Loading summary
Transcript74 lines
- [00:00]
A
Thank you all very much for coming today. I'm Peter Trubowitz, professor of International Relations here at the London School of Economics. We're very privileged to have an extraordinarily distinguished panel here today to debate the future of the liberal world order. The debate is being co sponsored by the Department of International Relations here at the LSE and the Transatlantic Academy, which is based in Washington D.C. i think this is fitting as a number of my colleagues in the IR Department have written extensively on this topic. And it is very much this topic at the heart of the Transatlantic Academy's research agenda. I should mention also that the Transatlantic Academy has a summary of their work on this general topic. And those are available, I think, on a table outside, so you can pick one up on the way out. The topic today is of course a big one and it's got so many different dimensions that it is, it's hard to get your arms around it. At its core though, it's a rather straightforward proposition or question, really. Is a long period of Western hegemony coming to an end? And if so, what the heck will replace it? In many ways, the Western based order is a distinctive one. It's organized right around open markets, multilateral institutions, collective security partnerships, democratic norms, and last but not least, American leadership. Some think that this the order is in deep trouble, deeper than many Western leaders understand. Others think that for all its warts and the challenges it faces, the liberal order can and will persist. Each of our panelists have thought and written a great deal about these issues. And for those of you who know their work, you already know that they don't see eye to eye. And in the spirit of constructive engagement and debate, this is the LSE after all. My goal today is to help get those differences on the table so that we can reflect on them together. And in that connection, I invited our panelists to consider the following three questions in preparing their remarks, no matter how they were coming at the problem. Number one, in thinking about the future of the liberal world order, what's the single biggest challenge going forward? Number two, can the challenge be met within the international institutional architecture that's currently in place? Or do we need new structures? And if the latter, what might those structures look like? So that's the agenda. Before we get down to business, let me just say a few words about the panelists and in the order that they will be presenting. Our first speaker will be John Eikenberry, the Albert Milbank professor of Politics and International affairs at Princeton University, and this year the Eastman Visiting professor up at Oxford. John's most recent book is Liberal Leviathan the Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order with Princeton University Press. Barry Boozan, a hometown favorite, will speak next. Barry is emeritus professor of International Relations at the LSE and honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University. His most recent book, co edited with Oli Weaver, is Regions and the Structure of International Security, and that's with Cambridge. Trina Flockhart will follow Barry. Trina is senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and this year a senior Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy. A number of the fellows from the Transatlantic Academy are here with us today. Her most recent book, co edited with Tim Dunn, is Liberal World Order, and that's with Oxford University Press. Charles Kupchan gets to bat cleanup today. He is professor of International Relations at Georgetown University and the Whitney H. Shepherdson Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign, and he also is a senior fellow this year at the Transatlantic Academy. Charlie's most recent book is no one's the the Rising Rest and the Coming Global Turn with Oxford. Each of the panelists, each of our panelists have been allotted 12 minutes. That's it. To make their case. And after we've heard from all four of them, we'll then open things up to the floor. I'll do my level best to accommodate as many questions as I can. We'll probably end clustering questions. I should add that this event is being recorded and so if you haven't already, please switch your mobile phone to silent for Twitter users. Today, it's lseir. And so without further ado, please join me in welcoming our panelists today. So, John, the floor is yours. You want to take it down there? Thank you, Peter.
- [05:55]
B
Yeah, I'll just sit here. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming and what a great chance to debate a big issue. I'm going to more, I'm going to praise rather than bury liberal world order today. I'm going to be more optimistic than maybe some of the other panelists. I think there are crises and transitions that we can watch that are happening today, but they are crises and transitions of success. That is to say, they're the kinds of transitions that you would want if you are trying to build an open, highly interdependent world order, which is the way I think we would want to talk about what liberal international order is. But there's a debate and these are big questions. I think there's wide agreement that we are witnessing a global power transition, that is to say, unipolarity is ending we are moving into a more diffuse world order. Some people say multipolar states are rising and declining. I think there's strong agreement that that is what's happening at the underlying system of power. But there's less agreement on the consequences for international order, for the political formation, for the rules and institutions. We do know that there are thinkers who are suggesting this is a very dangerous kind of transition. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, EH Carr all warn us that power transitions can be dangerous. They can even generate war. Certainly struggles over the basic terms of order. That follows from the argument that orders are really created by powerful states to suit their interests. And when those power constituencies change, there's a struggle over those rules and institutions. It's a structural argument really, that powerful states rise up, find opportunities to create a governance system. Eventually they decline. There's a legitimacy crisis, a gap between power and the ability to enforce the order. There are new contenders who are either struggling to impose a new set of institutions and rules, or spoilers and bring the system down, even if they don't replace it. But the question remains, what sort of order do non Western rising states want? Are there deep divides between the west and the rest over the terms of the liberal international order? Is it a struggle over authority, as I would argue, or is it a basic struggle over principles, rules and values that are much more deep and much more consistent with a wrenching global transition? Put simply, when the world is less American and less Western, will it be less liberal? My view is that the liberal transition is actually not leading to something that would be post liberal. That is to say, the power transition is not triggering a fundamental struggle over liberal world order, even as it diffuses power and authority away from the West. Indeed, what is the most striking feature of the existing struggle over order is that China and other rising states, Brazil, India, South Korea, are rising up within rather than outside of the rules and institutions that have been built over the last 60 years, the big ones, the IMF, the World bank, the United nations, and the other regimes of that order. Put differently, the rise of China and the non Western developing countries is not creating a reduced or shrinkage constituency for liberal world order, but rather a rising, expanding constituency, wanting more rather than less liberal internationalism defined as openness and the rule of law, and contrasted with orders built around blocks and spheres and zones and empire. The struggle today seems to be about authority and rule. Who sits at the table? Who decides who, about revising the political hierarchy of liberal order. Not a struggle over rival visions of modernity or even rival ideologies. Of order. There are several reasons for making this argument. I'll mention four of them. Number one, the old order that rising states are rising up and greeting is actually a much more formidable, complex, deeply entrenched order than past rising states of the Paul Kennedy narrative have encountered. It is an order that is global, highly institutionalized. I described it as easy to join and hard to overturn. I think