Western liberalism and the challenges of the emerging global order

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.