2 The Post-Western World Order

Even before the upheavals of Brexit and Trump in 2016, there was a widespread sense that global international society (GIS) is in a significant period of transition, or even crisis, with the longstanding Western order being under siege from several different directions. By 'the Western world order', I mean the period from around 1820 to 2008,during which a relatively small group of mainly Western states dominated the world not only in terms of wealth and power, but also in terms of the ideas and ideologies of modernity. That domination persisted throughout this period despite three world wars among the core powers (First, Second and Cold) about what political and economic forms would carry the project of modernity forward (liberalism, socialism, or fascism). The leading states within the modern Western core have been Britain and the US, or more broadly, the Anglosphere.

The rise of China, India and “the rest” is steadily eroding the relative dominance of the West, both material and ideational. This is a deep and ongoing process of redefining the structure and distribution of power and authority in GIS that began with the rise of Japan in the late 19th century, and reflects the successful adaptation to the revolutions of modernity of more and more states and societies. While decolonisation undid the political side of the Western colonial order, the rise of the rest is steadily undoing its more durable economic and cultural core-periphery structure. At the same time, global capitalism, which was the big winner of the Cold War, now seems to be entering a substantial crisis, with inequality undermining its political legitimacy, and automation and globalisation undoing its model of wealth distribution through mass employment. More generally, an increasingly interdependent human species on an ever more densely occupied planet is facing a variety of intensifying shared-fate issues ranging from climate change and global diseases, through terrorism and threats to the internet, to instabilities in the global economy and the biosphere. Although the GIS is less threatened by interstate war than it has been for a long time, and has a deeper economic order than ever before, it nevertheless looks unstable. By dropping the Anglosphere out of its longstanding leadership role at the core of GIS, Brexit and Trump heighten the sense that a big transition to a post-Western GIS is underway. It is interesting to note that over two decades ago many American commentators made the prescient observation that the US was more likely to be driven out of its superpower status by the unwillingness of its citizens to support the role than by the rise of any external challenger. That seems now to have happened.Post-Western seems the best label available, not in the sense that the West will disappear as Rome did, but that it will become just one amongst several centres of wealth, power and culture.

I make six general assumptions about the post-Western world order. The sources and arguments for these can be found in my works mentioned above, so I will just state them baldly here.

1. The global capitalist economy will, despite its current troubles, continue as the basic economic structure, because there is no obvious alternative for generating wealth and power on the scale necessary to support political legitimacy. This means that world trade and global finance will remain as key features of the global economy though perhaps with more restrictions than before 2016.

2. The distribution of power and legitimacy will continue to become more diffuse. In terms of states, there will be no more superpowers (powers for whom the world is their region), but a state system dominated by great powers (influential in more than one region) and regional powers (mainly influential within their home region). The world order will thus remain global (economically) but become politically decentred in terms of power, culture and authority. Because there will be no competition to dominate GIS, this will not be 'multipolarity' as classically understood. Possible terms to label this structure are:plurilateralism, heteropolarity, no one's world, multinodal, multiplex, decentred globalism, and multi-order world. I will label it deep or embedded pluralism. It is reasonable to expect that this order will be significantly regional in form, and that there will be spheres-of-influence competitions amongst some great powers. The diffusion of power will also play between states and societies, albeit in complicated ways. Some non-state actors will acquire power to challenge or ally not just with other non-state actors, but also with states, both their own, and/or others more distant.

3. The group of great powers that will dominate GIS in the decades ahead will be inward-looking to the point of being autistic. To the extent that great powers, have autistic foreign policies, they lose touch with their social environment, and are blind to how their policies and behaviours affect the way that others see and react to them. In such conditions a cycle of prickly action-overreaction is likely to prevail, and building trust becomes difficult or impossible. Everyone sees only their own interests, concerns and “rightness”, and is blind to the interests, concerns and “rightness” of others. The cycle of prickly action-overreaction relations is already visible in US-China, Russia-EU, US-Russia, and China-Japan relations.

4. Humankind will become increasingly vulnerable to shared fates, some of them natural and others human-generated. These existential threats range from the now well established ones of nuclear proliferation and war threatening the inhabitability of the planet, and both global terrorism and instabilities in the global economy threatening social and political disruption; through climate change, sea-level rise, the possibility of new global diseases either naturally evolved or engineered, and threats to the planet from cosmic events; to mass migrations, possible breakdowns in or of the cyber-sphere, and the rise of artificial intelligence(s) that might compete with human control. The rise of these shared-fate threats will increasingly compete for dominance of the security agenda with the more traditional threats posed by states and societies to each other. As these logics of“common security”(security with)become more intense,they will compete with logics of“national security”(security against).

5. In terms of its normative structures, the society of states is stronger than it has ever been, and despite some fault lines, shows clear signs of deepening and widening its range of primary institutions. But as both the West and liberalism weaken, and other cultures acquire wealth,power and legitimacy,the global normative structure of world society is becoming more openly fragmented and diverse than it has appeared to be over the previous few decades. The ongoing divide between democracy and authoritarianism will increasingly be seen in cultural rather than ideological terms.