there are four characteristics that 1 might want to flag about that order. Integration capacity. It has seen over the last 60 years the capacity to integrate rising states, starting really with Germany and Japan, but post Soviet states. States that have been connected to it in trade and security and made transitions, political and economic in character, shared leadership. It's also an order that is expansive in the way it brings states together. Think about the move from G7 to G20. It allows for remarkably, the sharing of the spoils of modernity. You can get rich if you are on the periphery, certainly the semi periphery of this liberal order. And fourthly, it accommodates different strategies of development. This is really also not often reflected upon, that is to say, inside of the tent, so to speak. There have been and continue to be rival and alternative strategies of development. Of course there's the laissez faire, neoliberal, fundamentalist sort that is associated with certain states at certain moments. But there's also the embedded social democratic, more European vision of political economy and international order. And there's also a what I'll call a developmental statism, the state development led model which you associate with East Asian states which was accommodated within this order. And indeed there's at least some evidence that Deng Xiaoping, when he was thinking of making this heroic move towards markets and capitalism, he had his eyes on his neighbors, Japan and Korea. Ezra Vogel's book talks a little bit about that. So there is in this order, and this is the first point about the order, these characteristics that make it very different and I would argue more formidable and more attractive, but also less changeable, if you will, than past orders. Secondly, China and other non western rising states want what liberal internationalism will give them. Defined as I suggested, by two most fundamental characteristics, openness and at least loosely rule based order. Openness gives you and gives these states access to other societies for trade, investment, knowledge, technology, resources and rules and institutions. Because rising states gain, as they gain wealth and standing, they want more rather than less rule based order to protect, if nothing else, their equities. Which is precisely the story I would tell about the rise of liberalism in Europe and the West. That is to say, it's a more CB macpherson type of story about rules and institutions, not simply reflecting a set of values, but strategies and mechanisms to protect property rights and those equities that you've gathered. And that is not a Western or a Christian or cultural based demand. So I think we need to think what liberalism is as we talk about whether there are universal principles that can allow for these transitions to occur. Number three, China and the other non Western states are not a bloc. They have different interests. Yes, they are all capitalist and most of them are democratic. Yet they have different geopolitical interests in trade and energy and regionalism and security. Brazil has a stronger critique of China than it does of the United States now, which is interesting. Worried about de industrialization from the Chinese connection. Worried about exchange rates from the Chinese connection. Alignments are complex. When Obama met Dilma last year, he asked, there's a little mouse in the room that told me this story. He asked Dilma, what are your priorities? And she said, infrastructure, clean energy, education and science and technology. And he said, well, those are my priorities. This is not a value difference. It's industrial capitalist democracies that are all struggling in one way or another, trying to solve problems about energy, about inequality and, and the fundamental social contract. They have more in common than not. They are in the same boat, worried about the same things. Fourthly, it's important to look beyond the global power transition defined in terms of the BRICs, which have gotten a lot of attention. I would argue that the real, the big story of our period, of our age, of our era, is the rise of what I would call a global middle class of states. Not just India and Brazil and China, but other states. Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, Canada. Countries that are all rising and seeking a voice, all exhibiting what I would call stakeholder strategies pushing for more multilateral cooperation. That's part of the increasing heft of the multilateral liberal order. You have a whole new cohort, a new generation of states that want more, not less, multilateralism. They're worried about states at the top who are not multilateral enough. And so a new constituency, a new choir that's singing a song that is a song associated with liberal multilateralism influencing the world through the politics of agenda setting, bridge building and coalition diplomacy. South Korea is the poster child. I go to Korea a lot. This is really the state I would look at as much as China. A state that has been articulating a vision of global Korea, that is hosting the G20 as it did the Global Nuclear Safety Summit, Clean Energy, Human Security Forums. It is a stakeholder state that is important. And when you talk about the transition from the west to the east and from the north to the south, you have to talk about states like that. I do think in the end you have to look at China. It's the swing state in many ways. And if you look at China, it's not a state that is articulating a revisionist economic vision of international order. It's moving closer to the center, not away from the international order. In earlier decades, China and several other associated states were talking about a new international economic order, the language of the 1970s. You see this in government and party documents from the 70s and 80s and 90s, but at least as early as 2007, you see a gradual shift in the discourse towards reform. Wang Jizhu, the professor at Peking University, says this is subtle but important. The way that China thinks about the international system is changing. Essentially it means it's language of reform, of reasonableness, of fairness in the way, not so much fairness in the division of the spoils, but as how we govern the system. And it really means essentially we want more voice, we want a bigger table, we want a bigger chair at the table. And if we have a wish list, what is China's wish list? It is, number one, greater voice within the IMF and World Bank. Number two, greater influence in leadership forms like the G20 and then in the long term, internationalization of the currency. And that ultimately all three of those bring you closer to, to the center of the world capitalist system and the political institutions and bargains that are part of it than away from it. There isn't a Chinese model, there isn't an ideology of an alternative to liberal internationalism. It just isn't there. So to conclude, I would say that my argument is that we are in a period of transition and I would even say a crisis of liberal international order. But it's not an EH Carr crisis, it's rather a Carl Polanye crisis. What I mean by that is it's not a crisis, as Carr would have it, a moment when realists step forward and say, liberals, you got it wrong. You just couldn't do it. The return to anarchy or power politics, the enduring truths of international politics are reasserting themselves. Sorry, that's not the kind of crisis we're in. It's a Polanye crisis where in some sense it's a crisis of success. As I said at the very beginning of the system bubbling up with growth and expansion and integration and new problems rooted Ultimately in how do you stabilize and make liberal democracies work? It's a crisis really of rebuilding the foundation that has been overruled, the activities that have been generated by that system, activity that if you were in 1945, 46, 47, thinking about what kind of order could we create and they could see the order today, it would just be a jaw dropping moment of success. We've succeeded all too well and now we have problems to deal with. It seems like that's the kind of problem we have. It's the world of democracies is the universe of social phenomenon that require our attention. Political stability of democracies, economic inequality and the problems of energy and sustainable development, these are all problems that all states have. It's not a divide that separates the west from the West. Thank you.
- [19:43]
A
Well, thanks John, for very much for that spirited defense of the liberal order. Well, Barry, I think John teed things up pretty nicely for you. So he says the future of the liberal world order looks pretty bright. What say you?
