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It is often said that OTL is a Euro/West-wank, and a Britwank more specifically; it could also be said of OTL that ours is a Liberalism-wank. Was the former a necessary precondition for the latter? And if not, how could an ATL with some other power being dominant on the world stage in the 19th and 20th centuries (eg Russia, China, Mexico, what have you) have been as or more triumphant for liberalism as/than OTL? Mind you, using a definition of liberalism that present day OTL would recognize.
Now obviously that last point is potentially tricky, since “liberalism” includes a lot of stuff from economically right libertarianism to support for a policies indistinguishable from the most radical social democrat to basic income, and even the broadest definition of liberalism can be hard to pin down; and while there are certain values that generally come to mind - civil rights democracy; freedom of speech and the press; freedom of religion and separation of church and state; at least some conception of equality of race and gender; capitalism (particularly with free labor, free markets, and/or a welfare state); and international cooperation and the free movement of goods and people - these can get messy and vague when getting into the details. (And that’s not even getting into the whole can of worms of defining Neoliberalism- though I think it sufficient, for the purposes of this thread, to establish it as a subsection of liberalism, and not its entirety.)

And yet, despite this difficulty, one thing that is considered indisputable is that liberalism is the dominant ideology (or meta-ideology, if you’d rather) of not only the worlds most powerful nations, but of the global order in general. And even those who would dispute that much will agree that liberalism, however we want to define it, has played a pivotal role in creating the world we live in today.
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