The problems encountered in the projections of Western foreign policy internationally - in the forms of conflict-prevention, statebuilding, development assistance and in the spread of liberal rights norms and market economies - have been increasingly discursively analysed in terms of the limits of liberalism. It seems that liberal universalism has become increasingly discredited with the ''lessons learned'' from the last two decades of Western interventionism: that markets and democracy cannot simply be ''exported'' from the liberal West to the non-liberal Other. This paper argues that the spatial or externalised understanding of the limits of liberalism plays the ideological role of apologia. The crisis of liberal modernity is, in effect, played out in discourses of the international. This paper explores the reasons for this, in the end of Cold War rivalry sharply posing the gap between the promise of liberal universalism and the reality of hierarchy and institutionalised inequality, and draws out a genealogy of the decline of the West - through the critique of liberal universalism and the privileging of difference - focusing, in particular, on new institutionalist framings highly influential in the policy-making of international institutions and through drawing an analogy with Foucault''s powerful and prescient work on the birth of biopolitics.
