Christian Machuca

@ChristMachuca

Argentine Diplomat. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of Argentina. Former delegate to the HRC, ICRC and IPU.

Joined March 2019

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Christian Machuca

@ChristMachuca

about 1 year ago

IR theorists’ debate on the future of the liberal international order 👇 G. John Ikenberry, The Future of the Liberal World Order, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2011 “The liberal international order is alive and well. The struggle over international order today is not about fundamental principles. Emerging great powers do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the liberal international order; they wish to gain more authority and leadership within it. Indeed, today's power transition represents not the defeat of the liberal order but its ultimate ascendance. Rising powers have all become more prosperous and capable by operating inside the existing international order -benefiting from its rules, practices, and institutions, including the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the newly organized G-20. Their economic success and growing influence are tied to the liberal internationalist organization of world politics, and they have deep interests in preserving that system. The liberal international order has no competitors. On the contrary, the rise of non-Western powers and the growth of economic and security interdependence are creating new constituencies for it. Given the emerging problems of the twenty-first century, there will be growing incentives among all the great powers to embrace an open, rule-based international system. In a world of rising economic and security interdependence, the costs of not following multilateral rules and not forging cooperative ties go up. As the global economic system becomes more interdependent, all states -even large, powerful ones- will find it harder to ensure prosperity on their own. The old and rising powers may disagree on how exactly the multilateral cooperation should proceed, but they all have reasons to avoid a breakdown in the multilateral order itself. So they will increasingly experiment with new and more extensive forms of liberal internationalism. The liberal international order has sown the seeds of its own discontent, since, paradoxically, the challenges facing it now -the rise of non-Western states and new transnational threats- are artifacts of its success. But the solutions to these problems -integrating rising powers and tackling problems cooperatively- will lead the order's old guardians and new stakeholders to an agenda of renewal. The coming divide in world politics will not be between the United States (and the West) and the non-Western rising states. Rather, the struggle will be between those who want to renew and expand today's system of multilateral governance arrangements and those who want to move to a less cooperative order built on spheres of influence. These fault lines do not map onto geography, nor do they split the West and the non-West. There are passionate champions of the UN, the WTO, and a rule-based international order in Asia, and there are isolationist, protectionist, and anti-internationalist factions in the West”. John J. Mearsheimer, Bound to Fail, International Security, Vol. 43, No.4 (Spring 2019) “The liberal international order was destined to fail from the start, as it contained the seeds of its own destruction. First, intervening in the politics of countries to turn them into liberal democracies is extremely difficult, and attempting such ambitious social engineering on a global scale is virtually guaranteed to backfire and undermine the legitimacy of the enterprise itself. Nationalism is almost certain to cause significant resistance inside the countries targeted for regime change. Balance of power politics will also help impede the enterprise in particular cases. States that fear regime change will band together for mutual support and seek ways to thwart the policy of regime change. Second, the liberal international order ultimately creates conditions that lead to serious political problems regarding sovereignty and national identity within the liberal democracies themselves. Again, the principal cause of the problem is nationalism, which is the most powerful political ideology in the world, and thus is at odds with international institutions and the universalistic or transnational perspective of liberalism. Third, hyperglobalization has produced significant economic costs for large numbers of people inside the liberal democracies. Those costs, including lost jobs, declining or stagnant wages, and marked income inequality, have serious domestic political consequences, which further undermine the liberal international order. Moreover, the open international economy helped fuel the rise of other powers, which eventually undermined unipolarity, an essential condition for creating a liberal international order, because this order can arise only in unipolar systems where the leading state is a liberal democracy. The emerging multipolar world will consist of a realist international order (not liberal) where great powers engage in intense security competition and balance of power politics.” G. John Ikenberry, The Next Liberal Order, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2020 “The liberal world order is collapsing because its leading patrons have given up on it. Some people in their foreign policy establishment have moved on to the next global era: that of great-power competition. This fractured world, the thinking goes, will offer little space for multilateralism and cooperation. The grand strategy will be defined by what international relations theorists call “the problems of anarchy”: hegemonic struggles, power transitions, competition for security, spheres of influence, and nationalism. Ironically, it was the success of the liberal world order that sowed the seeds of the current crisis. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the last clear alternative to liberalism disappeared. As the liberal order grew from being one-half of a bipolar system to a truly global order, it began to fragment, in part because it no longer resembled a club: states cooperate with the liberal system on an opportunistic, ad hoc basis.“

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Christian Machuca

@ChristMachuca

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