The world order is changing. It is battered by a receding globalisation and diminished multilateralism, threatened by climate disaster and endangered by greater strategic competition, between a Trump-led United States fearful of losing its hegemony and a China-led Global South determined to hasten the process.
Such factors are readily selected from a growing list of forces driving change. How they are prioritised matters for understanding what is happening. So do the concepts and vocabulary used to characterise them. They too are part of the contested field of international power and relations that together make up world order.
The international relations scholar Stephen Walt says world order is “a set of rules or institutions that establish who the principal actors are and that help manage their interactions”. It is based on relative power and social purpose. He identifies a changing balance of power, climate change, migration, science and technology and eroding norms, allowing previously taboo actions such as genocide back on the international agenda, as major driving forces.
To tackle and manage that he proposes that a new global “meta-regime” of rules should be negotiated to replace the inoperative United Nations regime based mainly on liberal western hegemony after the end of the cold war. It would distinguish “prohibited actions” from “co-operative negotiations and mutual adjustments” and “independent actions”.
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This is a helpful, if admittedly abstract, way to think about what needs to be done to restore some sense of universalism to a rapidly fragmenting world. That it is agnostic about the actual content of the rules in each category shows just how much is now contested. The more usual vocabularies of continuing US-led liberal hegemony through a rules-based order, or of a multipolarity recognising and endorsing greater equality in the world balance of power, both have major analytic, normative and empirical shortcomings.
Liberal hegemony is threatened in its heartland by Donald Trump’s much more determined illiberal or post-liberal presidency, which attracts right-wing authoritarians everywhere to its banner. The liberal versions of rules-based order are increasingly hollow because of their selectivity and hypocrisy on who actually makes and adheres to the rules – a criticism that applies to the European Union member states as well as the US.
Multipolarity is a better way to talk about a world in which power is more equally distributed and economic interactions have shifted pronouncedly from Europe to Asia and the Global South. Such realities are explicitly welcomed by Chinese and Russian leaders in their endorsements of a multipolar world, to which they add their own versions of civilisational diversity to distinguish themselves from western ones. Multipolarity would decisively supersede liberal hegemony or its rules-based variant. That is why it enjoys such a wider appeal.
A serious shortcoming is that multipolarity is based mainly on 19th and early 20th century European precedents concerning balances of state military and strategic power, centred on world empires at the time. That world lacked multilateral institutions, one of the progressive features of the UN-based one, despite its hegemonies.
Nonetheless, polarity usefully describes a world in which power is distributed between three or more players, even if the balance of military power remains concentrated between the US and China. Liberal critics of the concept say it is unrealistic for that reason and because the world remains far from equal in economic, civic and human resources.
A valuable addition is made to these debates by the international relations scholar Amitav Acharya and his colleagues. A critic of liberal hegemony through an Asian lens, he proposes that a better way to characterise today’s world is “multiplex” rather than multipolar. A multiplex world allows due place in producing order and disorder for today’s proliferation of non-state actors such as institutions, corporations, extremists and social movements.
Counterposed to liberal hegemony and multipolarity, a multiplex world recognises state interactions alongside hierarchy, interdependence rather than mercantilism, multidimensional but specific issues rather than all-embracing ones and allows for a variable geometry of governance regimes. It seems a more appropriate concept with which to understand a world that remains highly interconnected despite its evident fragmentations. These scholars analyse a data-set of world treaties to justify the concept empirically. They show an emerging world that remains unequal but is distributed across six or more clusters of states and regions.
Seen from within the European Union, this looks like a better way to understand and act upon this world than multipolarity, which implies a great power and exclusionary system rather than one with multilateralism built into it.
The EU faces daunting challenges to protect its beneficial social models in a more competitive and insecure regional and world environment. Simply increasing military expenditure, as proposed by Nato leaders, does not solve that. Rather should it search out an innovative combination of multilateralism and interdependence, as multiplexity implies.