When great powers compete, every institution becomes a theatre of that competition.
How Great Power Competition Reshapes Institutions
Great power competition — the sustained rivalry between major states for relative advantage in economic, technological, military, and institutional domains — does not operate only through direct confrontation. It operates through the institutions that govern international behaviour, which become arenas of competition as rival powers seek to shape institutional rules, staffing, and agendas in ways that serve their strategic interests. The multilateral institution that was designed to provide neutral governance of a specific domain becomes a site of strategic contest, with each major power seeking to ensure that the institution's decisions and standards reflect its preferred outcomes rather than its rivals'.
This institutionalisation of great power competition is not new — it characterised Cold War multilateralism as thoroughly as contemporary competition. What is different in the current period is the scale and sophistication of the competition and the number of actors engaging in it. China's systematic investment in multilateral institutions — in their staffing, their financing, and their standard-setting processes — represents a qualitatively more sophisticated engagement with international institutional architecture than prior revisionist powers demonstrated.
The Institutional Casualty
The institutional casualty of great power competition is institutional neutrality — the fiction, which served important functions even when it was never fully accurate, that international institutions were genuinely independent arbiters of the shared interests of their membership rather than instruments of their dominant members' preferences. As great power competition intensifies, the fiction becomes harder to maintain, and the legitimacy that international institutions derive from their claimed neutrality erodes with it.
Institutions that lose their legitimacy as neutral arbiters retain their formal existence and their bureaucratic infrastructure, but they lose the most important element of their institutional capacity: the willingness of member states to accept their decisions as legitimate constraints on national behaviour. The institution that is perceived as captured by a rival power's preferences will be defied by that rival's opponents, which reduces it from a governance mechanism to a forum for the symbolic expression of the competition it was supposed to manage.
In periods of great power competition, institutions do not stand outside the competition — they become part of it. The question for every institution is not whether it will be contested but whether it has the design features that allow it to maintain enough legitimacy across the competing powers to remain functional.
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