Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the old world order and the new one.
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The World of Yesterday
Today, Donald Trump faces resistance in Minnesota; but a mere week ago, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he met resistance from Europe.
In Davos, Trump’s provocations — about Greenland, NATO, and the EU — seemed to mark the end of the “international rules-based order” that has reigned since the end of World War II (or the end of the Cold War, depending on who you ask).
Some commentary:
Trump Heralds the End of a Useful Fiction. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech has been widely praised for bluntly announcing the end of the rules-based order:
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. […] This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
Trump Wants European and British Subordination. Carney’s speech was good, says UnHerd’s Aris Roussinos, but
A clearer assessment of our place in the world was given, if unintentionally, by the European leaders at Davos, when Belgium’s Prime Minister sadly declared that “being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else”, as if this were a meaningful distinction. Like Orwell’s analysis of Dickens’s politics, observing that the novelist’s lament was not the fact of exploitation in itself but that the factory owner was insufficiently benevolent to his proles, America’s regional branch managers in Europe chafe not at the fact of their servitude, but at its worsening terms.
Trump’s United States Is Not an Ally of Britain, says historian Simon Schama:
Trump Chickened Out Over Greenland, argues Francis Fukuyama, and he won’t transform the world order:
Trump’s enduring legacy is not an institutional structure, but rather a highly toxic culture that has been adopted by many of the president’s followers and will live on after he is gone. Threats against Greenland, NATO, and individual European countries mean that no ally will be able to trust commitments made by the United States again. Discourse by government officials has been degraded. Cabinet officers and press secretaries know that they don’t have to respond to questions they don’t like because they can simply insult the questioner. And companies will understand that they need to seek individual favors rather than general policies governing entire sectors.
Trump Won Davos, says historian Niall Ferguson:
The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.
China Won Davos, suggests the New York Times’ Peter S. Goodman. Or, at least, it gained some ground in its long-term mission to win over Europe:
“China definitely wants to assume the mantle of being the adult in the room, while the United States continues capriciously showing hostility,” said Eswar Prasad, an international trade expert at Cornell University. “The question is whether the rest of the world is willing to accede. I don’t think the world is ready to carry full on into the embrace of China.”
What Comes Next?
Three sources to help make sense of this pivotal geopolitical moment.
The United States Has Become a Revisionist Power, argues political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) David Polansky. Even though the United States built the international rules-based order, today Trump believes that the United States no longer benefits from that order. And so, he wants to shake things up:
The benefits of a favorable status quo are not alone sufficient to ensure its stability. It must be a goal of political rhetoric to make compelling claims on behalf of the existing regime — especially to those who derive less obvious benefit from it.
There is admittedly a danger to inertia, especially when it comes to the domain of international politics, which is defined by flux and change and requires flexible policies to match. As the famous line in The Leopard has it: If we wish for things to remain as they are, it is necessary for everything to change.
The World Order Is Disintegrating, and Will Do So For a Long Time. So writes professor Gareth Williams:
… I have proposed the term “post-sovereign decontainment” in order to indicate that it is no longer a question of an old epoch that is coextensive with a linear temporal transition toward the contours and possibility of a new destiny, of a new epoch of representation. It is simply globalization (which by now cannot even be understood in the same terms as “late modernity” was just thirty years ago) as a perpetual form of hollowing out and ending. It is no longer a question of Prometheus bound or unbound. Promethean thinking is moribund, overcome by a historical and conceptual perishing that is incapable of positing anything new in its place. This an-epochality — the boundless disaster of epochality itself — raises a number of questions, one of which is that of the tendential patterns, if any, which endure in the persistent, limitless turmoil that is the late neoliberal, global order.
The World Is Reorganizing Itself Into “Civilization States.” This means that world governance, and the international rules-based order, are over. So theorized Portuguese philosopher Bruno Maçães in 2020:
The shift now taking place is arguably deeper and more radical. By accusing Western political ideas of being a sham, of masking their origin under the veneer of supposedly neutral principles, the defenders of the civilization state are saying that the search for universal values is over, that all of us must accept that we speak only for ourselves and our societies.
From the Crowd
Dictators Come In All Shapes and Sizes. A sharp response to our last podcast by political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) Sam Mace:
I think I would maintain a distinction between the governments of someone like Putin and Saddam Hussein. Whereas Hussein was purely a man of the gun, especially post-1991, when the finances of the regime collapsed, and Iraq slid into totalitarianism and was ultimately devoid of domestic support outside of fear of the regime and propaganda. Ultimately, this was shown by the biggest challenge in stabilising Iraq coming from groups taking advantage of US-induced chaos in the country as opposed to any real resistance for Saddam or Ba’athism to return.
Whereas Putin, although authoritarian and potentially just as Brutal as Saddam, does retain domestic political support. I think if there were a genuine democratic election in Russia, then he’d likely win it, or at least garner a significant portion of the vote. To me, therefore, this represents a significant difference between the two regimes.
I would also say the US and Europe post WW2 have clashed significantly over values on a wide range of issues. The death of the European Empire, which the US not only presided over but also enforced, also led to the slow downturn of European militarism. The US, as the global behemoth, took over control of safeguarding much of the liberal order precisely because it defanged antiquated imperial orders that could no longer be seen as legitimate or be sustained. So, on the question of defence, who else was going to pick up the tab? You cannot realistically expect to be the global hegemon without the corresponding duties of defense.
See you next week!
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This was a great pastiche of responses (and responses to responses) to Carney's speech. Since it's award season, let's hand out a few.
--Sam Mace's last sentence is brutally on-target. Indeed, the post WWII role of the United States has been to serve as guarantor, both of European security and world energy energy flows. Abandon the role if you wish, but others are going to get a say about your new role.
--And the very important award for silliest response goes to Aris Roussinos, who pedantically focuses on the meaning of "vassal" - but by cherrypicking a casual modern sense of the word both misunderstands and misrepresents Bart De Wever's point, which is that it's one thing to be a secondary or tertiary member of an alliance (and accept the US's leading role) but quite another to be treated with contempt (i.e., as a slave and not as a vassal) by that leading member.
What's interesting is how De Wever's and Mace's points converge.
This is phenomenal coverage of the Davos moment and what it means for global order. The shift from universal rules to civilization states feels like we're witnessing history pivot in real-time. I remember when folks used to talk about the end of history post-Cold War, now we're basicaly seeing the opposite - history coming back with a vengance. Carney's speech really nailed it - the fiction was useful til it wasn't.