Remaking a rules-based world order

In an increasingly insecure world, Europe should sponsor a renewal of rules-based multilateralism.

Endless moral outrage—the heated debates over refugees, climate change, identity, the pandemic or the football world cup are framed in terms of good versus evil. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the screaming matches have reached the courtly domain of foreign policy.

This moral panic of the middle classes has a lot to do with the breakdown of liberal hegemony. And, given the geopolitical dangers to the survival of Europe, it is a dangerous aberration we can no longer afford.   

It is in the nature of hegemony that one cannot see it from within. Discourse hegemony naturalises the distribution of resources and power. Essentially, it is a technique which reduces the cost of rule by making the foundations of dominance invisible and therefore no longer a subject of struggles. The voluntary acceptance of a regime considered legitimate by the ruled give ruling elites power well beyond what their means of coercion could achieve.

Unipolar moment

After the collapse of its main rival in the cold war, the superiority of American power resources—the dollar as the global reserve currency, the centrality of Wall Street, the supremacy of the United States military—ushered in a unipolar moment. The US used this rare constellation, when no other power was in a position to challenge it, to establish a liberal hegemony.

This promotes a world economy of open markets, multilateral institutions for global governance and, most importantly, an interventionist foreign policy which supports liberal democracy and human rights around the world. In ‘The end of history’, Francis Fukuyama naturalised the pillars of liberal hegemony, American-style democracy and capitalism, as the inevitable conclusion of global historical processes.

Even today, when the relative decline of the west can no longer be overlooked, liberal beliefs (such as democratic peace theory, change through trade, the responsibility to protect) still inspire ‘value-based foreign policies’, including calls for regime change in authoritarian regimes which violate the human rights of their citizens.

Within western countries, the material foundations of financial capitalism—the predominance of the finance sector, the technocratic restraint towards interfererence in the market, the erosion of the (welfare) state—were so widely accepted that, for decades, no rival ideology could challenge liberal hegemony. In the ‘Washington consensus’, neoliberalism was naturalised as lessons hard-learnt from the errors of history.

The removal of the material base from sight was helped by the hegemony of postmodern thought in academia. In Jacques Derrida’s world made of text, cultural discourses about identities replaced the struggle over material distribution between classes. Virtue signalling, such as the symbolic reiteration of values, and the moral appeal to individuals to change their behaviour, soon started to dominate public discourse.

Even after its near-implosion in the financial crisis of 2008, the non-viability of the neoliberal programme was so widely ignored that Colin Crouch diagnosed the ‘strange non-death of neoliberalism’. To put it in Marxist terms, the ideological superstructure temporarily masked the decay of the material base.

Matter and power

Post-materialism never took hold in the centres of power or in the periphery of the global south. Liberal post-materialism did though become hegemonic in academia, media and the cultural industries of north America and western Europe. Unsurprisingly, it was in those places where the return of history—the brutal Russian war against Ukraine, the struggle over energy resources, the migration flows, the pandemic and global heating—came as an epistemic shock. It turned out the world was not made of text, but of matter and power.

For decades, liberal discourse hegemony concealed the erosion of the material base of US global superiority. Mired in one crisis after another at home, the west lost its shine in the world. Its fading muscle resulted in loss of access to energy, raw materials, markets and human talent.

Worsening opportunity structures made the economic engine stutter. This in turn accelerated zero-sum struggles—barely masked ‘culture wars’—over a shrinking pie. The crisis of the neoliberal model at home and of western dominance abroad reinforced each other.

If for decades the material base crumbles, the ideological superstructure will sooner or later come tumbling down. Inside western countries, the downfall of the last-but-one British prime minister, Liz Truss—who received a thumbs-down from the financial markets for proposing a textbook neoliberal reform programme—signified the death of the ideology which had naturalised financial capitalism for decades. Globally, the rise of China has sealed the end of the unipolar moment and posed a challenge to the American-led world order.

The erosion of liberal hegemony does not necessarily mean the end of a rules-based multilateralism. While the multilateral order is mired in crisis, the vast majority of states, including China, still see value in a system of rules and institutions with the United Nations at its core.

While the world economy has been hit by a wave of protectionism, most states still believe in the benefits of open markets. If the (last) cold war is any reference, despite renewed systemic rivalry the chances of survival of a rules-based framework for global co-operation are not too bad.

