The Exclusionary Foundations of Embedded Liberalism

About this event

Under embedded liberalism, free trade, multinational investment, and liberal immigration policies enabled factors of production to flow across national borders. Analyses since Ruggie (1982) have focused on trade in goods and capital, implicitly assuming that labor represented just another factor of production. We argue that much as capital controls were essential components of the embedded liberal compromise, so too were restrictions on the democratic rights of labor migrants. Generous welfare programs in labor receiving countries thrived alongside accommodative immigration policies, but this arrangement was only tenable if migrants were politically or socially excluded in their destination countries. Embedded liberalism abroad rested on exclusionary political foundations at home. In bringing together the IPE literature on the “Globalization trilemma” with the comparative politics of citizenship and membership exclusion, we provide a novel account of how embedded liberalism actually worked, with implications for current debates about the fate of the liberal order in a time of populist resurgence.

Sara Wallace Goodman is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her research examines democratic citizenship and the shaping of political identity through immigrant integration.

Thomas B. Pepinsky is a Professor in the Department of Government, Cornell University. He studies comparative politics and political economy, with a focus on emerging market economies in Southeast Asia.

You can read their full paper here.