Forum: The Rules-Based International Order in the Indo-Pacific
Forum: The Rules-Based International Order in the Indo-Pacific
8 February 2023
In recent years discussions among scholars, analysts, and policymakers have focused on the nature, transformation, and/or ostensible crisis of the rules-based international order. To what extent can the late-20th and early-21st century makeup of world politics be meaningfully labelled ‘rules-based’? How (if at all) are norms, practices, and institutions of the rules-based international order under threat?
What might a supposedly ‘non-rules-based’ international order look like? We invite several experts to offer three distinct perspectives on these ongoing debates in the context of the Indo-Pacific in this Forum for 9DASHLINE.
STRATEGIC NON-ALIGNMENT OR REGIONAL INSTABILITY
DR VAN JACKSON — SENIOR LECTURER, VICTORIA UNIVERSITY WELLINGTON
The Indo-Pacific is in massive trouble and the only foreseeable hope is a new movement for strategic non-alignment. Sri Lanka’s tragic experience with economic default, riots, and ultimately regime change in 2022 is a signpost of where the Asian political economy is drifting. For the region’s minor powers, sovereign debt is unsustainable, and even those governments that are able to continue servicing their debt burdens (like India) do so by investing less in their own national development. Moreover, large-scale worker precarity across Asia is leading to predictable unrest as workers demand a greater share of the national income. Economic growth is the safety valve that makes it possible for societal stability to endure despite an imbalance of class forces, but growth prospects are dim. The East Asian development model is a thing of the past and nothing has replaced it.
Worse, the global economic order in which the Indo-Pacific is embedded is actively being broken down by Sino-US competition. The United States and China are both asserting exclusionary spheres of influence in their own ways, seeking the alignment of secondary states into zero-sum camps. This is a trend toward regional fracture.
But there is a more hopeful countervailing trend. 2022 also saw Indonesia, East Timor, India, Singapore, and a number of Pacific Island nations assert strategic non-alignment in different ways. Nations that ‘choose’ between China and the United States are choosing to exacerbate Sino-US rivalry no matter which side they take. The real strategic choice, then, is between intensifying processes of Sino-US rivalry or instead coalescing into a political-economic bloc committed to a new Non-Aligned Movement. As great powers try to impose a new Cold War, Asia’s hedging trend is likely to evolve into something like the Third-World politics we saw during the original Cold War.
MORE-THAN-HUMAN DIPLOMACY IN THE INDO-PACIFIC
DR FLEUR JOHNS — PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Multilateral engagement in the Indo-Pacific is increasingly mediated by non-human entities and automated socio-technical systems. International order and diplomacy in the region need to be framed accordingly, as matters of multi-species and multi-actor interaction are subject to varying levels and modalities of human direction.
Both China and the US are making use of uncrewed, remotely operated maritime vessels to conduct survey missions in the region for scientific, commercial, and military purposes. Automatic Identification System (AIS) data is being used by many governmental and non-governmental actors to monitor ship movements and marine traffic. International and regional relations are informed as much by vessels ‘speaking’ to one another in this way as they are by talks among human officials.
Non-human interactions of other kinds are likewise of growing significance. The Indo-Pacific region holds most of the world’s mangrove forests and the vertical accretion of sediments in mangroves is vital to its capability to withstand sea-level rise. However, the effects of river damming and other anthropogenic activity in the Indo-Pacific are reportedly outstripping mangroves’ combined capacity for sediment delivery. Meanwhile, larval and adult movements throughout the Indo-Pacific by invasive and predatory species, such as the Indo-Pacific lionfish, are transforming the region’s ecology.
Scholarly and strategic analysis of international order in the Indo-Pacific has typically been preoccupied with patterned relationships and communication among humans. But order and conflict in the Indo-Pacific must be approached as more-than-human concerns if we are to navigate them peaceably in 2023 and beyond.
ANXIOUS TIMES
DR GEORGE LAWSON — PROFESSOR, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
The term ‘international order’ often invokes considerable anxiety, whether from policymakers, scholars of International Relations, or both. On the one hand, this anxiety stems from a number of immediate shocks: the COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine, rising pressures on the cost of living, and more. On the other hand, it is the product of two deeper dynamics: first, a shift from a world centred around Western power to one that is more decentred; and second, a world that is less liberal, at least in terms of being dominated by states that see themselves as liberal — even if they do not always, or even often, practice what they preach.
In the Asia-Pacific, this context provided the background for three major developments in 2022: first was the attempt by Western states to reassert their position within the region, whether through security alliances like AUKUS, high-profile visits by US parliamentarians to Taiwan, or the rebooting of relations with Pacific states. Second, and linked, was intensified Chinese assertiveness in the region, as witnessed by both its heightened militancy towards Taiwan and its more everyday interventionism in the Pacific. Third, and perhaps less noted, were the challenges presented by radical movements from below, most potently in Myanmar.
How these dynamics will play out in 2023 is unclear — if predictions are always filled with uncertainty, this is even more so in what is a highly volatile, rapidly changing regional landscape. One issue that will be particularly important is China’s ongoing struggle to manage COVID-19. If China’s rise was accelerated by its handling of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, its disastrous experience with COVID-19 looks like it is having the opposite effect. This is a reminder of the close, and not always smooth, relationship between events and broader structural changes. It also speaks to a further period of uncertainty — and anxiety — in both the region and the wider world.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/John Samuel.