The post-war international institutional order is in transition. What replaces it will be determined by the governance choices of the next decade.
The Transition
The international institutional order that was constructed after the Second World War — the United Nations system, the Bretton Woods financial institutions, the GATT/WTO trade system, and the security alliances that have structured international relations for eight decades — is in structural transition driven by the shift in relative power from the United States and Europe toward China and the developing world, the emergence of transnational governance challenges that the sovereign-state-centred institutional order is inadequate to address, and the internal crises of the democratic governments that provided the political and economic foundation for the post-war order.
The transition does not have a predetermined destination. The scenarios available include the continuation of the existing order under increasingly stressed conditions, the emergence of a genuinely multipolar order with competing institutional frameworks, the fragmentation of the existing order into regional institutional clusters, and the emergence of new institutional forms — in digital governance, in climate governance, in financial governance — that operate outside the existing sovereign-state framework. Each of these scenarios has different implications for the populations whose wellbeing depends on the governance of the international system, and the governance choices made by the major powers in the next decade will determine which scenario materialises.
The international institutional order's transition is the most consequential governance process underway in the current moment. Its destination is not determined — it is being determined, by the governance choices being made now, by actors who understand and by actors who do not understand what is at stake. The institutional analysis that makes the stakes visible is the analysis that the current moment requires.
Discussion