Recasting order in the Indo-Pacific: Europe, Asia, and the future of the Liberal International Order

The chapter discusses the Liberal International Order (LIO) pertaining to the international system and institutionalized particularly after World War II. The liberal order script for the international system has been written and rewritten through various internal and external contestations over the past more than 70 years. Some of these contestations have successfully transformed the LIO, while others have had little effect. The chapter challenges the dominant interpretation of the LIO as a US or “Western” hegemonic order by pointing to its many authors from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The chapter documents the history of the LIO as a history of contestations by focusing on three foundational documents, namely the 1945 United Nations Charter (the LIO’s “constitution”), the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements as setting up the liberal international economic order, and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the founding document of international political liberalism.

Most explanations for the crisis of the liberal order revolve around geopolitics, globalization, economic resentment fueling new forms of populism and nationalism, and Western states following their interests away from liberal values and institutions of their creation. But international orders are produced and legitimated by both material and spiritual forces. The spirit in liberalism is moral progress defined by practices of humanity. If the Liberal International Order (LIO) is in decline, then perhaps we should consider its moral foundations. Section “Introduction” briefly introduces the question of international order, categorizes international relations theories according to the mixture of consent and coercion, and how legitimacy often refers not only to the existing order but a vision of progress. This is particularly true of the liberal international order. Section “International Order, Legitimacy, and Progress” turns to the liberal international order, progress, and the possible spiritual decline of the liberal international order. After briefly considering the liberal in international liberalism and the late 20th-century emergence of the liberal international order, I argue that one reason for its declining moral foundations is because of the pronounced individualism that resides at the heart of the contemporary international order. In other words, the sources of decline are not exogenous but rather part of liberalism. The Conclusion asks: what is next? The conjunction of the decline of the LIO and COVID-19 has complicated the debate about the future international order, and much of the conversation hinges on whether and how the United States can recover from its self-destructive tendencies and China’s intentions. But where is the spirit of moral progress and humanity in this discussion?

The liberal international economic and political order which the United States created from the ashes of World War II and has since led is in trouble. To United States President Donald Trump, the order which provided the framework under which sovereign states agreed to follow a rules-based system of economic and political cooperation and shared multilateral governance, has not only allowed other nations (in particular, China) to take advantage of US ‘magnanimity’, but also weakened the United States economically, while asymmetric alliances compromised its military advantages. Given the sustained assault this cosmopolitan order is facing, many fear that it may not survive if Trump is re-elected in November 2020. Indeed, if the United States response to the COVID-19 pandemic is any guide, an ‘America First’ agenda, especially a hard-line approach to China, will shape US policy if Trump wins a second term.

This article analyzes the tension between the liberal ideals of freedom and equality and cultural difference. It argues that decency has become intertwined with the fragility of the liberal international order by providing a problematic threshold of international justice. The idea is that as global pressures mount for protecting the human dignity of persons/peoples, they also congeal or harden decency’s political and social constraints (impartiality, neutrality, and basic rights enforcement) on engaging others. Decency as a moral threshold of international justice, the article claims, has become static or a self-reinforcing limitation. This contradictory decency/dignity dynamic of the liberal international order not only explains how states have aggressively asserted their interests by absorbing these constraints, but also how politics can limit the pragmatic potential to bridge the various social gaps in values and belief systems. This article seeks to conceptualize a pluralist ethos that shows how such constraints can be reimagined as, or turned into, the conditions of possibility/freedom that transition us to a global pluralist politics. It concludes with a discussion of the refugee crisis and Islamism, showing how both cases resonate the felt stigmatization and alienation within the liberal international order.

Globalization and liberal internationalism are two respective concepts that are often connected as globalization largely results from the liberal international order. The liberal international order, which is concurrently the product of globalization, and its continuation is now being challenged by several factors. Historically, the development of international order has mostly been associated with trade across the world, and post-World War II there has been a revision of the approach to stimulate liberalization. Many scholars have debated the decline of the liberal order. Looking ahead, the future of this international order will probably be shaped by the continuous processes of globalization and the reactions to trends of deglobalization. Hence, the paper aims to investigate the current state of globalization and how it affects the liberal international system. Globalization, which once supported liberal ideals, has revealed weaknesses by encouraging trends like protectionism, nationalism, and the rise of alternative groups like BRICS. These changes indicate a move away from the core values of cooperation and openness that have defined liberal order. To explore these dynamics, the study used a qualitative research approach, including a comprehensive literature review, to identify gaps and better understand the evolving challenges. The study emphasizes the urgent need for reforms to make the liberal order more effective in addressing contemporary global challenges.

