But can the US-led order last forever? Charles A. Kupchan believes that the order of the United States and the West is on the decline, not necessarily towards a China-led system, but to a multi-polar system where no state is all-powerful in the international system.
See below for my take on Kupchan's argument in No One's World.
In No One’s World, Charles Kupchan provides the reader with a vision of a multipolar world order, extrapolating off trends that show developing states like China and India are poised to overtake the West. In his vision of the “coming global turn” towards multipolarity, in which no country or region is the hegemon of the international system, Kupchan sees the “rising rest” as modernizing on paths divergent to that of the West because of the impact of country-specific socioeconomic, historical and cultural factors on the method and pace of development (Kupchan, 2012, p. 3, 46, 88-89). Whereas the West rose primarily ahead of their competitors in the pre-modern era due to the emergence of a democratizing and economically invigorating force in a middle class able to challenge hierarchical forms of government in a less interdependent world and its later ability to export Western institutions and ordering principles abroad, the “rest” have tended to staved off similar regime challenges in this interdependent world forged by the West by coopting their potentially regime-challenging middle classes as standards of living improve (Kupchan, 2012, p. 46, 88). A consequence of this order Kupchan envisions is that there will be a diverse set of multiple power centers with differing socioeconomic development patterns, political systems and worldviews needing to find some way to retain multilateral cooperation despite an emerging “global dissensus” (Kupchan, 2012, p. 145). This challenge of retaining multilateral cooperation is the lens used to argue for a new consensus (Kupchan, 2012, p. 145).
Utilizing the conceptual lenses of the “problem condition,” “cognitive condition,” and “hegemonic condition” introduced by Ritterberger et al.’s (2011) text International Organization to explain the thresholds that need to be met to form international organizations, I will elucidate and evaluate Kupchan’s main argument in favor of finding a new set of organizing values and institutions for a multipolar world order that are not primarily based upon the Western values of “liberal democracy, industrial capitalism, and secular nationalism” (p. 7, 35). Ultimately, Kupchan’s argument takes a similar mostly institutionalist perspective on how international peace and security will be preserved in a multipolar world. Briefly, the main actors serving as focal points for Kupchan’s analysis are the West (primarily represented by the United States and the European Union) and rising powers or developing country actors (primarily China, India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa).
Starting with the “problem condition” in need of addressing, Kupchan recognizes the increased interdependencies yet concurrent diversity in rising world powers as the main issue presenting simultaneously an obstacle and an imperative for increased cooperation (Ritterberger et al., 2011, p. 35). Moreover, Kupchan highlights the growing awareness among Western countries towards this problem of diverse rising powers (“cognitive condition”) and the need to closely incorporate them into the existing international system (Ritterberger et al., 2011, p. 35). This acknowledgment on the part of the Western powers is important as powers like China and India are poised to close the gap in terms of military, economic and political power by the end of the twenty-first century, with their GDPs predicted to eclipse that of the United States and Europe and providing a means for growing military strength (Kupchan, 2012, p. 84). Thus, the “hegemonic condition” of the international system in transition, as Kupchan sees it, hinges on the West’s willingness and ability to peacefully shepherd the world into multipolarity where all will share “ideological tolerance coupled with economic dynamism” (Kupchan, 2012, p. 189). Ultimately, the West must bear the costs of domestic fallout as “responsible governance” (i.e. embracing a diversity of political systems if they promote citizen welfare) becomes the new ordering principle of the international system (Kupchan, 2012, p. 189). These hegemonic costs are magnified by the disunity of the West produced by domestic political polarization as in the United States or the trend towards “renationalization” of politics that threatens to harm unity and the ability of the European Union to effectively use their combined capabilities abroad (Kupchan, 2012, p. 158, 165).
