International
Public Policy
Review
Global Liberalism in Harder Times
Andrew Hurrell
IPPR Volume 6 Issue 1 (July 2010)
pp 16-24
International Public Policy Review • The Department of Political science
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Global Liberalism in Harder Times
Andrew Hurrell*
Global liberalism finds itself in harder times. The tectonic plates are shifting. Both
the international political system and the structures of global capitalism are in a
state of flux and uncertainty. Power is shifting in global politics to a new group of
emerging powers. The financial crisis sharply underlined the relative strengths of
the newcomers who are recovering rapidly, and the new weaknesses of the established G7. The international system is increasingly characterized by a diffusion of
power, including to emerging and regional powers; by a diffusion of preferences
with many more voices demanding to be heard both globally and within states as a
result of globalization and democratization; and by a diffusion of ideas and values,
with a reopening of the big questions of social, economic and political organization
that were supposedly brought to an end with the end of the Cold War and the liberal
ascendancy. There is a strong argument that we are witnessing the most powerful
set of challenges yet to the global order that the United States sought to construct
within its own camp during the Cold War and to globalize in post-Cold War period.
Many of these challenges also raise questions about the longer-term position of the
Anglo-American and European global order that rose to dominance in the middle of
the 19th century and around which so many conceptions and practices of power-political order, international legal construction and global economic governance have
since been constructed.
In the 1990s global order was widely understood through the lens of liberal internationalism or liberal solidarism. Globalization was rendering obsolete the old
Westphalian world of Great Power rivalries, balance of power politics and an oldfashioned international law built around state sovereignty and strict rules of nonintervention. Bumpy as it might be the road seemed to be leading away from Westphalia – with an expanded role for formal and informal multilateral institutions; a
* Andrew Hurrell is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations, Bailliol
College, Oxford University. He is a leading theorist on the “International Society”, pioneered by Hedley Bull, and his current research interests include the emergence of
regional powers. He has published widely on international relations theory and Latin
American foreign relations, particularly with the US.
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17
huge increase in the scope, density and intrusiveness of rules and norms made at
the international level but affecting how domestic societies are organized; the evergreater involvement of new actors in global governance; the moves towards the coercive enforcement of global rules; and a fundamental changes in political, legal and
moral understandings of state sovereignty and of the relationship between the state,
the citizen and the international community.
Academics, especially in the United States, told three kinds of liberal stories. Some
stressed institutions. Institutions are needed to deal with the ever more complex dilemmas of collective action that emerge in a globalized world. As large states, including large developing states such as China, India or Brazil expand their range of interests and integrate more fully into the global economy and world society, they will
be naturally drawn by the functional benefits provided by institutions and pressed
towards more cooperative and “responsible” patterns of behaviour. Others stressed
the Kantian idea of the gradual but progressive diffusion of liberal values, partly as a
result of liberal economics and increased economic interdependence, partly as a liberal legal order comes to sustain the autonomy of a global civil society, and partly as
a result of the successful example set by the multifaceted liberal capitalist system of
states. A third group told a more US-centred story. The US was indeed the centre of
a unipolar world. But, true both to its own values but also to its rational self-interest,
Washington would continue to bind itself within the institutions that it had created
in the Cold War era in order to reassure smaller states and to prevent balancing
against US power. A rational hegemon in an age of globalization would understand
the importance and utility of soft power. In return for this self-binding and the procedural legitimacy it would create and in return for US-supplied global public goods
and the output legitimacy that they would create, other states would acquiesce and
accept the role of the United States as the owner and operator of the system.
Through a mix of these three processes those states of the old Third World that
had previously challenged the western order would now become increasingly enmeshed, socialized and integrated. The challenge of the Second World had been seen
off. The challenge of the Third World was being tamed, if not rendered obsolete. Yes,
of course there would be isolated rogues and radical rejectionists. But they, we could
confidently assume, were clearly on the wrong side of history. So note three things:
first, a clear sense of the liberal ascendancy; second, an equally clear assumption
that the US has a clear capacity to say what the liberal global order was all about;
and third that the western order worked and that it had the answers. These assumptions fed into academic debates on global order which were dominated by a dual
liberal hegemony: a historicist hegemony that has too easily assumed that history is
moving down a one-way street; and, just as important, an analytical liberal hegemony that has tended to work with a narrow notion of agency; with too little room for
the historical analysis of the structures within which supposedly ahistorical logics of
rational choice and collective action play out; and still less room understanding their
temporal and geographical rootedness.
