On the Concept of International Disorder

On the Concept of International Disorder

Aaron McKeil is a Course Convenor and Course Tutor of the Executive MSc International Strategy and Diplomacy Programme,
at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

It is widely considered international relations are experiencing deepening disorder today. [1] Richard N. Haass, for instance, argues an increasing state of ‘disarray defines them’. [2] Others use the word ‘chaos’. [3] The international disorder is gaining increased attention and interest. [4] Yet, despite this recent interest in international disorder, in and beyond the academy, and despite the decades-long interest in the international order, there is still little agreement on the concept of international disorder, which is often used imprecisely and with an alarmist rather than analytical usage. This is a problem if the international disorder is to be understood in theory, towards addressing its concomitant problems and effects in practice. Surely, what is often called ‘the problem of international order’, namely how to achieve it, is in one sense the problem of mitigating and circumventing international disorder. [5] To what extent can international order be understood and explained without a corresponding understanding of international disorder? It is a curiously significant conceptual oversight in international order studies and is an important topic considering the global scope and potential severity of deepening international disorder including, for instance, the potentiality of war and economic turmoil, among other serious concerns. This article aims to clarify and advance debates about deepening international disorder in international relations.

In this article, I identify and explore two ways international order studies can benefit from a clearer and more precise conception of international disorder. First, I argue it enables a more complete picture of how orderly international orders have been. International order studies, by focusing on the substance of orders, have neglected or obscured the amount and variety of disorders involved in international orders. Second, I argue that a clearer grasp of the relationship illuminates a greater understanding of the problem of international order between order and disorder in world politics. Towards this second point, I suggest that the relationship between international order and disorder has a generative and deeply historical character. I advance these arguments in three steps. First, I develop and propose an analytical definition of international disorder. Second, applying it to the history of modern international orders, I explore the extent to which there is a generative relationship between order and disorder in international systems. Third, I clarify and specify the deepening international disorder in international affairs today and consider its reordering effects. I conclude by indicating a research agenda for International Relations and international order studies that take the role of international disorder more seriously.

The concept of international disorder

What does international disorder mean? Whereas international order has been a subject of sustained and significant interest in International Relations, the concept of international disorder lacks conceptual scrutiny. Discussions about international disorder suggest examples such as war, revolution, and economic turmoil, but do not analyze the concept itself. [6] We often use the concept as an alarmist provocation, but with little reflection. Its deceptively intuitive meaning, as everything international order tries to avoid, is, when examined, conceptually vacuous and murky. If the international disorder is the absence of order, then is it nothing at all? If the international disorder is instead that which is opposed or contrary to international order, then what is it exactly? If it is war and revolution, is it also international economic turmoil and ecological collapse? How do these distinct things fall under the common category of international disorder?

The idea of international disorder

Ngram graph shows us that the popular use of international order and disorder emerged with notable spikes in use around the First and Second World Wars:

This suggests that it was the emergence of the overwhelming international disorder of the world wars that gave the concepts of international order and disorder their salience and prominence in political discourse. However, Ngram graphing also reveals the infrequent use of international disorder compared to the use of international order. This shows the concept’s relative lack of conceptual attention, both in scholarly and public discourse.

It is the modern imagination of an ‘international’ realm of social life that makes possible such notions of international order and disorder. [7] This is not an unimportant point, because it illuminates some of the defining features of how international disorder is imagined in the modern mind. Perhaps most interestingly, for instance, the modern notion of the international as a realm ‘outside’ or ‘among’ sovereign states defines the international disorder as either something among states (e.g. wars) or as something breaking down and overwhelming the existence of borders and barriers delimiting sovereigns (e.g. transnational revolutionary movements). The conventional usage of international disorder in modern discourse is to imply the negative binary to international order, its disruption or deficiency. This implies that international disorder is commonly understood to be the emergence of qualities in opposition or contrary to international order. These qualities are the concept’s conventional connotations. At least six are identifiable: international instability, meaning a state of international affairs vulnerable to violent change, typically characterized by increasing reprisals and broadening scales of military posturing, as well as revolutionary discontent; international uncertainty or unpredictability, meaning confusion what the rules are and what actions actors can be expected to take, a state of affairs where and when the real status of diplomatic relations are unclear among statesperson, when friends and enemies become blurred distinctions and fear and distrust abound; international criminality, meaning the open or secret disregard for international law; international political discord or controversy, as in the emergence of heated controversy and disagreement over international issues, particularly ideological disagreement over fundamental international principles; international dysfunction, meaning functionally ineffective international rules, norms and authorities; and finally, international conflict and violence, meaning opposing interests, real or imagined, precipitating open hostilities, ultimately in warfare.