The most visible cracks in the liberal world order show in the institutions that promote democracy and human rights, from the International Criminal Court to the UN Human Rights Council. After the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, it would seem, liberal regime change is a thing of the past.

Balance-of-power politics

The question is whether liberal hegemony can survive the end of the unipolar moment. For ‘realist’ international-relations thinkers, such as John Mearsheimer, in a bi- or multipolar world liberal hegemony is no longer an option, because great powers need to return to balance-of-power politics to manage the competition with rivals who could threaten their security.

Maybe the current moral overdrive is a symptom of this erosion of liberal hegemony—a last hurrah to save the liberal order at home and abroad, a reaction to the existential dread when the ground is shaking and an abyss of uncertainty looms. Think of virtue signalling as whistling in the scary woods.

In Germany, the pendulum is swinging to the other extreme. Yesterday’s pacifists are today’s arms enthusiasts. Those who recently wanted to do away with borders and nations are now erecting a new iron curtain in the centre of Europe.

To a certain degree, this is a rational reaction to the return of war and scarcity after the collapse of the European security order. But the ‘us versus them’ dichotomies are essentially a new version of the same old ‘good versus evil’ moral discourses. And some of the calls—such as to break up Russia, punish China or shame Qatar are dangerously out of touch with geopolitical realities after the end of western hegemony.   

The power of the US, even at its peak, was never so dominant that it could remake the periphery—the middle east or Afghanistan—in its image. Still less will it today, in its relative decline, be enough to defeat Russia and contain China simultaneously. Contrary to the hyperbole of European liberal hawks, there is an understanding of these limitations to American power on both sides of the divide in Washington.

With the rise of new powers, and the relative decline of the west, a new world is being born. In the struggles over the new world order, the west still matters. Its voice will be heard more clearly if it reduces external vulnerabilities, solves its internal crises and keeps the transatlantic alliance strong.

Securing the neighbourhood

Europe needs to do its homework. Faced with war at its border, energy shortages, deindustrialisation pressures, a new wave of refugees and resurgent nationalisms, Europe will for the foreseeable future be entirely invested in safeguarding its own survival and securing its neighbourhood to its east and south.

Receiving a democratic mandate for this neighbourhood peacekeeping from its tired people will already be a challenge. There is simply no more capacity for out-of-area slaying of dragons.

Amid great power conflict, Europe must concentrate all its forces on defending its existential interest: a rules-based multilateral entity such as the European Union can only survive in a rules-based world order. Hence, Europe needs to reach out to potential allies which share its interest in upholding rules-based multilateralism.

Unfortunately, these potential allies are not necessarily all democratic regimes. So abolish the counter-productive idea of pitting an ‘alliance of democracies’ against an ‘axis of autocracies’. Stop alienating potential allies though talk of ‘jungles and gardens’.

To survive in this dog-eat-dog world, Europeans must learn the language of power but avoid the adolescent adventurism that often comes with it. To safeguard the opportunity structures that allow Europeans to live peacefully and prosper, we need to do away with the finger-pointing and focus on building alliances for rules-based multilateralism.

In the midst of the erosion of liberal hegemony, European liberal hawks are doubling down on its main promises. With the return of the security dilemmas of great-power competition, however, US administrations drawn from either side of the aisle are under pressure to abandon costly and risky interventionist foreign policies with the aim of regime change.

Given global challenges—from climate change to pandemics to mass migration—a return to balance-of-power realism will not suffice. A new concert of great powers cannot provide the global co-operation and co-ordination needed to face these challenges.

‘Transformative realism’

What is needed is new thinking which combines a clear view of the balance of power with the ambition to change the world for the better—‘transformative realism’. This starts from a forensic analysis of the international political economy and looks for strategic entry points which would allow an alliance of like-minded actors to shift the balance of power. Such an alliance will not come together on a liberal interventionist platform, but rather embrace a more Westphalian outlook which strengthens sovereignty, territorial integrity and peaceful conflict resolution.

The UN Charter is an excellent starting point for such a group of friends. Its goal must be to uphold as much as possible of the rules-based multilateralist framework for co-operation, which will allow humankind—amid intensifying great-power competition—to face collectively the global challenges ahead.