22 Oct Alternative Logics of International Order: The Need for a New Pluralism
By,
Roberto Russell, Contributor, MSI²
Keynote lecture at the ceremony of appointment as Emeritus Professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Competing Logics of Organization
The topics we have addressed encompass two issues in international relations that are fundamental, and at the same time particularly complex: the question of international order and the factors and circumstances that account for its formation, development, and deterioration, and the alternative models or logics for organizing that order with which we work in the discipline. I have dedicated much of my writing and teaching to these two subjects, which continue to capture my greatest interest. And, of course, always with my mind focused on the place, role, and strategic options available to Latin America and, in particular, Argentina, during the different phases that the international order has gone through since the years of the Cold War until the present.
To prepare this lecture, I reviewed what I had written on the subject, especially during two critical periods when much was produced and debated on these topics. I refer to the period immediately following the collapse of the USSR and the early years of the twenty-first century. Two very different situations, both in the context of what was called the post–Cold War order.
I did this with the idea of comparing which aspects stood out in the discussions of those years with those that would currently define the essential problems we face regarding international order at a time when, as in those previous two occasions, the question of international order and its organization and disorganization has again occupied a central place in political and academic debate, in what presents itself as a turning point—not only of the so-called “liberal international order,” but also of the long historical cycle of more than three centuries of successive international orders that were conceived, shaped, and dominated by the West.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 placed the question of international order and its organization in circumstances comparable to those of 1919 and 1945, but this time without a world war and with an unparalleled concentration of power in the hands of the leader of the victors. The nature and magnitude of the victory led to a broad debate about the possibility of moving toward a new—peaceful, cohesive, and cooperative—order based on the progressive extension of the premises of liberal internationalism on a global scale, and even more so, on the opportunity the moment offered to qualitatively transform international politics, that is, to progressively move away from constant interstate conflicts and rivalries and from the tragedy of war, and to establish an order whose guiding principle was the rule of law.
The envisioned order would not be simply “new” because it followed the Cold War; it would be new, or could be so, in its essence. This revolutionary idea was not original, given that references to a “new world order” have a long history, but in this instance, circumstances were different. There was unipolarity; democracy and capitalism had triumphed over socialism, and the only pole responsible for the task was the United States, the largest and most powerful liberal democracy in the world. A nation that, a few years later, Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, would describe as “indispensable” for achieving global peace and progress.
Of course, this sense of mission also had practical reasons. As John Ikenberry, from the academic world, expressed, being the most prolific and intelligent defender of the liberal project, it was also a long-term investment in hegemony to preserve it when the redistribution of power—something inevitable—would be less favorable to the United States.
The liberal logic of organizing international order in this triumphalist version dominated the center of the West during the 1990s, but it also had followers, although on a smaller scale, in the peripheries, particularly in Latin America. There were interested supporters, but also true believers. I recall them vividly in the debates we had in our country and region during those years.
The liberal project peaked in the 1990s, though it faced its first clouds in those years, and it gradually waned until it disappeared. The debate will continue for a long time on the main causes that fatally wounded it, and when it received the final blow, and whether that shot came from outside or from the United States itself, a country in conflict with itself and the world. It is not my purpose to discuss the causes of its failure, whether due to its intrinsic flaws, its excesses, or the resistance it encountered.
What matters to me here is its transformation. The original idea of organizing the world based on the assumptions of liberal internationalism evolved into an appeal to the moral superiority of its premises to justify behaviors of an imperial nature. Along the way, fundamental principles of the Westphalian organizational logic established in the United Nations Charter were violated. This situation revealed the existing tension among three alternative logics for organizing international order, which would increase from the turn of the twenty-first century: the retreating liberal, the transgressed Westphalian, and the returning imperial.
The clearest case marking the beginning of this tension occurred during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a coalition of countries led by the United States without UN authorization. Unipolarity, which for liberals was the condition for a rules-based order through benevolent hegemony, could not overcome its intrinsic flaw: discretion in the use of power—a tendency worsened when imbued with an ideology claiming universality. This problem was one of the key points of realist criticism of the liberal aspiration of the 1990s. From a constructivist perspective, there was also a warning about the risk that unipolarity would strengthen the imperial identity of the United States at the expense of its democratic and republican identity.
In this context, political and academic debate shifted focus in a climate far removed from the optimism of the immediate post–Cold War. The then-ascendant neoconservative visions proposed that the choice was power or chaos, and that, faced with this alternative, only the United States could prevent humanity from returning to a new “dark age” in the face of rising forces called fragmentary. In this dark side of the moon, global terrorism and religious fundamentalism stood out. From this perspective, the problem was not excess power but a world without power. As Niall Ferguson expressed, the finest exponent of this thesis: “The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity, a global power vacuum” (Ferguson, 2004, p. 39).