Struggles for recognition, rooted in the desire to be acknowledged by others, are fundamental to the stability of international orders. All international orders face actors with recognition grievances, and sometimes these grievances become major sources of contention. At the same time, each international order faces struggles that are specific to its mode of legitimation because they are rooted in challenges over the constituent elements of that order. The liberal international order (LIO) is no exception to this rule. Unlike international orders that are organized through explicit social hierarchies, the LIO claims to foster egalitarian, meritocratic justice based around universal, ‘rational’ standards. Yet it is clear to many actors around the world that the LIO has historically been, and remains today, premised on ‘irrational’, unjust forms of hierarchical recognition, often organized around group identity. This opens up the LIO to charges of hypocrisy. We trace the ways in which this ‘hypocrisy charge’ is levelled by both LIO ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’, arguing that it generates an irresolvable tension within the LIO. This tension may not spell the end of the LIO, but it does point to a period of extended contention.

For many scholars, policymakers, and media commentators, it is self-evident that we live today in a liberal international order and that the big questions concern the durability of this order; its ability, in particular, to survive the rise of non-liberal great powers and the politics of anti-liberal social forces. But what is an international order, and what is the nature of the liberal international order, in particular? One prominent answer is provided by John Ikenberry, who defines an international order as “the ‘governing’ arrangements among a group of states, including its fundamental rules, principles, and institutions” (2001: 23), and a liberal international order as one that “is open and loosely rule based”, creating “a foundation in which states can engage in reciprocity and institutionalised cooperation” (2011: 18). International orders, so understood, are constructed by great powers, and the present liberal order reflects the post-1945 ascendance of the United States.

The Liberal International Order (LIO) that has largely structured relations between states since World War II is now deeply contested. Although the challenges to the LIO began long before Donald J. Trump was elected president in the USA in 2016, and especially before his second term, he has successfully transformed the Republican Party into a nationalist, unilateralist, sovereigntist and possibly imperialist coalition. While this essay is not a postmortem on the LIO, I seek to explain what was the LIO, its origins, the challenges it faces, and possible futures. Understanding how international orders are constructed, sustained, and challenged as well as the history of the LIO is important for analyzing the future of international order. Although I am pessimistic, I argue that the future is not foreordained but allows for choice by the new superpowers and other states.

Recent debates about challenges to the liberal international order (LIO) have led International Relations (IR) scholars, both those critical and supportive of the concept, to examine its origins and effects. While this work has shed new light on the evolution of international order, there has been a surprising absence: Latin America. I explore the theoretical consequences of this empirical gap for IR's understanding of the liberal international order. After assessing the literature's treatment of Latin American and the LIO, I offer a macro-historical sketch of the region's role in the order's critical junctures. The LIO has shaped Latin America, and Latin America has shaped the LIO—but not always in the ways supporters or critics might expect. The region's sovereignty and statehood evolved alongside the LIO—with international experiences very different from those of areas colonized during the LIO's expansion—and, in turn, Latin American engagement shaped the practices of Great Powers through international law and organization, cooperation and resistance. Despite its participation in the LIO's founding moments, Latin America was often accorded second-class treatment and benefits for the region have often been narrow. The experience of Latin American states over two centuries—independent but often internationally unequal—highlights the consequences of partial inclusion or marginalization from the LIO. Deeper study of Latin America's history with the LIO casts light on the ways in which non-Great Powers outside the order's core shaped, and were shaped by, the elements of the evolving order.

International Economic Law (IEL) has largely regulated cross-border trade and investment in the post-WWII world. IEL has become an important part of the Liberal International Order that prescribes a set of rule-based relationships for international cooperation based on political liberalism, economic liberalism, and liberal internationalism. However, economic globalization has witnessed a relative decline, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. This form of ‘de-globalization’ challenges the assumptions upon which modern IEL is premised. This introductory article to the special issue on ‘Domestic Investment Laws and International Economic Law in the Liberal International Order’ explains how domestic law has started playing an increasingly important role in regulating foreign investment. Often overlooked instruments such as Domestic Investment Laws, Investment Screening Mechanisms, and Investment Promotion Agencies are now important tools in promoting or restricting foreign investment flows. Expanding on this premise, the article examines the transition from international to domestic in the Liberal International Order with a focus on Domestic Investment Laws. The move to domestic law does not signal a new era of economic isolation for States. Instead, it presents an effort to achieve similar ends of attracting foreign investors using different means while exercising more control over foreign investment.

