The Transition of Global Order

Legitimacy and Contestation

M. Terhalle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137386892
• eBook ISBN: 9781137386908
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study looks at the underlying foundations of global order, putting aside mainstream institutionalist approaches in showing how China and the US are engaged in an intense process of contestation and renegotiation of an institutionalized order that has long been taken for granted.

Part I

Introduction and Framework

1

Global Orders: Contestation and Transition

Why do global orders lack constitutive legitimacy? The answer is that systemic contestation between leading great powers prevents the large-scale institutional redesign required to remove deadlocks in the existing global governance structures. The main problem in this process of order transition is the lack of a new political bargain on the material power structures, normative beliefs and management of the global order among the key players.

Since the end of the Cold War, the theretofore dominant structural view of the anarchic fear of war driving state behavior has been superseded by a global governance focus on how to identify collective action problems and how to provide global public goods (Barnett and Sikkink 2008:63). Consequently, after the demise of the Soviet Union, questions about the nature of the underlying international order were put aside. The governance structures that had been evolving from the 1970s onwards have since taken on a strongly institutionalized and norm-based character, if fragmented; since the end of the Cold War, they have been complemented by attempts to legally codify international law, global legal regimes and international organizations into a coherent body of law (Weeramantry 2004).¹ Normatively, these efforts have had a cosmopolitan connotation (Keohane 2002; Mayntz 2010; Zürn 2010). In this respect, processes of liberal institutional enmeshment and norm-based socialization have widely been predicted to help adopt the developing world into the liberal Western order. Equally, processes of enmeshment have been assumed to involve the United States more deeply into today’s post-Westphalian setting. In essence, “deep globalization, the rise of transnational actors and global civil society, and increasingly cosmopolitan norms and identities” made earlier great-power-based accounts “increasingly anachronistic” and, in turn, promulgated the dawn of “the age of global governance” (Lake 2013:569, 570).

However, two developments have severely undercut the strength of this narrative. Firstly, while the international and transnational governance-related structures and processes underlying the notions of institutionalization (Ruggie 1998; Dingwerth et al. 2009:13), norm diffusion/promotion/conversion (Zürn et al. 2012:4–8; Simmons et al. 2006) and constitutionalization (Klabbers et al. 2009; Wiener et al. 2012) have persisted due to their built-in path-dependence (Young 2012:10–11), their “overambitions” (Buzan 2011:6) to socialize rising powers into the existing order have, largely, failed. The reasons for this failure are manifold. In essence, governance accounts and related theories have neglected the impact of changes in the balance of power, of pluralistic domestic politics as well as of divergent worldviews. Thus, neither has membership in international organizations implied compliance with the overall goals of the respective institution nor has an increase in Hirschman’s voice opportunities precipitated a greater sense of loyalty to such organizations (Acharya 2011:867). Conspicuously, while the socializee’s agency has long been downplayed by conventional theories, it has now returned with a vengeance. Reflecting this, China’s new assertiveness has widely been seen to be confirmed by its international behavior since the high point of the financial crisis in late 2008 (Narlikar 2010:78–102; Bader 2012:69–83; Johnston, Chen and Pu, 2014; Shambaugh 2013).²

