The 'Rules-based
international order' is dead & unless West finds new way to accommodate
Russia & China, it will reap a whirlwind
23 Mar, 2021 09:55 / Updated 3 days agoGet short URL
Russian President
Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare for family photo
session at the G20 leaders summit in Osaka, Japan, June 28, 2019. © Reuters /
Kim Kyung-Hoon
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By Glenn Diesen, Professor at the University of South-Eastern
Norway, and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal. Follow him on
Twitter @glenndiesen.
The gloves are off? The
hostile exchanges at the China-US meeting in Alaska last week had striking
similarities with the combative recent meeting between the EU's foreign policy
chief and the Russian foreign minister in Moscow.
Both disastrous encounters have demonstrated that after years of animosity
it is not possible to return to the previous format for cooperation. Rudyard
Kipling famously once wrote "east is east, and west is west, and
never the twain shall meet." That doesn't have to be true, but
it's a fair summation of where we are now.
Returning to a bygone
era?
If you believe the preliminary messaging, the new US government sought a
more pragmatic relationship with China as its diplomats went to Alaska, while
the EU endeavoured to improve relations with Russia on the trip to Moscow. What
was on the agenda to restore more friendly relations?
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced before the talks that the US
would “discuss our deep concerns with actions by China, including in
Xinjian, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic
coercion of our allies.” In Moscow, the EU foreign policy chief Josep
Borrell similarly sought to lecture Russia about its domestic affairs and
various perceived bad behaviours in international affairs.
As both the meetings predictably ended in spectacular failure, China was
accused of having “arrived intent on grandstanding” and Russia
was charged with having prepared the “humiliation” of the EU.
But why did Washington and Brussels believe it was appropriate to set an agenda
that interfered in the domestic affairs of the other and focusing solely on
transgressions by one side? The West also has mounting domestic challenges and
is hardly innocent in military adventurism, cyber attacks or economic coercion.
However, the meetings were not intended to be between equals and cooperation
was not meant to establish common rules for mutual constraints.
A liberal international system becomes synonymous with liberal hegemony,
and relations are organised between a political subject and a political object,
between a teacher and a student, between police and a suspect. Cooperation is
defined in pedagogic terms as the one side correcting the “bad
behaviour” of the other side.
Liberal hegemony or a
rules-based order?
From the Western perspective, a rules-based order requires the West to
uphold liberal values and thus become a “force for good”. Blinken
cautioned that “the alternative to a rules-based order is a world in
which might makes right and winners take all”. For China and Russia, the
unipolar era has been one where might makes right and liberal values has merely
legitimised unilateralism. For example, witness how Moscow's concerns about
Western military adventures in Iraq, Syria and Libya, all of questionable legality
under international law, to various degrees, were ignored.
Liberal hegemony as a value-based international order contradicts the
concept of a rules-based order. A rules-based system infers the consistent
application of international law, while a values-based system endows the
liberal hegemon with the prerogative of selective and inconsistent application
of international laws and rules.
The system of liberal hegemony demonstrates that values and power cannot be
decoupled. Western states, like all other nations, formulate and pursue foreign
policies based on national interests, and values are adjusted accordingly. In
Kosovo it was decided that self-determination was more important than
territorial integrity, and in Crimea it was decided that territorial integrity
was more important than self-determination.
The same rules don't apply to everybody, equally. It's "asymmetrical," not
symmetrical. So, when Russia intervened in Syria at Damascus' request and the
US entered Syria, without Syrian or UN permission, Moscow was judged to have
broken the rules.
While democracy and human rights should ideally have a place in
international relations, the application of these values are always aligned
with power interests. Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny is nominated for
the Nobel peace price, while Julian Assange rots away in a British cell without
such accolades. Washington’s abandonment of a four-decade long One-China Policy
in terms of Taiwan, claims of “genocide” in Xinjian and
support for the Hong Kong riots are also evidently motivated by geoeconomic
rivalry. A rules-based system does not entail mutual constraints, but a system
where the West as the political subject will police China and Russia as
political objects.
Accommodated or
contained?
Were Russia and China accommodated in the post-Cold War international
order? This question is rarely asked, yet it should be considered the most
important question in contemporary international relations.
Since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger “opened China” in
the 1970s, every American administration believed that China has been
accommodated in the international political and economic order. Likewise, both
the EU and the US believe that they have sought to include Russia in Europe
since it emerged as an independent state in 1991.
Yet, both Russia and China consider themselves to have consistently been
contained. Answering the aforementioned question should be of the greatest
importance. When the Cold War ended, the West enjoyed abundant political
legitimacy and the leading foreign policy objective of both Moscow and Beijing
was to cultivate friendly relations with Washington – two and a half decades
later the two Eurasian giants formed a strategic partnership to construct a
Greater Eurasia to reduce reliance on the US.
After the Cold War, both Russia and China were confronted with the dilemma
of accepting the role as political objects and perpetual students in the
Western-led order, or be contained as enemies of the liberal international
order.
In the absence of a common European security architecture, an expansionist
NATO and EU filled the vacuum. But Russia’s reaction to Western expansionism
and unilateralism subsequently returned Moscow from the role as a compliant,
civilising object to an enemy of the liberal international system that had to
be contained.
China was in a much more favourable position as it did not face the same
revisionism along its borders. China thus implicitly accepted temporarily
foregoing a significant role in the international system. Deng Xiaoping
famously defined China’s “peaceful rise” as entailing “[to]
bide our time and hide our capabilities” by focusing on internal
development whilst avoiding provoking the great powers. This approach was
always temporary, as China would one day outgrow the US-dominated system. In
2010, China had become too powerful and Barack Obama announced its “pivot
to Asia” to contain China, which escalated to an economic war under
Donald Trump.
Between unipolarity and
multipolarity
The current international disorder is caused by an interregnum – the world
is currently stuck between a unipolar and a multipolar format. The West is
pushing for a return to the unipolar era that existed before sanctions on
Russia and the economic war against China. However, the two Eurasian giants,
Russia and China, have spent the past years adjusting to a multipolar system.
The West will insist that on maintaining liberal hegemony due to a
commitment and belief in liberal values, among elites (although that is no
longer uniform), while Russia and China will reject a value-based system that
is instrumental to impose an untenable unipolar order. There is no going back
as the world has moved on, although the West is not yet ready to move forward.
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The statements, views
and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not
necessarily represent those of RT.
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