However, well before Bush and certainly before the financial crisis, a compelling list
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of factors were pushing in a rather different direction. These include: the renewed
salience of security, the re-valorization of national security, and a renewed preoccupation with war-fighting and counter-insurgency; the continued or renewed power
of nationalism, no longer potentially containable politically or analytically in a box
marked “ethnic conflict” but manifest in the identity politics and foreign policy actions of the major states in the system; the renewed importance of nuclear weapons
as central to major power relations, to the structure of regional security complexes,
and in the construction of great power hierarchies and the distribution of seats at
top tables; and finally the quiet return of balance of power as both a motivation for
state policy (as with US policies in Asia) and as an element in the foreign policy of all
second-tier states – not hard balancing and the building up of hard power; but soft
balancing – both through attempts to de-legitimize US and western power and in the
form of new groupings such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russian, India and China) or IBSA
(India, Brazil and South Africa).
Economic globalization also fed back into the structures and dynamics of a Westphalian state system rather than pointing towards its transcendence. The state as an
economic actor proved once more resilient in seeking to control economic flows and
to police borders; and in seeking to exploit and develop state-based and mercantilist
modes of managing economic problems, especially in relation to resource competition and energy geopolitics. Still more important, the most important impact of successful liberal globalization was to contribute to a major shift in the distribution of
inter-state political power. If the debate over power shifts in the 1990s concentrated
on the shift of power from states to firms and non-state actors, the “power shift” of
the past decade has focused on rising and emerging powers, on state-directed economic activity, and on the mismatch between existing global economic governance
arrangements and the distribution of power amongst those with the actual power of
effective economic decision. The Bush years marked the bankruptcy of hegemonic
or top-down modes of governance. The financial crisis has exacerbated the already
evident decline in the idea that the legitimacy of international institutions could be
grounded in western claims to superior economic or technological knowledge.
It is of course possible to see these developments simply as international relations
returning once more to its “Westphalian norm” – the return of history and the end of
dreams, as Kagan would have it (Kagan 2009). But is more accurate and more helpful to face up to the complex, hybrid and contested character of international society
-- a society that faces a range of classical Westphalian challenges (especially to do
with power transition and the rise of new powers) but one that faces these challenges in a context marked by strong post-Westphalian characteristics (both in terms of
the material conditions of globalization and the changed character of legitimacy).
How has, and how should, the US respond? Obama’s foreign policy has been dominated by the major issues inherited from its predecessor: Iran, Afghanistan, North
Korea, and Iran. The intractability of the world to US power and to US purposes
mean that there has been a significant degree of continuity. Obama overestimated
the power of personal diplomacy (especially in the Middle East and with Iran) and
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19
found that multilateralism is tricky not for ideological reasons (as with Bush), but
for practical and pragmatic reasons (as was clearly visible in the US reaction to Copenhagen). Foreign policy is very heavily constrained domestically. The traditional
framing values of human rights and democracy have been tarnished by the excesses
of the Bush era; and the soft power attractions of free market capitalism have been
severely undermined by the financial crisis.
One already visible response is to try and return to a more Great Power-centred
order. Faced by the intractability of many international crises and by the limits of its
own power, the United States should secure its own interests, reduce the range of
its burdens, and share the costs of tackling shared challenges by negotiating a new
set of bargains with major emerging and regional powers. This kind of thinking
is visible in the endless language of “partnerships” and in the practice of informal
concert-like groupings such as the G20. The chairs around the table would be re-arranged and the table probably expanded. There would be a good deal of “global á la
cartism”. Global order would involve a mosaic of different groupings and lots of what
Richard Haas calls “messy multilateralism”. In part, groupings would be functional
and be formed according to the needs of the problem in hand. But issue-specific interests, functional problem-solving, and the provision of global public goods would
only be one part of the story. The important thing about such groupings is that the
logic would also be power-centred.
But it is hard to difficult to move very far towards this kind of order without coming
into conflict or tension with important elements of the global liberal order that the
US has espoused, especially since the end of the Cold War. First, accommodating the
regional interests of other major players (Russia most obviously) cannot be easily
compatible with expansive notions of democratization and human rights – think of
Georgia. Second, the pragmatism of the Obama administration has involved a very
significant continuation of military and intelligence policy with the Bush years, especially in Afghanistan. The escalation of drone killings, the shift back to the use of
military tribunals and the recently announced expansion of “informal intervention”
across the Middle East all bring the US into severe conflict with its professed commitment to liberal goals. Third, á la carte groupings and messy multilateralism are
hard to square with even weak liberal notions of constitutionalism or the rule of law,
effective consultation and giving voice, and epistemic and moral openness. Even if
the ad hoc groupings are supposed to act according to agreed international principles, where are such principles themselves supposed to come from? And by what
principles other than effective power are the groupings themselves to be formed?
