politically achievable once states knew how to guarantee social pro-
tection to their citizens.^6
This being said, the consensual character of the postwar settlements
should not be exaggerated. Even within the West, the gap between
the left and the right remained important. In fact, when one looks
attentively at the actual contours of embedded liberalism, what appears
is less an encompassing consensus than further manifestations of
the global ideological battle identified by Kemal Dervis. The terms of
the debate were less extreme, but the dividing lines were basically the
same. At home, political parties and social movements also fought
over capitalism and socialism.
The real novelty of the era was less in a putative consensus than in
the scope of the debate. For the first time, politics became truly global.
International negotiations included independent states from every
continent and drew an unprecedented web of cleavages. All human
beings were also recognized as citizens, endowed with basic demo-
cratic and social rights. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights formally established “the equal and inalienable rights of all
members of the human family.”^7 In principle at least, it was becoming
increasingly difficult to exclude persons on the basis of nationality,
ethnicity, status, or gender. In the West, the emergence of encom-
passing social programs gave a tangible meaning to this evolution, as
it made universal social rights a core attribute of citizenship. This was
indeed the age of universality. For almost four decades, the left and
the right would debate the domestic and the international implications
of this new vision, and argue over the mixed economy, the welfare
state, the East–West conflict, and the North–South divide.
The mixed economy
The Great Depression of the 1930s shook the liberal order and radically
undermined thelaissez-fairedoctrine. The dramatic fall of industrial
production, the collapse of agricultural prices, and the lasting unem-
ployment of up to a third of the labor force made the idea of an
(^6) Elmar Rieger and Stephan Leibfried,Limits to Globalization: Welfare States and
the World Economy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003, p. 6.
(^7) United Nations,Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and
proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of December 10, 1948
(www.un.org/Overview/rights.html).
The age of universality (1945–1980) 109