The tradition of realist international thought suggests these are the normal qualities of international affairs, which, from a realist outlook, is a realm of social life virtually devoid of order. In the modern imagination, the international realm is commonly and not unreasonably characterized as an especially disorderly part of the modern world, unusually resistant to ordering and not infrequently subject to the notably severe disorder, of warfare. These notions and impressions of international disorder, particularly their realist expression, are derivative of a certain conception of order as a hierarchy: the vision of the international as an anarchical system of states lacking an ‘orderer’. As a nineteenth-century anarchist thinker put it, ‘The meaning ordinarily attached to the word “anarchy” is the absence of principle, absence of rule; We have regarded it as synonymous with “disorder”’. [8] What counts as ‘order’, however, is contentious, because the concept is relative to the values attributed to it. [9] Traditions of critical thought, for instance, view international disorder in a favorable light, with positive connotations, because critical outlooks conceive international disorder as disruptions of oppressive and exploitative orders and generative of transformative change. [10] We cannot equate international disorder with international injustice. [11] However, the values attributed to international order today are modern, a defining feature of which is their ‘progressive’ character. For this reason, one of the major points of disagreement among modern approaches to international order concerns the extent to which progress is possible. [12] Thus, disorder, in this discourse, is often equated with the forces or obstacles that are thought to be standing in the way of progress. This point, however, only clarifies the modern grounds on which the concept is essentially contested. [13]

Towards an analytical conception

While the contention among competing conceptions of international disorder is partly normative, it is also partly theoretical, because different theories pose and implicitly hold different propositions about the sources of international disorder. Realist theory, for instance, suggests or implies that international disorder arises from failures to navigate power shifts under anarchy, whereas liberal theory suggests international disorder arises instead of a lack of international organization and transnational cooperation. Each of these theoretical views in this way equates disorder with the theory of its sources. In this way, a theoretical conception of international disorder derives from a theory of international relations that explains it. A more primary and less ambitious aim, however, is instead to clarify an analytical conception of international disorder, one that is applicable for analysis of its occurrence but does not assume theoretical explanations of it.

Towards this end, it is helpful to distinguish the different senses in which the language of international disorder is often used. First, international disorder is often used to refer to the breakdown or absence of international order, perhaps most clearly, but not only in great power wars, when international orders are almost destroyed. Second, we often use international disorders in another sense, to refer to the action of irresponsible foreign policy that contradicts or undermines order and churns up instability and unpredictability; conduct such as reckless and illegal wars or violating of international treaties for convenience. Third, international disorder is also often used in an evaluative sense, to refer to the mismatch or gap between the aspirations of international order and its reality, between what people want the international order to achieve and the realities of its limitations. From these different senses, we can distinguish three notions of international disorder. First, there is the sense of disruption or absence of ordering rules or institutions, because they have not yet been developed or have broken down. Second, we can distinguish the state of a broken-down or absent order from the action of disregarding and breaking order by states. This second sense we might call disorderly international conduct—conduct against or transgressing order-disorder in an order which may or may not be sufficient in scope to overturn the order itself. Third, there is a disorder in the sense of a faulty or dysfunctional order. This is the disorder of an order, as in the failure of an order to achieve its aims and purposes. An aggressive and reckless war, for example, is an instance of disorder in international affairs, but the disorder of international affairs means rather that the established expectations of behavior, rules, norms and authorities are themselves inadequate, even when they are abided.

These are ways of thinking about the disorder as an absence, transgression, or lack of order. Is a more substantive conception possible? Because Bull’s conception of international order is widely employed and admired for its lucidity and acuity, his discussions of the disorder are relevant and can also provide a helpful set of distinctions for clarifying the meaning of international disorder in world politics. Bull’s reasoning is elucidated when he says: when we speak of order as opposed to disorder in social life, we have in mind not any pattern or methodical arrangement among social phenomena, but a pattern of a particular sort. A pattern may be clear in the behavior of men or groups in violent conflict with one another, yet this is a situation we should characterize as disorderly. Sovereign states in circumstances of war and crisis may behave in regular and methodological ways; individual men living in Hobbes’s account of the state of nature, may conduct themselves in conformity with some recurrent pattern, indeed Hobbes himself says that they do, but these are examples not of order but disorder. [14]

Bull provides his widely admired definition of international order as, ‘a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society’. [15] Bull’s notion of international disorder might then be defined as patterns of activity that disrupt or deny the purposive goals of an international order, as we hold them to be by participants in that order. This is an intriguing definition, because it emphasizes the disordering patterns of activity, although we might recognize that what the purposive goals of an order are is controversial, even and perhaps, especially if we define those goals according to what participants hold them to be.

With Bull’s approach, we can derive a few further conceptual clarifications. First, scrutinizing Bull’s concept further draws forward the sociological point that international order and disorder must always be thought of as international ordering and disordering, as ongoing processes of activity. It is always an ongoing process of ordering and/or disordering. Bull’s notion of a ‘pattern of activity’ is the ordering behavior. Second, because Bull suggests his definition of international order is ‘minimal’ (being limited to the elementary or primary purposes of international affairs), this implies a ‘maximal’ conception of international disorder, because only the disruption or denial of the most primary purposes of international society make up a negation of international order. While it is intuitive that less severe degrees of international disorder also exist, we should agree that logically something that disrupts or denies the very possibility of any international order counts as an international disorder. Bull also distinguishes international from world order, the former meaning order among states and the latter meaning order among states and humankind organized into a series of ‘domestic’ orders. While it is analytically as well as intuitively impossible for there to be world order without international order, we can achieve international order, according to Bull, alongside and often at the cost of world disorder. [16]

