The fatigue of multilateralism: A new hope for international law—Afterword to the Foreword by Karen Alter

Abstract

Abstract Karen J. Alter’s Foreword describes how the history of international law is, to a large extent, the history of modern capitalism. Her regime complexity approach shows the political nature of international law and its distributional consequences. But international law also is a cultural product. In this sense, international law is dynamic and can be responsive to rapid social change. Any potential change of international law, therefore, must be understood historically and within the context of the changes in the ideas that led to an American “world order.” Hence, I argue that the current transformation of international law is not caused solely by changing power imbalances and geopolitics, but also by cultural change. In this Afterword, I use Alter’s provocatively ambitious Foreword to sketch what international law may say about social changes and pose that these changes also signal a breakdown in the structures that supported Alter’s multilateral international law: a contrived view of the state; the use of law to normalize colonial inequities; the deployment of international organizations to advance the idea of individual choice; and international law as a primarily spatial (rather than temporal) phenomenon.