On the contrary, other authors argued that the concentration of power in the United States was the greatest source of disorder and international insecurity, and consequently, identified the state system and its institutions as the most suitable—and only available—mechanism to organize international order and grant it legitimacy.
The choice between empire or Westphalia at that time foreshadowed an opposition of organizational logics that would gain more strength in this third decade of the twenty-first century, in which more actors have claimed the right to intervene in other states, even through military force, which is why I revisit it.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has defended three different ways of organizing and controlling the world: benign hegemony, also called by its proponents—and in a positive sense—“anti-imperial imperialism” or “liberal imperialism,” and two successive forms of imperialism of different character.
The first was expressed in the grand strategy of primacy reformulated after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which Washington claims the right to unilaterally use force, set patterns of behavior for others, determine threats, and dictate justice. Coercion and force displaced consensus, but still in the name of a transcendent mission: to remake the world for a higher purpose. Liberal imperialism, but this time with boots. As in the early years of the post–Cold War, but in a different context and with a different attitude, the United States repeats the dangerous temptation, as Morgenthau would say, of identifying a country’s moral aspirations with the moral precepts governing the universe, pretending to know what is right and wrong in relations among nations.
The second form of imperialism is that adopted by Trump II, now without a grand strategy, without euphemisms, and without the redeeming mission of the previous version. Yet it remains based on the belief that the country is destined to govern and control the world. We witness this mode of conceiving and exercising power daily; there is no need to elaborate further on a topic we all know and that forms part of our frequent conversations.
The interesting aspect of this trajectory is that the United States participates, in its own way, in the resurgence of classical-style imperial mentalities also visible in Eurasia, Russia being the most evident case. With each case’s particularities, the phenomenon is founded on the will to legitimize dominion or influence over geographically nearby states or territories and their populations in the name of cultural, historical, linguistic, ethnic, or religious ties. We are not in a new era of empires, nor in the first half of the twentieth century when most of humanity was governed by empires, but imperialism has reappeared in traditional garb, and with it, its organizational logic of the world—and certainly the danger of its expansion.
In contrast, voices have grown everywhere identifying Westphalian regulatory norms as the only ones capable of enabling progress in coexistence and international cooperation: that is, the limitation and accommodation of great powers to manage their rivalry, respect for sovereignty, non-intervention, and territorial integrity of states, the limited role of ethical values in international affairs, and each country’s right to autonomously choose its political, economic, and social system.
It can be argued in this case—and this is a matter for another important debate—that the Westphalian flags claimed by some countries today are a pretext to oppose and confront what they still call U.S. hegemonism, and to justify a new form of global governance that definitively displaces the West from its dominant position. The recent Tianjin Declaration, for example, is a perfect compendium of Westphalian logic and the reasons for its necessity; it expresses genuine visions and interests, but also hypocrisy and cynicism when one examines some of its signatories. Yet, for the majority of countries—clearly for us—the validity of these flags is essential to place barriers against rising imperial forces, prevent escalation in rivalry among great powers, and safeguard sovereignty and development opportunities.
The Need for a New Pluralism
Having said all this as a long introduction, I will briefly explain why I believe in the need for a new pluralism. First, at a time when so much is said about the decline, death, and birth of international orders, it is necessary to make a first distinction between two different orders that are often confused and overlap: the post–Cold War order and the so-called liberal international order.
The order that has died is the post–Cold War order and, with it—perhaps better said—the organizational project that inspired it in its two successive and imprudently utopian forms: benign hegemony and liberal imperialism with boots. We can also consider globalization in its neoliberal expression dead. As in the case of communism in the Soviet Union, the triumphalist liberal model is the past of an illusion and has no return.
The order that persists, although weakened, is the one that began to take shape during the course of the Second World War and at its conclusion. From its origin, it is a hybrid order based on Westphalian principles with liberal attributes, promoted by the West, which gained greater volume over the years, both globally and regionally. For example, the UN collective security system and institutions such as the WTO or the IMF, to which China and Russia also belong.
This order lacks a proper name and has recently been erroneously called the Liberal International Order, although no one gave it that designation nor conceived it that way at its birth or during most of its life. Consequently, when people talk about the end of the liberal international order, they overlook something essential: the hybrid order that has been built since the end of World War II, with its attributes and subsequent developments, not only coming from the West, has much that remains standing, with its virtues and undeniable flaws.