However, even if Bull helps clarify important aspects of the concept, a discussion of his conceptual reasoning only takes us so far toward an analytical definition, partly because Bull’s approach is highly associated with a particular theoretical approach today, the English School. Critics, such as Shiping Tang, for instance, argue that international order is more ‘rigorously’ conceived as a state of ‘predictability (or regularity)’ among states, which suggests disorder is a state of unpredictability and irregularity. [17] To distill and discern a more refined definition of international disorder, it is also helpful to derive it from analytical definitions of international order. Among analytical definitions, some emphasize patterns of behavior, while others emphasize institutional rules and norms. Reconciling these, we can suggest analytically that international orders are the patterns of behavior, rules, and norms that provide international relations with stability and predictability. [18] It is important to note that this definition reconciles ways of ordering with the quality of order, the condition of international stability, and predictability. Order is both a state of affairs and quality or condition. International orders produce the quality of order either spontaneously or by designed institutions, but with varying degrees of success in different periods. Because of this variety of the quality of order, it is important to insist that analytically ordering behavior, rules and norms are distinct from the quality of order that they effectuate. With this definition, we can say that multiple distinct international orders exist when different expected patterns of behavior, rules, and norms apply to distinct sets of relations. Orders can also be nested, however, with multiple orders existing within broader orders. [19] For instance, the international system during the Cold War was bifurcated into a Western order and a Soviet-led order, but both were within the broader system-wide order of the UN system. A change in order is when expected patterns of behavior, rules, and norms change. A change of orders is when the major ordering expectations, rules, and norms change, typically after major wars. Systems transformation, however, is more fundamental when the units themselves change, such as in the emergence of the modern system from the medieval system.

On this basis, to propose an analytical conception of international disorder, we can think of international disorder as the disruption of ordering international behavior, rules, and norms, producing a condition of instability and unpredictability in international affairs. This analytical definition combines the different senses of international disorder, either as the breakdown or as the violation of international order, with their common effects, the qualities of instability and unpredictability. It is important to combine these elements with their effects, because the breakdown of ordering behavior, rules, and norms may at least conceivably be involved in a stable and predictable process of reordering, producing more stability and predictability in international affairs. We can identify the emergence of international disorder when the breakdown of order is combined with the qualities of instability and unpredictability. However, an added benefit of using the term ‘disruption’ in this proposed definition, rather than ‘absence’ or ‘denial’, is that it releases the conception from a binary relation with the order, where the presence of one would presume the absence of the other since orders can be disturbed and disrupted without being entirely negated. This enables a more careful assessment for a more complete picture of the disorder present in or amid an international order. Finally, this analytical definition is still partly normative. I must concede if we consider stability and predictability as among the primary purposes or functions of international orders. I suggest them, however, because, among other ends and ambitions, international orders seem to strive to produce a condition of international stability and predictability. The proposed analytical definition should be distinguished from a purely evaluative and normative definition of the concept.

Ordering yesterday’s international disorder: 1919, 1945, and 1989–1991

What light can this analytical definition shed on the disorder in international relations? I want to suggest, first; that it gives us a more complete picture of how orderly international orders have been. International order studies, by focusing on the substance of orders and ordering processes, have neglected the amount and variety of disorders that orders have involved and even generated. Second, beyond this and perhaps more interestingly, I also want to suggest that greater attention to international disorder reveals its deeply historical character, where ordering institutions are shaped by the experience of the disorder. This suggests, that the study of the international order has focused perhaps too narrowly on the role of hegemon and ordering powers, and can benefit from a closer study of the way the experience of disorder transforms the kinds of orders that people believe are valid and those that they strive to develop. [20] In more refined language, I suggest that international disorder has a generative relation with international orders in world history, each affecting the other in a generative process.

Let me attempt to explain this suggestion in more detail and provide examples. It is an old saying that wars are often fought with the weapons and tactics designed to fight the last war. Applying the proposed conception of international disorder, I suggest, reveals that a similar tendency applies to international orders; We built them to prevent the last disorder. There is a kind of trial-and-error process at work in the history of modern international orders, but my suggestion is that the relation between order and disorder is deeper than this, that the very notion of what disorders need to be prevented and what institutions are needed is shaped by the historical experience of historically specific disorders. For example, a notable feature of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe was its combination of a congress system of diplomacy with a deliberate balancing of power designed to avoid both competitive balancings and to prevent the rise of another revolutionary hegemon. [21] the Japanese East Asia order (emerging after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905) was based on regional Japanese hegemony. They constructed this regional order not only to promote modern Japanese imperial power but also to build its regional hegemony in response to and towards the prevention of further disruptive Western imperialism. [22] The point these examples suggest is that to coin a term, international orders are ‘disorder contingent. Practices and events that undermine and disrupt international orders generate new practices and institutions intended to prevent those disruptions. [23]

To show this suggestion, it is helpful to distinguish between different ordering institutions. International orders develop institutions for ‘managing’ or ‘governing’ international relations, [24] but we can also note that they do so through two analytically distinct types of institutions: platforms for cooperation and pursuit of common interests, as well as institutional bulwarks designed to prevent the recurrence of prior international disorders. [25] In the case studies below, disorder-preventive bulwark institutions prevented the disorder as perceived by the ascendant powers, but I argue that the explanation of this tendency is not solely found in the distribution of power or character of ascendant powers; we also found it in the change in beliefs and outlook of participants, in their new inability to believe any longer in the premises and assumptions of the old order, given their new understanding of the sources of international disorder and what disorders need preventing. The victory and defeat of a hegemon in major wars are undoubtedly and immensely consequential for what orders rise and fall, but a focus on this important fact I want to argue should not completely overshadow the other important fact that there were major wars, wars manifesting disorder of such magnitude that they affected the very character of the era and the deeper rationale of any order that might follow. Attention to this pattern reveals that this backward-facing character of bulwark institutions generates new unforeseen disorders.

