Bearing in mind the events if the last 18 years (from wars, globalisation, the "war on terror" and its consequences, "economic crisis and stagnation, Arab uprisings, migration and cruel borders, to the rise of the far-right nationalism ... one might find the following conclusion, written in 2000, still pertinent:

"The liberal individualist analytical corset does not fit the world as it is. It fails to strap American power into its prognosis of a supra-state order. It fails to identify mechanisms that can pull the social dominance – both economic and political – of the Pacific Union states over other societies under cosmopolitan governance. It fails to spot how the spread of liberal democratic polities is combined with the undermining of the conditions for their organic consolidation. And  finally it does not recognise that intervention by powerful states in the name of liberal individual rights is inevitably and inescapably arbitrary given the haphazard political bases of state unity in the world today and the contradictory requirements of the most powerful states. In short, a cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights will not work: it is more likely to plunge us all into increasingly divisive turmoil."
—Peter Gowan, The New Liberal Cosmopolitanism, 2000