This picture shows a session of the U.N. General Assembly from June 13. Institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and others represent the liberal world order -- a global system that is not as inevitable as first believed.
The liberal world order is neither inherently universal, nor is it the inevitable path of societies across the globe. Like the ideals of democracy it embodies, the liberal world order — for us, a Western-oriented financial and trade system that emerged following World War II and which prescribes democracy as the sole path for all societies — is a political construct that has evolved and developed in a certain place and at a certain time. Such historicization is not to argue against the liberal world order's merits nor deny its problems and challenges. As Winston Churchill intoned in 1947, "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
