The New Age of Hybridity and Clash of Norms: China, BRICS, and Challenges of Global Governance in a Postliberal International Order

Abstract

This article sketches an analytical framework to account for new patterns of global governance. We characterize the emergent postliberal international order as a new age of hybridity, which signifies that no overriding set of paradigms dominate global governance. Instead, we have a complex web of competing norms, which creates new opportunities as well as major elements of instability, uncertainty, and anxiety. In the age of hybridity, non-Western great powers (led by China) play an increasingly counter-hegemonic role in shaping new style multilateralism—ontologically fragmented, normatively inconsistent, and institutionally incoherent. We argue that democracy paradox constitutes the fundamental issue at stake in this new age of hybridity. On the one hand, global power transitions seem to enable “democratization of globalization” by opening more space to the hitherto excluded non-Western states to make their voices heard. On the other hand, emerging pluralism in global governance is accompanied by the regression of liberal democracy and spread of illiberalism that enfeeble “globalization of democratization.”