Abstract
This chapter sets the question of effective multilateralism within the broader analysis of global order and the ways in which the patterns of global order and the understanding of global order have evolved in the period since the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, dominant western understandings about multilateralism were firmly rooted within the context of economic globalization and an apparently stable western-centred global liberal order. In the early 2000s, multilateralism was frequently viewed through the prism of US hegemony. Now, the picture is one of flux, fluidity and great uncertainty. This chapter seeks to shed light on some of the principal features of the contemporary global order and some of the major sources of this uncertainty.
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Notes
C. Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
I examine these trends in more detail in A. Hurrell, On Global Order. Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially chapter 3, pp. 57–94.
See, for example, Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin (eds.), Experimentalist Governance in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
See, for example, M. Koskenniemi, ‘Miserable Comforters: International Relations as New Natural Law’, European Journal of International Law, 15:3 (2009), 395–422.
See B. Kingsbury, ‘The Concept of “Law” in Global Administrative Law’, European Journal of International Law, 20:1 (2009), 23–57.
N. Krisch, Beyond Constitutionalism. The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
For the elaboration of this logic, see G.J. Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
On this debate, see S. Chan, ‘Can’t Get No Satisfaction? The Recognition of Revisionist States’, International Journal of Asia-Pacific, 4:2 (2004), 207–238.
This brief summary should not imply that the sources of US revisionism run as a continuous thread through the post-Cold War period. Whilst there are important continuities both before and after the second Bush administration, there are major differences. In particular, the neo-conservative self-description of themselves as ‘hard Wilsonians’ should not disguise the extent to which the Bush administration was, in Drolet’s words, ‘ferociously predatory on liberal values’. See J.-F. Drolet, ‘A Liberalism Betrayed? American Neo-conservatism and the Theory of International Relations’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 15:2 (2010), 89–118.
On the idea of soft balancing, see S.G. Brooks and W.C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance. International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and A. Hurrell, ‘Hegemony, Liberalism and Global Order: What Space for Would-Be Great Powers?’, International Affairs, 82:1 (2006), 1–19.
R. Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Vintage, 2009).
For a recent account of the changing character of legal legitimacy, see J. Brunnée and S. Toope, Legitimacy and Legality in International Law. An Interactional Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
See K.J. Alter and S. Meunier, ‘The Politics of International Regime Complexity’, Perspectives on Politics, 7:1 (2009), 13–24.
E. Benvenisti and G. Downs, ‘The Empire’s New Clothes: Political Economy and the Fragmentation of International Law’, Stanford Law Review, 60 (2007), 595–631; M. Koskenniemi and P. Leino, ‘Fragmentation of International Law? Postmodern Anxieties’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 15 (2002), 553–579.
W.I. Robinson, ‘Beyond the Theory of Imperialism: Global Capitalism and the Transnational State’, Societies Without Borders, 2:1 (2007), 5–26.
P. Evans, ‘Is an Alternative Globalization Possible?’, Politics and Society, 36:2 (2008), 283.
P. Collier, The Bottom Billion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 3.
R.B. Zoellick, ‘The End of the Third World: Modernizing Multilateralism for a Multipolar World’, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, 14 April 2010, available at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS.
See R. Wade, ‘Emerging World Order? From Multipolarity to Multilateralism in the G20, the World Bank and the IMF’, Politics and Society, 39:3 (2011), 347–78.
See, for example, R. Foot and A. Walter, China, the United States and Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
A. Hurrell, ‘Cardoso and the World’, in H. Martins and Maria Angela D’Incao (eds.), Democracia, crise e reforma. Estudos sobre a era Fernando Henrique Cardoso (São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 2010), pp. 473–99.
On this theme see, in particular, D. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), especially chapters 7 and 8, pp. 133–201.
M. Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986).
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© 2013 Andrew Hurrell
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Hurrell, A. (2013). Effective Multilateralism and Global Order. In: Prantl, J. (eds) Effective Multilateralism. St Antony’ Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312983_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312983_2
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