Are such moves towards a more power-centred order feasible? Certainly not on
their own; and probably not very much at all. Great Power orders have always had
two sides – a horizontal set of relations amongst major players; and a vertical set
of relations between the major states and the rest. On the one hand, the stability of
major power relations will be significantly influenced by the degree to which major
powers believe that their claims for equal status have been accepted by their peer
or peers and their mutual interests recognized and accommodated. This is clearly
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no easy task. On the other, smaller states accept the legitimacy of the collective hegemony of the major powers to the extent that it provides some accommodation of
their interests.
You cannot be a major power unless you help to solve other people’s problems or define your interests in a sufficiently broad enough way to foster at least some degree
of legitimacy. Here the problems quickly appear. On one side the difficulties come
from a dominant state that has been very used to deciding what counts as “global
values” or “global problems”. On the other side, today’s emerging powers have – perhaps for obvious historical reasons – tended to conceive of their interests in a narrow way and to eschew developing a clear vision of what their favoured global order
might look like.
But these traditional limits to top-down forms of global order have been reinforced
by three of the post-Westphalian features of contemporary global politics.
It is post-Westphalian, first of all, because of the structural changes in the nature of
the foreign policy and governance challenges faced both by individual states and by
international society collectively. Dealing with these challenges – climate change,
stable trade rules, a credible system of global finance – necessarily involves both
cooperation but also rules that will involve deep intervention in domestic affairs.
This is a structural change. In earlier periods it perhaps made sense to think of accommodating rising powers within the realist world of power politics: concerts of
power built around the recognition of limited reciprocal interests, the management
of power balances, the recognition of spheres of interest. The scope of engagement
is today of a very different order. The US and China have no option but to negotiate
on climate change and to subject their domestic social organization to international
negotiation. The old world of concerts of power has not gone away; but the context
is structurally different.
It is post-Westphalian, second, because of the changing problem of legitimacy and,
in particular, the spread of ideas about democracy and human rights and the everincreasing capacity for social mobilization. However much the US might want to
back away from an overt policy of democracy promotion in the Middle East, events
on the ground get in the way. In Iran, to take the most pressing example, it is impossible for diplomatic engagement to ignore anti-government protests within the
country. But there is a broader point, namely the shifting role of domestic politics.
This arises almost automatically in relation to the United States. This is not just a
contingent matter of Obama’s limited domestic space to manoeuvre. It stems rather
from the persistent difficulty of meshing the external bargains that are inevitably
involved in the on-going negotiation of hegemony with the complexity and relatively
closed character of US domestic politics. But, and this the critical point, something
similar can be said about today’s large, complex and fast-developing emerging powers. India’s domestic constraints on climate change are ever bit as complicated and
contested as those in the US.
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Is this new? In broad terms probably not. Think of the often stark domestic tensions
produced by rapid economic change in the course of the rise of the United States,
Germany and Japan, and the consequences that these tensions had for the foreign
policy of these states and for their search for an international role commensurate
with their rising power and their sense of themselves. But what is new – or at least
harder to avoid – is the degree to which the substance of major power relations necessarily involves a wide range of issues that reach deep within the structure of domestic society. Here one might focus less on the BRICs as a group; and more on the
intellectual and policy “bricolage” – to use Mary Douglas’s term -- that has been taking place within each of the emerging states and through which old and new ideas
and policies are melded together in ways that will work against these states becoming simply absorbable within some expanded version of a liberal Greater West.
The third element of the post-Westphalian context has to do with what one might
call the “provincializing of Westphalia” and the shift in power away from the core
western industrialized world – historically first built around Europe and the European colonial order and then around the United States and the Greater West. It is increasingly difficult to see the western state-based order either as a universal model
or as the stable core of a successful global system.
Multilateralism worked for much of the post-1945 period in part because it was not
very multilateral. It was centred around a core of western developed states and
many of the major institutions were dominated either by the US alone or by a small
group of western and industrialized states. It excluded the Soviet bloc and the Soviet
threat was essential to managing the geo-economic challenge posed by the economic rise of Japan, South Korean and the other Asian NICs (newly industrializing countries) from the middle of the 1960s on. The Third World played only a marginal role
and, where it was engaged, its interests were limited and overwhelmingly defensive
(very clearly illustrated by developing country participation in the GATT).
Today the situation is very different. Today’s new emerging and regional powers are
indispensable members of any viable global order. From a power-centred perspective such states are seen as central to the dynamics of the balance of power in the
21st century, as well as to the possible emergence of new concert-style groupings
of major powers. From an institutionalist perspective such states are also crucial.
Their detachment or opposition to current institutions is correctly seen one of the
most important weaknesses of existing institutions – think of the move away from
the World Bank and IMF on the part of major emerging economies, or the opposition
to developed country preferences in the WTO led by Brazil and India, or the effective breakdown of the global aid regime in the face of the new aid donors such as
China and India. Such countries are clearly substantively critical to the management
of major global issues as climate change or nuclear proliferation. But they are also
procedurally critical if international institutions are to re-establish legitimacy and
a degree of representativeness, for example through reform of the United Nations
Security Council or of the international financial institutions.
