States, Civilisations and the Reset of World Order

Richard Higgott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000440898
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book evaluates the current state of world (dis)order at a time of growing populism, nationalism and pandemic panic. It distils the implications of the 'civilisational state' for world order.

The retreat of US leadership is mirrored by the decline of both the material and normative liberal multilateral infrastructure it supported. Meanwhile, the rise of China as a challenger is accompanied in political, economic and cultural terms by other emerging powers no longer bound to the norms of 20th century world affairs, notably Turkey, India, China and Russia. By emphasising a cultural lens of analysis alongside robust political and economic analysis, the author offers a prescriptive agenda for the coming post-pandemic age that recognises the changing powers of civilisational, state and hybrid non-state actors. Without overestimating their probabilities, he outlines prospects and preconditions for effective inter-civilisational dialogue and proposes a series of minimal conditions for a multilateral 'reset'.

This book will appeal to public and private decision-makers, the media, the educated lay public and civil society actors interested in the rise of civilisational politics and its possible consequences for world affairs. It will be of particular interest to students and researchers in the fields of politics, international relations, international political economy, geopolitics, strategic studies, foreign policy and social psychology.

PART I
States, civilisations and world order

1
Making sense of liberal international order

Concepts and context

Conceptual deck-clearing: order, culture and values

The scholarly community freely uses, often in contradictory fashion, a range of concepts and terms that are not settled in their understanding. Many of these terms are what social scientists call ‘essentially contested concepts’. Moreover, it is often assumed that the policy community, both public and private, will understand these concepts when they often do not; and indeed, when there is no good reason why they should. This is a lacuna that needs to be addressed. What follows is a clarification of some essentially contested concepts—notably (i) ‘world order’ which, notwithstanding some semantic differences, is used interchangeably with ‘global order’ and ‘international order’; (ii) ‘civilisation’ and ‘civilisations’; (iii) ‘culture’, ‘cultural relations’ and ‘cultural dialogue’.

The idea of ‘order’ is not without complication. Our starting point must be that any order, such as an international one, as exemplified in the writing of Hedley Bull (1977) is socially constructed. Construction usually implies, as it did for Bull, the creation of rules and norms that reflect stability rather than conflict. In the hands of US scholars of liberal institutionalism, the idea of international order developed beyond Bull’s simple idea of order to reflect an emerging, albeit thin, pluralistic solidarism of states.

Through the work of scholars such as Robert Keohane an understanding of order gave much greater attention to the impact of economic interdependence and the increasingly complex nature of global governance. Throughout the latter quarter of the 20th century it came to include an enhanced role for actors other than simply states (regimes, international organisations and non-state actors). Often used as a synonym for a liberal international order is the idea of a ‘rules-based order’. The meld of liberalism and order glossed over history. Anyone who knows just a little about European colonialism, or indeed US involvement in Latin America and the Philippines, understands that by no means all international rules (i.e. rules beyond the state) are axiomatically ‘liberal’.

Nor can a liberal international order be thought of as synonymous with what is often also referred to (including in this book) as a ‘post Westphalian order’ that privileges, in theory if not always in practice, the territorial sovereignty of states, and the principle of non-interference, as reflected in the UN charter above all else. While both concepts of order accept, again in theory rather than practice, the sovereign equality of states the theory, and in some core instances the practice, of liberal order went beyond the Westphalian core. It progressively incorporated principles of democracy, collective security reflected in the post-Second World War US led alliance structure and the relatively (never absolute) free movement of goods, capital and people and cooperation in collective action problem solving organised via multilateral institutions. These were no small achievements. Simply by stating the core components to be found in the heyday of the liberal order in the final third of the 20th century we can see the degree to which it is coming unravelled in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Core elements of the currently troubled liberal world order—especially acceptable levels of economic openness and universal commitments to collective action problem solving, negotiated through multilateral institutional processes and practices—must and will remain central to any new order. But for that to happen a way must be found to accommodate new demands for participation with non-universal civilisational/cultural norms advanced by the other rising actors.

