Rethinking International Order

ROUNDTABLE: THE PROBLEM WITH INTERNATIONAL ORDER

Rethinking International Order Ayşe Zarakol

Traditional accounts of "international order" assume that it is of recent vintage: that a European regional order increasingly became global between the seventeenth century and the present. This is partly because scholars and practitioners have not defined international order very well. There are two problems with commonly used definitions: on the one hand, they are too broad, conflating order with other cognate concepts; on the other hand, they are too narrow, unnecessarily building into the definition temporarily specific aspects that constrain our historical and future-oriented imagination. This conceptual fuzziness indirectly implicates some larger questions about the discipline of international relations and how it could rise to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The first section of this essay reflects on these problems. On the one hand, I argue that "order" should not be defined too broadly if we are to meaningfully observe how it can change, slip into disorder, or even completely fall apart. We can distinguish order from "structure" and "system" by reserving order for products of human design and agency, even if the outcome does not always perfectly resemble the design. Thus, I start by speculating about why IR came to conflate order with seemingly similar concepts such as system or structure in the first place. On the other hand, I argue that the term "international" is too narrow as a qualifier for orders with aspirations of universal coverage because it is too temporally specific and unnecessarily gives a priori privilege to a particular political unit-the nation. Orders with universalizing visions and ambitions predate the era of nations and nation-states. There is also no guarantee that the nation-state will continue to be the only or main unit of order-making in the future. Therefore, it would be better to adopt an alternative qualifier that allows for comparisons with the past and conceptualizations of the future.

In the second section of the essay, I put these arguments together to define "world order" as the (man-made) rules, understandings, and institutions that govern (and pattern) relations between the actors of world politics. A world order is more deliberately created (or designed) by its various actors and more reflexively maintained (or undermined) than structure. Defined as such, we can indeed find comparable world orders in history that we can learn from. Such orders have different primary units than the modern international order-for example, ruling houses-but are comparable to it in the ways that they were organized, reproduced, and/or undermined. Broadening our vision in this way also has important implications for how we think about the future of world order as well as our normative judgments about orderliness.

DEFINING AND QUALIFYING ORDER

For all the collective hand-wringing we have engaged in as a discipline in the last decade (at least in the Global North) over the fate of the so-called liberal international order, the concept of order remains undertheorized in a number of ways. The problem is not so much that we lack a definition of order (or a definition of the "liberal international order"). There are plenty of workable definitions of both: for instance, "international orders" are "institutionalised arrangements of sovereign states, in which institutions such as sovereignty, international law, and diplomacy help realize 'the elementary goals of the society of states' or 'large-scale configurations of political authority, which might be imperial, suzerain, heteronomous, sovereign, or some combination of these." Most of the definitions floating around are quite workable for the purposes of the discipline, especially if we are writing about contemporary events.

What I mean when I say that the concept of order is undertheorized is thus something else-that is, we do not have a good sense of how order differs from cognate concepts, on the one hand, and its antonyms, on the other. When I

was in graduate school in the United States in the first decade of the century, system discourse still eclipsed order discourse. Everyone talked about international systems (and structures) rather than international orders. There are probably a number of reasons for this. One is the influence of structural realism/Kenneth Waltz in the discipline. This is well-trodden ground. But, of course, it is not just Waltz or realists who spoke of state systems. In a nineteen ninety-four article he wrote for American Political Science Review, Alexander Wendt defined "constructivism" as "a structural theory of the international system that makes the following core claims: one, states are the principal units of analysis for international political theory; two, the key structures in the states system are intersubjective rather than material; and three, state identities and interests are in important part constructed by these social structures, rather than given exogenously to the system by human nature or domestic politics." This was also a moment when both Anthony Giddens and structuration theory were quite influential in IR constructivism, and of course Giddens talks about social systems as the functioning of structural relationships.

