Darren Lim and John Ikenberry perform a valuable service in fleshing out the theoretical underpinnings of questions that are central to anyone working on international politics and security today: how does China conceive of the problem of international order, and how might China’s domestic political-economic model shape the “logic and organizational principles” of a future Chinese hegemonic order?Footnote1 In answering these questions, Lim and Ikenberry offer a conception of order that importantly acknowledges that order is shaped by both interest-driven behaviour and habituated practices. They clearly articulate what is distinct about China’s state-capitalist political-economic model, and they take pains to plot what can be quite a nebulous range of Chinese international ordering ideas. Yet their conception of hegemonic orders – which sees order as emanating from a single hegemonic state’s domestic interests, institutions and practices – results in an overly pessimistic set of conclusions about the future of a potential Chinese hegemonic order. Instead, I suggest we pay attention to the collective foundations of international orders, and rescue pluralism from its unnecessary association with (American) liberalism. Doing so will allow us to better interrogate how China will work with others to shape the future of international order, while still identifng the worrying blind spots in China’s vision for that order.
The Collective Foundations of International Order
In developing their logic of hegemonic order-building, Lim and Ikenberry start from a rationalist premise in which the hegemonic state is situated at the centre of international order creation and change. In this view, the hegemon is paramount, and its preferences, choices and, in particular, its domestic institutions and practices, ultimately shape the order’s character. While Lim and Ikenberry acknowledge the role of other states in a hegemonic order, arguing for example that “hegemonic orders are built around relations between sovereign states”,Footnote2 and that “hegemony is built around bargains and partnerships” with others,Footnote3 their focus remains unapologetically on the hegemonic side of these relations and partnerships. This approach is problematic because, for at least the last four decades, the International Relations literature has understood that international orders have a fundamentally collective, or shared, basis. Without an understanding of the shared basis of an international order, John G. Ruggie argued back in 1982, we misdiagnose an order’s character, the sources of its legitimacy, and the reasons for its endurance, even in the face of hegemonic decline.Footnote4
Ruggie’s original claims were made in reference to the very same moment of post-WWII order creation that Lim and Ikenberry use as the basis for the development of their own model of a Chinese “illiberal” hegemonic order. Yet, despite citing Ruggie widely, Lim and Ikenberry appear to overlook Ruggie’s central claim that the post-WWII order was not merely reflective of US preferences, behaviour and practices, but rather had a shared basis, emerging from a fundamental compromise between the United States and Europe. That compromise, described by Ruggie as the order’s “legitimate social purpose,” is what gave the order its very “embedded liberal” character. It reflected not only the US preference for a liberal, multilateral international order, but also a consensus developed within the industrialised world, and particularly a war-ravaged Europe, about the need for the state to ensure domestic socio-economic stability in the face of a turbulent international economy.Footnote5
Recent scholarship has further underscored the collective origins of the post-WWII order, highlighting in particular the order-shaping role played by post-colonial, non-Western, and “illiberal” (to use Lim and Ikenberry’s term) states in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These states did not merely endorse or legitimise, post-hoc, a package of US ordering ideas and practices. Instead, they played a decisive role in the development of some of the order’s most elemental ideas: universal sovereignty, the right to self-determination, international human rights, and economic development.Footnote6 To be sure, the fact that these ideas became established, on America’s watch, rests in part on the discursive foundations of the US-led order, and in particular the US emphasis on equality. As I have shown in my own work, in the 1940s “illiberal” countries like Nationalist China seized the opportunity to appropriate US discourse on equality, freedom from want, and opposition to empire, as a way to resist and reshape those aspects of the order that ignored, in China’s view, the economic needs and status of post-colonial, developing, and war-torn countries.Footnote7
Yet while the discursive foundations of the post-WWII US-led order certainly facilitated the participation of a host of putatively weak and “illiberal” states, the post-WWII US-led order is not unique in this regard. From the Mughal Empire, to the Sinocentric order led by the Ming and Qing dynasties, to the post-Cold War East Asian order, we see numerous historical and contemporary examples of collective orders comprised of the ideas and practices of multiple actors.Footnote8 In some cases, collaboration emerged through the appropriation and customisation of subordinate actor ideas and practices by superordinate actors keenly aware that the durability and legitimacy of the orders they led would require acceptance and co-constitution by subordinates and rivals.Footnote9 In other cases, the collective character of the order emerged piecemeal through “arduous multilateral deliberation,” as states sought to deal with pressing transnational problems.Footnote10 Finally, there are cases in which subordinate states successfully “use[d] the tools of their oppressors against them” by translating and appropriating superordinate state discourse as a way to contest, delegitimize and re-shape some of the most coercive aspects of the extant international order.Footnote11 While the motivations and processes that produced these collective orders are distinct, what unites them is the fact that they are comprised of much more than simply the preferences, practices or domestic political-economic principles of a single hegemonic actor. Even thin pluralist orders are still social phenomena, built upon rules, norms and shared practices, forged through negotiation, contestation, and (sometimes reluctant) consent.Footnote12
Pluralism Without Liberalism
For the past two centuries, a subordinate China has seized opportunities, where possible, to resist, negotiate and shape orders led by more powerful states. The key question, though, is whether a future order led by a superordinate China will invite similar collaboration or tolerate dissent, as the United States did vis-à-vis Nationalist China and other “illiberal” states during and in the wake of World War II.
