Crisis, what crisis? Liberal order building and world order conventions

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 615-640

  Koivisto, Marjo ^a   Dunne, Tim ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Crisis; Empire; Liberal internationalism; World order conventions

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953216266     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829810363509     Document Type: Article

References (118)

1. United States National Security Council, 'Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World' (2008): www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html.
2. David Long refers to the 'Harvard School' in David Long, 'The Harvard School of Liberal International Theory: A Case for Closure', Millennium 24, no. 3 (1995): 489-505. The centre of gravity of modern liberal internationalism has shifted to Princeton University.
3. G. John Ikenberry, 'Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilemmas of Liberal World Order', Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 1 (2009): 80.
4. Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, 'The Unravelling of the Cold War Settlement', Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 51, no. 6 (2009-10): 39-62.
5. Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California, 1983).
6. The 'practice turn' in IR is associated with works including: Iver B. Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy', Millennium 31, no. 3 (2002): 58-78;
7. Emanuel Adler, 'The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO's Post-Cold War Transformation', European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 2 (2008): 195-230;
8. Vincent Pouliot '"Sobjectivism": Toward a Constructivist Methodology', International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2007): 359-84;
9. Vincent Pouliot, 'The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities', International Organization 62, no. 2 (2008): 257-88;
10. Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006).
11. This is the understanding of liberalism as set out by Ikenberry; see 'Liberal Internationalism 3.0', 71-87.
12. There are many other characterisations of liberalism, including Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism and Socialism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
13. For a useful recent exposition of liberalism in IR, see Bruce Russett, 'Liberalism', in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, 2nd edn, eds Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95-115.
14. This phrase is Chris Brown's. See his article 'History Ends, Worlds Collide', Review of International Studies 25, no. 5 (1999): 41-57.
15. John Gerard Ruggie, 'International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order', in International Regimes, ed. Stephen Krasner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 195-232.
16. These are the phases of liberal international order that Ikenberry outlines; see Ikenberry, 'Liberal Internationalism 3.0', 71-87.
17. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
18. Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, 'The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order', Review of International Studies 25, no. 2 (1999): 179-96.
19. Karen E. Smith and Margot Light, eds, Ethics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
20. Peter Lawler, 'Janus-Faced Solidarity: Danish Internationalism Reconsidered', Cooperation and Conflict 42, no. 1 (2007): 101-26;
21. Peter Lawler, 'The Good State: In Praise of "Classical" Internationalism', Review of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2005): 427-49.
22. Richard Falk, 'An Inquiry into the Political Economy of World Order', New Political Economy 1, no. 1 (1996): 13-26;
23. David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006);
24. Chris Brown, 'Tragedy, "Tragic Choices" and Contemporary International Political Theory', International Relations 21, no. 1 (2007): 5-13.
25. Heikki Patomäki, 'Back to the Kantian "Idea for a Universal History"? Overcoming Eurocentric Accounts of the International Problematic', Millennium 35, no. 3 (2007): 579.
26. Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
27. See, for example, Michael Doyle, 'Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part II', Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (1983): 323-37;
28. Michael Doyle, 'Liberalism and World Orders', American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1151-69.
29. By political ontology we mean first-order theorisation of a given unit of analysis of international relations.
30. Stephen Krasner argued that the inter-governmentalist arrangement amounts to no more than 'organized hypocrisy';
31. for more see Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
32. See, for example, Colin Hay, 'International Relations Theory and Globalization', in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, eds Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 266-87.
33. For example, see the following works: Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundation of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997);
34. Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007);
35. Kimberly Hutchings, 'Political Theory and Cosmopolitan Citizenship', in Cosmopolitan Citizenship, eds Kimberly Hutchings and R. Dannreuther (London: Macmillan, 1999).
36. United States National Intelligence Council, l'Global Trends 2025'. Of course, it is technically more accurate to describe Russia, India and China as 're-emerging' great powers. There is a striking lack of historical engagement in how these debates are framed in leading US journals such as Foreign Affairs.
37. Rodney Bruce Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
38. See, for example, Colin Hay, 'Crisis and the Structural Transformation of the State: Interrogating the Process of Change', British Journal of Politics and International Relations 1, no. 3 (1999): 317-44;
39. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975);
40. Robert Goodin, ed., The Theory of Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
