151. After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World Order
- Author:
- Amitav Acharya
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Institution:
- Carnegie Council
- Abstract:
- “The dominance of a single great power,” wrote American scholar Robert Keohane in his widely acclaimed book After Hegemony, “may contribute to order in world politics, in particular circumstances, but it is not a sufficient condition and there is little reason to believe that it is necessary.”1 This proposition has never been put to a greater test as it is now. Since the election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president in November 2016 there has been a vast outpouring of anxiety over the future of the liberal world order.2 But the myths, limitations, and decline of this order have been anticipated and forewarned for some time, even though its proponents have not acknowledged it. The “first myth” about the U.S.-led liberal hegemonic order, as I have written elsewhere, is “how far it extended for much of its history, especially during the Cold War period.” I pointed out that “the Soviet bloc, China, India, Indonesia, and a good part of the ‘third world’ were outside of it . . . . Despite the exalted claims about its power, legitimacy, and public goods functions, that order was little more than the US-UK-West Europe-Australasian configuration.”3 Noting that the liberal order was hardly benign for many countries in the developing world, I argued that it should be seen as a limited international order, rather than an inclusive global order. Joseph S. Nye, one of the staunchest champions of the liberal order, made a similar point when he wrote in the January/February 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs that the liberal order “was largely limited to a group of like-minded states centered on the Atlantic littoral” and “did not include many large countries such as China, India, and the Soviet bloc states, and . . . did not always have benign effects on nonmembers.”4 The liberal order did expand and strengthen with the economic reforms in China and India, and with the end of the cold war. And while the champions of that order celebrated its expansion, they still generally assumed that the main challenge to it would come from the rising powers, led by China. Their assumptions notwithstanding, precisely at a time when many of these powers today are not doing all that well, the liberal order appears to be imploding. Trump’s victory and Brexit suggest that the current challenge to the liberal order is as much, if not more, from within as from without. Precisely at a time when many of the rising powers are not doing all that well, the liberal order appears to be imploding. The domestic challenges to the liberal order led by Trump and his supporters could be overstated, however. After all, Hillary Clinton won a majority of the popular vote, and the Brexit referendum only passed by a slim margin. More importantly, however, the crisis of the liberal order has deeper roots, owing to long-term and structural changes in the global economy and politics. As such, Trump’s ascent to power is a consequence—not a cause—of the decline of the liberal order, especially of its failure to address the concerns of domestic constituents left behind by the global power shift. Given these factors, Trump is unlikely to reverse the decline of the liberal order even if he wanted to. Instead, he may well push it over the precipice. In what follows, I first describe the foundations of the liberal order, and show that the ground on which it was built has been eroding for some time, though Trump’s rhetoric and policies are also damaging. Next, I argue that for now the rising powers are not in a position to overturn the current order completely, and in fact they may wish to preserve some elements of it in the near and medium term. I describe a “multiplex world” in which elements of the liberal order survive, but are subsumed in a complex of multiple, crosscutting international orders. Finally, I offer some suggestions on how scholars and policymakers can manage the transition to such a multiplex world.
- Topic:
- International Cooperation, Hegemony, Reform, and Liberal Order
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus