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Contested world order: The delegitimation of international governance

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Abstract

This article argues that the chief challenge to international governance is an emerging political cleavage, which pits nationalists against immigration, free trade, and international authority. While those on the radical left contest international governance for its limits, nationalists reject it in principle. A wide-ranging cultural and economic reaction has reshaped political conflict in Europe and the United States and is putting into question the legitimacy of the rule of law among states.

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  1. Layne (2012) argues that China’s views on international order are incompatible with those of the United States. Kissinger (2014) warns that unipolarity will be replaced by competition between four regional blocks with incompatible worldviews: European post-Westphalian, Islamic, Chinese, and American.

  2. See especially Anderson et al. (2019); and Schmidtke (2018).

  3. We understand ideology in a broad sense as a set of normative beliefs and values about the proper order of society and how it can be brought about (Jost et al. 2009: 309).

  4. On Europe, see Bechtel et al. (2014); De Vries (2018); Häusermann and Kriesi (2015); Rydgren (2013); Teney et al. (2014); Van Elsas et al. (2016). On Brexit, see Hobolt (2017); Hobolt et al. (2018).

  5. Our argument highlights nationalist mobilization in the liberal heartland as the chief source of instability, but this is compounded by opposition from rising powers and authoritarian rulers. Rising powers may challenge IO governance because it reflects the interests and norms of its Western founders. Authoritarian rulers may reject IO authority because it queries their hold on power. Interestingly, challenges from rising powers or from authoritarian rulers are also often couched in a nationalist rhetoric.

  6. The rule of law was long alien to international relations. The first time that the UN Security Council expressly made reference to the principle was in 1996 (Bingham 2010: 117; see also Alvarez 2005). Beginning in the 1990s, International Relations scholars developed new concepts to come to grips with this development: legalization (Goldstein et al. 2000), institutional design (Koremenos et al. 2001), and judicialization (Romano et al. 2014).

  7. See the 2005 IO special issue on international institutions and socialization which problematized how agents’ priors constrain international socialization (Checkel 2005).

  8. This argument builds on a growing literature that investigates the politicization of IOs. See e.g. Conceição-Heldt (2013); Ecker-Ehrhardt (2014); Hooghe and Marks 2009; Hooghe et al. (2019); Hurrelmann and Schneider (2015); Kay (2015); Mansfield and Mutz (2012); Morgenstern et al. (2007); Rathbun (2012); Rixen and Zangl (2013); Zürn (2004); Zürn et al. (2012).

  9. For exhaustive discussions of the global justice movement which comprises these strands, see Baumgarten (2017); Della Porta (2007); Smith et al. (2016). For discussions of the left’s mobilization to build a social Europe, see Hooghe and Marks (1999); Rhodes and van Apeldoorn (1997); Ross (1995).

  10. Anderson et al. (2019) find that the second-most important reason why survey respondents in Germany and the United States perceive a hypothetical Global Climate Conference to be undemocratic is because they fear that business interests dominate negotiations.

  11. At the eleventh hour, the Clinton administration secured two side accords custom-tailored to allay particular US environmental and labor concerns (Morgenstern et al. 2007). For an astute analysis of the politics surrounding the genesis and development of NAFTA, see Bow and Santa Cruz (2015).

  12. “When I was young, we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade. We’d win with wars. At a certain age, I remember hearing from one of my instructors, “The United States has never lost a war.” And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. We don’t win anymore. The old expression, “to the victor belong the spoils” -- you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil.” Full text: Trump, Pence remarks at CIA Headquarters on January 23, 2017: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-cia-speech-transcript/

  13. Neoliberal ideas on international authority were influential in the structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s, the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, and the phenomenal rise in preferential trade agreements in the 1990s (Haggard and Kaufman 1992).

  14. It is doubtful whether NAFTA’s successor, the recently concluded US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), can be categorized as an international organization, “a formal organization for collective decision making constituted by three or more states … structured by rules for a continuous purpose” (Hooghe et al. 2017: 14–15). A sunset clause triggers automatic expiration after sixteen years unless formally renewed by the three parties.

  15. Global Compact, written under the guidance of John Gerald Ruggie, was announced by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his Address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan 31, 1999 (Press Release SG/SM/6881).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 275, USA

    Liesbet Hooghe & Gary Marks

  2. Institute of Political Science, University of Goettingen, Platz der Goettinger Sieben 3, 37073, Goettingen, Germany

    Tobias Lenz

  3. GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354, Hamburg, Germany

    Tobias Lenz

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Hooghe, L., Lenz, T. & Marks, G. Contested world order: The delegitimation of international governance. Rev Int Organ 14, 731–743 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-018-9334-3

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