Western liberalism and the challenges of the emerging global order

As we approach the end of the first decade of this new century, the international political system is once again going through a period of profound change. The fault-lines that now divide the international community are changing, in Ken Booth’s words, the “context of living globally”. They have the potential to redraw the contours of the geopolitical landscape and to reshape many of the rules, norms and institutions that are an integral part of the Western liberal order.

The Western liberal order

With roots reaching back well into history, that order has been evolving rapidly since the end of World War II and shaped the international relations of the second half of the 20th century.

It is an order essentially pluralist in character, one built around the states system with expanding and progressively more open market economies, broadly liberal democratic values upheld by a diverse coalition of Western allies under American leadership, and reinforced by a dense web of rules, norms and institutions.

Although not always a peaceful order, among its many virtues has been its adaptability and capacity to evolve through, for example, expanding economic growth and market liberalisation, the drawing in of new participants such as the remnants of the Soviet empire, and enhancing peace and stability through the development of new global and regional institutions that among other things have helped to strengthen the domain of rule-making in international affairs.

The forces now shaping change within this system defy easy or simple characterisation. While they have a resonance with earlier periods in history, they also have a contemporary character, complexity and ambiguity that make them unique to our age.

The resilience and capacity for adaptation of the existing order may enable it to continue expanding as it has done over the last half a century. Were this to be the case, Australia’s prosperity and security would be more certain than if things were otherwise, but in the end there can be little doubt that Australia’s future will be heavily dependent on the way it responds to the impact of the changes now buffeting the international system.

The challenges of the emerging global order

Much about the emerging global order remains confused and confusing, but the fault-lines that now divide the international community all point in the direction of profound change: strong clashes of ideas and interests are creating widespread instabilities and insecurities which are shaking the foundations of the international order. Several issues will be especially critical in determining the extent of change and its impact on Western liberalism.

First, it will be determined by the way the international community responds to the many disjunctions of globalisation. The third great phase of globalisation since the early years of the 20th century is running in the words of Tom Friedman, “farther, faster, cheaper and deeper” than in any phase before it. As a consequence, its impact is more profound and the debates over its future more intense.

Globalisation undoubtedly benefits significant sections of the international community and is unlikely to be reversed or end suddenly. Its geopolitical impact is profound creating new hubs of global power notably in Asia, but it is also leaving considerable political, economic and social wreckage in its wake and not just in developing countries. The extent to which it can survive in its present form will be one of the most critical issues for the international community in the decades ahead.

The second critical issue and the one that will be the key to determining the contours of the geopolitical landscape in the decades ahead is the future of American primacy.

America’s ascendency began during World War I and continued throughout the remainder of the 20th century to reach the point of unchallenged geopolitical pre-eminence with the end of the Cold War. But after a decade of strategic upheaval in global affairs, America’s primacy shows troubling signs of fragility.

The “unipolar moment” will certainly continue for some time to come, but as other states rise, the issues at the very core of every debate over the future of Western liberalism are America’s global leadership, the way the US will exercise its unique power and how long its status as the unchallenged hegemon can be sustained.

Third, questions abound over the extent to which movements animated by fanaticism and extremism, some clothed in coherent ideologies and others not, will shape the new order.

International politics has long been an arena of often intense ideological competition, but in recent years the rise of new fundamentalisms, whether they revolve around tribalism in parts of Africa, theology in the Middle East, politics in the Balkans, or zealotry somewhere else have not only wrought misery, they have destabilised countries as well as international affairs more widely.

The times ahead seem hardly more promising. Perhaps fanaticism can be contained - its destructiveness of prosperity and security limited to the local. But leaving aside the questionable moral aspect of any such strategy, dealing with extremism, militancy and fanaticism in all of its ugly manifestations will be a serious test for the political resourcefulness of the international community.

Fourth, the character of the emerging order will be shaped by the international community’s success in confronting the challenges of environmental sustainability.

Environmental decline has caused the collapse of small communities in the past and others are now at risk, but the scale of the environmental challenge is now global, affecting states and cultures, habitats and ecosystems.

Climate change may be the most visible sign of environmental stress, but the strains on the Earth’s land, air and water resources are widespread and in some places leading to acute insecurities. Many of these environmental challenges will have to be confronted in the decades ahead.

Whether modern science and technology offer the knowledge needed to manage this deteriorating situation is an open question, but this seems less in doubt than the need, still far from hand, for the international community to summon the political energy, will and leadership to develop solutions.

Finally, the character of the new order will be defined partly by the norms and values that predominate within it. Concepts of peace, justice, order, security, prosperity and legality all possess a challenging complexity within the context of international relations, yet all ages tend to be defined by the extent to which values such as these gain legitimacy among members of the international community.

If Western liberalism, for example, has not been the most peaceful of global orders, it has nevertheless been notable for its increased rule-making and expanding institutionalism. This trend could continue if, as some commentators have suggested, we are entering an era of significant normative development in international relations.

Perhaps our age is one that will pay greater attention to more sophisticated ideas of right, obligation and society in international affairs than has been the case in the more recent past. If so, the results will be surely slow to mature. Still, if the new order were to evolve in this way it could well involve some significant changes in the normative foundations of international relations.

The way these key issues play out over the coming decades will determine the future of the Western liberal order. Some of the trends in the international system - the rise of new great powers, for example - will pose acute strategic challenges for great power management and presage an era of considerable instability. The trends overall do not necessarily foreshadow a period of confrontation, or indeed the wider use of military force to resolve disputes. But in periods of insecurity where interests clash and power is shifting among key actors, this cannot be ruled out.

There is reason to hope however, that the rules and institutions which constitute such an important part of the current order will permit many of the coming instabilities to be managed in other ways.

What will happen?

The foundations of Western liberalism are now deeply embedded in the international system. The rising powers which are the main threat to its stability are already such obvious beneficiaries of its norms and values that overthrowing it would be very costly to their interests: they could well make the strategic choice to become more fully integrated into its structures and processes and seek to influence its direction from within.

This would certainly be to Australia’s advantage and to the West more generally but while possible, it is anything but a foregone conclusion. Nor will this necessarily make managing issues on the international agenda any easier.

Despite the elaborate network of rules and institutions that are constitutive of liberalism, tensions and conflicts over issues as widely separated as trade, terrorism, migration, non-proliferation and climate change are a persistent endemic feature of international life and testify to the deep fissures - the fault-lines - that afflict the global body politic. There is little to encourage optimism of significant change.

But as hard as global management may be, it is difficult to see any other system offering greater assurance of security and prosperity. A far less sophisticated system of order, constructed around a new global concert of powers or a fresh balance among the great powers, is possible but one would still require a high degree of international co-operation and the other a sustainable capacity to manage competition. Both would demand more purposive policy behaviour than seems possible in an anarchical system with many sources of power, and would probably mean a more volatile and unstable future order.

If the form and character of the emerging order remains problematic, there seems little doubt that we have entered an era of challenging strategic complexity, and for many states and communities, pervasive insecurity. From our current vantage-point, President G.W.H. Bush’s September 1990 vision of a “new era free from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace” is no closer to realisation and may well have receded further from view.

Arguably, the international community already possesses many of the means - the normative frameworks and political structures - that would enable some shift towards the former president’s ambitious goal with, as Lawrence Freedman once remarked, its “appealing sense of international progress,” but whether it can find the political leadership and summon the political will to make effective use of them is another matter entirely.