- [19:58]
C
Well, I'm not a liberal here and I don't think it looks quite this bright or John, but there's quite a bit on which we agree. I think probably most of us here will agree about the decentered world order in one version or another. And I think most of us would agree that great power war is no longer going to be an important mediator of how this order works. And maybe we all agree. I would certainly agree with John that Russia and China are not in some sense challengers to this order because partly they're bound up with it and partly they don't have an alternative. That said, if I turn to Peter's three questions, it does seem to me that his first question raises a lot of issues. I mean, he asked us to identify the biggest challenge to the liberal world order. And I mused with that for a while and then thought, well, you know, I've been a team player up to this point, but it seemed to me the only way I could obey the rule is to say that the biggest challenge is that there are several challenges is all happening at the same time. And that gives me a way to talk about a variety of things. And I'm not sure that I have an order of priority for these, but all of them seem to be important. I mean, John has hinted at one of them, that because we are approaching the end of a long era of Western dominance, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a power transition crisis, but it does mean that there's a problem about the succession of global governance, if you will. In other words, we're moving away from having a hegemonic carrier of this order to something else. And something else isn't very clear as yet. So there's a problem about what the governance order is going to be that relates to the second problem, which is that the practice of the liberal global order, it seems to me, has discredited it in a variety of ways. Some of these are general issues to do with the functioning of liberalism and capitalism particularly, and most obviously the great inequalities that are associated with that system of political economy and that introduces political strains and also principled opposition. The liberal order has come to be too much associated with the US it seems to me, and with the particular self centered interests of the us. So American policy in the Middle East, American policy in the war on terror, and the various hypocrisies around human rights associated with that, all of these, it seems to me, have damaged the credibility of the liberal world order through its practice. So the problem of the lack of a hegemonic leader is in a sense amplified by the fact that the existing leader has somewhat been botching the job over the last decade or so, and that the US is no longer, in a sense, the shining model, the city on the hill as it once used to be. The US used to be able to make a reasonably credible claim to own the future, and a lot of people agreed with that. But when you look now at American politics, at American health care, at the war on drugs and various other things, there's a lot more doubt around that, it seems to me. And that also therefore weakens the liberal model. There are of course principled reasons for opposing the liberal model anyway. I've mentioned inequality already. The claim to own the future would be disputed from a variety of different perspectives. The necessity of valuing individualism amongst most things would be disputed on cultural grounds from a variety of different quarters. So it seems to me there are questions both about practice and about principle in relation to the liberal world order. Another one that's emerging is how it's going to deal or if it's going to deal with the coming global environmental crisis. Doesn't look too good on that so far. But perhaps the main point I have to make here might sound like a rather hair splitting academic point, but I think it's important is that if we think carefully about the ending of the Cold War and all of that, what won the Cold War was not a liberal order, but a capitalist one. And I think we need to going forward to think about that, because in a sense, one could argue that capitalism is economic liberalism, but that it's not necessarily carrying the rest of the liberal package with it. In other words, economic liberalism can do fine under a variety of political regimes. And we see that in practice. I mean, there's liberal democratic capitalist regimes, as exemplified by the US There are social democratic capitalist regimes as exemplified in much of Europe and Japan and Korea. There's what you might call competitive authoritarian capitalist regimes like Russia, where there's a kind of semblance of democracy, but it's played on very uneven grounds, and it's essentially an authoritarian version of capitalism. And then the state bureaucratic capitalism, as exemplified by China, where democracy is more or less completely out of the picture. Now, if you were a good classical liberal, which I'm not, you would argue that the package of capitalism must eventually reproduce the whole package of liberalism. Now, this may be true, but it's one of those things that. But if it is true, it's not going to be true in a hurry. It doesn't seem to me that we could look around the corner and see a kind of Star Trek world in which all of capitalism is going to take on the liberal democratic or the social democratic form. The authoritarian capitalists and the state bureaucratic capitalists are looking reasonably comfortable in their seats at the moment. They are not doing worse than the democratic capitalists. Some of them are doing better in some measures. So it seems to me a reasonable assumption that we are going to have a politically mixed capitalism. I think I heard John say something like, we are all capitalists now, and I more or less agree with that. I know you're not allowed to say that in China, but you only have to spend a few minutes walking around in Shanghai or Beijing or any other major Chinese city to feel that you are right in the middle of what looks and feels very much like a capitalist society, even if the government can't actually say so. But this looks like a reasonably stable form of capitalism that's going to be there for decades. So in terms of the immediate transition that we've got, the problem, it seems to me, is that we've got capitalism more or less universalized. In other words, the economic side of liberalism more or less universalized, but the political and social side of liberalism still hotly contested and in ways that are not likely to disappear anytime soon. And if you look at the varieties of capitalism literature, there's pretty good grounds there for thinking, as I say, that this politically varied capitalism is going to be with us for a Long time. So it seems to me there are both principled and practical questions about the liberal order which don't have easy answers. It's not clear to me how well the liberal democratic capitalists are going to get on with the authoritarian capitalists. In principle, they should share a lot more. In other words, the ideological bandwidth of international society is now much narrower than it's been for any time in the last century and a half. But nonetheless, the difference between authoritarians and democracies is still playing strongly. And the world order or disorder that we're going to look at is going to depend on how much weight is put on those kinds of political differences. Now, Peter's second question was can the existing institutions cope? And I have a very short answer to that, which is no, basically because these are still institutions that are backward looking, formed during the period of Western hegemony. The UN and the UN Security Council are already hopelessly out of date and they are basically unreformable as they stand. And they're just going to get more and more out of date. So I think that's pretty clear. We need to think about institutions in a more basic way. His third question, what might new institutions look like? That then becomes a rather important question. Now here I'd have a big disagreement with John. I'm not quite sure whether you're still advocating the concert of democracies or anything of that sort, but to my mind that's an appalling idea.
- [29:41]
B
I'm not, I'm not good, just changed my mind.
- [29:45]
C
That seems to me to be offensive liberalism in both senses. What I think my diagnosis points to is the need for a concert of capitalist powers. And I have in mind very much of the 19th century concert of Europe. It needs to be a pluralist international society based on a coexistence logic, practicing soft geoeconomics, in which one tries to maximize the shared interest in managing global capitalism and to minimize the political differences in which that capitalism is embedded. One of the great assets here, as John was hinting at, is that the idea of imperial capitalism or imperial preference type capitalism was more or less thrown out with the Second World War. It was defeated in a sense by that war. So all of these modes of capitalism are essentially hitched to a global capitalism in terms of the institutions. Therefore we need to build institutions along those kinds of lines, pluralist institutions. But I think we also need to look not at institutions in the liberal sense, but at institutions in the English school sense, because there's a substrate of important shared ideas, including sovereignty and nationalism. The market, human equality, international law, diplomacy, the illegitimacy of empire and great power war. There are many primary institutions, as I would call them, that are shared across the political spectrum. So it seems to me the grounds for optimism lie in the idea that capital, we're all capitalist now. The ideological bandwidth is therefore narrower. And what we need to do is to find an institutional way of building on that. Thank you.
- [31:44]
A
Thanks, Barry, for those terrific comments and coming in on time. Well, I don't know, Trina. From where I'm sitting, it looks like I don't know. Barry thinks John's got it mostly wrong. So I think the next question is whether or not there's any chance that Barry's got it right about backward looking institutions and the need to fundamentally reform them.
