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What Liberal World Order? by Mark Leonard - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...-order-by-mark-leonard-2017-02

history crisis world_order

shared by silveiragu on 13 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • LONDON – After the annus horribilis that was 2016, most political observers believe that the liberal world order is in serious trouble. But that is where the agreement ends.
  • When the West, and especially the United States, dominated the world, the liberal order was pretty much whatever they said it was.
  • But as global power has shifted from the West to the “rest,” the liberal world order has become an increasingly contested idea, with rising powers like Russia, China, and India increasingly challenging Western perspectives. And, indeed, Merkel’s criticism in Munich of Russia for invading Crimea and supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was met with Lavrov’s assertions that the West ignored the sovereignty norm in international law by invading Iraq and recognizing Kosovo’s independence.
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  • The original iteration – call it “Liberal Order 1.0” – arose from the ashes of World War II to uphold peace and support global prosperity.
  • Liberal Order 1.0 had its limits – namely, sovereign borders. Given the ongoing geopolitical struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, it could not even quite be called a “world order.” What countries did at home was basically their business, as long as it didn’t affect the superpower rivalry.
  • After the collapse of the Soviet Union
  • Liberal Order 2.0 – penetrated countries’ borders to consider the rights of those who lived there.
  • But now the West itself is rejecting the order that it created, often using the very same logic of sovereignty that the rising powers used
  • The first would require a country like Germany, which considers itself a responsible stakeholder and has some international heft, to take over as a main custodian of the liberal world order
  • European countries are unsure how to respond to this new global disorder. Three potential coping strategies have emerged.
  • With the United Kingdom having rejected the European Union and US President Donald Trump condemning free-trade deals and the Paris climate agreement, the more fundamental Liberal Order 1.0 seems to be under threat.
  • A second strategy, exemplified today by Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
  • Turkey isn’t trying to overturn the existing order, but it doesn’t feel responsible for its upkeep, either.
  • extract as much as possible from Western-led institutions like the EU and NATO,
  • ostering mutually beneficial relationships with countries
  • The third strategy is simple hypocrisy: Europe would talk like a responsible stakeholder, but act like a profit maximizer. This is the path British Prime Minister Theresa May took when she met with Trump in Washington, DC. She said all the right things about NATO, the EU, and free trade, but pleaded for a special deal with the US outside of those frameworks.
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