March/April 2020 165munist countries has less to do with the
reassertion o primordial nationalist and
illiberal identities than with a perceived
need on the part o citizens in those
places for independence, recognition, and
dignity. The authors argue that, especially
after the long wake o the 2008 ¥nancial
crisis, Western defenders o liberal
democracy need to oer a more realistic
vision o world order, making room for
alternative models while maintaining faith
in the resilience o liberalism.Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and
Fall of Self-Determination
BY ADOM GETACHEW. Princeton
University Press, 2019, 288 pp.In the mid-twentieth century, empires
collapsed and postcolonial peoples
around the world struggled for self-rule.
In this important book, Getachew
presents a sweeping new account o the
global visions o the activists who led
this charge. Scholars have typically seen
the post-1945 decolonization movement
as a story o nation building as post-
colonial leaders in Africa and Asia
embraced Western norms o sovereignty
and self-determination. Looking closely
at the political ideas o¤ ¥gures such as
W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah,
Julius Nyerere, and Michael Manley,
Getachew identi¥es a more revolution-
ary project aimed at pushing the world
in a more egalitarian and anti-imperial
direction. She explores this new thinking
as it appeared in three domains—the
push for self-determination at the
United Nations, the building o pan-
African and pan-Asian regional federa-
tions, and the calls to adopt the New
International Economic Order (a trade
agenda launched by some º² memberRecent Books
Political and Legal
G. John Ikenberry
The Light That Failed: Why the West Is
Losing the Fight for Democracy
BY IVAN KRASTEV AND STEPHEN
HOLMES. Pegasus Books, 2020, 256 pp.I
n this original and deeply thought-
provoking study, Krastev and
Holmes argue that the retreat from
liberal democracy in eastern Europe and
elsewhere is rooted in liberalism’s post-
1989 global triumph. With the collapse o
communism, Western liberalism had no
rival. U.S. unipolarity set the stage,
and liberal democracy became an all-
encompassing model o modernity. What
followed was “copycat Westernization,” in
which countries all over the world found
themselves pressured to mimic the
institutions, values, and ways o life o the
United States and western Europe. In
eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union, this mimicry was all the more
painful because these same countries had
just been released from the ideological
and institutional impositions o the Soviet
era; now, they were again adopting the
ideas and identities o a superpower,
albeit under less duress. The result has
been a deep and festering resentment in
those societies, a collective “psychological
stress” that has culminated in a wide-
spread political backlash against liberal-
ism. In Krastev and Holmes’s account, the
right-wing politics coming to the fore in
Hungary, Poland, and other postcom-