Effective Multilateralism

Through the Looking Glass of East Asia

Jochen Prantl

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349334889, 9780230298699
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312983
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Existing theories of cooperation assume a stable geo-political order, led by countries with a shared conception of the modalities of cooperation. These assumptions are no longer justified. Effective Multilateralism makes the case for a new approach to explaining international cooperation through the lens of East Asian.

Part I

Explaining Cooperation – Disciplinary Perspectives

1

Effective Multilateralism and Global Order

Andrew Hurrell

This chapter sets the question of effective multilateralism within the broader analysis of global order and the ways in which the patterns of global order and the understanding of global order have evolved in the period since the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, dominant western understandings about multilateralism were firmly rooted within the context of economic globalization and an apparently stable westerncentred global liberal order. In the early 2000s, multilateralism was frequently viewed through the prism of US hegemony. Now, the picture is one of flux, fluidity and great uncertainty. This chapter seeks to shed light on some of the principal features of the contemporary global order and some of the major sources of this uncertainty.

The tectonic plates are shifting. Both the international political system and the structures of global capitalism are in a state of flux and uncertainty. Power is shifting in global politics, from the old G7 to a new group of emerging powers. The financial crisis of 2008 sharply underlined the relative strengths of the newcomers who are recovering rapidly and the new weaknesses of the established ‘G7’. The international system is increasingly characterized by a diffusion of power, including to emerging and regional powers; by a diffusion of preferences, with many more voices demanding to be heard, both globally and within states, as a result of globalization and democratization; and by a diffusion of ideas and values, with a reopening of the big questions of social, economic and political organization that were supposedly brought to an end with the end of the Cold War and the liberal ascendancy. Reinforced by the economic, financial and political crises in many parts of the advanced countries, there is a strong argument that we are witnessing the most powerful set of challenges yet to the global order that the United States sought to construct within its own camp during the Cold War and to globalize in post-Cold War period. Many of these challenges also raise questions about the longer-term position of the Anglo-American and European global order that rose to dominance in the middle of the nineteenth century and around which so many conceptions and practices of power-political order, international legal construction and global economic governance have since been constructed.

The speed and complexity of these changes pose a tremendous challenge to both analysts and practitioners. Changes are occurring at multiple levels – power transitions between states; a highly unstable form of global capitalism in which the scope for effective political control or social re-embedding is unclear; the erosion of established institutions and taken-for-granted state and regional models (currently, of course, the EU); wrenching social and economic change in fast-growing countries; and the absence of any clear ideological framing able to dislodge a neo-liberalism that, as Colin Crouch has argued, refuses to die.¹

I

In the 1990s, global order was widely understood through the lens of liberal internationalism or liberal solidarism.² Globalization was rendering obsolete the old Westphalian world of Great Power rivalries, balance of power politics and an old-fashioned international law built around state sovereignty and strict rules of non-intervention. Bumpy as it might be, the road seemed to be leading away from Westphalia – with an expanded role for formal and informal multilateral institutions; a huge increase in the scope, density and intrusiveness of rules and norms made at the international level but affecting how domestic societies are organized; the ever-greater involvement of new actors in global governance; the moves towards the coercive enforcement of global rules; and fundamental changes in the political, legal and moral understandings of state sovereignty and of the relationship between the state, the citizen and the international community.

In addition to an expansion of the inter-state modes of governance, increased attention was being paid to the world of complex governance beyond the state. Such governance was characterized by the complexity of global rule-making; the role of private market actors and civil society groups in articulating values, which are then assimilated in inter-state institutions; and the increased range of informal, yet norm-governed, governance mechanisms often built around complex networks, both transnational and trans-governmental, and the inter-penetration of international and municipal law and of national administrative systems. From this perspective, the state was losing its place as the privileged sovereign institution and instead, is becoming one of many actors and one participant in a broader and more complex social and legal process.

These developments posed great analytical and practical challenges for those seeking to understand international law and governance. A vast amount of regulation, administration and normatively framed rule-making was emerging that did not at all easily fit within the standard model of law between states. Such rule-making and regulatory practice is hard to square with traditional doctrinal ideas of sources, of state voluntarism, of even delegated consent. The optimists did not seem to worry overmuch: they saw great potential in the disaggregated state, in fluid and flexible networks of experts and in the claims that dynamic experimental rule-making can be both efficient and deliberatively inclusive.³ Sceptics worried about precisely these same features – the dangers posed by the often hidden rule by experts and embedded orthodoxy, the marginalization of meaningful politics and the perils of de-formalization and of the deepening fragmentation of the legal ‘system’.⁴

International and transnational law and regulation were becoming ever-more central – both functionally as well as a broadly appealedto source of normative judgement. But, exactly what was happening proved extremely difficult to pin down. For example, it seemed clear that many innovations in governance and many developments in international law were shifting and eroding our understandings of public and private and of the boundaries between them. If so, it followed for many that finding adequate regulative principles must involve broadening our understandings about what constitutes public power at the international or global level; that we should no longer see states as the only subjects of political legitimacy; and that we should instead concern ourselves with all those forms of power that constrain the autonomy or welfare of those subject to them. Others sought to use notions of publicness and principles derived from public law as a basis for understanding legal normativity within global administrative spaces that have become such an important element of global governance and for preserving the distinctively legal character of law in the face of rampant instrumentalism.⁵ Much of the debate on the character of the legal order was framed in terms of a set of choices: reassert the old doctrinal practices and boundaries; move forward to some variety of global constitutionalism; or try to navigate the messy byways of the new legal pluralism.⁶

How to explain what was going on?