Reviewing the interwar order, the Cold War order, and the post-Cold War order sheds light on the role of international disorder in international orders and provides a necessary background for clarifying and deepening international disorder in international relations today. Selecting these cases has the additional benefit of providing a sequence of three successive cases for a diachronic analysis of the generative dynamics of international order and disorder that I aim to explore here.

1919 and the interwar order

What impact did the disorder of the First World War have on the shape of the interwar order that followed? The immensity of disorder manifesting in the First World War generated the construction of new international institutions of unprecedented scope. Perhaps most significant was the turn to collective security and open diplomacy through the League of Nations, which foreclosed the miscalculation and balance of power system that were now seen as key sources of the war. Woodrow Wilson’s agency in this period was undoubtedly important for how these institutions were envisioned and established, but he also worked within a historical context that generated the ideas he championed. Wilson’s reasoning is clear in his famous claim, September 1919, ‘I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it’. [26] Yet, the idea for the League was not originally or only his own. It was first proposed in 1915 at a meeting of professors at the Century Club, in New York. [27] It was also a proposal commonly shared by British wartime committees and working groups on the postwar order question. The committee of David Lloyd George’s government took the position that the League should be tasked with preventing another world war, but not governing the world. [28] They reasoned that miscalculation caused the Great War, avoidable in the future through new inquiry and delay mechanisms. George Clemenceau and the French delegation of 1919 in principle supported the League proposal but proposed that it should include an international army to enforce peace because they saw ‘covenants without swords’ as insufficient. The proposal was ultimately rejected by the other great powers. [29] However, France was satisfied instead with punitive reparations imposed on Germany, insisted upon by Clemenceau. [30] This is not to suggest that it does not matter that Germany lost the war. If the punitive terms of the Soviet-German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk are an indicator of Germany’s postwar intentions, which the allies thought they were, the German leadership aimed to expand German imperial territory, punish defeated powers and establish itself as a European hegemon. Germany too did not relish the war, and also felt they had been thrown into it, so likely would have sought to build bulwarks against the sources of the war. Yet, while it is unclear what German leadership perceived those sources to be, certainly war would seem to be foreclosed by diminishing the territories and capacities of France and Italy and making a series of vassal states unable to mobilize a serious threat in the future. It surely matters which powers prevail after major wars, but it generated ideas for preventive institutions and practices from the experience of the war.

After 1919, it cemented the interwar order in two further treaties, the Pacific Treaties of the Washington Naval Conference, 1921–1922, and the European Peace Pact devised at Locarno, 1925. [31] However, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, of 1928, stands out as a remarkable reordering, in its attempt to outlaw the use of war. Perhaps even more so than the League, it’s radical legal reordering of the system was highly problematic and ineffective as an institution to prevent war, because while it proscribed war, it had no mechanisms to suppress it or quell its sources, except for the promises and commitments made to the treaty itself. [32] This had the unintended consequence of paralyzing the League’s ability to keep and enforce the peace since the signatories had proscribed the use of war to themselves. [33] The League mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration were ineffective at preventing a war if a belligerent power wished war.

Besides the League organization and outlawry of war, a further notable if limited reordering was the development of a new rationale and order of minority rights. The Treaty of Berlin, 1878, had established standards for national minorities and new states, [34] but their rationale had become a practical problem in the war’s course, because of the role that minority troubles played both as one of the war’s perceived triggers and as one of its consequences following the breakup of the defeated empires. Former director of the Minorities Question Section of the League of Nations, Pablo Azcarate, explained:

The object of protecting minorities which those treaties committed to the League of Nations was to avoid the many inter-state frictions and conflicts which had occurred in the past, because of the frequent ill-treatment or oppression of national minorities. [35]

It became an embarrassment for the victor powers, however, that there was no universal order for minority rights. [36] It also became a widespread disappointment in the interwar order itself. [37] While the victors established mandates from colonies of defeated powers and intervened in ‘new states’ of Eastern Europe, they had no equivalent rules or norms of minority rights applied to their empires or internal affairs.