- [32:08]
D
Well, it's such a pleasure to be here because all of these three panelists have all played an enormous role in my thinking on liberal international order. But I don't really disagree wholeheartedly with any of them, nor do I disagree completely with any of them. But what I do is I take little bits and pieces from each of them and mix it up. So I guess I'm the pragmatist in this panel and you use what I think is useful and discard what I think isn't. Barry and Charlie, I completely agree with the decentered, pluralist conception of international order. I think we are moving towards a pluralistic, decentered world that is going to consist of several different international orders. And John, I agree that liberal order is and must absolutely remain open and easy to join and that the leading state in an international order maintains internal cohesion of that order through different forms of relationships that are based either on rules or on power. So that is sort of some of the things that I take from them. And it's especially the latter bit that I want to talk about because when I thought about the questions, the three questions that you asked us to consider, then what is the biggest challenge going forward in relation to the future of liberal world order? Well, then it struck me that there's two ways. Well, Barry says there's lots of ways and I'm sure there is. But in the way I was thinking of it, there are two ways of looking at that question. One is how to sustain liberal order into the future. This is about the internal health of liberal international order. And the other is about how to ensure global order in a more pluralistic world. And that is about how to facilitate cooperation, to be able to provide public goods and to be able to meet common challenges in this pluralistic order that I think we are moving towards. Now, I would have loved to speak about both of them, but I think my 12 minutes limits me to the first one. And what I want to do is really to unpack the concept of international order. Because if we are seeing these several orders emerging, then there must be something that international orders have in common. And I think it will be useful in our thinking ahead, especially on the question on how eventually we might be able to cooperate, facilitate cooperation between different orders, to have a more clear idea about what an international order actually looks like. So I won't bore you with many slides, but I have one drawing where I have attempted to draw international order. I start from the premise that international orders are clusters of states that usually converge around one leading state. And they have four basic features. First of all, international orders are characterized by their capabilities and resources often provided by the leading state. And they're also characterized by their internal cohesion and their magnetism, which I guess you could say is. Is Joseph Nye's soft power. So for short, I call that part or that element of an international order just power. You'll recognize the second one, Barry. International orders are characterized by a number of durable and recognized patterns of shared practices receding in values held commonly by the members of the order and embodying a mix of relatively fundamental norms, rules and principles, that is primary institutions, which I have nicked word for word from Barry. Then thirdly, international orders are characterized by an institutional architecture, which I guess is your secondary institutions. And here I think it's important that an institutional architecture might be either dense, comprising many formal and rule based organizations as well as informal networks along the lines of what Annemarie Slaughter is talking about. Or it may be a thin institutional architecture that is based much more on traditional forms of small social structures and traditions. And then finally, in the middle of my drawing, international orders, of course, all have a domestic element which has particular structures and political processes which will both influence, but also be influenced by the other elements of the order. Now, I'll spare you further slides, but clearly the interesting issues here is that if you have this conceptualization of international order, then it enables us to focus on particular aspects of international orders. How do these different elements influence each other? And what channels might there be to facilitate cooperation between different orders? What I then want to do is basically look at the current liberal international order. How is it doing and what, what needs to be done? What institutions do we need to help where there may be health issues? Well, liberal order is clearly declining in Power status, at least in relative terms. However, despite the current economic crisis and despite marked decline in, for example, military spending and some of all those other parameters that are usually used for measuring the health, I think the west is, or liberal order is still strong along all measurable parameters in comparison, and perhaps more so in those parameters that are less easy to measure, such as innovation, resilience and legitimacy. And you could probably think of many others. US global hegemony may be at an end, but then that was always on the cards. I don't think anyone could ever have expected for hegemony of this sort to be anything other than a temporary condition. But within the power element, the internal cohesion of liberal order is in danger and its magnetism especially appears to be fading, despite recent attempts to repair the damage that was caused, especially by the Bush administration. Things like the pivot, Bush, Gates rather, predictions of a dim and dismal future for the transatlantic relationship, and lately the NSA scandal, these are all issues that are undermining the cohesion of liberal order. Moreover, the economic crisis and the ongoing political debacles in American politics and elsewhere I think is damaging liberal orders. Magnetism then, on the primary institutions, which I would probably say is the sort of the whole package of a liberal idea set. And I would include an economic dimension, but I think it's important to look at it both as a political and economic dimension. Here it's common to talk about crisis, but I think once you start looking at the ideas that underpin liberal order, then liberal ideas have always been in some sort of crisis. In fact, it is its ability to change over time and to absorb new ideas and adapt to its environment. That is the strength of the liberal idea. So liberal orders perceived weakness elsewhere that it once adhered to. Colonialism, was racist, was undemocratic. All of that is true, but I don't think necessarily we should see that as a weakness, but rather as a strength that it isn't like that anymore. So the secondary institutions, and this is where I do most of my research, look at NATO and the eu. Well, I think we can easily agree that all is not well in the secondary institutions. The EU appears to be floundering both from economic, political, and especially from the military perspective. NATO appears to be irrelevant, the WTO, ditto. And the UN is, as Barry mentioned, in need of fundamental reform. But I think if we stay with the first question, that is the internal health of liberal order, then I think the institutions that we have are actually in not pretty good shape, but they're certainly in a shape that we can work with. And also I think it's important to remember that in comparison to what went before, the institutional organization of liberal order is very strong. It's a very dense institutional architecture. Also, I think what is the strength here is that because of that dense institutional architecture, I think liberal order has a much greater propensity to be willing to cooperate with others across dividing lines, whether they are cultural, political or economic lines. So there's a great potential here for cooperation. If I was to look at the other way of looking at liberal order, finally with the domestic structures, well, democracy is not always the most efficient form of governance. I think that is very plain. But even in the midst of deep crisis, political and social unrest has not developed to the extent that I think you could have perhaps feared it would. And I think democracy, even in those countries that are most touched by crisis, are still not questioning the actual validity of democracy. So my SWOT analysis of liberal order, this leads me to conclude that yes, there is certainly a perhaps urgent need for improvement in all four elements, but the order is not beyond repair and should certainly be able to be sustainable into the future. Now then, to the question briefly, if the challenges can be met within the international institutional architecture that we currently have in place and do we need new governing structures? Well, I think the answer is yes to both camps. And one of my yeses is not a league of democracies, but I would call it something else. But I think if we have an international order that is different from other orders, then I actually think we need an institution that can signal what it is that order is. Now, how do I best explain? No, I think I'll stick with what is changing at the moment. I think the ttip, for example, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that is currently being negotiated, this is one way of reforming the existing institutional order in, in liberal order. Trans Pacific Partnership is another. That is, I think, particularly important to what John is talking about because I think the Trans Pacific Partnership is actually changing the foundation for partnerships in the Pacific and Asia from being bilateral and power based to moving much more towards being rule based and multilateral. But on the concept of democracies, I hate that term and I disagree with it. I think we need something that can signal very clearly liberal orders continued cosmopolitan aspiration and something that makes that stops being apologetic about liberal orders and liberal ideas passed. But that is open. And this is what makes it different from a constant concept of democracies or the suggestion that the Council of Foreign Relations had for like minded democracies because I think it needs to be something that is an open institution. The Council of Foreign Relations said 10 democracies. I can't remember what the concept of democracies, but again, it was quite difficult to join. And this goes against the whole spirit of liberal order. We need to have something that actually says, well, you're welcome to, to join us even if you are not in the transatlantic area or within any of the other organizational structures that we have. And that clearly signals what is it to be a liberal state? Because to be honest, I don't think any of us really have a definition of what it means to be a liberal state. And I think that is something that we need.
- [45:54]
C
Great.
- [45:54]
A
Thank you very much, Trina. Charlie, One of the challenges in going last, of course, is that very often there's nothing left to say when you finally get your 12 minutes. But something tells me that's not going to be an issue here.
