The Tensions between Multipolarity and Multilateralism and the Emerging Global Order

Abstract

This panel explores the tensions between the intersecting trends of globalisation and transnational governance on the one hand, and the return of both covert and overt contestation and competition on the other. The rise of China and the Rest has challenged the post-Cold War consensus on the diminishing importance of traditional state-based politics. Trade and regulatory competition has remained the provenance of states, in spite of the transnationalisation of demographic, trade, and financial flows. The assumption that traditional military power has become more and more irrelevant after the end of the Cold War, and that conflict is mainly ‘new’ wars, is challenged by regional build-ups of military power and emerging arms races. In sum, many facets of the current global order reveal elements of the old, supposedly out-dated international system. It is also difficult to deny that this order has structurally changed through increasing ties that bypass governments, whether trade or finance, and that the manifestation of inter-state interaction through multilateral institutions morphed into supranational governance and revolutionised the relations between state sovereignty, domestic accountability and the influence of outside, often non-state, actors. These main institutional bedrocks of the international order face increased contestation from outside and inside. It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the current order is self-sustaining. The panel will discuss the intersections and interactions between these separate and seemingly contradictory trends by focusing on a range of subjects across various domains, including strategic competition between the U.S. and China, environmental regulatory competition, rule-setting, nuclear proliferation and other security challenges, that demonstrate the wide-ranging and divergent manners in which the current global order is undergoing dynamic change.

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