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Abstract
Given the widely shared belief that, following a long period of crisis, the American-led liberal world order is now in transition, the question arises: what comes next? Considering China’s ‘parallel order-shaping’ project with respect to the liberal order as a harbinger of a ‘multi-order world’, it is reasonable to expect a concert-like mode of ordering, which will draw on a new common language to reach consensus among proactive stakeholders at the global level. Those interested in maintaining the liberal character of this arrangement, such as the EU, should therefore steadily engage in the process leading to its establishment in order to gain and retain full membership while enhancing their discursive power.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the excellent, constructive comments.
Notes
1 In “Liberal Internationalism 3.0”, Ikenberry’s highly dynamic view of the liberal order underscored its resilience without downplaying the challenges to its persistence.
2 “Out of order? The Future of the International System” is the telling title of the January/February 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs. See Nye, “Will the Liberal Order Survive?”.
3 Nel, “Redistribution and Recognition”.
4 A Pew Research Center poll released on 5 May 2016 shows that 57% of Americans believe the US should deal with its own problems and let others deal with theirs as best they can, http://www.people-press.org/2016/05/05/public-uncertain-divided-over-americas-place-in-the-world/.
5 Scholarly opinion supports such an attitude. See Posen, Restraint; Mearsheimer and Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing”.
6 In A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order, Haass makes the case for a “new operating system” because liberal order – the “old” order in the title of his book – no longer appears to be up to the challenge.
7 On 17 February 2017, Xi Jinping, chairing a seminar on national security, stated for the first time that China should “guide” the shaping of a “new world order”. See Deng, “Can China Save the Global Order?”.
8 Beeson and Li (“China’s Place in Global Governance”) point out that China essentially qualifies as a status quo (rather than revisionist) power, but that in the realm of governance “it also contains novel ideas and possible principles that are generally not well understood or taken seriously in the West” (493).
9 Flockhart, “The Coming Multi-Order World”.
10 Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics”.
11 Flockhart, “The Coming Multi-Order World”.
12 Chen, “China and the Fragile World Order”. ‘An Order-taker China Turning into an Order-shaper’ is the title of the paragraph in which Chen articulates China’s ‘reform from outside’ strategy that can both complement and compete with the liberal order. See also Heilmann et al., “China’s Shadow Foreign Policy”.
13 Humphreys, Concerts as a Mode of Ordering.
14 Ibid., 10.
15 Zakaria, Post-American World.
16 China has embraced the concept of polarity and thus of great power responsibility, while it has contested and rejected, as a matter of principle, the practice of (military) intervention. Cooperation has been reformulated in win-win terms. Principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures constitute regimes (Krasner, International Regimes). If they change, regimes will change, perhaps leading to a transition to a new regime.
17 Ikenberry and Lim, China’s Emerging Institutional Statecraft.
18 Breslin, “China’s Global Goals and Roles”, 64.
19 Recently, the coherence and internal tightness of the liberal order appears to be rather overplayed by some, possibly in reaction to its weakening. Its composite and complex nature will instead prove relevant, later on, when considering the nature of Chinese order-shaping activities and their potential impact on the liberal order.
20 Colombo, La disunità del mondo.
21 Jentleson, “America’s Global Role after Bush”. This conclusion somehow diminishes the relevance of the contested ‘American decline’ argument.
22 Mearsheimer, “Back to the future”.
23 Kagan, The Return of History.
24 Power politics being the means that revisionist powers use to further their interests. For this reason, “great powers […] often fear rules that may constrain them more than they do anarchy. In an anarchic world, they rely on their power to provide security and prosperity.” Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, 38.
25 So much so that even international order seems to serve the competitive, zero-sum game we usually rather associate with power politics. See Patrick, “Trump and World Order”.
26 Bremmer and Roubini, “G-Zero World”.
27 Turner, “Russia and a Multipolar World Order”; Hurrell, “Brazil: What Kind of Rising State”.
28 Such fields of force should affect states, while stopping short of determining their conduct, at least in Posen’s understanding. He argues that it is very difficult to anticipate state choices based on the mere distribution of material power resources within the system, even if measuring power were a meaningful exercise, which he doubts. See Posen, “Emerging Multipolarity”, 347.
29 Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 132.
30 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 131.
31 Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 132-3. That poles “shape and bend movements and connections between states” is particularly relevant when considering the role played by diplomacy and alliances in multipolarism. See, for example, Posen, “Emerging Multipolarity”.