- [46:15]
E
Well, Peter, thanks for organizing this. I'll try to very briefly do three things in my 11 and a half minutes. One is describe where I come down on this issue. Secondly, say a few things about why I come down where I do. And then finally, since I'm batting clean up, to try to identify where I think the sources of divergence come from. What are some of the underlying differences, conceptual and intellectual differences, that leads one to arrive at different positions, conclusions on this issue of wither order in the 21st century. As far as my own view, let me begin by sort of proposing a thought experiment. And that would be, imagine that we gathered here in the year 1700, not here in this room, wasn't here yet, but in London. We'd be in a country that was moving forward, post glorious revolution, parliament stronger, beginning to feel like it was going to reach out as a great power. But the world in the year 1700 was one in which power was very broadly diffused around the globe. In fact, 50% of global wealth in the year 1700 was either in India or in China. And then you had three other main spheres of influence, Japan, the Ottomans and Europe. The question of how to manage global politics in the year 1700 didn't matter, didn't come into play because these zones of influence were relatively compartmentalized and segmented. And therefore the question that we are debating today, how do you create order in the world? Didn't come up. There was order in the Ottoman world, there was order in the Qing Dynasty, that was enough. Then we get to 1815, end of the Napoleonic wars, beginning of Pax Britannica, and I think that we have been living in a certain kind of world order since 1815, in which globalization and interdependence has kicked in, in which we are smushed together in ways that we've never been smushed together before. But that process of interdependence and globalization has taken place under the watch of either an Anglo Saxon country on this side of the Atlantic or an Anglo Saxon country on the other side of the Atlantic. In other words, the world that we live in today has been constructed by and overseen by one particular kind of Western liberal polity. And we are moving in my mind, to a world that will for the first time be interdependent, be globalized, where the question of global governance is front and center in a way it's never been before. But there will no longer be a captain at the helm. There will no longer be someone in the driver's seat. And the key question before us is, can we move to a world that is decentered materially without also moving to a world that is decentered normatively? John's answer to that question is yes. My answer to that question is no. I think the wheels are about to come off the liberal Western international order. And it is the grand strategic question of our time to figure out how to go from where we are today to a new rules based system that will continue to preserve international order. But they won't be our rules. They will need to be rules that are rewritten in a compromise and a consensus between the Atlantic democracies and merging powers, most of which do not share our fundamental perspectives on either domestic or international governance. So why do I come out on that position? I think we are all in agreement about the end of the unipolar moment. And you could look at any number of indicators to show that the world that we have been living in, that is one dominated by the Atlantic democracies, is coming to an end. And I think the easiest way to see that is to say our democracies collectively used to represent 70 to 75% of global GDP. For the first time in the modern era, we collectively have sunk below 50%. We're now at about 48%. And that market share will continue to decline as China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia take a larger share of the pie. The interesting question, and I think the question where we disagree, is what does that mean for how the world works? And here I think I'm closer to Barry and Trina. Well, Trina, I guess is right in the middle. But the, you know, when I look at China, I See, a country that on most critical dimensions of order, does not buy into the Western liberal order to reduce international order to trade. To say, well, they're capitalist and therefore they will buy into our views about governance, about democracy, about human rights, about sovereignty, about legitimacy, strikes me as not looking at China with eyes wide open. And I would point out that there have been other capitalist states in history with whom the Atlantic democracies have gone to war. Germany would come to mind in World War I, even though it was an aristocratic society heavily influenced by the Junkers, nevertheless was a capitalist society. But that didn't do much to prevent war against Britain or against the United States. When I look at the Middle East, I see a part of the world that is capitalist, generally operating according to market principles, but on fundamental dimensions of order. And politics has very little in common with the Western world. Political Islam is the winner of the Arab Awakening. Thus far. That part of the world thinks about the relationship between religion and politics completely differently than we do, in part because the west became the west after or as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation. In other words, there is a very different kind of political formation emerging in the Middle east than there has emerged in North America or in Northern Europe. And finally, when I look at Brazil or India, countries that are ostensibly secular and liberal already, I see countries that are really willing to play by the rules only so far, and that there is a potent head of steam in a country like India or Brazil to stand up to the Western liberal order and not to play by its rules. And I would simply point out one small anecdote. The reaction in India over the past few weeks to the arrest of a diplomat in the United States for not paying her nanny a full wage. It has led to a crisis in diplomatic relations, which is to some extent scraping the surface of how much underlying tension there is and animosity there is in India about American hegemony and about the sense that India continues to operate under the thumb of Western hegemony. Finally, and both Barry and Trina have talked about this, and maybe John could weigh in on this in the Q and A. Is our Western system going through a blip, a downturn in the business cycle, or is the system stumbling in a deeper way? I don't know the answer to that question, but it's something that I think we need to debate today. I don't think it's coincidental that the global balance of power is shifting at the same time that the west is stumbling. And that's because globalization is taking wealth from our societies. Transferring it to emerging economies, causing a deep decline in the welfare of our own middle classes. And that's one of the reasons that I think our democratic systems are stumbling. I don't see that as something that can be easily corrected. And as both Barry and Trina have said, number one, that makes the west somewhat less attractive as a model. And number two, it means that our lights are not fully on as we head into this difficult international period. Let me conclude by saying a few things about where I see the main intellectual divides on this debate. First, I think that a key question is where do norms come from? When a power goes out in the world and attempts to create order, what norms does it push out? And I think in John's world the answer to that is functional norms. Norms that have to do with market norms that have to do with accounts, balance sheets. In my world, they push out norms that come from their history, their political culture, their socioeconomic foundations. So when China gets up there, they're not going to say we will abide by norms written by standards and poor. They're going to be pushing out Confucian norms, history with a huge head of steam about the humiliation of the Chinese people for the last two centuries. In other words, norms come from these deep cultural and political and socioeconomic foundations. Second, how intimately connected are power and ideas? I think in John's world, the ideas that the west has propagated are everybody's ideas. They were written behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. In my world, the rules that we have written are of the west and for the west they have served our interests. They are not everybody's rules. And as a consequence, when we go out there in the world, it's very difficult to untangle the liberal world order from Western power. Furthermore, I think the appeal of our ideas is to some extent a function of our power. Yes, liberal democracy, human rights, dignity are attractive ideas, but they're especially attractive when they're attached to aircraft carriers and to dollars. And when someone comes calling with a different set of ideas and they are attached to Chinese aircraft carriers and to suitcases full of renminbi, which are now internationalized, Chinese ideas may have a lot more cachet than they do today. Third, intellectual difference. I think this is both an EH Car moment and a Polanyi moment. That is to say, I see much more intrinsic geopolitical competition out there than I think John does. Right, it's 5:04 now. By 6:00', clock, Japan and China could be exchanging fire over the offshore islands. As I said, there's an enormous head of steam in China. And it's not just about, as John said, more voice in the World bank and trade. It's about the fact that the Pacific Rim is a parking lot for the US Aircraft carrier. They don't like that. They want naval primacy in their coastal waters. That's geopolitics. That's eh, car. And then the final issue as I touched on this earlier, where are we in the Western model? And I think I would end with one exhortation or one piece of policy advice. And that is wherever you come out on this issue, I think we all end up in the same place in terms of policy prescription. And that is our first, second, third and fourth priorities has to be to get our own house in order because if the European Union is falling apart and the United States is closed for business, we will definitely get this coming transition wrong. If our economic and political systems snap back, not only will the Western model look better in a world in which there is a plurality of options, but we will at least be able to go out there and manage a transition, try to create a new rules based system even as we, as Trina said, preserve, protect and defend our own liberal order. But I think the biggest mistake we can make is to assume that our liberal order is about to be universalized and get on our horses and go stuff it down people's throats.