Secondly, the United States has objected both to the thickening web of global governance structures and processes and the relative power gains on the part of China, mainly because it has led to the current order’s decreasing effectiveness, as viewed from Washington. To begin with, contrary to the conventional wisdom of unipolarity theory, according to which the unipole can operate almost without any barriers in international politics, the United States has had to acknowledge powerful veto players. The latter are actors “whose agreement … is required for a change of the status quo” (Tsebelis 2002) and who are “in a unique position to simply say no” (Voeten 2011:128) to any US plans to reshape the world’s institutional architecture to suit its own interest. Furthermore, demand for US compliance with international institutions and regimes has precipitated the resistance of large domestic constituencies (Foot and Walter 2011; Rabkin 2005:ch. 2). In response, the US government has – in keeping with its more revisionist foreign policy tradition – applied power-based techniques in order to retain its freedom to act and to remake the environment in which it has to operate (e.g. forum-shopping (Drezner 2007)). Its key aim has been to employ instrumental measures to secure its national interest at a time when it is no longer the case that “[t]he world, in effect, [has] contracted out to the United States to provide global governance” (Ikenberry 2011:297). This attitude has been underpinned by other factors such as the “desire to preserve what one has while the advantage is still on one’s side” (Gilpin 1981:239).³ In fact, leading US officials have repeatedly stated the “ ‘resident power’ status that Washington wants to maintain” (quoted in IISS 2011:414). As a consequence, while embodying the structural as well as the liberal foundations of the order (Wertheim 2010), the United States has often refused to get more deeply enmeshed in institutionalized and norm-based governance structures (Jervis 2006; Mead 2002). In turn, this means that the enmeshment of the United States has failed.

These developments have produced a somewhat different empirical picture than the one imagined by global governance accounts. It is characterized by the increasing salience of US–Chinese great-power politics, or, as Keohane soberly put it, by “more basic problems” (2012:133). Firstly, a political and military competition between China and the United States has ensued, even if their economic ties reflect a state of complex interdependence. Despite over a dozen meetings between the US president and his Chinese counterpart in the Strategic and Economic Dialogue between 2009 and mid-2014, the relationship has evolved from Chinese hedging and “biding its time”, US pivoting and bilateral attempts to strengthen strategic trust, into an era of merely managing and controlling their “trust deficit”, as China’s new leader Xi Jinping put it (Guangjin and Yingzi 2012). The material underpinnings of this development have been enabled by a still little understood dialectic trend in world politics. Accordingly, the early differentiation among developing countries and subsequent large-scale economic growth have established China as the strongest rising power, while simultaneously, beginning in the 1970s, the Western-led process of institutionalization took root. Although an unintended consequence, this development was initially facilitated by the United States’ opening of the capitalist order to Beijing in 1971. It eventually enabled China to assume a crucial system-preserving role during the financial crisis of 2008–9. This crisis and the nature of China’s behavior during the crisis, it is argued, presented the equivalent to a “turning point” (Abbott 2001) in international politics⁴; however, since this “turning point” was missed, the corresponding lack of effective voice opportunities has subsequently led to China’s new assertiveness. China’s economic success has, tacitly, elevated it to the status of a de facto great power; or, as the British foreign secretary, Miliband, suggested with a rather unusual degree of outspokenness after the G20 meeting in London 2009, China had become one of the “two powers that count”, underlining its “indispensability” (Guardian May 17, 2009).⁵ Interestingly, when he mentioned those “two powers”, that is, the United States and China, he referred to their exclusive bilateral meeting during the G20 meeting as the most important one at a time when it was a widely shared (and propagated) belief that the G20 was the new quasi-government in world politics. Secondly, the United States and China are involved in a process of reciprocal socialization (Terhalle 2011). This means that the two countries have come to mutually influence each other to the extent that each warily observes the other’s behavior toward international institutions and regimes and, subsequently, draws its respective conclusions as to how this affects its own position in the global power hierarchy (Foot and Walter 2011:4). As a result, this process has made the contest between the United States and China central to world politics precisely because “the global order and the attitudes and behavior of these two important states are a mutually constitutive social phenomenon” (Foot and Walter 2011:23). Most conspicuously, this is reflected in a recent, substantial change in great-power hierarchies. While “P-5 coordination is still substantial” at the United Nations Security Council, “bilateral U.S.–China consultations outside the Council chambers have become far more important” (Prantl 2012:5).⁶ Thirdly, both China’s failed socialization and the United States’ interest-based selectivity concerning its engagement in global governance structures have come at the expense of the post-Westphalian setting that had emerged since the 1970s and, more forcefully, after the end of the Cold War. As Keohane put it, “[a]s a generalization, it seems that … what could have been seen in the mid-1990s as a progressive extension of international regimes, with stronger rules and larger jurisdictions, has been halted if not reversed” (2012:134). This development has, in turn, further strengthened the great-power competition that has already ensued. Pointedly, “on balance”, it has “eroded the willingness of both to accept global normative frameworks as legitimate standards of appropriate behavior” (Foot and Walter 2011:294). Signposts of this evolution toward great-power-based politics can be observed in both countries. Since 2012, Chinese leaders have conceived global governance as a “new type of great-power relations” (Economist June 8, 2013:10). Moreover, such thinking is reflected in China’s scholarly research agendas being strongly committed to great-power relations.⁷ In fact, the “highest grant for state-sponsored social science research” was received in November 2011 by a Chinese university undertaking “[s]tudies on the evolution of the international structure and great-power interactions in the twentieth century” (Liang et al. 2012:19).⁸ As for the United States, the National Intelligence Council’s 2012 report for the new administration believed that the “underpinnings of the current post-Cold War equilibrium are beginning to shift. … If the international system becomes more fragmented and existing forms of cooperation are no longer seen as advantageous to many of the key global players, the potential for competition and conflict also will increase” (2012:82).⁹

