Edward Hallett Carr spent 20 years of his professional life in the British Foreign Office before applying for, and rather surprisingly being appointed, in 1936 to a chair in International Politics in Aberystwyth in Wales bearing the name of a US president (Woodrow Wilson) to whose ideas he was opposed and whose institutional memorial (the League of Nations) he thought an edifice built on straw. However, in that small Welsh town, Carr was given the time and space to write no less than seven books, far and away the most famous and influential being The Twenty Years’ Crisis published in 1939. A controversial volume that stoked up quite a storm when it first appeared, Carr’s book ruthlessly dissects the reasons for the breakdown of the international order between the wars while delivering several hammer blows to those liberals—like Wilson— who thought they could build a peace system constructed on treaties, international law, and invocations against war. Assailed by critics for worshiping at the altar of power but admired by many more—including those who went on to construct the field of international relations (IR) in the United States after World War II—it remains one of those “must-read” volumes that over the years has spawned a small but robust academic industry that shows no sign of closing down anytime soon.

Philip Cunliffe, the author of this lively and provocative volume, clearly stands in the camp of Carr’s admirers. A no-holds barred writer who has over the past two to three years made a strong case in print for “reimagining” Lenin and the Russian Revolution, and crafted an even stronger case against liberal cosmopolitanism, in his new book he deploys Carr the critical theorist and author of The Twenty Years’ Crisis to rethink our current condition.

Cunliffe sets out his stall in four well-crafted, but punchy chapters. He opens his account with a lengthy introduction that starts by asserting that not only is the real world in “serious trouble” (p. 3) but also that IR—here taken to mean the academic discipline—is in equal disarray (p. 5). This, of course, is where Carr comes into the picture according to Cunliffe, because what Carr did back in 1939 was provide a brilliant analysis not only of why his own world was in such a mess, but of also why the IR of his day failed to come to a serious understanding of why this should be so. Coming out of a bloody war that had nearly destroyed the international system, those who made the peace and then went on to write about it thereafter—powerful figures like Arnold Toynbee and Alfred Zimmern— were in Carr’s views gripped by a liberal desire to reform the world and remake it in their own liberal image. This was all well and good in the 1920s. However, as one fairly quiescent period gave way to that “low-down decade” of the 1930s, the whole edifice came tumbling down and with it a form of wishful thinking quite unable to come to terms with the rise of revisionist states like Germany, or indeed with the fact that the liberal economic order on which the postwar peace had hitherto depended was in complete meltdown.

Cunliffe does not repeat Carr so much as draw inspiration from him to explain what he sees as our new 20 years’ crisis, the period between 1999 and 2019 whose malignant symptoms are clearly still affecting the body politic today. Just as Carr analyzed the crisis in his own time, Cunliffe sets out to do the same in ours. Like Carr, he looks for the deeper sources of the crisis less in the behavior of illiberal states opposed to liberalism and more within liberalism itself. Born out of hope after the end of the Cold War, this liberal order finally crashed and burned on the rocks of a most ruthless form of globalization that generated profound inequalities, a loss of identity, and social dislocation. This in turn spawned a backlash of its own in the shape of contemporary populism, which because of its smashing successes, was far from being understood for what it was—namely, a revolt against a dysfunctional liberal order—and instead was held in near contempt by liberals in the academy.

Cunliffe, of course, accepts that there are differences between the interwar period and the years after the end of the Cold War. But as he suggests, quite convincingly, in the chapter aptly titled “Carr’s Crisis and Ours,” there are also deep similarities—perhaps the most important being that the two orders that the winning powers tried to construct, first in 1919 and then again in 1989, were both built on illusions spawned by the same kind of liberal thinking. This then brings us to modern IR and what Cunliffe clearly sees as its deep flaws. Here again he takes few prisoners in a tour de force that puts most schools of thought to the sword. Once again, he goes for the jugular and insists that, for all the intellectual variety that seems to characterize contemporary IR, when the crisis hit the world in 2008, the vast majority of the IR community ran to what Cunliffe calls the “shelter of the temple” marked liberalism (p. 61).

Finally, in his last chapter, he takes liberals and liberal theory to task yet again, though this time for having such a starry-eyed view of what he sees as a deeply flawed European project. Here he is perhaps at his most scathing. This “Eutopian” system as he characterizes it has not only escaped “popular control” (p. 113); after the financial crisis its unaccountable leaders in Brussels then went on to lay “waste to the Greek economy,” cause “stagnation” in Italy and “consign so many refugees and migrants to the watery mass grave of the Mediterranean” (p. 115). Little wonder a populist revolt followed.

Of course, there is another, much more positive story to be told about liberalism, which even the most vocal of its critics would have to accept has chalked up some successes over the last 75 years. We should also be wary of blaming the European Union for all of Europe’s current troubles. All the criticisms Cunliffe directs against the EU are on target, but warts and all, it has still done a very great deal to keep the nations of Europe together—and the alternatives look a whole lot worse. Nor can we, including Cunliffe, be so sure whether the crisis of liberalism today is terminal or whether, as many modern liberal thinkers would insist, it is but a transitional moment that will in time pass and experience the renewal of a reformed liberal project. We can only wait and see. Meanwhile, as Cunliffe has demonstrated in this challenging new volume, we could do a whole lot worse than return to Carr and his The Twenty Years’ Crisis to help us think creatively and critically about how we got to where we are today and how we might move forward in the future.