미국 예외주의로서 자유주의 국제질서에 관한 비판적 검토

초록

This paper offers a critical examination of American exceptionalism, which has functioned as a dominant framework for evaluating Trump’s America. American exceptionalism is the product of an active process of forgetting — one that effaces the enduring legacies of racism and imperialism in U.S. history. It can be divided into two major variants. The first is an “internal” exceptionalism, formed during the Cold War, which holds that the United States has been liberal since its inception. The second is an “external” exceptionalism, shaped in the post–Cold War era, which claims that U.S. foreign policy is itself exceptionally liberal; G. John Ikenberry’s theory of the liberal international order is the paradigmatic example. Ikenberry’s theory of the liberal international order, first articulated in 1999 under the label of “structural liberalism,” argues that post–World War II American hegemony was grounded in a transnational, civic liberalism that overcame racial nationalism, as well as in the liberal characteristics of American politics, which accommodated diverse domestic and international interests. Externally, this liberal hegemony purportedly created an open international economy that generated absolute gains large enough to render interstate competition over relative gains unnecessary, and strengthened its legitimacy by institutionalizing the interests of allies while exercising restraint. This framework achieved significant ideological success by offering a renewed justification for American hegemony. However, theoretically and empirically, it fails to account for key realities that recent scholarship collectively confronts: the illiberal traditions within the United States, the Cold War foundations of its hegemonic power, the pathologies of neoliberal globalization, and, above all, the rise of Donald Trump, whose politics categorically reject both the domestic and international forms of American exceptionalism.

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