Such observations led to the central arguments explored in this book. It will be argued that, in contrast to the more unilinear assumption of an increasingly cosmopolitan order with its focus on the provision of global public goods, the resurgence of great-power politics has precipitated a new process of order transition understood as system-relevant changes in the main practices pertaining to the nature of the global order’s governance. The great-power contestation underlying the order transition has prevented large-scale institutional redesign or readjustment in order to break up existing deadlocks precisely because of the lack of a new political bargain on material power structures, normative beliefs and the management of the order among the key players. This is why, in essence, the current order lacks systemic legitimacy. In turn, this highlights the fact that, while the (unresolved) consequences of order transition are most tangible at the regime and institutional levels, the deadlocks and impasses international regimes and organizations have undergone do not only present collective action problems. Rather, a closer look reveals that the deadlocks reflect the great-power disagreements underlying the contestation of the Western order. This is precisely why leading practitioners of global governance and scholars alike hold “one broadly accepted view”, according to which “existing institutions and arrangements are mostly deadlocked in the attempt to solve some of the outstanding global issues”, while notwithstanding the varying degree of contestation among those issues (CIGI 2012:28; Foot and Walter 2011:6).¹⁰ Effectively, what is currently contested and is most tangible at the regime level is the liberal economic, financial and environmental governance structure of world politics (e.g. the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change),¹¹ albeit within a capitalist framework; equally, a great-power competition for key spheres of influence has ensued (e.g. ASEAN, East/South China Sea); finally, opposing exceptionalist worldviews reflect a highly intricate search for common sets of values (e.g. Responsibility to Protect, global aid regime). While the attribution of the roles of the hegemon and the challenger in the different theaters of contestation might be clear-cut on the surface, both states need, in fact, to be regarded as revisionist powers, each pursuing an instrumental path to securing their sovereignty within a highly institutionalized and regulated world.

What then does the argument – that the existing deadlocks have exposed the vast degree to which the current order is lacking systemic legitimacy – imply in disciplinary terms? It underlines the need to shift the research focus away from the currently predominant views, which are inherently linked to a frame of reference set by today’s theories of the existing institutionalized world. Thus, while the prevailing strand of research is partly determined by the output bias of analyses narrowly focusing on legitimacy-related concerns, which pertain to the of issuespecific regimes (Koskenniemi 2009), the argument makes it necessary to shift the research focus toward generating new theories about the search for a consensus on the “basic rules of the system” (Gamble 2011:36).¹² While there is some overlap between this study and theories of global governance and liberal institutionalism, in order to theoretically capture the underlying notion of systemic legitimacy, this analysis is broadly, but not exclusively, framed by English School Theory with its key focus on the notion of order.¹³