- [59:53]
A
Okay, so we have about 25 minutes to work with. Rather than giving the panelists another bite at the apple here, we're going to go straight to questions. So I would ask you, if you have a question, please raise your hand. I'll do my best to recognize, try to get as many people involved as possible. When asking a question. I would ask you to refrain from any kind of a speech and just get straight to the question. Maybe just begin by briefly identifying who you are. So do we have any questions? So we have a hand right down here and I think what I'm going to do is. Let's see. And then there's a hand kind of in the middle. Gentleman in the middle there. Is there any other? I'll try to take three questions in a group and right up here. Okay, I'm starting over here.
- [60:51]
C
Okay. I'm Gar Vincent. I used to work with Soledanos and others in the old Eastern Europe during.
- [60:56]
E
The end of the regimes there. I was pretty disturbed to hear, I.
- [61:00]
C
Think Professor Bazan saying we can all roughly, we can rest assured the future.
- [61:06]
E
Won'T be mediated by war.
- [61:09]
C
I don't understand why can we assert that it seems to me probably there are more people in uniform in the world than ever before, a greater range of weapons and so on.
- [61:20]
A
Okay, the next question is Christian up there?
- [61:23]
C
Hi.
- [61:23]
B
I was just wondering whether it was.
- [61:26]
C
A deliberate point that the idea of.
- [61:29]
B
Soft power and kind of the ideological cultural dominance of the US or the Western world was not mentioned at all. Do you feel it's irrelevant or do.
- [61:37]
C
You just feel like you should prioritize.
- [61:39]
E
The issues you mentioned?
- [61:42]
A
And then John, down here in the.
- [61:44]
B
John Hemmings International Relations department here, in.
- [61:47]
E
Terms of global governance architecture, I mean, is it true that all of it needs reform or certainly just certain elements?
- [61:53]
B
Because it was hard to get from the panelists.
- [61:56]
C
In general, the UN Security Council may.
- [61:58]
B
Need reform, but on the other hand.
- [61:59]
E
The wife to seems to be going.
- [62:01]
B
Well, et cetera, that kind of a.
- [62:03]
E
Little bit more in depth than that.
- [62:04]
A
Okay, John, do you want to, you want to go ahead and take a first crack at that and we'll maybe come right down quickly here.
- [62:13]
B
I'll start with a reaction to Charlie. And I think, I think what I've heard him make this argument over the years and I still, at the end of the day, you know, there's a kind of what where's the beef? Kind of reaction. And it has to do with our norms are not their norms. But I never hear what their norms are. And when we get more into their norms, it sounds a lot like protecting sovereignty, promoting commerce and resources and when possible, projecting some domination regionally, which is sort of not a vision of a new world order. It's more operating, yes, in power political terms within an existing order where there is a lot of agreed upon framework. So I think where I would caution Charlie, is that there's a lot of conflation going on in your argument. At one point you're arguing and using as evidence for the west as a Western order and not shared it's aggravation with America. And that's of course my argument that there is a. There is a authority crisis that is polanye in form in the sense that the governance structure does not support the wider array of states that are in the system. So yes, hegemony is contested, but hegemony is not liberal order. Liberal order is in its core and there are many different varieties, as Trina has suggested. I've used a kind of Gatesian 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and whatever comes next will not be American or Western. It will be something very different. But to bristle at hegemony is not to reject the deeper principles and organizational arrangements of liberal order. And that's very important to keep that separate. And when you conflate that, you miss what is where the agreements and disagreements are. And secondly, a kind of conception of what liberal order order is. I know that he always throws in western liberal order because he wants to brand it as something that isn't portable, shall we say. And here I would just say that one of the features that makes liberal order so durable and takes so many different form, shifting forms, is that it isn't loaded with social purpose. That is to say, you can have different ethnic identities, religious identities, forms of values inside of your society and still operate within a liberal international order. That's what makes it so attractive. At some level you semi privatize as you do within liberal democracies in Britain, in the United States and other liberal democracies, you move outside of the sphere of politics, into society, those identity differences that are very real and you celebrate them. Likewise you do within a liberal international order that has as its foundation a vision of sovereign state, self determination, self rule. You decide on your own how you want to organize up to some limit, and that limit is there, but it's always been there. And it has more to do with violence and crimes against humanity and not about differences and how you self celebrate religion and other social practices. So I think there's a kind of misreading of the system in pretty important ways. And thirdly, what will the future look like? It seems to me that in the end, what Charlie misses is when we think about what will international order look like, like in 20 years, 30 years, when Charlie and I are finally too old to do this and we'll be drinking wine on the front porch.
- [66:09]
E
We're doing that tonight.
- [66:12]
A
Maybe.
- [66:16]
B
The order. International orders rise and fall I think because of three things. Power, there does matter. If there are powerful states behind it, they do help create it, sustain it. But secondly, legitimacy, that is to say, the rules and norms of the order at some sense have to synchronize with polity, principles that states in it embrace. And then thirdly, yes, functionality, that is to say, problem solving. And if international orders can't problem solve, they can't solve problems that states in them care about, then that's going to be an order that's going to lose legitimacy. And so, so in the future, what order rises, whether there's something that's truly non liberal. And I still have not heard what Charlie means by that because I think it is a null set, it will be One that has some synchronicity with polity, principles of states, and it will solve problems. And if there are, to be sure, the current system doesn't solve a lot of the problems. So there is an opportunity for new order builders to offer new solutions. But they will need to be back with power. They will need to have some modicum of legitimacy, and they have to do things that can't be done.
- [67:31]
A
Now, Charlie, you'll have to respond over wine later tonight. I can't even remember what those questions were, but I'm hoping that Trina and Barry can pull the rabbit out of the hat here. Trina.
- [67:45]
D
Okay, I will address some of those questions, but I'm also just going to address what. But only because I'm going to use it to answer one of the questions.
- [67:54]
A
Okay.
- [67:55]
D
And this has to do with the question of where do norms come from? Because I think you're assuming that norms sort of spring out of nowhere. This thing that norms have no navals or like nations, and that we can just rely on history for what our norms are. Well, if that was the case, then we would still be burning witches and doing all sorts of other nasty things. So the point is that norms change and they change because our practices change. So I think practices actually predates or precedes our norms. So, of course, if we can change practices, which I think relates to your point about functionality, we get together and we solve problems in a functional manner that will lead to practices and that will lead to new norms. That's the sort of simple answer. The reason why I'm bringing that up is to the question on soft power. I did actually mention it, but I clouded it between magnetism. It's. Magnetism is part of the power, part of international orders. And I think that is soft power, and that is what should be used to change norms. So soft power is incredibly important in order to spread liberal values, those liberal values that are worth spreading. That may be more to do with rule based on global cooperation between different orders. Now, the other question on global governance, does it all need reform? I don't think so, but I think some of it does. I didn't mention it because I'm just so utterly pessimistic about the possibility for it. It seems clear to me that unless the United nations can be reformed in a way that reflects the spread of power in the international system, and that, I'm afraid, does mean giving up European seats on the Security Council, it means thinking in quite different terms about who is it that gets to decide in the top decision. Making body in the global organizational structure. Before we can do that, I don't think we can get very far in constructing that cooperative order that is going to have to be established at some point to ensure cooperation between different orders. So yes, didn't mention it because I'm just too depressed about it.
