The good, the bad and unavoidable compromise

Navigating the collisions between democracies and autocracies, and interests and values in the emerging coming global disorder

Leave behind grand designs. Put aside comfortable assumptions about an architecture of fixed allegiances and permanent alliances. Imagine instead a transactional global order, organised around what lawyers call limited liability partnerships - a kaleidoscope which sees nations link up and disband in pursuit of narrow interests. 

The LLP metaphor belongs to Samir Saran. The president of India’s Observer Research Foundation offered it to “The World We Share” symposium in Florence, hosted by the European University Institute’s School of Transnational Governance. 

To my mind it captures an uncomfortable reality. Much as it is tempting to frame the post-western world as a clash between the United States and China or a contest between “good” democracies and “bad” autocracies, the contours of the emerging geopolitical landscape are ragged, fluid and overlapping. On this new territory, sometimes the good will join forces with the bad.

The basic framework of globalisation, the STG’s gathering of scholars and experts concluded, would probably endure. The change would come as enduring multilateral arrangements were overlaid with a tapestry of regional or neighbourhood patterns.  

Alex Stubb, the director of the STG and former prime minister of Finland, began with a caution to those who continue to see international relations through the prism of the west and the rest. The global south has moved beyond being seduced by clarion calls for liberal democracy. The goal of rising nations, he said, was to secure greater agency for themselves in decision-making. They would pick and choose their friends. We are rediscovering, as Saran put it, that “geography still matters”.

We can see this in the Middle East. Not so long ago Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was viewed by other Arab leaders as a pariah. Isolation is making way for realpolitik. Last month Assad was feted as an honoured guest of the United Arab Emirates. A visit to Damascus by Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister signals a similar thaw with Riyadh. In between times, Beijing has stepped in as a mediator between the Saudis and Iran. 

What’s happened? It’s simple enough. As the United States has turned to the Pacific, the Middle East’s regional powers are making their own choices about the neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia still looks to Washington for sophisticated weaponry, but will also strike bargains when it suits it with Beijing and Moscow. The same approach has been writ large in the refusal of most of the Global South to join western sanctions on Russia in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. 

India is perhaps the lead example of the new geopolitical promiscuity. Fearful of China’s military power it has joined up with the United States, Japan and Australia in the Quad of Indo-Pacific nations resolved to counter Beijing. Conscious of its economic, military and and trade interests, India also sits down with China and Russia in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

For the speakers at the symposium, this redistribution of power carries obvious lessons. Instead of lectures on the merits of democratic systems, the west should be looking at sharing power in the international institutions at the heart of the present, western order. You cannot deny rising nations the increased agency they deserve at the United Nations or International Monetary Fund and then expect them to stand firm with the west in defence of the old order.

The transition from the Pax America to something resembling a coherent alternative system - whether multipolar or more akin to the 19th concert of powers - will be neither smooth nor immediate. Stubb looked forward to “a decade of disorder”. 

Sylvie Bermann, who served as France’s ambassador in both Moscow and Beijing, struck a still more sombre note, quoting Italy’s Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” 

For now, we are living in geopolitical no-man’s land. Even the pact “without limits” between Xi Jinping and Putin, Bermann noted, was conditional. Russia sees the west as an enemy. China’s stance is more nuanced, particularly as between the United States and Europe. It also has a big interest in preserving an open trading system.

If not quite monsters then certainly upheaval. Fiona Hill, a Brookings scholar who served as director for Russia at the White House National Security Council, spoke of deep disillusionment with the United States as the dominant global power. Today’s international relations often resembled a proxy war of “the rest against the US”.

Washington, she said, had surrendered the moral high ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the 2008 financial crash and in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Middle powers in the global south no longer sought Washington’s permission as they bid to act as great powers in their own regions. 

Not so long ago, Europe considered itself a normative power. It would succeed because others wanted to be like, well, Europeans. More recently, Putin’s aggression has seen it think a lot harder about the military dimension of power.

The transition will not be easy, Stefano Stefanini observed. Stefanini, a former Italian ambassador to Nato, pointed to Emmanuel Macron’s controversial remarks on Europe’s relationship with China as evidence of national reluctance to cede control of foreign policy. Europeans had power, but lacked the will to deploy it collectively.

Not all was gloom. Kalypso Nicolaidis, the chair in global affairs at the STG, and Tanvi Madan, the director of the India project at Brookings, underlined the powerful impulses that mean the west is not alone in holding a big stake in the postwar system.

For all that it rails against the western design of the present order, many of the rules suit China’s economic and geopolitical ambitions. For their part, small and medium-sized states see multilateral arrangements as a shield against the emergence of great power spheres of influence. But yes, the west needs to swap its habit of seeking to impose its own values for a willingness to share power in the international system.

For William Hague, a former British foreign secretary, liberal democracies are about to find ever-present compromises between the pursuit of values and the pull of interests get even harder. To divide the world between democracies and autocracies is to ignore the imperative for co-operation across the ideologies in facing existential challenges such as climate change and pandemics.

There were ways, though, for the west to better align values and interests. To make a start, Hague offered, rich democracies could offer the global south the financial institutions and resources it needs to meet net zero targets for carbon emissions. 

Here, according to Charles Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University and former director on the National Security Council, lies the unique challenge facing this generation of world leaders.

Even as the western order makes way for multiple centres of power, the world has never been more tethered together by economic interdependence and shared threats. Many of the interests of rival powers are inextricably linked. What’s missing in the posturing about an all-or-nothing contest is any evidence of sober consideration as to if and how these dangerous but unavoidable tensions can be managed.