Academics, especially in Europe and the United States, told three kinds of liberal stories. Some stressed institutions and the cooperative logic of institutions. Institutions are needed to deal with the evermore complex dilemmas of collective action that emerge in a globalized world. The complexity of the governance challenges meant that international law and international regimes would necessarily increase in number, scope and variety. It also meant that as large states, including large developing states, expanded their range of interests and integrated more fully into the global economy and world society – as they ‘joined the world’ in the idiom of the 1990s – they would be naturally drawn by the functional benefits provided by institutions and pressed towards more cooperative and ‘responsible’ patterns of behaviour. The process would not necessarily be easy nor automatic; but in this view, the broad direction of travel is clear.

Others stressed the Kantian idea of the gradual but progressive diffusion of liberal values, partly as a result of liberal economics and increased economic interdependence, partly as a liberal legal order comes to sustain the autonomy of a global civil society and partly as a result of the successful example set by the multifaceted liberal capitalist system of states. A third group told a more US-centred story. The United States was indeed the centre of a unipolar world. But, true both to its own values and to its rational self-interest, Washington had a continued incentive to bind itself within the institutions that it had created in the Cold War era in order to reassure smaller states and to prevent balancing against US power. A rational hegemony in an age of globalization would understand the importance and utility of soft power. In return for this self-binding and the procedural legitimacy it would create, and in return for US-supplied global public goods and the output legitimacy that they would create, other states would acquiesce and accept the role of the United States as the owner and operator of the system.⁷

The challenge of the Second World had been seen off. Through a mix of these three processes, those states of the old Third World that had previously challenged the western order would now become increasingly enmeshed, socialized and integrated. The nature and dynamics of power were changing. Soft power would outstrip hard coercive power in importance and concentrations of liberal power would attract, rather than repel or threaten. Just as the example of a liberal and successful EU had created powerful incentives on the part of weaker and neighbouring states towards emulation and a desire for membership, so, on a larger scale and over a longer period, a similar pattern would be observed in the case of the liberal, developed world as a whole. A new raison de système would emerge that would alter and ultimately displace old-fashioned notions of raison d’état.

The 1990s, then, were marked by a clear sense of the liberal ascendancy; a clear assumption that the United States had the right and power to decide what the ‘liberal global order’ was all about; and a clear belief that the western order worked and that it had the answers. Yes, of course there would be isolated rogues and radical rejectionists. But, they were on the ‘wrong side of history’, as President Clinton confidently proclaimed.

Two other points should be noted here.

First, this was a period in which an enormous normative ambition ran together with relatively weak institutionalization. Through the 1990s, the normative ambition of the international legal order continued to expand dramatically. But, these expansive and expanding goals were to be achieved on the back of very thin institutional structures – lots of networks, lots of market mechanisms, lots of private or hybrid governance; but rather little in the way of serious multilateralism or institutional renewal or reform. A comparison with the world order debates of the late 1940s is instructive. Looking back, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that much of the talk of global governance was a rhetorical façade. The real heavy lifting was to be done by the apparently effective centralization of power around the United States and a liberal Greater West.

Second, this was a period of striking and far-reaching legal and normative revisionism. It is often simply assumed that the dominant state or group of states in terms of power can be associated with the status quo. It is the emerging states or rising powers that seek to challenge the ‘basic norms of the system’ or to revise its ‘foundational principles’.⁸ However, any status quo has at least two dimensions – the first focused more or less directly on the distribution of material power; the second on the character of the international order and its dominant norms. From the perspective of the dominant norms of the system, the United States has rarely been a status quo power and as its power has grown, so too has the revisionist character of its foreign policy. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been in many ways a strongly revisionist power, sometimes, a revolutionary power: in the 1990s, in terms of pressing for new norms on intervention, for the opening of markets and for the embedding of particular sets of liberal values within international institutions; and in the early years of this century, in terms of its attempt to recast norms on regime change, on the use of force and on the conditionality of sovereignty more generally.⁹ Hence, for example, the states of the Global South have not faced the United States within a stable notion of a ‘Westphalian order’. Quite the contrary. Just as countries such as China had come to accept and to stress many of the core principles of the old pluralist system (non-intervention, hard sovereignty, hierarchy based on power), the dominant western states were insisting that many of the most important norms of the system ought to change, above all in ways that threatened greater interventionism and sought to mould the ways in which societies were to be ordered domestically. Nor is this simply a story of a traditional sovereignty-obsessed South seeking to remain in its comfort zone. In the case of climate change, it has been the South that has sought to protect the globalist commitments of Kyoto against the revisionism of the United States and some of its allies. Understanding the contested character of notions of ‘status quo’ and ‘revisionism’ and the political construction of ideas about ‘responsible behaviour’ is fundamental to understanding the ways in which changes in the distribution of power may be affecting the international legal order.

II

However, even before we get to the Bush Administration and to September 11, and certainly well before the financial crisis, it was clear that these sorts of liberal narratives represented only one part of the picture. In this phase, most of the academic analysis of global governance, international law and international order focused on the hegemonic position of the United States and a good deal took the form of critique – drawing out the many flaws of the liberal image of the 1990s and giving far greater weight to inequality, hierarchy and coercion.

Although analytically beguiling, liberal writing on global governance had tended to skirt far too easily over the problem of managing power, especially unequal power, and the difficulties of mediating between conflicting values. Governance focused on the identification of collective action problems and on the question of how global public goods are to be provided. The alternative view was sidelined, namely seeing governance as concerned with the ordering and preservation of power and with answers to the question of who exercises power? on whose behalf? and to whose detriment? Equally, liberal interest-driven accounts of the problems of global governance all too often disguised or evaded the deep conflict over values, underlying purposes and ways of seeing the world. Normatively, debates on governance were often dominated by issues of effic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: International Cooperation under Order Transition
• Part I: Explaining Cooperation – Disciplinary Perspectives
• Part II: Case Studies
• Bibliography
• Index