6. The increasing diffusion of both wealth and power, and cultural authority, means that there will be a decades long struggle to reform or remake the intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and regimes that still reflect the period of Western domination. Moves by the BRICS and China to set up their own (so far mainly financial) IGOs are the opening shots in this struggle.

These assumptions suggest three predictions about GIS in the coming decades. The first is that it is entering a period of quite deep and sustained transition. The second is that what is emerging will not be any form of “back to the future”, but something quite novel that stands substantially outside mainstream IR theories about polarity. The third is that the emerging GIS will display a strongly pluralist structure layered between regional and global levels.

GIS is moving away from its longstanding form of being a Western dominated coreperiphery structure, US-led, and with a relatively small core and a large periphery. It is moving towards reflecting a culturally and politically diverse group of great and regional powers, with an expanding core and a shrinking periphery. At the same time, the overall state-centrism of GIS is being reshaped by both the increasing role and power of a diverse range of non-state actors, both civil and uncivil, and by the relentless increase in interaction capacity and shared fates. The material and normative structures of this emerging post-Western GIS will be strikingly different from the Western-global model. Material power will be more diffused, and normative legitimacy will be more diffuse and stem from multiple cultures, including liberalism but no longer dominated by it. This cultural pluralism will be the case not only among states, but also between states and a wide variety of non-state actors.

This movement towards cultural and material pluralism is not, however, simply a return to the status quo ante of premodern times in which civilizations were semiautonomous developments, and the world had several centres of power, mostly thinly connected to each other. In the emerging GIS, the diffusion of power and normative legitimacy will take place in a context of sustained, deep, and unavoidable interconnectedness and interdependence. Thus, even though cultures subordinated by Western power and liberalism during the 19th and 20th centuries are now reemerging, they are far from doing so in an autonomous way. While the rising powers may be rediscovering and re-authenticating their cultural roots (Confucianism in China, Hindutva in India, “America first” in the US, Slavophilia in Russia), they are also inescapably fusions with the ideas and institutions of modernity. Modernity is now woven into their social, economic and political fabric, and, just as for the West, is essential to their pursuit of wealth and power. Rising powers thus represent cultural fusions quite different from their premodern forms. Just as the traditional Western culture of Christendom was transformed by modernity, so too are all other cultures that encounter it. Thus although the GIS that is emerging may be more culturally pluralist than that of the period of Western domination, it will also share a significant substrate of the ideas and institutions of modernity as a legacy of its formative process. That shared modernity explains why the primary institutions of GIS remain relatively strong.

Structural pressures within the emerging post-Western global order will push in opposite directions, producing a more pluralist, layered form of GIS. The desire among states and peoples for more political, cultural, and up to a point economic differentiation is strong, and increasingly linked to a more diffuse distribution of power and cultural legitimacy. That combination, along with the autistic tendencies of the likely great powers, suggests a powerful trend towards more regionalised and culturally and politically differentiated international societies. Yet at the same time,the normative structure of GIS is relatively robust, and the imperatives of shared fates, including the maintenance of the global economy, make a substantial amount of global level cooperation unavoidable unless states and peoples are prepared to accept big reductions in their wealth, power and security. The strength of the forces currently pushing both options suggests that the puzzle for the coming decades will be how to reconcile the localising imperatives of revived cultural diversity and diffused power, with the globalising ones of shared fates, and to do so in a decentred world with no dominant core group or culture or superpower. What these structural pressures point to is a more layered GIS in which regional and/or subglobal differentiation driven by civilizationalism will play alongside a pluralist global level sustained by the need to deal with shared fates.

Nothing “universal”, in the sense of a broad view of what is politically and morally right, will replace the liberal framing of the Western era. Modernity will unfold along several political and social lines rather than just one. Those in China, Russia, Iran, France, India and elsewhere who have long opposed US/Western hegemony, and called for a more “multipolar” international order, will get their wish. But in the long tradition of “wish” stories, they will not get what they expected. Regions will increasingly, and for better or for worse, be left to fend for themselves. In the absence of both superpowers and globally dominant ideologies, the global level will not be about the world political and social order in general, as it has been over the past several decades. Rather, it will be about a series of specific functional agreements and institutions to deal with shared-fate issues that are recognised and accepted by all as such, and are not treated as areas of ideological contestation. The retreat of GIS to a limited set of functional specifics was perhaps foreshadowed by the ability of the US and the Soviet Union to agree on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons even during the depths of their otherwise zero-sum rivalry. More recently, the shift from disagreement to consensus on climate change between Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015, suggests the emergence of specific functional cooperation against a shared threat, though whether this will survive Trump remains to be seen. This shift will be reflected in a new framework of IGOs. Such a structure would only be multipolarity in the sense that there would be several great powers and no superpower, but not one that fits the classical model. This “multipolarity” will take place in a highly globalised context of interdependence and shared fates. It will feature a set of autistic great powers none of which will be either seeking the job of global hegemon, or have the necessary material strength and ideational legitimacy to carry it out. And it will contain an impressive array of non-state actors that both challenge and support the states system.