- [70:34]
C
Okay, I'll take on the question about war. I didn't say that the future will not be mediated by war. I said the future will not be mediated by great power war. Great power war is not impossible, but it is more or less completely irrational. And we might take an interesting survey here. How many of you think that you are going to live in your lifetime in a great power war? Not very many. Okay, a few pessimists out there. It seems to me that the old Charles Tilly line about war makes the state and the state makes war. That was a pretty good line up until about 50 or 60 years ago. And now it's not, you might want to say the markets make war states and the states make markets or something like that. But the basic driving forces for the evolution of political economy have changed. Because great powers cannot sensibly go to war with each other in an all out way anymore. Because there will be no winners in an all out war. So it seems to me two kinds of war have gone out of fashion. One is great all out great power wars. The other is colonial wars of occupation. Because with RPGs and AK47s everywhere, this doesn't work either. If you want to worry about violence, it seems to me that the point of violence to worry about is the conjunction between rather large powers of destruction on the one hand and relatively small groups of people all the way down to individuals on the other. Because it's now possible for small groups or even individuals to do a huge amount of damage in a way that it hasn't been until rather recently. That, it seems to me, is a very profound political problem beyond international relations. It's a problem of governance both internationally and domestically, which will define the future in all kinds of ways. You have only to imagine what would happen if one city, anywhere disappeared as a result of a nuclear explosion from a non state actor. This would change everything. We'd all immediately vote for something like totalitarian political systems. That, it seems to me, is the big big problem about violence. Just one thing since. Since nobody can leave the kind of John Charlie thing alone and to give them something to talk about tonight over their wine glasses. It seems to me that if, if both of you paid more attention to what I call Primary institutions, these things like sovereignty and nationalism and the market and in other words, the underlying principles. You could be less pessimistic and you could be less ambitious. There's an interesting solid ground there where a certain kind of optimism can be built.
- [73:33]
E
Absolutely.
- [73:34]
A
Great. So Barry's a bridge builder here. So we've got time for another round of questions, I think. So we've got Leslie up here, and then there's another hand. Leslie, right there on my left. And I see hand back up midway, and then one in the. And then in the very back. Okay, so, Leslie, go ahead. Hi.
- [74:00]
D
My question, I think, is for John. And John, my question is the norms that are perhaps changing or that become more contested and less sustainable as material power shifts, are they. Question mark. A fundamental difference between states and societies that give more priority to group identity and group rights over individual rights and individual identities.
- [74:29]
C
And does the reason that the liberal.
- [74:30]
D
Order have to sort of be reconceived, is it partly because the standards for.
- [74:36]
C
The liberal international order have become so.
- [74:38]
D
Increasingly high post civil rights, post international human rights movement, such that it's not the sort of. The thin definition of liberal internationalism is no longer what the expectation is? So I guess my question is sort of, you know, is the normative shift, one that is premised on a fundamentally different idea of what the fundamental.
- [75:03]
C
What the group, the primary group is in societies?
- [75:08]
A
And then there's a hand. Great, thank you, Leslie. Where somebody had their hand up right there. There you go.
- [75:14]
D
Right.
- [75:14]
A
Yes.
- [75:15]
C
You're.
- [75:15]
E
You're on.
- [75:16]
D
I'm an LSEIP student and I'm Brazilian. So as a Brazilian, I have a question about the. Everyone agrees that the international world is changing to a multipolar world. And I, as a Brazilian, I would actually ask the question, is it really? Because I don't know. Everyone keeps quoting Brazil as an emerging country that is growing. But if you see, last year we only grew 1.5%, which is less than the US that's going out of a crisis. And also about what he said about soft power. If you see, in Brazil, I don't know, kids study Western European history. We don't study anything else. We learn English, and we are in all sorts of contexts with US and other Western European influences. So my question is, is it really changing, or is it just some signs that it will change, but by the end, it would continue on being a Western European society?
- [76:29]
A
John, you have a fan. Just one second. She'll have the mic to.
- [76:47]
D
Hello, my name is Narimov. I'm an Iranian Blogger, actually I have a question. What do you think about Iran's rules in the free tribular world order? Because now Iran actually trying to close the west and the US and today Iran is said we are in the come to Iran. And actually he said to the oil company to come to Iran and invest their money inside Iran. What do you think about Iran in the future? Thank you.
- [77:20]
A
Okay, very good. Any John, do you want to begin or in responding to Leslie's question and then Charlie, maybe you can respond on the Brazilian, an Iranian.
- [77:35]
B
Why don't you let Charlie go?
- [77:36]
A
Okay.
- [77:37]
B
Right.
- [77:42]
A
John's loading up there. So go ahead.
- [77:52]
E
I will comment not on John, because I'm not allowed to just pick up on a few issues that have floated around in the Q and A. Just a quick word on the international institutions issue. My guess is that we will see global governance be devolved to the regional level increasingly. And that's because I think the global institutions are going to be less and less effective and the providers of public goods, which have tended to be the EU and the United States states are going to be shrinking in terms of their ability and willingness to provide those goods. So then the next question is, well, if it's not going to happen at the global level, where's it going to happen? And I think it's likely that it will be at the regional level where you see regional institutions step up in terms of authority and capacity to try to deliver some of the goods that historically others provided. So that's just a guess, a speculation. And also because I think there will be greater normative consensus at the regional level than there will be at the G20 and at the broader international level. One quick word on Leslie's comment which triggered me to think that, you know, the standards are getting higher and I think we need to, we need to think about the implications of that. I mean, I'm a T Tip fan, for example, because I think the west needs it symbolically, politically, economically. But we should also recognize that the higher our standards of Western integration, the more likely it is that others can't play. Because T tip is really at the high end of the food chain. It's regulations, right? It's what you bolt your bumper onto your car with. And so if that's where the Western democracies are at in trade, I think it makes it less likely that this order that we're building gets universalized because other countries can't meet those standards. Again, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but we need to understand about our Effort to strengthen ourselves internally may actually build more barriers with countries that aren't yet part of that world. Just a quick word on Iran. You know, I think we are at an extremely important moment in this conversation, and the agreement is under attack in Iran and in the United States. I don't know how many of you have been following the debate in Congress, but, you know, there is a real effort up to, I think, 59 votes, only need 67 to be veto proof to impose a new set of sanctions. And similarly in Iran, there are hardliners that are very opposed to what's been going on vis a vis the nuclear agreement. You know, I'm cautiously optimistic and hopeful that a deal, that a deal can be struck and that if that deal is struck, it would then it would so strengthen the moderate forces that I could imagine rapprochement advancing on regional issues, on Iraq, on Syria, on Afghanistan. You know, that's in some ways the most optimistic scenario. If it doesn't happen, if that deal is not forthcoming, I think the chances of a war between the United States and Iran are extremely high.
- [81:41]
A
We're pushing right up against the time limit. But I'd like to let you guys respond. Barry, why don't you go first and then John.
- [81:48]
C
Okay.
- [81:50]
A
Would you like to jump in here, too? So we'll just go straight down the line. Okay.