IR theorists' thinking about structure has always found inspiration in social, economic, and organizational theorizing about systems. English School theorists spoke of international systems or state systems as well, drawing from structural realism. Barry Buzan and Richard Little published an article called "The Idea of 'International System': Theory Meets History" in nineteen ninety-four, where they explored the issue from a historical angle. In sum, in the nineteen nineties and also the aughts, most everyone in IR thought of the international as a system rather than an order (likely even the liberal institutionalists). We could delve into the bigger reasons for this-the influence of systems theory on social sciences in general, for instance. The desire to seem scientific probably also has something to do with using "system" rather than "order." The latter invokes human agency more explicitly and thus inevitably reminds us of the messiness/unpredictability of the same (I will discuss this below).

In the last decade, it has become somewhat less fashionable to talk about systems in IR and much more common to talk about order. Even a cursory web search will show that conference and workshop themes aimed at broad IR audiences in recent years invoke "order" much more frequently than "system" or "structure." Some of this may have to do with the decreasing influence of neorealism in the aughts. Neorealists were always much more likely to talk about systems and structure, and when they dominated the field, their jargon also dominated conversations. Much of the order talk was specific to the liberal international order, of course; first about its resilience (though I note that Daniel Drezner's twenty fourteen book on this theme was called The System Worked [emphasis added]), and then, especially after twenty sixteen, about its crisis and decline. In time, this begat efforts (that many of us in this roundtable have also been involved in) to properly theorize order. But we never properly had a conversation in the discipline about how system differs from order (or vice versa).

The terms are not necessarily in competition, but nor are they interchangeable. But a lot of people do use them interchangeably, especially in oral discussions. The growing order literature would benefit from clarifying how order differs from system. At a very basic level, we could note that the main difference seems to be the aforementioned respective associations with structure and agency. As noted previously, system points more easily toward structure, whereas order points more easily towards human agency. This may be another reason why the term order has become more popular lately. Many scholars and policymakers think that we are in a period of global crisis; it is possible that in such times observers become more aware that much of their environment was or is man-made. They become aware of its fragility; they realize that the world around them is not naturally or automatically self-sustaining, which takes them away from systems/equilibrium thinking and moves them toward thinking about order. In periods of crisis, we may want to believe in the possibility of ordering the world because we need to believe we have the agency to fix what is wrong.

So, we have established one problem with discussions of international order: orders are different from systems. This brings us to a second issue: Must orders be necessarily called international? "International" presumes the presence (or even the ubiquity) of nation-states, so it does not work for historical purposes before the nineteenth century. Nations in the sense we understand them did not exist until at least the eighteenth century, so it is misleading to speak of international relations or international orders before then as well (not that this stops anyone from speaking about Europe using these terms). This is partly what led us to believe as a discipline that orders of macroscale and universal ambition were of recent vintage and a European invention only.

But it is the unnecessary temporal restriction built into the term international order itself that leads us to make erroneous assumptions about non-Western actors. As I argue in my recent book Before the West, in IR, non-Western states and peoples are frequently understood to have been without international politics or an interest in the world at large until Europeans brought them into a global order in the nineteenth century; that is, they are understood to have been local actors only. In recent years, the rise of China (and "the Rest"), as well as the growing criticism about the Eurocentrism of traditional IR theories, has increased interest in studying the history of other parts of the world from an IR perspective, especially that of East Asia. Welcome as such efforts may be, most of them also still suffer from the assumption that all non-European orders were only regional not only in practice but also in aspiration. Furthermore, in studying non-European orders as regional, we tend to impose onto the past today's regional divisions and sometimes also today's national historiographies and myths. As I will discuss in the next section, if we did not unnecessarily build the unit expectation into our labels for orders, we could uncover historical orders comparable in their scope and ambition to the modern international order. If we pull back from the idea of "international relations" to instead look at interpolity relations and think about international orders as universalizing world-ordering arrangements, then we can be more open-minded about what sorts of "world orders" have existed outside of Europe.

"Global" is arguably better as a qualifier of orders (especially going forward in time), but it is still anachronistic when applied to periods before people thought of the world as a globe. Also, global implies an even stronger judgment about the coverage area of the order than "international." When we call an order international or global, are we referring to its universal ambition or its geographic span? Maybe both, but making the definition too much about the empirical on-the-ground reality would disqualify all orders, and leaning too much in the other direction is not feasible either.