Here, the evidence is decidedly mixed. In its favour, China champions the maintenance of a pluralist international order as the most realistic way to achieve relatively peaceable coexistence between states with highly diverse histories, political systems, values, and interests. For China, this pluralism is best achieved through upholding principles of “sovereign equality” and non-interference in the internal affairs of other sovereign states.Footnote13 These principles find particular articulation in the United Nations (UN) system, around which China has provided staunch support in recent decades, seeing this as the best way to preserve “the integrity of the international system of rules and procedures in which everyone has a stake.”Footnote14
While Lim and Ikenberry similarly acknowledge China’s support for an international order based upon what they describe as a “logic of difference,” they view this Chinese ordering idea as one designed merely to “creat[e] a congenial space for China’s domestic political model to flourish,” rather than as something designed to preserve a pluralist international order.Footnote15 Instead, Lim and Ikenberry see the post-WWII order’s pluralism as an offshoot of (American) liberalism, arguing that the United States’ liberal domestic political-economic model and its characteristics of “openness, the rule of law, and principles of reciprocity and non-discrimination,” allowed for contestation and rules-based dispute resolution in America’s relations with other advanced industrial democracies.Footnote16 By equating liberalism with pluralism, Lim and Ikenberry seemingly return to what Andrew Hurrell has described as the classical European view of order: one that sees order as possible only between states holding shared values, with those outside this “civilized” grouping unable to partake in the membership or benefits of such an order.Footnote17 More problematically, Lim and Ikenberry overlook the historical reality that, in the post-WWII period, a group of states that did not share a domestic political system or values was nonetheless able to forge a plural order based on at least partial consensus about legitimate international behaviour across a range of economic, political and security domains.
The Limits of China’s Pluralist Vision
Yet, while China has continued to defend the pluralist elements of the post-WWII order, Lim and Ikenberry are correct that China has failed to articulate a concrete vision for how collective problems and disputes should be resolved in this pluralist order.Footnote18 China has remained an active participant and supporter of extant multilateral institutions, such as the UN system, the World Trade Organisation, and their dispute resolution processes. Unsurprisingly, it has sought to strengthen its weight and voice within those systems. At the same time, China has used its power and diplomatic tools to shift those institutions closer to its own preferences and beliefs, and has worked closely with Russia, in particular, to “reinforce the sense that there is no consensus on some key global issues.”Footnote19 While such an approach may reinforce the pluralist foundations of the international order, it has left China with little to show on the question of how collective problems and disputes beyond the borders of a sovereign state might productively be resolved. Instead, China’s preference for bilateral negotiation, whether in the South China Sea or in the roll-out of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is rather more evident. Such bilateral processes allow China to bring its disproportionate power to bear in negotiating with weaker partners, while also enabling China to tailor outcomes to diverse situations and states. Nevertheless, as Todd Hall and Alanna Krolikowski have recently argued with respect to the BRI, China’s preference for bilateral rather than multilateral negotiation has left China “ill-equipped” to realise multilateral “coordination game[s] involving massive hurdles and complexity.”Footnote20
Beyond its championing of a pluralist international order, China is also at the forefront of an emerging solidarist order, based around the shared idea that economic development is the cornerstone of regime and national security.Footnote21 China’s development-centred foreign policy has resonated so strongly in the Global South not merely, as Lim and Ikenberry suggest, because China can use economic side-payments to transform actor preferences, allowing conflicts to be more effectively resolved, or avoided at all.Footnote22 Rather, Chinese ideas about “common development” and its very development model resonate because they are ideas that are shared deeply within East Asia, as well as more broadly across the developing world.Footnote23 What makes China’s “logic of win-win” so powerful is that, in many parts of the world, China has not needed to transform actor preferences because they were already aligned.Footnote24 Yet once again, the critical question is whether China will invite or tolerate genuine collaboration and dissent by subordinate actors as this more solidarist order evolves. Despite ideational alignment between China and many other governments on state-led approaches to economic development, China has been much less responsive to the voices of civil society and those outside the governing regime, for instance, as they raise concerns about Chinese loans and development practices.Footnote25
Conclusion
Lim and Ikenberry are correct that the People’s Republic of China “will work to embed organizational principles into international order that reinforce and legitimate its model of authoritarian governance and state-directed economy,” just as the US did during and in the wake of WWII.Footnote26 Yet extrapolating the contours of any future international order from the domestic political-economic model and principles of a single hegemon is an unhelpfully limited place to start. My reading of the construction of past international orders, and my analysis of China’s contemporary international ordering ideas and practices, leads me to be simultaneously less certain, but also more optimistic, about that future. Orders are fundamentally collective phenomena, wrought through the hard-won sharing of ideas, values and practices between diverse groups of states. While it is crucial that we understand China’s international ordering ideas, the key question is how those ideas, values, and practices will shape, and be shaped by, China’s interactions with others. Xi Jinping’s China has had much to say about its ongoing support for a pluralist international order, and about those of its ideas that already align with the developing world. However, thus far it has remained relatively silent on how China’s ordering ideas might be shared with, and shaped by, resistance, compromise and negotiation between developing countries, liberal democracies, and sub- and non-state actors alike. This means that the future international order remains undetermined, and that a whole host of actors will have roles to play in defining the shape of its shared future.
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Amy King
Amy King is Associate Professor in the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. With the support of the Australian Research Council (DE170101282) and Westpac Scholars Trust, she is currently researching China’s role in shaping the international economic order.
Notes
1 Darren Lim and John Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies38, no. 1 (2023): 1–31.
2 Lim and Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies 38, no. 1 (2023): 9.
3 Lim and Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies 38, no. 1 (2023): 20.
4 John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 379–415, cited in Amy King, “Power, Shared Ideas and Order Transition: China, the United States, and the Creation of the Bretton Woods Order,” European Journal of International Relations 28, no. 4 (2022): 912–13.
5 Ibid. See also Christian Reus-Smit, “The Liberal International Order Reconsidered,” in After Liberalism?: The Future of Liberalism in International Relations, ed. Rebekka Friedman, Kevork Oskanian, and Ramon Pacheco Pardo (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 176; Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138–139.
6 See, for example, Christian Reus-Smit, “Human Rights and the Social Construction of Sovereignty,” Review of International Studies 27, no. 4 (2001): 519–38; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Eric Helleiner, The Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
7 King, “Power, Shared Ideas and Order Transition,” 922–26.
8 See, for example, Andrew Phillips, How the East Was Won: Barbarian Conquerors, Universal Conquest and the Making of Modern Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021); David C. Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Evelyn Goh, The Struggle for Order: Hegemony, Hierarchy, and Transition in Post-Cold War East Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
9 Phillips, How the East Was Won.
10 Andrew Ehrhardt, “Disease and International Order: Lessons from the Nineteenth Century,” in After Disruption: Historical Perspectives on the Future of International Order, ed. Seth Center and Emma Bates (CSIS Project on History and Strategy, September 2020), 22.
11 Amanda J. Cheney, “Tibet Lost in Translation: Sovereignty, Suzerainty and International Order Transformation, 1904–1906,” Journal of Contemporary China 26, no. 107 (2017): 772. See also Stefan Kroll, “The Emergence and Transformation of International Order: International Law in China, 1860-1949,” Asian Perspective 37 (2013): 31–52.
12 Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), see especially 32–33, 37–39, 47–48.
13 Rosemary Foot and Amy King, “China’s World View in the Xi Jinping Era: Where Do Japan, Russia and the USA Fit?” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23, no. 2 (2021): 210–27, see especially 222.
14 Thomas M. Franck, “The Power of Legitimacy and the Legitimacy of Power in an Age of Power Disequilibrium,” American Journal of International Law 100, no.1 (2006): 105–6, cited in Yongjin Zhang, “China and Liberal Hierarchies in Global International Society,” International Affairs 92, no. 4 (2016): 803. See also Rosemary Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection: Beliefs, Power, Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
15 Lim and Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies 38, no. 1 (2023): 22–23.
16 Lim and Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies 38, no. 1 (2023): 13.
17 Hurrell, On Global Order, 40-42.
18 Lim and Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies 38, no. 1 (2023): 28–29.
19 Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection, 264.
20 Todd H. Hall and Anna Krolikowski, “Making Sense of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Review Essay,” International Studies Review 24, no. 3 (September 2022): 13.
21 Alice Ba, “Outside-in and inside-out: Political Ideology, the English School and East Asia,” in Contesting International Society in East Asia, ed. Barry Buzan and Yongjin Zhang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 119–43.
22 Lim and Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies 38, no. 1 (2023): 26–27.
23 Foot and King, “China’s World View in the Xi Jinping Era,” 213–14.
24 Evelyn Goh, “Contesting hegemonic order: China in East Asia,” Security Studies 28, no. 3 (2019): 20-21. See also Evelyn Goh, ed., Rising China’s Influence in Developing Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
25 As Reilly shows through the case of Myanmar, for instance, China has not responded to civil society complaints until they have first been raised by the local governing regime. See James Reilly, Orchestration: China’s Economic Statecraft across Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 154–55.
26 Lim and Ikenberry, “China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony,” Security Studies 38, no. 1 (2023): 21.