1945 and the cold war order

The demise of the interwar order—inevitable or not—again generated new notions about the sources of disorder and means of preventing it. Allied planning of the postwar order began with the Atlantic Charter in 1941, followed by a string of allied conferences that prepared the bases for the UN Charter and postwar international order. The UN Security Council, designed to prevent deviations from the peace by use of a permanent council of great power management, was a significant institutional adaptation. The need for such an adaptation was a widely shared view early on. In 1940, the US State Department outline for postwar order suggested that an executive committee of great powers with armed forces should replace the League unanimity mechanism of collective security. [38] In his first meeting with Churchill, in 1941, Roosevelt suggested their respective countries should ‘police’ international order towards the establishment of a functioning international organization. [39] In 1942, the UK Foreign Office, in consultation with the State Department, produced the Four Power Plan, expanding the proposal to a ‘Four Policemen’ model, with the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and also China, jointly managing security. [40] In the Tehran Conference in 1943, Roosevelt pressed for this proposal and Stalin in principle supported it, but suggested, as Churchill had separately, that it would require management through respective regional committees, rather than global cooperation. [41] The Soviet view of the matter came from a different outlook. [42] The lesson of the League’s demise from the Soviet outlook was a confirmation that imperial powers inevitably descend into war. Stalin’s postwar aims were security from the next inevitable conflict. [43] His support for and included in the UN Security Council supported that aim, by providing an institutional bulwark, but also maintaining a semblance of unity with Western powers.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was another institution of the post-1945 order notable for preventing a perceived prior disorder. The experience of the Great Depression generated the view that the international monetary and financial order was dysfunctional. To correct it, the celebrated British economist John Maynard Keynes produced a plan for a new international currency and a set of international commitments. Henry Dexter White produced an alternative, less ambitious American plan. Their common ambition was to preserve open markets through mechanisms designed to prevent situations wherein states needed to protect their markets. It reconciled the two plans at the Bretton Woods Conference, which set out the bases of the IMF, designed to preserve open markets by managing currency exchange rates by member states and by providing financial support to them when needed. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade complemented the IMF in the postwar international economic order but were institutions more of a platform type, used for rehabilitating and opening markets. The IMF’s capacities contained the major bulwark mechanisms for preventing markets from falling out and closing up again. As this economic order developed, it encountered new challenges and fundamental changes, particularly in the Nixon Administration’s abandonment of the gold standard, but its initial depth and character were nonetheless shaped in direct response to the perceived sources of the economic disorder of the interwar years. The Soviet view on the interwar economic disorder was rather different from those of the West. The Soviets perceived capitalism itself, not its mismanagement, as causing the economic boom and bust of the interwar years. This did not foreclose Soviet participation in the Bretton Woods Conference, which its delegates attended, nor did it foreclose the Soviet Union’s participation in the new economic order, but the Soviet Union declined to ratify the agreements reached at the conference.

In its early conception, Franklin D. Roosevelt wished to make the post-1945 order more refined but also more ‘sellable’ to the American public, because he wished to avoid Wilson’s mistake of making commitments beyond what the public would support, to prevent the disorders many have attributed to US interwar isolationism. [44] The emergence of the Cold War, however, kept US interests in Europe and elsewhere beyond the Western hemisphere to a greater degree than Roosevelt had envisioned. [45] The relations between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies conflicted if two orders emerged, limiting the scope and range of shared institutions to a minimum. For instance, what about the Cold War nuclear order? In one view, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought prominent intellectuals like Albert Einstein among others, to conclude that a world government was necessary to prevent a two-way nuclear war. However, once the spread of nuclear weapons made a two-way nuclear war a reality, the statesperson sought to prevent its possibility, perhaps not so much from its experience as an awareness of its consequences in the future. The nuclear order that arose in the 1960s and 1970s contained two preventive measures: non-proliferation and deterrence. [46] The Non-Proliferation Treaty proscribed the sharing of nuclear weapons, committed nuclear states to pursue disarmament, and affirmed the right of states to peaceful nuclear energy. The logic of deterrence, however, did not lend itself to disarmament, because it required nuclear powers to maintain arsenals with devastating second-strike capabilities. The origins of the deterrence system can be traced to the ‘massive retaliation’ doctrine of the US, meant to balance Soviet conventional forces with the threat of a nuclear response. Yet, after the emergence of Soviet nuclear forces, the deterrence order eventually found its basis in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, whose logic aimed at preventing nuclear war by mutual maintenance of assured massive second-strike capabilities. This path to order required arms control, however, and has always been limited and uncertain, being persistently vulnerable to the emergence of new technologies, new actors, and periodic arms races.

Finally, not entirely resulting from the experience of the war, but not entirely disconnected from it either, was the emergence of decolonization. While the Second World War diminished European power on a global scale, it was the experience of the disorder of colonialism by most of the humankind that generated the construction of institutions to prevent its continuation and return. It is important to acknowledge that the experience of the disorder of colonialism has deeply affected the character of subsequent international orders, chiefly in the globalization of sovereignty, meant to prevent further colonialism. [47] Of course, the process of decolonization did not entirely prevent neo-imperialism, but the disorder of modern colonialism has had a lasting post-colonial impact on the character and institutional makeup of the modern international system. For instance, it also shaped the character of the global Cold War, as both superpowers sought to legitimize their cause and attract support in the global south by portraying themselves as anti-imperial and their rival as imperialist. [48]