International Relations discussion of the Ukraine War has revived an interest in ethical foreign policy debates that were central to the discipline in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This short article seeks to draw an important distinction in articulations of liberal idealism between the early post-cold war period and today. The key point is that liberal internationalism in the post-cold war period assumed that a liberal international order was able to literally come into being, realising the Kantian cosmopolitan imaginary. However, the realisation of a liberal international also brought a problematic sense of closure, an end to imaginaries of progress. The discussion of this crisis of modernity was often displaced to debates over globalisation and, more recently, the Anthropocene and catastrophic climate change, rather than directly referencing the international order itself. In analysing the Ukraine War as the first war articulated as enabling the repair of this closure, able to ‘un-cancel’ the future, this article seeks to bring the concerns of temporal closure and international order together. It is suggested that the drive to project a liberal futural imaginary marks a return to Kantian ethics with a clear separation between liberal ideals and the ‘evil’ of empirical reality itself.

The Liberal International Order (LIO) is under pressure from various angles. To account for this phenomenon, a recent trend is to focus on endogenous sources of contestation—institutional properties of the order that create negative feedback effects. In this article, we seize on and extend an endogenous explanation centring on the LIO’s political structure and institutional design. While existing research stipulates a connection between the rising authority of liberal international organisations (IOs) and their increasing politicisation, we still lack a clear understanding of the reasons behind the growing rejection of the order at the level of mass publics. We argue that the LIO’s institutional setup contains a widening ‘democracy gap’ denoting a disconnect between the participatory legitimation requirements for the exercise of political authority and the technocratic legitimation rationale characterising IOs. By creating a justification deficit, the democracy gap incites growing political dissatisfaction and, by implying a responsiveness deficit, it turns policy contestation into outright polity contestation. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument in case studies of the EU and the international regimes on trade and human rights, and subsequently discuss the analytical and normative implications of our argument.

How do major Asian states regard the current international security order? Do they agree or disagree among themselves? This is an introduction to a special section on ‘Asian conceptions of international order: what Asia wants’. It draws on articles analysing the stances of China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam towards the existing international security order usually described as a liberal international order (LIO). It argues that Asian states substantially support the main constitutive and regulatory norms and institutions of the LIO, but they worry that the LIO does not consistently honour these norms. Asians disagree on the centrality of political liberalism, but even Japan and South Korea, the most liberal states, are uncomfortable with strident criticism, punishment and the exclusion of less liberal states. Asians also disagree on the role of US alliances: some are strongly supportive, some are ambivalent and some are negative. Finally, Asians disagree on how they voice dissatisfaction. Japan and South Korea supplement existing norms and institutions as a way of transcending the limitations of the LIO; south-east Asian states promote ASEAN's mediatory role for peace and security above and beyond existing global arrangements; and Indonesia, India and China want to move from being norm takers to becoming norm shapers. The introduction ends with six policy implications.

This essay uses COVID-19 to illuminate the sacrificial practices of the liberal international order as woven through the concepts of humanitarian governance, moral economy, triage, and sacrifice. The concept of a sacrificial international order calls attention to how all international orders have their share of sacrifices—and this includes liberal international orders. International orders can be distinguished by the selection mechanisms used to identify the sacrifices and the meanings attached to them. I call attention to how liberal international orders often rely on markets as a selection mechanism and interpret these deaths as part of progress. Following critical contributions to the study of neoliberalism that show how markets shape the ethics of “giving life” and “letting die,” I illuminate these processes through four concepts: humanitarian governance and the claim that the highest moral principle is saving lives and relieving suffering; moral economy that regulates who has access to basic subsistence goods during periods of crisis; triage, which considers how to prioritize whose lives are valued; and whether all deaths count as sacrifices or whether they are better understood as “those who can be killed.” I conclude by discussing how COVID-19 conjures hierarchies of humanity ignored by the liberal international order and challenges the discipline to consider the sacrifices in world order.

The relationship between liberal international order and global trade has evolved over the years. International trade sectors that emerged in both the 19th and the 20th centuries reflect the interest of the hegemony. The agreements that lowered tariff barriers between nations established global orders that contain strong mercantilist and protectionist practices. Even so, the international order after World War II have been much more liberal than is usually assumed and provided the basis of expanding global trade in 20th century. Although the rise of Asian nations, Japan and China in particular, has contributed to the growth of the global trade, they have not yet made real drastic changes in liberal international order. It is to be seen how Japan’s initiatives of TPP renewal and Chinese OBOR efforts play out in establishing new international order that defines the patterns of global trade.