This week's blog question immediately called two recent articles to mind, each of which represents a prominent viewpoint on this topic.
The first article ("Liberal World" by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018) argues the current challenges to the liberal world order are not without historical comparison. Moreover, the order is resilient enough to survive the shifts the world is experiencing today, because the most powerful countries have adopted liberal methods of interaction that will reaffirm the liberal world order. In other words, the current shift should be read as norm-governed change.
I think the best answer is yielded by mixing these points together. Regarding Walt's argument, great power politics can remain a primary concern ordering the thoughts of US and Chinese policymakers, without being entirely unaffected by the norms of a liberal world order. I would argue there are examples where liberal institutions seem to have affected great power politics. Take the example of the WTO. While many commentators point to Chinese intellectual property theft and state-owned enterprises as unresolved examples of trade disputes, it is important to note that the WTO's dispute settlement body has successfully handled trade cases pitting the US and China against each other on everything from frozen chicken to steel. Moreover, both the US and China have complied with these rulings, and since its accession to the WTO in 2003 China has increasingly adopted the multilateral body as a tool of its economic policy. This example is important because it also contains one of the chief challenges to the embedded liberal order: the consolidation of China's state-owned enterprises. Yet even in this case, the institution has made sure that other countries unfairly affected by the favoritism ingrained in these policies can seek recourse (it should be noted the same goes for cases where the US has tried to strong arm the global economy). Other areas that could be of note are the UN security council's role in shaping conflict between the US and Russia over chemical weapons in Syria, and the cooperation of the security council on Obama's JCPOA. I would also point out that, as my argument predicts, a chief challenge to the postwar economic world order, Trump's use of the "national security exception" in the GATT to justify his tariffs, has been met by fierce opposition on the part of other countries... through the WTO's dispute settlement body. See, for instance, DS564, a complaint regarding US measures on steel and aluminum imports headed by Turkey and requested to be joined by the EU, Russia, Canada, China, Mexico, and Thailand. Thus, the norms shared by the world's most powerful states seem to persist on some level despite the changes in the world order brought on by Trump's policies, and liberal institutions continue to structure some aspects of great power relations. Similarly, the institutions and practices of "embedded liberalism" can live on without being sufficient to guarantee a norm-governed change. Deudney and Ikenberry's argument centers on the idea that the liberal world order can survive some of its members being, well, illiberal. Yet this resilience is not because these rival forces can not erode the liberal world order, but rather because the institutions which provide the foundation for liberalism are not, in themselves, liberal. Thus, even illiberal politicians may make use of these institutions and keep them alive, leaving them to be used to maintain the liberal order in the future. Does this suggest norm-governed change? I don't think so. Consider the ascendancy of illiberalism in major states such as China, Russia, Turkey, and, speculatively, Brazil. What if these states displace the core values of the liberal world order, such as democracy and human rights, but continue to use the UN and the WTO. The end result might not be drastically different from that yielded by norm-governed change, but it would seem more like a case of "partial-norm-governed change," wherein states simultaneously treated some aspects of the world order as though they shared the norms that justified them, while other aspects were discarded as though the order was changing. I believe this term better approximates the way change actually occurs. World orders are rarely completely discarded, and any non-totalizing progression between orders will inevitably involve keeping some norms and discarding others. How does one tell the difference between when an order is changing and when it is ending? I'm not sure this question can be entirely answered.
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AuthorAmerican University Class of 2021. Interested in state-building and economic governance. Archives
December 2018
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