While there is no doubt that the West’s power has plateaued and that the need to incorporate the rising powers into the Western-built international order as well as for the West to regain its economic vitality and cohesion going into this transition are imperatives, Kupchan’s argument in favor of an accompanying ordering principle of “responsible governance” superseding the West’s historical delegitimization of autocratic regimes is problematic in multiple respects (Kupchan, 2012, p. 189). For one, as Kupchan pointed out, the current international order is undergirded by “European conceptions of sovereignty, administration, law, diplomacy, and commerce” exported via Western imperialism (Kupchan, 2012, p. 65). As G. John Ikenberry pointed out in Liberal Leviathan, institutions are hard to change due to their ability to produce and reinforce certain organizational principles and values, meaning that the existing Western-established institutions have firmly entrenched the above Western values of consensus and multilateralism within the international order via their operation (Ikenberry, 2011). Moreover, the rise of powers of like China and India are due more likely to the benefits provided to them from joining the international club of prestigious organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Ikenberry, 2011). This dynamic produces a powerful incentive to not overturn the ordering principles of this order lest the benefits of increased economic, political, and military stature diminish (Ikenberry, 2011). Therefore, the international order has shown a remarkable ability to, per the model of “global governance” espoused by Ritterberger et al. (2011), to flexibly facilitate the “horizontal coordination” among diverse actors without the need for a supranational authority and provides hope that a transition to a multipolar order would not be as destabilizing as Kupchan posits (p. 269, 275).
This latter fact exposes the contradictory nature of Kupchan’s argument to save the international system from the destruction possible during a power transition: to save the international order, the West must undercut its own exported multilateral principles most likely to facilitate multilateral cooperation to more closely accommodate the rising powers (Kupchan, 2012, p. 192). Ultimately, Kupchan’s approach is flawed, as the Western-modeled international system already has the ordering principles of “compromise, tolerance and pluralism” built-in to the international organizations that provide arenas to peacefully settle disputes between developed and developing nation-states, while solving transnational problems multilaterally by effectively utilizing the combined resources invested in those organizations by their member states (Kupchan, 2012, p. 192). While delegitimizing nondemocratic regimes, the West still has a history of working together with these same regimes to solve pressing international issues within the confines of the current order. Effectively, the proposed principle of “responsible governance” is rendered moot if the West can simply expand on already existing principles of cooperation by further incorporating these rising powers into the international system, creating a higher stake for all in the system’s overall preservation (Ikenberry, 2011; Kupchan, 2012, p. 189).
Moreover, aside from the need for a critical mass of actors and a common perception of the nature of the problem and its solutions, institutional change would be very difficult to undertake even for future hegemons due to the path dependency of international organizations reflecting a different consensus reached at a specific historical juncture that can only be overridden by achieving a new consensus (which requires considerable expenditures of social, political, economic, and diplomatic capital and resources). In other words, the institutional structure as it exists is not overly dependent on the fluctuations or perceived credibility of Western power and to some degree is self-perpetuating (Ikenberry, 2011; Ritterberger et al., 2011). Therefore, the inclusion of a new “responsible governance” standard may not be necessary; to some extent, it has always existed within the current order (Kupchan, 2012, p. 189). Thus, the existing Western-built order has successfully accommodated rising powers to date and provides a solution to the “problem, cognitive, and hegemonic” conditions both Ikenberry and Kupchan have recognized in their narratives about the future of the international order (Ritterberger, et al., 2011, p. 35).
In conclusion, while it is an engaging read, Kupchan’s No One’s World nevertheless poses contradictory arguments in his thesis that the coming multipolar world order will require the West to undercut its own order in favor of embracing a largely redundant principle of “responsible governance” to more closely accommodate the political diversity of the rising powers along with a similar economic revitalization to regain its capacity to shepherd the coming transition (Kupchan, 2012, p. 189). For the latter reason, readers may find the book to be hard to follow because of its internal contradictions, despite its well-written introduction providing the context for his later arguments in concisely cataloging the rise of the Western powers over their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and the concurrent trends predicting the plateauing of Western power. Nevertheless, despite the contradictory (and redundant) nature of Kupchan’s arguments in providing solutions to peacefully transition to a more multipolar world, Kupchan’s No One’s World presents an intriguing narrative that forces readers to not discount the challenges posed to the flexibility of the international system in terms of rising powers’ political and cultural diversity.
Works Cited:
Ikenberry, G. J. (2011). Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kupchan, C. A. (2012). No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ritterberger, V., Zangl, B., & Kruck, A. (2011). International Organization (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