1989–1991 and the post-Cold War order

When the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and the Cold War finally ended, there emerged an attempt to build a ‘new world order’ and lasting peace. [49] The UN was given renewed hope and ambition, a fully globalized market was pursued through an expanded World Trade Organization (WTO), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and North American Free Trade Agreement, and democracy and human rights promotion also became reaffirmed global agendas. These goals had a unifying ambition to prevent the perceived disorders of bipolarity. The pursuit of cementing US primacy in this period was designed to prevent the return of the instabilities and divisions of great power competition. If there had been different US Presidents, different policies of course would have been pursued, but it is unlikely the United States would have pursued a distinct set of policies. Leadership through security and economic club benefits was a consistent pattern of US leadership among the advanced democracies and in a post-Cold War moment, this pattern of hegemonic leadership, if globalized, offered a recipe of unity to prevent the ills of a divided system. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), for instance, was not dissolved but expanded. If the Soviet Union had instead been victorious, only if a calamity or revolution toppled the United States, Soviet leadership likely would have sought a similar post-Cold War order, only inverted in its character: Soviet hegemony, global communism promotion, and global economic planning. The experience of the burdens and anxieties of the Cold War would likely have brought them to also strive to prevent the disorders of the Cold War order.

The post-Cold War order, perhaps in its search for unity, unintentionally failed to prevent the new disorders that quickly emerged. [50] The first Gulf War was the first test of the new order and the rise of nationalism, and ethnic conflict posed further challenges to the post-Cold War order. [51] Perhaps the most consequential was the successful attacks of 11 September 2001. The subsequent unilateralism of the United States in the Iraq War in 2003 damaged the post-Cold War order, undermining the predictability of US leadership and increasing international instability. [52]

The new international disorder

The growing interest in international disorder today is mainly but not only a response to the emergence of the Trump Presidency and its deliberate disruption of the post-Cold War order. What clarity can a refined conception of international disorder bring to this?

First, an analytical definition of international disorder helps to specify and clarify disorders arising in international affairs today. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from international treaties, combined with the diplomatic alienation of US allies by President Trump’s remarks has created a condition of uncertainty and unpredictability in international affairs, not least because it is unclear to too many how these actions are within United States’ interests and that it is alarming to many observers that the United States is unmaking many of the institutions it had been a principal supporter of. [53] There has also been a rise in instability, particularly with the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iran nuclear agreement. This disorder is not caused by the centrality of the United States in the post-Cold War order, but the outsized relative power of the United States and its central role in ordering institutions makes its disordering conduct simultaneously undermining both the order’s principal support and virtually impossible for other powers to constrain. Crucially, however, while the Trump administration has threatened to, it has not withdrawn the United States from some of the more significant institutions such as NATO and the WTO, thus disorder has not as yet overturned the post-Cold War order. The disordering conduct of the Trump administration has undermined and challenged the assumption of the United States’ support for the post-Cold War order, questioning its viability. [54]

Second, closer attention to the concept of disorder and its relation to order raises interesting and important questions about what reordering impulses the experience of contemporary disorder may be generating. Interestingly, the response of many middle powers such as Canada, Australia, and Germany has been an attempt to preserve the post-Cold War ‘rules-based-order’, albeit with admissions of a need for some modifications. [55] These powers are hoping to preserve the order until the United States returns to a more predictable and cooperative foreign policy, although it is unclear if the United States will. [56] In this respect, there is also a sense that if this disorder continues and worsens (increasing instability and deepening unpredictability in international affairs), this may generate a move towards greater reordering initiatives to minimize vulnerability (at least as much as possible) to this kind of disorderly US conduct. These new insulating institutions could take on three broad forms: (a) the abandonment of current US-centric institutions in favor of new regional and global security and economic institutions to eliminate reliance upon US hegemony or (b) the duplication of current US-centric institutions in new regional and global security and economic institutions as institutional insurance that may be turned to and relied on in times of errant hegemony or (c) a combination of (a) and (b). Because of the virtual unavoidability of the outsized United States in international affairs and because many of the major institutions of the contemporary order are long-standing and not being dismantled by the United States, it is more likely that states will duplicate economic and security institutions to insulate their vital interests from vulnerability to the ill effects of errant hegemony. Small and middle powers cannot ignore or effectively resist hegemonic states, but they can build new additional institutions to limit and prevent complete vulnerability to them. This means institutions like NATO and the WTO will probably endure but, depending on the depth and persistence of US unilateralism, they will probably become increasingly nested in webs of additional overlapping regional and global security and economic institutions.

Third, however, it is at least worth noting that the endurance of existing institutions depends on the international system avoiding more severe manifestations of international disorder, chiefly great power war. Such a war is improbable but therefore not impossible. [57] If such a war were to occur, and if humankind survived at all, it would generate radically broader and deeper international institutional reform. Such a war would manifest a disorder of sufficient magnitude to erase and permanently invalidate the prevailing international order. The institutions that such disorder would generate are hard to expect because they would essentially be constructed to establish an entirely new international order. If instead, such conflict is avoided, as is more likely, several world order observers suggest the current period of disorder is generating a reordering of the international system in a potentially more diffuse or fair distribution of power and authority over rule-making, a decentered globalist or ‘multiplex’ world order of multiple nested regional orders. [58] There is some plausibility to this because order-negligent US foreign policy is making US allies increasingly wary of over-reliance on US power while rising powers advance alternative visions of multipolar and polycentric order. China’s aims and interests, for instance, are increasingly to limit its reliance on the United States and to limit the ill effects of errant US hegemony on China by building up a network of alternative institutions, while not dismantling the institutions that already exist. [59] The institutions comprising the post-Cold War order will survive, but depending on the depth and persistence of contemporary disorder, they will also likely become increasingly nested in further regional and global institutions, as hedges generated in response to disordering US policy. [60]