The concept of culture always presents a problem for scholars and practitioners of international relations alike. The impact of cultural diversity on international politics is not well understood. In particular, the growing influences of non-Western powers, ethno-nationalism and religiously inspired violence give a lie to our traditional assumptions that cultures are tightly integrated, neatly bounded, clearly differentiated and causally powerful as explanatory factors in how civilisations work. The conclusion we now have to draw in the wake of events such as Brexit, ‘Making America Great Again’—indeed culture wars in the US and Europe generally—and the reassertion of Confucian nationalism in China and Hindu nationalism in India is that contest and conflict are often as omnipresent as order.

The current debate about civilisational states is telling us that we need to recognise that shared ideas shape the interests and practices of states as much as material forces. It is often too little appreciated that this has been well understood and articulated in the development of constructivist academic scholarship of international relations of the last 25 years (see Wendt, 1999 and Reus-Smit, 2019), but it is something relatively new for us to think about in the applied public policy domain of a post-neoliberal era.

The operating tool of cultural analysis is the idea of ‘shared meaning’ in the norms, values and principles that make action in international relations understandable, noting that norms, values and principles can never be perfectly defined or universally agreed. Identifying universal values has always been a problematic enterprise. One of the earliest, and failed, attempts came from US President Woodrow Wilson in his programme for the League of Nations. Some value propositions—notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including a (limited) number of human, civil, social and economic rights—were later to be adopted, albeit in a non-legally binding way, by the UN in 1948. Then, between 1966 and 1976, they were incorporated into the International Bill of Rights built on the post-colonial, pan-African and pan-Asian spirit of idealism of the time. But this was always a strained relationship given that rights were very much a European conception while order—be it consensually generated or not—was much the greater African and Asian priority.

At the height of the Cold War, again reflected in Bull’s view of order, the themes of order and stability took precedence in the developing world over those of justice, liberty, rights and accountability (for a discussion see Higgott, 1983). The Bangkok Declaration of 1993 saw Asian states, led by Singapore and China, stress second and third generation rights of sovereign equality, fraternity and basic needs (see the discussion in Srinivasan, Mayall and Pulipaka, 2019).

In the search for global order of the kind addressed in this book, there is always a tension between the pursuit of material economic and politico-security goals on the one hand and moral and cultural-normative values on the other. For much of the post-Second World War era, liberal states implicitly—and often explicitly—imposed a liberal values-based conditionality on their relationships with the emerging (largely postcolonial) world. Alternative values, based on concepts such as Confucianism, Hinduism or other spiritual beliefs stressing societal obligations had invariably been assumed to be non-universalist for the purposes of creating a Western understanding of world order.

Values: If we are to bring about a reform of world order this asymmetric relationship between Western and non-Western value systems has to be addressed (Acharya, n.d). Specifically, we need to identify how Western rights-based order might satisfactorily deal with non-Western notions of moral obligation, and conversely, how Asian values, which privilege such obligations, might address issues of rights—notably political and human rights—of a liberal variety. This is a fundamental task; indeed, a major challenge for humanity in the foreseeable future. Are there fundamental and irresolvable differences of values or is the difference merely an age-old issue of power politics in international relations that could, with appropriate will and skill, be negotiated? This is a key question for the future.

To make sense of the conversation over the relationship between states and civilisations we need to be clear on the distinctions that exist. If values are defined as principles or standards of behaviour, then by extension, they represent judgements about what is important in life. This implies, among other things, the existence of right and wrong. It also implies the existence of choice between them. Choosing right over wrong and good over bad are moral and ethical acts. As such, they contrast with what we understand by modern, post-Westphalian, international relations as the practice of statecraft, where the essence of statecraft is making choices usually driven by realist thinking and expedience. Values, as ethical or moral principles, seem less central to modern day Western foreign policy than was, rhetorically at least, the case in the past.

Again, by contrast, collective self-perceptions, enduring habits, precepts, and customary ways of doing business, derived from the history and culture of a people, as Chapter 3 will illustrate, offer us a clearer way of understanding the policy actions of countries such as China and India with long civilisational traditions. National character and tradition remain important in their foreign policy choices. Their organic roots are to be found in the very fibre of society. China’s oft touted ‘century of national humiliation’ infuses the national project over the long term, even in the face of questions of immediate material gain or loss.