It is important to recognize that Latin America has contributed ideas and proposals to enrich this order, finding a fruitful space to make its voice heard as well as opportunities to propose reforms and defend its interests. For their part, rising states in the international power hierarchy integrate this order and do not seek to overthrow it; they want to reform it to gain more control and influence over its institutions, and, of course, to create and expand their own institutions reflecting their interests.
When the end of the Liberal International Order is proclaimed, it is done so without a proper assessment. Everything tends to be thrown out, and at the same time, the novelty of the present is exaggerated. The history of international orders is marked by strong ruptures, but also by continuities that respond to an evolutionary and cumulative process preceding them, establishing a framework of norms, rules, and institutions that over time define what is acceptable in international politics. States’ behavior is judged precisely in light of adherence—or lack thereof—to these norms, rules, and institutions.
To clarify and avoid confusion, it would be better to call it the “Second Postwar Plus Order,” at least for this presentation, to make my argument clearer. The “plus” refers to all rules, agreements, and institutions, formal and informal, that have been added, both globally and regionally, creating new spaces for multilateral action.
It is clear that this order has suffered a dual setback in both its Westphalian and liberal attributes. The most severe attacks on its Westphalian components have come from the United States and Russia, and more recently, Israel. Its liberal components have been mainly violated and questioned by the country that was its greatest promoter. Today, they are defended by their main beneficiaries, such as China and India.
Secondly, I want to point out that international relations will take place in a non-hegemonic international order, understood as a constant condition. Moreover, this order will be the first of a post-Western and post-American world. The notion of a non-hegemonic international order is a category of analysis used to describe a type of order in which no state or coalition of states and social forces is capable of establishing a global hegemony. This applies to both ways the concept of hegemony is used in International Relations: as dominance in the realist sense and as leadership in a Gramscian sense. It is also unlikely that a regional hegemon will emerge. U.S. hegemony over much of Latin America will continue to weaken. China, for its part, will encounter significant obstacles to becoming a hegemonic power in its own region. The United States and its neighbors will do everything possible to prevent it from achieving that status.
Third, and closely related to my previous point, I want to emphasize that any reflection on the future of international order and its organizing logics must consider the rise of the Global South, of which neither China nor Russia are part. This process, as Andy Hurrell has sharply noted, is a fundamental driver of historical change and, therefore, a central aspect for the theoretical and practical analysis of international relations if one seeks to fully understand the global dimension.
The Global South, as is known, is a diffuse and debatable category. For some, it simply does not exist; for others, it is a residual status; while for many, it is the space from which alternative orders may emerge, especially in opposition to the West. We must leave aside this discussion, which leads nowhere. The important thing is to recognize the emergence of the South as a long-term phenomenon, predating the Cold War by far, and demonstrating the growing will and capacity of numerous countries and social forces to play an active and more autonomous role in international and global politics. This South is not the Third World of the Cold War and decolonization. It has more wealth, more power resources, and its own narratives about what happens and what should or should not be considered acceptable conduct in international politics. Moreover, its activism is expressed both in new multilateral spaces and in the growing reaffirmation of national, ethnic, and religious identities that will not be easy to suppress.
What I have just outlined, in an incomplete and stylized manner, forms the contextual framework that has led me, for some time, to consider the need for a new pluralism. I prefer to speak of pluralism following the terminology used by the English School to refer to a logic of organizing international order, rather than Westphalia, on which it fundamentally relies.
I do this because Westphalia is highly mythical, and because what it was and its legacy are often presented in our discipline superficially, ignoring that the principles, rules, institutions, and practices constituting what is now considered Westphalian have been developed over more than three centuries. Westphalia, as Henry Kissinger rightly notes, was not the beginning of the state system; it was a practical accommodation among different political units to end the Thirty Years’ War by means that later transformed into general concepts of world order.
Furthermore, Westphalia alone is a term that says little and does not help to understand the nature and complexity of the problem we face. Pluralism, by contrast, takes us to the core of the problem: that is, how to provide a certain order to a world politically constituted by states unequal in power, differing in their forms of political, economic, and social organization, diverse in cultures and values, and different in internal practices and interests defended. The difficulty is compounded because this environment, in addition to being plural, lacks a central authority.
Finally, pluralism is a neutral term; it describes the world as it is. Westphalia, in contrast, carries a Western bias too strong for an era in which one cannot conceive of order and its management without the participation and contribution of other cultures and civilizations.