Ian Clark’s and Robert Gilpin’s complementary accounts, both combining material and ideational aspects, serve as two theoretical starting points. The former explains the elements that shape the politics of legitimacy, referring to the dynamic interplay between the notions of legality, morality, constitutionality and balance of power, while the latter provides the key patterns that need to be renegotiated during order transition (e.g. rules concerning the economic-and security-related aspects of an order, its underlying worldview, the special rights great powers are endowed with, agreement on key spheres of influence and on the overall balance of power). This helps immensely in adopting an overall more accurate perspective on the topic of order transition and systemic legitimacy than those available in current theoretical accounts.

By unpacking some of Clark’s underlying assumptions and, subsequently, conceptually adapting his account to the current order transition, the scope of its theoretical application to and usefulness for analyzing the dynamics of systemic legitimacy is increased in three important and interrelated ways. The three adaptations refer to the notions of (today’s) hybrid environment, common culture and effectiveness. They are briefly outlined here.

Firstly, building on the English School’s broad spectrum-based view on changes in practices opens up space for a hybrid global environment oscillating between solidarist global multi-level governance and more pluralist and increasingly salient, dynamics of great-power-based politics (Buzan 2004:49). Therefore, the revised model should be able to explain to what extent the processes and structures of global governance have been able to retain a degree of their supposed, and path-dependent, autonomy. Secondly, broadening Clark’s notion of morality by drawing on the English School’s principal suggestion of a plurality of values and historical identities, that is, worldviews, helps to better account for whether or not the absence of a “common culture” among (today’s) great powers inevitably leads to the impossibility of peaceful order transition and, therefore, the instability of the global order. Finally, order transition also makes it necessary to rethink the notion of effectiveness in a hybrid environment. The latter is usefully juxtaposed with Clark’s original parameter of constitutionality. The revised model of effective management may then answer the following question: “What kind of hegemony is needed to provide effective leadership and how, if at all, this may be reconciled with the ideas of proponents of global governance?”

Inevitably, having put forward a new set of conceptual parameters requires the analysis to pause and to raise questions as to what kind of theoretical framework is employed in the book. Building on a recent sociology of knowledge provided by Buzan and Hansen (2009) helps to clarify the problem. Since the book theorizes the parameters “as interplaying rather than as distinct and free-standing” (Buzan and Hansen 2009:48), it runs the risk, some might say, of becoming more of a framework and less like a falsifiable theory. The latter would seek to “make causal explanations where the impact of one … [parameter] is tested against that of the others” (ibid.:41). However, precisely because the nature of systemic legitimacy and the (contested) search for consensus thrive on the dynamics of the interplay between the parameters, singling out one of them, respectively, and testing it against the others would necessarily distort the characteristic tensions between them. Instead, the book willingly accepts the above risk and relies on the conceptual framework provided by the offered set of parameters. In fact, they “have a heuristic explanatory quality that allows us to produce a structured, yet … empirically sensitive analysis” (ibid.). The case studies undertaken in Chapters 6–8 will reflect this approach.

The key tension that runs through the entire book is that between the resurgence of (US–Chinese) great-power politics and how this development is reshaping established patterns of international order, on the one hand, and those post-Westphalian regime complexes, institutions and non-state actors that have become an integral part of world politics, on the other. If operating under strain, the latter ones do not allow us to view today’s environment as the kind of blank slate on which the United States could have built its order in the West at the end of World War II. Rather, it is more accurate to see the developments of the last six years as (still) being embedded in a solidarist environment. This is underlined by the fact that leading practitioners, representatives of international institutions and scholars of global governance have, somewhat unsurprisingly, continued their unabated commitment to the notions of complex gov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction and Framework
• Part II: Conceptual Revisions
• Part III: Explorations
• Part IV: Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index