Conclusion

This study of international disorder in world politics suggests a research agenda for International Relations and international order studies that take the role of international disorder more seriously. Studying international disorder opens up an interesting and significant research agenda to complement international order studies. This agenda should consider not only the extent of disorder amid orders past, and the relation between ordering and disordering patterns in world politics, but also broader questions about the extent to which comparative world order models mitigate or precipitate disorder. For instance, in his classic study of the Concert of Europe that followed the disorder of Napoleonic France, Henry Kissinger argued that while Metternich ‘may have been right in asserting that those who have never had a past cannot own the future, those who have had a past may doom themselves by seeking it in the future. [61] We can say this is an incisive point about the Concert, but with an eye to the role of disorder, we can also suggest that international orders since 1919 have not been doomed so much by clinging to order past as by the way they have been shaped by the hopes of forestalling disorders past in the future. The interwar attempt to prevent a second world war through collective security and the outlawry of war made itself vulnerable to multiple simultaneous pursuits of individual security through war. Similarly, the post-1945 attempt to prevent such disorder with a revised great power management mechanism in the UN Security Council made itself susceptible to great power rivalry. Finally, the post-Cold War attempt to prevent the recurrence of Cold War divisions through globalized US-backed institutions has stressed vulnerability to order-negligent US foreign policy. While no international order can be prepared for unforeseen historical forces and events, it also seems to be the case that orders produce their peculiar forms of disorder, even by their very attempt to prevent it.

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[1] G. John Ikenberry, ‘The End of Liberal International Order?’ International Affairs, 94(1), 2018, pp. 7–23.

[2] Richard N. Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (New York: Penguin, 2017).

[3] Robert Jervis, Francis J. Gavin, Joshua Rovner, et al. Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

[4] In 2019, for instance, the London School of Economics and Political Science held a School-wide research festival on ‘New World (Dis)Orders’ and a conference was also convened on ‘Order and Disorder in International Politics’ at Cambridge University.

[5] Marc Trachtenberg, ‘The Problem of International Order and How to Think About It’, The Monist, 89(2), 2006, pp. 207–31; Randall L. Schweller, ‘The Problem of International Order Revisited: A Review Essay’, International Security, 26(1), 2001, pp. 161–86.

[6] See, for instance, J.L. Black, Michael Johns and Alanda D. Theriault (eds), The New World Disorder: Challenges and Threats in an Uncertain World (Lanham: Lexington, 2019); Fred Dallmayr and Edward Demenchonok (eds), A World Beyond Global Disorder: The Courage to Hope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Daniel Innerarity, Governance in the New Global Disorder: Politics for a Post-Sovereign Society, trans. By Sandra Kingery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Javid Husain, Pakistan and a World in Disorder: A Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave, 2016); Bobo Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder (London: Chatham House and Brookings Institution Press, 2015); Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Penguin, 2014); Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Twelve, 2014); Sai Felicia Krishna-Hensel (ed.), Order and Disorder in the International System (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); David Hannay, New World Disorder: The UN After the Cold War: An Insider’s View (London: I.B. Taurus, 2008); Richard M. Pearlstein, Fatal Future? Transnational Terrorism and the New Global Disorder (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004); Robert Harvey, Global Disorder: America and the Threat of World Conflict (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Keith Suter, Global Order and Global Disorder: Globalization and the Nation-State (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). None of these texts, despite their titles, provide an analytical definition of international disorder.

[7] David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: History of an Idea (New York: Allen Lane, 2012); Aaron C. McKeil, ‘The Modern International Imaginary: Sketching Horizons and Enriching the Picture’, Social Imaginaries, 4(2), 2018, pp. 159–180.

[8] P.J. Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (New York: Dover, 1970 [1840]), p. 277.

[9] Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2002 [1977]), pp. 3–8.

[10] See, Roland Bleiker, ‘Order and Disorder in World Politics’, in Alex J. Bellamy (ed.) International Society and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 179–92.

[11] Rosemary Foot, John Gaddis, and Andrew Hurrell, Order and Justice in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

[12] Richard A. Falk, ‘Contending Approaches to World Order’, Journal of International Affairs, 31(2), 1977, pp. 171–98; Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 2–8; Amitav Acharya, Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 4–12.

[13] W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56, (1955/56), pp. 167–98.

[14] Bull, The Anarchical Society, p. 3, emphases added.

[15] Bull, The Anarchical Society, p. 8.

[16] See, Hidemi Suganami, ‘The Argument of The Anarchical Society’, in Suganami (ed.) The Anarchical Society At 40: Contemporary Challenge and Prospects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 33–5.

[17] Shiping Tang, ‘Order: A Conceptual Analysis’, Chinese Political Science Review, 1(1), 2016, pp. 30–46; Shiping Tang, ‘China and the Future International Order’, Ethics & International Affairs, 32(1), 2018, pp. 31–43.