Just a couple of decades ago, it was said that the pluralist model was anachronistic for a world in the process of globalization, limited in its moral ambition, and dysfunctional for addressing transnational problems affecting the lives of all of us, not just states. The state itself was presented as a barrier hindering the possibility of establishing an international and global order more in line with the new times. Thus, there was talk of the need to move toward a postmodern configuration of the political space.
Much water has passed under the bridge, and today other topics dominate the debate and our concerns. A world without hegemonies implies more turbulence and instability, while revealing the need for rules and institutions that restrain violence among states and stabilize competition among great powers. We have two centers of power, led by the United States and China, which rival in the ideas they promote to reconfigure order, differing in narratives and positions in each crisis, and conducting a “war without direct war,” as observed in the case of Ukraine. Unipolarity will not repeat, and regardless of the power distribution—bi- or multipolar—the balance of power and diplomacy regain a central role as institutions of international order for political negotiation and the legitimization of agreements. For medium and small states, the greatest threat again comes from the imperial impulses of the most powerful, and consequently, the importance of external sovereignty and respect for territorial integrity as basic goals and attributes of international order is reaffirmed. These are all fundamental aspects inscribed in the pluralist conception of minimal order—a minimalism that does not seem small in its ambition for this era, now commonly called the “age of upheaval.”
Winston Churchill defined democracy as the worst system of government, except for all the others. In the same vein, we can define the pluralist model as the worst organizational logic of international order, except for all the others. Its endorsement at that time may seem modest and conservative, but it is the only model that can lay the foundation for an order with a greater political and moral claim. It is the unavoidable and primary starting point.
We live in a world in which the nation-state will remain the principal constitutive unit of international order, facing the same structural difficulties that have characterized international order since the beginning of modernity, making its governance extremely complex: strong power asymmetries and diversity of interests, values, and cultures of the states that constitute it.
At this stage of my life and profession, I have the duty of hope. By imposing this duty on myself, I realize I risk going against the tide, but I go ahead anyway. The world we are in reaffirms the validity of realism and the need to recover pluralism in its minimalist expression, but it demands much more. It requires breathing new life into progressive contributions to international order, deriving both from liberal internationalism and the socialist tradition, which must be disentangled from practices that, in their name, betray and distort their noblest purposes. These contributions are part of the “Second Postwar Plus” order and a banner of struggle for numerous political and social forces worldwide, which will continue to rise.
I cannot remain within neorealist strands that see any effort to transcend the tragedy of great-power politics as an illusion. I prefer classical realists such as E.H. Carr and Reinhold Niebuhr, who considered the possibility of reform positively. Even Hans Morgenthau, in his monumental Politics Among Nations, went so far as to consider, and I quote: “that international peace can only be as secure as domestic peace when nations have subordinated to a higher authority the means that modern technology has placed in their hands—when they have ceded their sovereignty” (Morgenthau, 1986, p. 646).
I do not dare to go that far, but I dare to think, like the classical realists, of the possibility of going a bit beyond mere minimalism without disregarding the risks ahead. Ferguson, the same one who proposed the empire or chaos choice at the beginning of this century, has just pointed out that the United States is entering a “late republic stage,” like the Roman Republic in its final days before becoming an empire. Recently, Fukuyama also moved from proposing the end of history to seeing a world returning to spheres of influence among the great powers, as in the 19th century. I hope they are wrong, as in their previous predictions.
The process of power and wealth diffusion produces a phenomenon not present in the traditional logic of pluralism, which emphasized horizontal relations among great powers. Today, asymmetric power distribution intersects with the diffusion of power and wealth to more states. We do not yet know how this unprecedented intersection will operate in vertical relations among large, medium, and small states in a fluid, interconnected world, which I prefer to call polycentric rather than multipolar. The only countries currently qualifying as full-fledged poles, the United States and China, lead two power cores that do not seem to be consolidating into rigid and impermeable blocs as in the Cold War. Some countries of the South will align with one of these two cores due to lack of choice or by will. The majority, however, will seek not to adhere to either. They do not want to be at the mercy of a power rivalry alien to them, nor do they want a great-power concert reserving them a subordinate place in a new Yalta.
The nature of international politics is not invariable. It is determined by a specific context and time, which set its limits, modalities, and scope. We must see whether this greater relative empowerment of those rising from below enables the development of new forms of power restriction not contemplated in classical pluralism. In particular, whether it becomes a factor that hinders or prevents the formation of spheres of influence as we have known them, operating in the opposite direction to what many predict as an inevitable consequence of the current geopolitical rivalry among great powers.