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A great deal of attention has, rightly, focused on China. Many, especially in the United
States, see the primary challenge to the global liberal order as coming from China and
Russia – the so-called autocratic revival. But challenges are also coming from states
in the developing world such as India, Brazil and South Africa which, for all the imperfections of their domestic political systems, have legitimate claims to shape the
nature of the global liberal order in the 21st century. Many in both the United States
and Europe find this unexpected and discomforting. They view India as unwilling to
assume its “responsibilities” as a rising major power. They see Brazil as an “adolescent”: it has acquired new power but has yet to learn to use it in a “responsible” manner. Thus Brazil and Turkey’s diplomatic engagement with Iran has prompted deep
displeasure in Washington. But, seen from outside, it is Washington that has failed
to appreciate just how much has changed in a BRIC-influenced world. Indeed the
language of “responsibility” and “responsible stakeholder” is itself contested. Who
is and who is not responsible depends on where the camera stops and from where
one is filming. Snapshots of particular Brazilian or Indian positions at Copenhagen
might appear to justify claims of being “unwilling to assume global responsibilities”.
But, in Delhi or Brasilia, it is just as clear that, in the bigger picture, the US remains
the “great irresponsible” when it comes to climate change and was prepared to bring
precious little to the negotiating table.
Being willing to be a part of global multilateral bodies is perfectly compatible with a
willingness to challenge the status quo, to reject US-favoured positions, and to push
for new forms of global governance. An India can be committed to economic integration and yet still see substantial gains to be made from a continuing strategy of
“saying no”. A PT (Workers’ Party) government in Brazil may well have “saved Brazil
for global capitalism” and be strongly committed to much liberal macro-economic
orthodoxy and yet, at the same time, see itself as a non status-quo power committed to challenging existing forms of global governance. Challenges to the US and the
Greater West do not come from non-democratic governments but from liberal and
democratic states in the developing world whose liberal agenda speaks to a different
range of interests, traditions and values.
Those in the US and Europe that have previously assumed a natural right to speak
on behalf of global liberalism therefore find themselves challenged in terms of ideas about global order. But what of ideas about justice? Here too there are signs of
change. As power diffuses away from the western, liberal developed core and as the
intractability of the international system to liberal prescriptions becomes more evident, so the character of writing on global justice changes. For Amartya Sen, for example, we should resist attempts to find universal principles for perfectly just social
arrangements and to identify transcendental principles of global justice (Sen 2009).
Instead we should concentrate on our shared sense of injustice and on the possibility of agreement on realization-focused strategies to mitigate some of the worst and
most pressing forms of injustice. Just as important, we should see value pluralism
both as an inescapable reality and as an opportunity.
For Charles Beitz it is not helpful for philosophers to try and tell us what human
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rights “really are”. Instead we should seek to locate and build upon what Beitz calls a
“practical conception” of human rights.
We want to understand how these objects called ‘human rights’ operate in the normative discourse of global political life. Whether we should accept claims about human rights as sources of reasons for action for us is a further question. But we cannot
think clearly about this further question without first understanding the practice in
which these claims are made and responded to. (Sen 2009: 105)
Moving down this road forces us to confront the pathologies of politics and of power.
To a notably greater extent than in his earlier writings, Beitz acknowledges the extent to which the contamination of the human rights system by the power and particular interests of the powerful can undermine the authority of human rights principles. So we have here a picture of international human rights that stresses both the
importance of embedded practice and the constraints posed by the distribution of
political power.
There is a great more that could be said about these important books. But, for all
the differences of their concerns and of their approach, these two examples suggest
some of the ways in which global liberalism is having to respond to the changing
character of global international society and to its complex and hybrid character.
Debates on global justice will have to pay far more attention to the implications of a
more equal distribution of political power across a much broader and more diverse
range of states; and to the role of Southern states in introducing new deliberative
practices or helping to re-frame issues in terms of global justice. Most fundamental
will be the importance of non-parochialism. As in much of his previous work, Sen
takes Adam Smith as his guide and mentor:
We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgement concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this
in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or
as other people are likely to view them (Smith 1790).
Although abstract human reason can assist in the search for impartial and generalizable principles of justice, it is “the eyes of other people” and the inherited wisdom of different historical and cultural traditions that are central. Non-parochialism
becomes an essential requirement of liberal justice in a global and interdependent
world.
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Bibliography
Kagan, R. (2009) The Return of History and the End of Dreams. New York: Vintage.
Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Smith, A (1790) The Theory of Moral Sentiments