[18] This analytical definition aims to neither favour realist conceptions of international order as an emergent property of the balance of power, nor liberal and English School conceptions that conceive it as a purposive set of institutions. Privileging either excludes important ordering dynamics and presumes theoretical explanations of them.

[19] John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order’, International Security, 43(4), 2019, pp. 7–50.

[20] Robert Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 9; G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3–20.

[21] F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 196.

[22] Akira Iriye, Japan and the Wider World: From the Mid-nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), ch. 2 and 5.

[23] This is to say that it is the socio-cultural experience of disorder and the learning that that affords which generates the pursuit of new international bulwarks against disorder. This implies that the maturation of international systems is not only a growth in the quantity, depth and scope of ordering behavior and institutions; international systems also mature qualitatively in their ordering competencies, in the proficiency of their design, as generated in response to encounters with the disorder.

[24] Ikenberry, After Victory, p. 23.

[25] In this discussion, I define international institutions broadly, meaning collections of rules and norms governing realms of international life, both in the sense of the fundamental or primary constitutive rules and norms, as well as the authorities and bodies charged with upholding them. The distinction between platform and bulwark-type institutions is analytical. Empirically, in historical practice, they overlap.

[26] Woodrow Wilson, ‘Address at the Omaha Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska’, 8 September, 1919, available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=117368

[27] F.S. Northedge, The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920-1946 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), p. 26.

[28] Northedge, The League of Nations, p. 27.

[29] Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 23–4, 32–3.

[30] MacMillan, Paris 1919, pp. 306–22

[31] Adam Tooze, Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (New York: Penguin, 2015), p. 2.

[32] Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. xvi.

[33] Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, ‘International Law and its Transformation through the Outlawry of War’, International Affairs, 95(1), 2019, p. 54.

[34] Jennifer Jackson Preece, ‘Minority Rights in Europe: From Westphalia to Helsinki’, Review of International Studies, 23, 1997, pp. 79–81.

[35] Pablo de Azacarate Y. Flores, League of Nations and National Minorities: An Experiment (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), p. 14; cited in Carol Weisbrod, Emblems of Pluralism: Cultural Differences and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 120.

[36] Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe’, Daedalus, 126(2), 1997, pp. 53–4.

[37] Urs Matthias Zachmann (ed.), Asia After Versailles: Asian Perspectives in the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919-33 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

[38] Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations: Volume 1, The Years of Western Domination, 1945-1955 (London: MacMillan, 1982), p. 18.

[39] Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 85.

[40] Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations: Volume 1, p. 18.

[41] Kimball, The Juggler, p. 97

[42] George F. Kennan, ‘Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, 1947, available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct

[43] John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 11.

[44] Gaddis, The Cold War, p. 17.

[45] Elizabeth Edwards, Spalding The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 2006).

[46] William Walker, ‘Nuclear Order and Disorder’, International Affairs, 76(4), 2000, pp. 703–24.

[47] Tim Dunne and Christian Rues-Smit (eds), The Globalization of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[48] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[49] Ian Clark, The Post-Cold War Order: The Spoils of Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[50] Michael Cox, The Post-Cold War World: Turbulence and Change in World Politics Since the Fall (London: Routledge, 2019).

[51] Stanley Hoffman, World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post-Cold War Era (Rowan & Littlefield: Lanham, 1998).

[52] Christian Rues-Smit, American Power and World Order (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).

[53] G. John Ikenberry, Inderjeet Parmar, and Doug Stokes, ‘Introduction: Ordering the World? Liberal Internationalism in Theory and Practice’, International Affairs, 94(1), 2018, pp. 1–5.

[54] Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, Exit from Hegemony: The Unravelling of the American Global Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Joseph S. Nye Jr., ‘The Rise and Fall of American Hegemony from Wilson to Trump’, International Affairs, 95(1), 2019, pp. 63–80; Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Transnational Elite Knowledge Networks: Managing American Hegemony in Turbulent Times’, Security Studies, 28(3), 2019, pp. 532–64; Richard N. Hass, ‘How a World Order Ends: And What Comes in its Wake’, Foreign Affairs, 22, 2019, pp. 22–30.

[55] Kori Schake, America Vs. the West: Can the Liberal World Order be Preserved? (New York: Penguin, 2019).

[56] Jeff D. Colgan, ‘Three Visions of International Order’, The Washington Quarterly, 42(2), 2019, pp. 85–98; Rebecca Friedman Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper, ‘The Day After Trump: American Strategy for a New International Order’, Foreign Affairs, 41(1), 2018, pp. 7–25.

[57] Christopher Coker, The Improbable War: China, the United States and the Continuing Logic of Great Power Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[58] Barry Buzan and Amitav Acharya, The Making of Global International Relations: Origins and Evolution of IR at its Centenary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chp. 9; Trine Flockhart, ‘The Coming Multi-Order World’, Contemporary Security Policy, 37(1), 2016, pp. 3–30; Amitav Acharya, End of American World Order (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).

[59] Evelyn Goh, ‘Contesting Hegemonic Order: China in East Asia’, Security Studies, 28(3), 2019, pp. 614–44.

[60] G. John Ikenberry, ‘Why the Liberal World Order Will Survive’, Ethics & International Affairs, 32(1), 2018, pp. 17–29.

[61] Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace: 1812-22 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 205.

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