In recent years, it has become clear that Russia, the US, China, and other big players with non-liberal values intend to change the world order. The switch from states working together, seen through the lens of liberal democracies, is here. For years, authoritarian regimes have worked tirelessly to undermine multilateral institutions, and the work has paid off. The Global South is fed up with the way in which powerful nations have dictated the course of societies and the goals of the future all over the globe. Meanwhile, the US is withdrawing from and working actively against the institutions they had been part of establishing.
This is the world liberals now inherit. And it comes with a choice.
To defend, and as a last resort go to war for, the world as it was, as one might expect from those of a more conservative disposition. Or we can look at the realities in front of us and be part of forming the world order of tomorrow.
It is already gone
Liberals are typically enthusiastic about market forces. Businesses that cannot sustain themselves should close. Products that cannot compete do not deserve life support. That is the market's verdict.
So let us apply that logic consistently. The liberal world order has for decades been a product on the geopolitical market. Many countries bought into it. But a growing number are choosing alternatives: the Chinese model, Russian influence, regional powers offering partnerships without democratic conditions attached. If we follow liberal logic to its conclusion, the answer should be straightforward. The market has spoken. The product lost. So why aren't we cheering?
The uncomfortable truth is that the same liberals who celebrate creative destruction in business suddenly abandon the framework when it is their own project being disrupted. Out come the declarations, the summits, the carefully worded expressions of concern. Everything except the honest question: what won, and why?
This is not an argument against multilateralism. The institutions matter. But institutions that no longer command broad legitimacy are not serving their purpose. If the liberal order as we knew it is already gone, the choice is not between saving it and abandoning it. It is between shaping what comes next or letting others do it for us.
Perhaps the world order described above is not just under pressure. Perhaps it is already gone - kept on life support by the institutions and rhetoric of people who built their careers and identities around it. If so, clinging to it is not a liberal position. It is a conservative one. So, what should liberals do then?
What should liberals do? Concrete ideas in practice (doctrine and purpose)
Deliver, don't preach
The liberal case has been made in moral terms for too long. If liberal democracy wants to win back credibility, it has to prove itself empirically - through better healthcare outcomes, less corruption, and more economic mobility for ordinary people. The argument for open societies cannot just be philosophical. It has to be visible in people's lives.
The concern is real: liberal democracies are currently struggling to deliver at home. Rising inequality, housing crises, and falling institutional trust make the empirical argument harder to make. Why would the Global South follow a model that appears to be failing its own citizens?
Before liberals can win the argument abroad, they have to win it at home. That means treating domestic reform not as a separate political project, but as the foundation of any credible foreign policy. You cannot export a model you are not willing to fix. Getting your own house in order is not a distraction from liberal internationalism - it is a condition of it. The United States exported the liberal democratic order to the world while maintaining segregation at home, suppressing workers' rights, and passing anti LGBT laws. And the world has started to notice.
Reclaim sovereignty as a liberal value
Liberals must acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: the liberal world order often feels like sovereignty with conditions attached.
Trade deals came bundled with governance requirements. IMF loans arrived with structural adjustment programmes that dictated how countries could spend their own money - cutting public services, opening markets, prioritising debt repayment over development. (Globalization and Its Discontents (2002)) Military interventions were framed as humanitarian but rarely happened without strategic interest behind them. Iraq in 2003 is the most obvious example, but the interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s and Libya in 2011 follow the same pattern. And democracy promotion, however sincere in intent, was applied selectively - enthusiastically in countries where regime change suited Western interests, silently ignored where it did not. For much of the Global South, the liberal order was not experienced as a rules-based system that protected the weak from the strong. It was experienced as a system in which the strong wrote the rules. To rebuild trust with the Global South, liberals must make genuine respect for sovereignty a core commitment, not a principle suspended when inconvenient.
The tension is real. Absolute sovereignty means you cannot intervene in genocide or pressure authoritarian governments on human rights and that cuts against liberal internationalism's moral core. The credibility gap from decades of selective interference is enormous.
The solution is not to apply the rules more evenly. It is honesty about the trade-off. Liberals must accept that genuine multilateralism means letting go of the control over when and how the international community acts. Including accepting outcomes they disagree with. That is the cost of legitimacy. An intervention decided by a truly multilateral body, with non-Western voices carrying equal weight, will sometimes not happen when liberals want it to. That is a price worth paying, because the alternative is a human rights framework that the rest of the world experiences as a Western veto dressed in universal language has already failed.
Win the information war from below
Liberal democracies have invested heavily in international media and public diplomacy. The results have been mixed at best. According to the V-Dem Democracy Report 2025, freedom of expression is now declining in 44 countries - the highest ever recorded - and media censorship has become the single most common tool used by autocratic governments to undermine democracy. Half of all autocratic countries are actively using state disinformation to shape public opinion. The platforms liberals built are increasingly used as the infrastructure through which this happens.
Across much of the countries outside of the West, Western-funded outlets are viewed with suspicion not because the journalism is poor, but because the funding sources shape how content is received before it is even consumed. The information war is not being lost from lack of resources. It is being lost from lack of trust - and no budget line can fix that.
The response cannot be more of the same. Instead, liberals should invest in independent local journalism in local languages. What matters is not the output liberals produce - it is whether anyone exists to report freely in the first place. This means investing in the conditions for independent local journalism: funding that carries no editorial strings, platforms that protect rather than expose sources, and the legal frameworks that allow a journalist in Nairobi or Jakarta to post a video freely.
But we also need to remember that the goal is not a liberal message. It is a free information environment because that, historically, is where liberal ideas tend to win.
Hope for the future: A world built from ruins
The liberal world order did not emerge from a moment of stability. It was built from rubble. Out of the most destructive war in human history, by people who looked at the wreckage and decided to construct something that had never existed before. Multilateral institutions, universal human rights, open trade, collective security. None of it was inevitable. All of it was a choice made under pressure, in the aftermath of catastrophe.
We are not in 1945. But the structural condition is not entirely different: an old order collapsing, power shifting, the rules of the international system suddenly up for negotiation. The question is not whether the world will be reorganised. It will be. The question is who does the reorganising - and on what terms.
This is where liberals must decide what they actually are. If liberalism is just a set of institutions to be defended, then the project is already failing. The institutions are under siege from outside and being hollowed out from within. But if liberalism is a set of values - individual freedom, rule of law, human dignity, the right of people to shape their own futures - then the project is not over. It is just beginning again.
That requires letting go of the world we were promised and engaging seriously with the one that actually exists. It means smaller coalitions, honest partnerships, domestic credibility, and a willingness to compete in the information environment rather than retreat from it.
History does not guarantee good outcomes. But it does show that liberal ideas have tended to win in open contests. The task now is to make sure the contest stays open - and to show up for it.
Sources:
Author: Mikael Freitag Pedersen
“This article was produced by a participant from the European Liberal Youth LYMEC with the financial support of the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. The opinions expressed in this article are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe.”
Let Fall What Cannot Stand: A Liberal Approach to the New World Order