The rules-based international order is a real thing with real value. It is also a term that its defenders use to mean more than it actually describes.
What the Rules-Based Order Is
The rules-based international order — the set of norms, institutions, and practices that have governed interstate relations since 1945 — is genuinely valuable and genuinely partial. It is valuable because the norms it has established — the prohibition on territorial conquest, the multilateral trade regime, the nonproliferation architecture, the international criminal law framework — have produced a world that is, by historical standards, remarkably free of great power warfare and relatively conducive to economic integration. The alternative, a return to the great power competition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that produced two world wars within thirty years, is significantly worse for most of the world's population.
It is partial because the rules it enforces are not universal. They are enforced selectively, most reliably against states that lack the power to resist enforcement, and most inconsistently when enforcement would require constraining the behaviour of the major powers that designed and benefit from the order. The "rules-based" character of the order is genuine in its legal framework and incomplete in its application.
The Challenger's Case
The challengers to the rules-based order make a case that is partly valid and partly self-serving. The valid part is that the order was designed by the victors of the Second World War to serve their interests, that it was imposed on much of the world without those populations' meaningful consent, and that its selective enforcement produces outcomes that benefit some states at others' expense. These are genuine critiques of a genuine deficiency. The self-serving part is the implication that the alternative to the existing order is a more genuinely rule-based alternative — a claim that the challengers' own behaviour does not support.
The rules-based order is worth defending because the alternatives are worse, and it is worth reforming because it is currently too partial to sustain the legitimacy that makes it effective. The defenders who insist on its current form, and the challengers who reject it entirely, are both wrong — in opposite directions that are equally dangerous to the institutions that make international cooperation possible.
Discussion