- [81:54]
C
I'll tackle the question from Brazil. And I'm going to be, forgive me, a bit kind of nerdy and international relations theory oriented here. You use the term multipolar, right? And I think you need to think very, very carefully about that. That is a loaded term. It means, in a sense, a system in which all the great powers are playing as if they're all contending for dominance within the system. Now, I think Charlie is absolutely right that that's not the kind of decentered system we're moving into. So the whole kind of bipolar, unipolar, multipolar framing for things is becoming historically obsolete. We're moving into a system which will have many centers of power, some great power like, some more region like. But nobody's contending for the job that the United States is going to be leaving behind. Nobody wants this job. You know, look at what it did to the United States. Why would anybody want this? Want this job? So this global order is going to be decentered, but it's not going to be multipolar in the sense that everybody's competing to see who can be number one within it. That's a new game. We need new language to talk about it. With it's not the same as traditional multipolarity in terms of the kind of institutions. I'm going to, again, sit on the fence between the ends of this spectrum and say, probably, you know, Chong is right, we're going to get a more regionalized order. But, you know, some regions are an incredible mess. Who would want to try and have a regional order in the Middle east, for heaven's sake? I mean, chances are basically zero. So you're going to have some species of disorder there. But, you know, in South America or in Europe or North America, possibly even East Asia, you can imagine degrees of regional order. So the regional picture will be very varied. But along with this, I guess I'd go with John in the sense that if the argument is correct that everybody is a capitalist now, and therefore there's a shared interest in keeping a capitalist global economy going that's going to require a variety of global level institutions. So is the environment. So perhaps is the problem of mediating this particular kind of violence that I was talking about and controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, dealing with environmental problems, et cetera, et cetera. So there's going to be a mix. There'll be some global institutions of a specific functional sort, some general global institutions, a concert of capitalist powers. Maybe a lot of regional institutions of very varied kind of strength and capability is going to be a mixed up world, but it is not going to be multipolar in the traditional sense of that phrase.
- [84:49]
A
That's helpful, Trina.
- [84:51]
D
Yes, I'll address the Brazil question as well. And first of all, concur with Barry. I don't think we can think in terms of multipolarity, both for the reasons that Barry has said, but also because when we did have multipolarity, all of the different powers actually, actually had very similar idea sets. That wasn't what was the issue. That could be what is the issue in the decentered system or the pluralistic system. The other thing, whether change is, in a sense, it doesn't really matter what the growth rates of Brazil is or any other country, because when we ask ourselves, is change really happening, that is not what is the indicator of change? The fact that we're having this discussion today, I think bears witness to the fact that the world is changing. We're just not sure exactly how it's changing. But we're all old enough to have sat on panels like this where Brazil, let alone China, would never be mentioned and that would not happen today. And I think that is reason to believe that change is Certainly if not visible in growth rates, then it is there. And this just very briefly on my little controversial idea of a liberal union. This is precisely why I think we need to have something like that. Because it's actually to kind of have some sort of self selection of states being able to say this is where we belong. I don't know whether Brazil is as different from liberal order as Charlie suggests. It is just because it has different ideas about what precisely liberal ideas might be more social democratic, it might be a slightly different economic model. But it may be that actually by self selection, by being able to choose an identity as a liberal state that we would be able to tease out states such as Brazil, Mexico, other so called swing states.
- [87:01]
A
Well John, you got, you got to bat lead off and now you get to bat cleanup. It doesn't get much better than that.
- [87:12]
B
No, this has been great. I would just make some bullet points. Number one, future global governance will look different. It will evolve. I do think there will be a lot of regionalism, there will be subsidiarity, there will be devolution, there will be layer cake kind of structures in the world. There will be networks. I think there will be a lot of variety. But at the same time, almost paradoxically, the ideological range of visions of what, what world order will look like has remarkably and dramatically narrowed over the last century. And I think I would hold to the most important claim I've tried to make today and that is that the vision of a open rule based order is not a western idea. And countries that are outside of the west should not feel embarrassed if they think their interests are attached to such a type of order. And indeed when you look at what states are doing, not just what they're saying, but what they're doing, you see them in fact embracing open rule based order. And what they are asking for rightly in legitimacy is more authority, more governance capacity that they will preside over. And it seems to me that that is the struggle. There are three kinds of struggles between rising and old states I think that shape struggles over order. One is a power struggle that's. You see that in the South China Sea. That's old. We know about that. We do have practices that mitigate rivalry security dilemmas. But that's there for sure, that's there. It's not an EH CAR crisis. It's a crisis of adjustment to security dilemma problems. There are secondly are struggles over principles and norms. I suggest that we don't have those. Maybe those are primary institutions. And there's a lot of consensus on That I would agree with Barry. The third kind of struggle is over authority over the distribution of rights and privileges. And that's where we're at. And it seems to be that countries like the United States and Europe are going to have to give ground on that. It's going to be painful. But looking at China as a bellwether of the non west, it seems to me that you see China increasingly tying its interests to an open rule based order. China, by the way, China has signed the Law of the Sea Treaty, the United States hasn't. And as Kishore Mahbubani said recently, it's a gift to China because what's going to be the next great naval power is China. And they will want rules that will allow them rights to have access to regions that they currently aren't in. So they are going to embrace in a way that perhaps the United States is going to be the reluctant liberal internationalists as it loses some of its hegemonic authority. And by the way, when countries are attacking American hegemony, as I said earlier, it's not attacking liberal internationalism because hegemony is in some sense is a mutation of liberal internationalism. It's attaching more hierarchy to liberal internationalism than exists in the underlying principles. So if we lose some of that, the United States may be reluctant to lose it, but that is actually making the system more liberal internationalist, not less. China has embraced the npt. It's a member of something people don't even know about, a G5 process that Britain instigated and proposed in 2009 to make the nuclear power states more focused on transparency and safeguarding. And it's active in that. It's moved. It's been a remarkable story of China going from being a nuclear outsider to being in the center of the club. And as Charlie said, yes, they want the internationalization, the renminbi between think about what that process is going to involve. They can't unilaterally assert that they are going to need countries around the world saying we want to hold their currency. And to do that, as they themselves know, they need to deepen their capital markets. They need to deepen a sense of rule of law and property rights. And that will bring them closer to the kind of world that we want to live in rather than further away from it. So again, I think that 2.0, 3.0, there will be variants of governance. They will be very interesting and full of struggles over who gets to do what and how do we cooperate. But it will be cooperation. I don't know anybody who argues that to get through the 21st century with the problems we're going to confront that we aren't going to need more rather than less liberal internationalism, defined as complex forms of cooperation where rules and institutions are hammered out and negotiated. And that is going to require a lot of creativity. And so we are at a moment where it's not just about defending the old order, it's about reinventing and finding new ways to share and cooperate. And it seems to me that's the heart of what this system has been and what it will probably be.
- [92:02]
A
Okay, on that positive note, I'm getting lots of hand signals from people in red, and that is because when LSE Public Events made this venue available to us on very short notice, I'm still wondering who got displaced. They also made it clear that there was another event set to start here at 6pm and that we had to vacate at 5:30. So we're 10 minutes over. So I don't think we obviously have not exhausted this topic, but I think we've put our 90 minutes to very good use. I'd like to thank all of you for coming and please join me in thanking the panelists. It.