History, philosophy, culture and mythology—the ingredients of our civilisational problematique—are more significant in modern day international relations than much economistic materialist-driven explanation of post-Cold War globalisation assumes. At the risk of simplification, and as a heuristic device only, we can see Chinese and Indian international relations and diplomacy functioning within a framework drawn from their own unique philosophical and cultural traditions, while Western international relations and diplomacy can be said to operate within a framework provided by a mix of Greek philosophy, Roman classics, the New Testament and later Renaissance thinking.

Liberal order and beyond: the argument in brief

We have come to recognise that the wisest and most effective way to protect our national interests is through international co-operation—that is to say, through united effort for the attainment of common goals.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr, closing address at the Bretton Woods Conference, July 22, 1944

We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.

Donald Trump, inaugural presidential address January 20, 2017; cited in Wolf, 2019

Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy.

President-Elect Joe Biden, cited in The Financial Times, November 25, 2020¹

How times change. The post-Second World War order, often referred to as a liberal international order, underwritten by the US acting as what Lisa Martin (2004) calls a ‘self-binding hegemon’ is increasingly challenged. This order, so the popular argument tells us, is over. But to be clear, the liberal order was never as liberal nor indeed as global as many of its strongest boosters would have had us believe (see Ikenberry, 2011).

If it is not over, more measured scholarly analysis identifies its difficulties (see e.g. Adler Nissen and Zarakol, 2020, Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Hofmann, 2020 and Copelovitch et al., 2020). Objections to the order come from without and within. While the US remains the major global power, objections to the liberal order, already in existence prior to the election of Donald Trump were exacerbated from day one of his administration and grew in the increasingly present populist political communities of other core member states of the order; hollowing out the order from within as Adler Nissen and Zarakol (2020) note. At the same time conversely, we have entered an era driven by the growing salience and interests of other great and rising powers that were not paid-up members of the liberal order. This is leading to a situation in which combative global geopolitics and geo-economics are reasserting themselves.

Liberalism has, overtime, always been both a contested and evolving concept, especially in its international applications such as how liberal principles might be, or indeed should be, spread. As a political philosophy liberalism probably faces greater challenge than at any time in its history, I have distilled liberal political theory (inadequately for any bona fide political philosopher I am sure) down to those elements only directly relevant to the arguments presented in the book. In this regard, in a classical enlightenment approach and captured in the 1795 writings of Emmanuel Kant (1983, pp. 107-143 passim) liberalism’s core component is a belief in individual human freedom and self-determination which overtime has seen the development of democracy and the rule of law as the best way to guarantee these freedoms.

The challenges to modern day liberalism as a political philosophy cannot be comprehensively addressed here. For a good, if pessimistic discussion of liberalism’s change over time and future, see Deneen (2018) and somewhat more optimistically, Garton Ash (2021). Each of them identifies liberalism’s challenges as both theoretical and empirical. Challenges come from across the political spectrum from left to right. Challenges are found at all levels of society from critiques of liberal pedagogy in the school system through issues of equality and opportunity within societies through to the area of concern for this book, the growing international contest between liberal values and the drift away from liberal world order.

For much of the post-Cold War era international liberalism suffered from a narrowing rationalist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: States, civilisations, pandemics and order
• Part I States, civilisations and world order
• 1 Making sense of liberal international order: Concepts and context
• 2 International order, the US–China relationship and Europe
• 3 Civilisational states and regions: Actors beyond a Western liberal order
• 4 Challenges for world order: Development, ecology and pandemics
• Part II A post pandemic world order: Towards a reset?
• 5 Civilisational dialogue as a vehicle for reforming world order: Can the liberalism–nationalism standoff be negotiated?
• 6 Relearning multilateralism: The principled case for a global reset
• 7 From principle to practice in a multilateral reset
• 8 Ten propositions and a provocation on world order
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• INDEX