41. In IR, see especially E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1946);
42. Christian Reus-Smit, 'International Crises of Legitimacy', International Politics 44, nos. 2-3 (2007): 157-74;
43. Ian Clark, International Legitimacy and World Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
44. Ian Hurd, 'Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics', International Organization 53, no. 2 (1999): 379-408.
45. See, for example, Claus Offe, 'Designing Institutions in East European Transitions', in The Theory of Institutional Design, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Cambridge: CUP);
46. Goodin, The Theory of Institutional Design.
47. Hay, 'Crisis and the Structural Transformation of the State', 317-44.
48. Goodin, The Theory of Institutional Design.
49. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977).
50. Our reading of the English School as being internationalist rests on the convergence of their account of authority and legitimacy in relation to types of international ordering. In the context of this article, we are not seeking to engage with internationalism in terms of the normative tension between pluralism and solidarism (which has been the subject of considerable attention in the revival in English School thought). In this sense, we follow Buzan in his mapping of a normative institutional order in From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalization (Oxford: OUP, 2004).
51. See, for example, Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994).
52. See, for example, William Bain, Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligation of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
53. Roland Paris, 'International Peacebuilding and the "Mission Civilizatrice"', Review of International Studies 28, no. 4 (2002): 637-56.
54. Mitchell Dean, 'Liberal Government and Authoritarianism', Economy and Society 31, no. 1 (2002): 37-61.
55. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983);
56. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
57. Indeed, these rather liberal 'universalist' values could be referred to as liberal societies' 'meta-commitments'.
58. The concept of 'practice' has only appeared in a formalised sense in English School scholarship very recently. The connection between English School theory and practice theory is most explicitly made in Cornelia Navari, 'The Concept of Practice in the English School', forthcoming in the European Journal of International Relations. Some English School work, as Navari notes, has sought to deploy a practice model to understand practices among states, including William Bain's work on trusteeship in Between Anarchy and Society. The practice theory literature in general conceptualises practices as conglomerations of rituals, words and positional placements, to which individuals look as guides for appropriate social behaviour. We take this understanding of 'practice' as the groundwork for our discussion and accept that some aspects of practice will not be concrete or directly accessible but must be analytically reconstructed in focusing on the social institutions and conventions that are identified as guiding particular practices.
59. On theorising practice, see in particular John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995);
60. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina and Eike von Savigny, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001);
61. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
62. In a recent article, Ikenberry and Deudney refer to 'higher liberalism';
63. see Deudney and Ikenberry, 'The Unravelling of the Cold War Settlement'. The broader tendency to repair fraying liberal inter-governmentalism with more liberalism can be seen in Jack Donnelly's analysis of the human rights regime in his Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989)
64. 'The Social Construction of International Human Rights', in Human Rights in Global Politics, eds Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 71-102.
65. The English School's relationship to liberal political theory was originally made ambivalent by Bull's rejection of the domestic analogy in his 'The Grotian Conception of International Society', British Committee paper, April 1962; later published in H. Butterfield and M. Wight, eds, Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966).
66. See, for example, the following neoliberal literature on regimes: Krasner, International Regimes;
67. Robert Keohane, 'The Demand for International Regimes', International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 325-55;
68. Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984);
69. Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane and Stephen Krasner, 'International Organization and the Study of World Politics', International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 645-85.
70. A, The Construction of Social Reality.
71. Chris Reus-Smit, drawing on H. L. A. Hart, in his essay 'The Politics of International Law', in The Politics of International Law, ed. Christian Reus-Smit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42.
72. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 127.
73. Ibid., 129.
74. Andrew Hurrell, 'International Society and the Study of Regimes: A Reflective Approach', in Regime Theory and International Relations, ed. Volker Rittberger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 60.
75. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 223;
76. cited in Navari C, 'The Concept of Practice in the English School', 6.
77. Martin Wight cited in Hurrell, 'International Society and the Study of Regimes', 63.
78. Some of the most elaborate cooperative regimes pre-date the emergence of international law by many centuries, including, for example, the protection of minorities living inside sovereign states. See Bruce Cronin, Institutions for the Common Good: International Protection Regimes in International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
79. Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society is the classic statement of the social and institutional basis of international society.
80. Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations; Or the Principles of Natural Law (Philadelphia, PA: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1853).
81. Robert Jackson, 'Sovereignty in World Politics: A Glance at the Conceptual and Historical Landscape', Political Studies 47, no. 3 (1999): 431-56.
82. See Ikenberry, 'Liberal Internationalism 3.0', 73.
83. For a sophisticated elaboration of this argument, see Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
84. When thinking of concrete practices, it is important to recall that Bull focused not so much on states as collective agents, but held that 'the real agents in international society are the diplomats and leaders who think and act on behalf of the state and its institutions'. Tim Dunne, 'The English School', in International Relations Theories, eds Dunne, Kurki and Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 132.
85. See Iver B. Neumann, 'To Be a Diplomat', International Studies Perspectives 6, no. 1 (2005): 72-93.
86. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of Modern International Law 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 514.
87. The concept of hierarchy has received greater attention from English School thinkers in recent years. See Robert Jackson's Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
88. Tim Dunne, 'Society and Hierarchy in International Relations', International Relations 17, no. 3: 303-20;
89. Ian Clark, 'Towards an English School Theory of Hegemony', European Journal of International Relations 15, no. 2 (2009): 203-28.
90. Notice that our usage of inter-governmentalism is convergent with the English School category of pluralism. For a good account of English School thinking on pluralism, see Nicholas J. Wheeler, 'Pluralist or Solidarist Conceptions of International Society: Bull and Vincent on Humanitarian Intervention', Millennium 21, no. 3 (1992): 463-87.
91. Andrew Hurrell, 'Order and Justice in International Relations: What Is at Stake?', in Order and Justice in International Relations, eds Rosemary Foot, John Lewis Gaddis and Andrew Hurrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 32.
92. As R. J. Vincent argues in Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
93. Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
94. As set out in Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39-40.
95. Ibid., 305.
96. Martin Wight, 'Western Values in International Relations', in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, eds Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966).
97. The Anarchical Society (p. 196), Bull argues that great powers are both unrivalled in material capacity and recognised by other states as having 'great power' status. They are also conceived by their own leaders and peoples to be in possession of 'certain special rights and duties'.
98. Clark, The Hierarchy of States.
99. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
100. It is in this context that Ikenberry mobilises his argument about the crisis of 'success' of US-led liberal international order in the new century.
101. Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security and the Making of the Postwar International Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
102. In this scholarship, 'empire' as a specific kind of organisational form is distinguished from imperial politics. As a political form, an empire, following Weaver, can be conceptualised as a 'supernational system of political control', and such a system may have either a city-state or a territorial state as its centre. See Ole Waever, 'Europe's Three Empires: A Watsonian Interpretation of Post-Wall European Security', in International Society after the Cold War: Anarchy and Order Reconsidered, eds Rick Fawn and Jeremy Larkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).
103. A most insightful recent analysis of 'empire' as an organizational form can be found in Daniel Nexon's The Struggle for Power in Early-Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
104. Indeed, as Michael Doyle argues, empire is 'a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of maintaining an empire.' Colonialism, on the other hand, is the practice of settling territories. Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 45. 70.
105. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
106. See also Patomäki, 'Back to the Kantian "Idea for a Universal History"?', 575-95.
107. John Gerard Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (London: Routledge, 1998).
108. It took until 1994 for terra nullius to be overturned. For an excellent account of the implications of this decision for the understanding of sovereignty, see Paul Patton, 'Sovereignty, Law and Difference in Australia: After the Mabo Case', Alternatives 21, no. 2 (1996): 149-70.
109. Anghie citing Hedley Bull, in Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 77.
110. Ibid., 78.
111. See Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
112. This notion is further unpacked in Douglas Bulloch, 'Carl Schmitt: A Conceptual Exegesis and Critique of IR Theory', unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 2009.
113. Also see Robbie Shilliam, 'What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the Transformation of Sovereignty Debate', Review of International Studies 32, no. 3 (2006): 379-400.
114. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 57. Indeed, Mehta identifies, for example, how 'Locke's universalistic anthropology is effected by the implicit divisions and exclusions of the social world that Locke imagines', and that 'sociologists since Durkheim have pointed to how the differentiations of a given society condition both its own reproduction and its various internal boundaries'.
115. Ibid., 57-8.
116. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 317.
117. Ibid., 320.
118. S. N. Eisenstadt, 'Multiple Modernities', Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1-29.