, while the super wealthy evaded taxation altogether by moving their assets to safe havens.
Backed by US-dominated bodies such as the World Bank, IMF, and the World Trade Organisation (established in 1995), the global offshoring of production, local plant closures and job losses became commonplace. There were regional integration initiatives, some of them at odds with the spirit and substance of neo-liberalism, such as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the European Union, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). China returned to the global order. The Soviet empire collapsed. Efforts to privatise state industries, welfare programs and other public services multiplied. Rising public and household debt and widening income and wealth gaps predominated. The seeds of citizen ressentiment were planted.
This article was drawn from Notes on Empire, America and the Decolonisation of Democracy – notes prepared for the TODA Global Challenges to Democracy meeting, Oxford, June 18 -20, 2026
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. Renowned globally for his creative thinking about politics, history, media and democracy, he is the author of the best-selling Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995), The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Power and Humility (2018), The New Despotism (2020) and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has been published in more than a dozen languages. He was nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize (Italy) and the Holberg Prize (Norway) for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences. His latest book is China’s Galaxy Empire.