Moreover, my hope is not limited to the possibility of obstructing or restraining imperial mentalities and wills. It has the sense of a higher aspiration based on practical rather than moral reasons. I think of it in the same vein as Kant, who maintained that democracy is not a state of angels and, moreover, that its establishment has a solution, even for a people of demons, provided they have understanding, that “…for its preservation, they jointly require universal laws, even though each individually tends to evade the law…” (Kant, 1985, p. 38).
I draw from this phrase the word preservation as the driving force behind universal laws. Classical pluralism identified coexistence as a common interest of states for self-preservation, deriving the possibility of establishing rules to limit violence, as indeed has been done. The new pluralism must not only face this challenge; it must also find a way to establish rules that ensure our survival. To the classical structural difficulties already mentioned—power asymmetries and state diversity—another structural difficulty is added, never previously present to this extent in earlier international orders: transnational problems that threaten the existence or security of humanity as a whole, which therefore demand interstate cooperation, as no one can face them alone.
For this purpose, and as Kant envisioned for the advancement of democracy, the moral perfection of human beings or good intentions is not required. The notion of preservation, as in Kant’s example of demons, can operate as the factor leading to mutual subjection to coercive laws, more intrusive even in the domestic sphere. In other words, to establish survival rules that complement coexistence rules and acquire, like the latter, a primary and fundamental character for an order that cannot be limited to merely protecting the life and property of states. There is no place, as I said, for a hegemony claiming universal reach, but there is a universal dimension that includes all of us, and is therefore independent of our differences. The failure of naive cosmopolitanism in liberal internationalism’s voluntarist expression should not obstruct the path toward authentic cosmopolitanism, which fosters a sense of shared humanity in diversity, from which we can think and establish rules and agreements grounded in a notion of general common good. There is nothing idealistic in conjecturing the need to advance along this path when we observe the magnitude of the threats we share. It is clear that multilateralism, as we have conceived and known it, is now in retreat, but there is no alternative to multilateral action in addressing the transnational problems we face. This challenge compels us to think of new forms of multilateralism, more limited and focused on specific issues.
Furthermore, the Second Postwar Plus Order has liberal components in its hybridity that must be foregrounded. I refer, for example, to the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One need not be an expert in international relations to know that these documents and agreements have been ignored and violated countless times, yet they should not be dismissed or discarded. Their achievement has been a great advance in the history of international society, and today they must be reaffirmed, based on their most fundamental and original meaning: to consider and treat all human beings as holders of universal rights, respecting the conditions and particular identities that define these rights. In principle, a world without hegemonies prevents demands for universality emanating from a single country or culture, and in principle allows us to assume it can offer conditions for these rights to be understood and upheld as universal purposes.
Finally, there is an aspect of the new pluralism of particular relevance for Latin America, which I do not want to omit at a time when democracy and human rights have nearly disappeared from the global agenda. The regional order we have built also has a hybrid character. It has been inspired by the liberal tradition to establish rules and institutions aiming to defend and promote democracy and civil and minority human rights. For example, the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the American Convention on Human Rights, or the Mercosur Democratic Clause. Latin America is part of the South by its level of development, but belongs to the West by its culture and history. These documents express a definition of democracy and human rights rooted in the West that we consider our own, in contrast to what occurs in much of the Global South. In our case, the classical pluralist approach, which requires setting aside values as much as possible in constructing order and political negotiation, is not applicable. The institutional commitments we have assumed to defend and promote democracy and human rights are now more relevant than when they were signed, as these values are not guaranteed and, in some cases, have been lost.
Some time ago, Roberto Keohane said that one does not study world politics for aesthetic reasons, since this politics has nothing beautiful. We are motivated by intellectual curiosity, but also by normative considerations. I highlight this point because I have closed this presentation by putting on the table attributes of order that contain a greater moral and political dimension, fully aware that they are subject to forces and influences that seriously contradict them. For this reason, we must not lower our guard, and we must expose the need for a pluralism that cannot be limited to its minimalist form regarding relations among states. It must include essential aspects that involve and affect our shared humanity and that are, moreover, a necessary condition for the relative stability and legitimacy of the non-hegemonic international order in which we already operate.
References
Ferguson, N. (2004). A world without power. Foreign Policy, July/August, 39. https://kropfpolisci.com/foreign.policy.ferguson.pdf?utm
Kant, I. (1985). Perpetual peace. Madrid: Tecnos. https://www.tecnos.es/libro/clasicos-del-pensamiento/la-paz-perpetua-immanuel-kant-9788430955824/?utm
Morgenthau, H. J. (1986). Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Miami Strategic Intelligence Institute (MSI²).