32 The term polyarchy is used here to mean only that a number of subjects perform ordering functions in a decentralised domain, see Ikenberry and Lim, China’s Emerging Institutional Statecraft.
33 Liao, “Out of the Bretton Woods”.
34 Flockhart holds that “the good news is that the multi-order world is not yet a reality and that there is still time to prepare for it”. “The Coming Multi-Order World”, 26.
35 Since identity is the component of order that she deems to be more significant in the future development of a multi-order world, the conclusion of the multi-culture perspective is not significantly different from the one she draws.
36 She mentions liberal order, but nothing suggests such correspondence being limited to it.
37 After all, the subtitle to his The Anarchical Society is A Study of Order in World Politics. See Dunne, “Inventing International Society”.
38 In her account, multipolarity is based on power, so that balance of power appears as the product of mere calculation on the part of states (not a primary institution of international society as in Bull’s account). Multi-party discourse focuses on identity (cooperative, Western) and a secondary institution (multilateralism), while the focus of multi-culture discourse is on identity.
39 Flockhart, “The Coming Multi-Order World”, 5.
40 The multilevel architecture of governance we are sketching out includes three layers: domestic orders, orders linking groups of states, and a systemic order embracing all of them.
41 Breslin, “China’s Global Goals”, 63-4.
42 Hurrell, “Hegemony, Liberalism and Global Order”, 2-3. See also Nel, “Redistribution and Recognition”. For this reason, Ikenberry argues that the crisis of the liberal order is a crisis of success, “Liberal Internationalism 3.0”, 78.
43 This is Flockhart’s definition of identity (“The Coming Multi-Order World”, 15). She mentions religion, culture, ethnicity and ideology as “strong identity signifiers”.
44 China’s present order-building has an important vehicle in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which goes well beyond a purely infrastructural project. This case offers the opportunity to stress that order-building entails more in terms of structuring relations through institutions and public goods provision than is usually intended when the concept of a sphere of influence is used. The consolidation of a sphere of influence may however be the motivating factor behind order-building. Moreover, while in a sphere of influence the relations are intrinsically hierarchic, in an order, member states may (or may not) be coequal, depending on the principle on which it is based. The same is true for openness, while a sphere of influence is set up to prevent external actors from interfering.
45 Liao, “Out of the Bretton Woods”.
46 The term ‘cluster’, introduced by Flockhart (“The Coming Multi-Order World”, 16), points to a group of states that have, or (are made to) believe they have, something in common. On this basis, they can develop an interest in becoming part of and maintaining an order. If such an order comes to life, it is a cluster-of-states order occupying the second layer of our multilevel architecture of governance, which comprises three layers.
47 This move may intuitively grant regionalism – which today appears to be “broader, inclusive, open and interactive” – a larger role (Acharya, The End of the American World Order, 111). The author of the “multiplex metaphor”, which is meant to stress interdependence in a decentred world (9), suggests that regionalism should be intended not as an “alternative to universalism, but a stepping stone to it” (110). After all, a multiplex cinema is so denominated because it houses various movie theatres in a single building. The nature of a multiplex world will greatly depend on the principle constituting the basis of regional arrangements, whether it be universalism or communitarianism in particular. It is also worth mentioning that Flockhart stresses that “identity, rather than region, is likely to be the major defining feature of new orders”, but with the exception of the Muslim identity, she associates supposedly identity-based groupings with geographical regions (Asian, Latin American, African), “The Coming Multi-Order World”, 24.
48 Breslin refers to Chinese decision-makers’ perception of this strategic opportunity (“China’s Global Goals”, 63).
49 A similar concern moves those calling for “new multilateralism”; see Hampson and Heinbecker, “The ‘New’ Multilateralism”. Their proposed solution of increasing flexibility and thus accommodating diversity through minilateralism is less ambitious than Flockhart’s suggestion.
50 See Buzan, From International to World Society?, for this distinction based on the level of institutionalisation.
51 Chen, “China and the Fragile World Order”.
52 As Hurrell stresses, “There is something intuitively logical about the idea that regional preponderance should represent an important element of any claim to major power status. […] And yet the cases of Brazil, Russia, India and China all bring out the complexity of the regional-global nexus.” The region can in fact be a “source of weakness” (“Hegemony, Liberalism and Global Order”, 8).
