The current international order is in crisis, but what action to take to address this is hotly debated. One pathway recently outlined in a USAPP blog post is to reform global institutions to give more power to already powerful states. In response, Ben Christian, Johanna Speyer, and Lisbeth Zimmermann write that this path would deepen the existing crisis. They argue that the rules-based international order which rests on multilateral cooperation will fail if its institutions are reformed to work even more in the interest of powerful states. 

Confronted with Donald Trump’s looming (and now realized) comeback, Benjamin Daßler, Tim Heinkelmann-Wild and Andreas Kruck argued in their November 2024 LSE USAPP blog post that “the liberal international order will only survive the US elections if institutions are reformed to not work against the interests of powerful states.” In order to maintain the support of powerful states, international organizations would have to be “reformed to give these nations greater freedom to pursue their own international policies”. The authors propose “liberal restraint” to protect multilateralism and the international institutions that sustain it – since the current Liberal International Order (LIO) has “overreached” by becoming overly inclusive and intrusive without sufficiently accounting for the interests of the most powerful states. Consequently, it has triggered a dangerous backlash of those same states, our colleagues argue. To save the rules-based order and its institutions, “countervailing reforms” (e.g., more veto rights, other privileges) would be necessary to give great powers “greater flexibility” and “more breathing space”, making them more likely to remain in these institutions and support the current order.

Are great powers really constrained too much by international organizations? 

We disagree with both the authors’ diagnosis of the problem and their proposed solutions. As for how they set out the problem as they perceive it, we generally do not see that great powers like the US are overly constrained by international institutions. Quite the opposite: the institutional design of many international organizations already gives these states much more power and privilege. This applies not only to the UN Security Council with its well-known veto rights, but also to the IMF or the World Bank, for example, where voting shares are based on a quota system that gives richer countries significantly more formal (and informal) influence over decision-making. Overall, the list of international institutions that objectively work against the interests of powerful states – or that constrain “their sovereign control over their own policies” – is very short to non-existent. Instead, the old rule-of-thumb still holds: if international organizations have significant enforcement authority, they are controlled by the most powerful states.

In those cases where major powers cannot control the policies and outcomes of an international institution – such as in the UN Human Rights Council, which our colleagues cite as an example of institutional expansion that led to US withdrawal, or in the UN General Assembly – the resolutions or decisions adopted are legally non-binding. In other cases, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court or international human rights treaties, great powers either do not sign and ratify inconvenient treaties or use the legal exemptions that already exist. While we do not argue that great powers are completely “unbound,” we want to stress that they already have a high amount of flexibility.

On a more general level, we also know that trends towards inclusion and democratization in global governance are almost always accompanied by “closures” of various kinds, both formal and informal – for example, through the establishment of new exclusive forums and clubs such as the G7. The current international order is already reflecting the unequal power distribution and is full of nuanced exceptions for some actors, with international institutions reproducing and maintaining these inequalities – which has been a major source of challenges and contestations to the present order since its very beginning. We argue that the current crisis of global cooperation cannot be resolved by institutional reforms that give major powers more freedoms and privileges than others – since this is already the status quo.

What’s the point of a rules-based order and international institutions? 

Any vision of an international order for a state-based system has to deal with the dilemma that it will only be effective if great powers take part but also needs to have an inclusive vision so as to attain legitimacy. In the case of the Liberal International Order (LIO), its supporters (most importantly the US) have sought to promote such an inclusive element in a combination of rules-based multilateralism, economic freedom and human rights. The restricted implementation of this vision and a highly complex web of international treaties and organizations based on all the hierarchical elements described above has time and again brought about major contestation. Today, challenges are also fueled by great power rivalry and more nationalist and nativist agendas – both aspects, which are not solved by merely offering more “flexibility”.

We agree that the LIO is facing major challenges, and that we will most likely see changes that will restrain or stop altogether intrusive (and liberal) aspects of various international institutions. Challenges will include further nationalist inspired withdrawals from organizations or major funding problems for multilateral institutions that are less of a political priority (such as UNDP), pursue inconvenient objectives and mandates (UNWOMEN or UNFPA) or have contrasting agendas to the US Trump administration (WB and IMF). Successful negotiation and effective implementation will become even more difficult in many of these international institutional contexts.

Photo by Donald Wu on Unsplash

Yet what do we generally expect from an international order to be able to consider it effective? In its most basic form, an international order should help to peacefully solve the conflicts and disagreements that occur among its followers . In a multilateral order, this should be based on state cooperation – an idea that Daßler, Heinkelmann-Wild and Kruck do not seem willing to give up. However, in advocating for increasing flexibility of the great powers, our colleagues overlook that such an order crucially depends on all its members following its rules to achieve this aim. But what is the point of a rules-based order, in which the rules that have been set out do not equally apply to everyone, not even on paper? Exemptions from rules always need to strike a balance between providing flexibility and honoring a rule’s substance and validity.

Openly establishing an even more pronounced two-class system that further deepens existing hierarchies, we argue, will diminish any “pull” to a rules-based order – especially at a time in which “double standards” are increasingly criticized; rightly so in most cases, but sometimes also to justify one’s own norm violations. Our colleagues’ proposal for reforming the institutional structure of the LIO necessarily implies an (unacknowledged) undermining of the basic normative underpinnings on which most global governance arrangements are based. In our view, the proposed measures will not save a more modest multilateral order but further disintegrate it.

How much institutionalized inequality can an order endure? 

Our colleagues are not willing to give up on multilateral cooperation that encompasses all states – and neither are we. However, we do not believe that a reformed order that rests on giving great powers greater privileges can accomplish that goal. Instead, we believe it would further cement the inequalities that are already apparent in many aspects of the Liberal International Order. Given that these inequalities have always been and remain a significant source of international conflict, the question arises: how much institutionalized inequality can the international order endure before it implodes? Not much more, we believe. After all, the dilemma remains: international institutions depend on great powers’ participation, but they will hardly be effective without also striving for greater inclusivity. While our colleagues advocate for solving this dilemma by privileging great power participation, we do not think that most states would subjugate themselves under such an order. The envisioned order will therefore hardly attain global reach and solve the many global (cooperation) problems we face. Instead, the current multiple crises call for even more inclusivity.

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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics. 
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