53 Breslin, “China’s Global Goals”, 70.
54 This expectation obviously sounds problematic, given the position on most relevant issues – from democracy itself to multilateralism – taken so far by the current Trump administration. The general argument advanced in this article may in fact explain why experts who believe in the crucial importance of liberal order for the peace and prosperity of the international community are so vocally critical of this administration. Among many equally concerned contributions, see Ikenberry, “The Plot against American Foreign Policy”.
55 Sovereignty was rather considered “constitutional”, while territoriality was not part of Bull’s original list, but it can be considered intrinsic to sovereignty, and has been mentioned by scholars working along the same line.
56 Buzan, From International to World Society, 193, mentioning a remark originally made by James Mayall.
57 The issue of ‘great power’ responsibility as independent from balance of power management is addressed later.
58 Even the EU is apparently sensitive to the changing global environment and might prove more willing to play a role in even harsher conditions, see Biscop, The EU Global Strategy.
59 The investigation will be limited to mainstream interpretations of processes that are underway, leaving aside self-perception and the domestic debates taking place within China.
60 Beeson and Li, “China’s Place in Global Governance”, 4. A different term for the same concept, conveying “a more ‘civilized’ ethical and political world order”, is, of course, “Beijing consensus”. For the role of the state, see Gabusi, “Reports of My Death Exaggerated”.
61 “The initiative of ‘One Belt, One Road’ […] is an offer of a ride on China’s economic express train. It is a public product for the good of the whole world”: This is the precise wording used to present the BRI around the world, Liu Xiaoming, Chinese Ambassador to Great Britain, Financial Times, 24 May 2015.
62 Breslin, "China’s Global Goals”, 70. This conception is in line with the “power as connectivity” idea originally put forward by Anne-Marie Slaughter and applied to polarity by John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 136.
63 Beeson and Li, “China’s Place in Global Governance”, 7.
64 Multilateralism has been presented as the international variant of the rule of law while explaining why its incidence has gone beyond purely functional needs; see Reus-Smith, “Constitutional Structure of International Society”.
65 Johnston, Social States.
66 Clark, Legitimacy in International Society.
67 Christensen, The China Challenge, 233-40.
68 Respectively, Badie, Un monde sans souveraineté, and Xi’s Vision: A Community of Common Destiny, a Shared Home for Humanity, 15 January 2017, http://english.cctv.com/2017/01/15/ARTIjfECMGRxn4TrlI0UqAcl170115.shtml.
69 Beeson and Li, “China’s Place in Global Governance”, 3. This will happen by developing global norms and then letting states or thicker cluster-of-states orders establish how to implement them.
70 Chen, “China and the Fragile World Order”, 776. This vision of a systemic order that is ancillary to state governance reflects the Chinese rejection of American hegemony through the top-down policies of the big global institutions such the IMF or the World Bank. Albeit for different reasons, the European Union Global Strategy (2016) also focuses on domestic governance, and in particular on state resilience, in order to strengthen world order.
71 Kynge, “Finance will create new alliances”.
72 Buzan, From International to World Society?, 190-4.
73 Ikenberry, “Constitutional Politics in International Relations”.
74 Based on the belief that “pluralism itself is valuable and that a concert is a feasible and relatively costless means of preserving pluralism” (Humphreys, “Concerts as a Mode of Ordering”, 12).
75 Humphreys (Ibidem), holds that “how the security domain is to be demarcated should be treated as specific to each putative concert”. This reflects the specific approach to the concert as an ideal type that the author put forward. Working out an ideal type entails recognising that concerts may be different and offering the opportunity to find out what is particular about each specific experience.
76 Clark, Legitimacy in International Society.
77 This clearly distinguishes this arrangement from a cooperative order in Buzan’s terms, as the latter includes more elaborate criteria for membership, From International to World Society?, 193.
78 Kynge, “China readies lending firepower”, 1.
79 Humphreys, “Concerts as a Mode of Ordering”.
80 Breslin, “China’s Global Goals”, 68. “China has begun to increasingly highlight its discursive power strategy in governance and has attributed ever-higher strategic significance to discursive power […] So, China has gradually formulated a strategy for discursive power that contains setting facts straight, innovating rules, and making breakthroughs in social practice” (Zhao, “China’s Discursive Power Strategy”).
81 If multilateralism can no longer foster a priori collective problem management, an issue will require a country or a coalition to assume the leadership to enter the systemic agenda. The announced EU-China partnership in leading the world’s efforts to tackle climate change after the United States pulled out of the Paris Accord may be a case in point.