“We are witnessing the end of multilateralism.”
No, just the end of multilateral certainties. In mid-September, over 50 foreign ministers gathered in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly for the official launch of the “Alliance for Multilateralism.” This strong response to the Franco-German initiative demonstrates that rising nationalism and growing geopolitical rivalries do not spell the end of the multilateral paradigm.
On the contrary: in a world in which major powers are using military and economic means of coercion in an increasingly direct way for their own geopolitical and geo-economic advantage, multilateralism is an indispensable antidote – for smaller states as well as middle powers like Germany. At the same time, advocates of this instrument are confronted with the end of multilateral certainties. Only ten years ago, speculations about a dissolution of NATO, the EU or the WTO would have triggered ridicule. Today, Germany can no longer be sure whether these key multilateral institutions will still exist in ten years’ time.
Until now, the United States was the main guarantor of the multilateral institutions. Without America’s support, the creation of the United Nations, of NATO, the WTO or the EU would have been inconceivable. And despite frequently resorting to exceptionalism (for example by making sure that the US is unaffected by the International Criminal Court), the US was an indispensable supporter of multilateral bodies. Now under President Donald Trump, the US is threatening these key institutions with a wrecking ball. But the survival of these organizations is not the only thing being called into question.
After the end of the Cold War, multilateralism was meant to be the core of a “new world order” beyond the great power rivalries. Today, it has become clear that such great power conflicts (especially between the US and China) are the central framework for multilateralism. And instead of quietly “socializing” into a world order shaped by the West, non-Western states are keen to influence multilateral rule-making. This not only applies to major powers like China, which is pursuing the parallel establishment of its own multilateral institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; also smaller, non-Western states no longer want to be merely the recipients of rules that were made by others.
Even in democracies, multilateral agreements are increasingly under attack in domestic politics. Nationalism and sovereigntism are haunting not only Trump’s America. Only recently, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned against a “new variant of globalism that seeks to elevate global institutions above the authority of nation states to direct national policies.” Similarly, Hungary’s Prime Minister Orbán has been raging against the “Brussels Empire” as other right-wing nationalists have cried out against the UN’s migration pact.
In light of this new situation, it is no longer enough to conjure up the multilateral spirit and lash out against nationalism. However, this was exactly all that German Chancellor Angela Merkel did in her widely celebrated speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2019. She invoked the “principle of multilateralism” as a “lesson that emerged from the Second World War and National Socialism, which was after all caused by Germany.” And she concluded by saying that “only all of us together” can provide answers to the enormous challenges that lie ahead.
However, the chancellor gave no answer as to how such cooperation should work in a world in which not everyone is willing to play along as nicely as had been the hope after the Cold War. The Alliance for Multilateralism pursued by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas goes further than that. Maas has three goals for this initiative: First, he wants to defend international norms and agreements where they are violated or have come under pressure. Second, he wants to reform the existing architecture to make it more inclusive and effective. And third, he wants to push for multilateral agreements in areas that have not yet been regulated. None of these efforts is self-sustaining, but this triad offers a direction as to how multilateralism can be strengthened under difficult conditions in a pragmatic way.
“The alternative to multilateralism is unilateralism.”
Not necessarily. During her speech in Munich, the German chancellor said that it was better to “see whether one can achieve joint win-win solutions rather than to think that one can solve everything on one’s own.” Indeed, it is only natural to view unilateralism as the antithesis of multilateralism – and it is accurate in certain instances like the US sanctions policy. In this case, the US government is unilaterally pursuing sanctions (for example, against Iran) that have a direct effect on third-party states (such as the members of the EU).
However, it is in fact bilateralism that for many is the more attractive alternative to multilateralism. Great powers in particular stand to benefit from bilateralism because it allows them to fully make use of their superior power. This view constitutes the essence of US President Donald Trump’s approach. He wants to get out of multilateral agreements that keep the superpower trapped in “bad deals.” And he is banking on bilateral agreements, especially in the realm of trade policy. His most important bargaining chips are access to the US market and the threat of tariffs. Following this logic, Trump has renegotiated the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada and is currently trying to secure similar outcomes with China and the EU. The British government is also betting on bilateral trade agreements after Brexit, but has far less market power – a painful fact it has already felt in the negotiations that are going on.
China, on the other hand, is becoming more and more self-confident in leveraging the power of its huge market. In public discourse, representatives of the Chinese one-party state present themselves as multilateral model students. Xi’s poetry focuses on a “new type of international relations with win-win cooperation and the creation of a community for the shared future of mankind.”
Of course, the reality looks quite different. Xi’s flagship project, the Belt and Road Initiative, follows a purely bilateral logic. The participating states sign bilateral agreements with China and only meet with other participants for annual show events in Beijing.
Bilateralism rests on concrete individual agreements, on specific quid pro quos. Multilateralism, on the other hand, thrives on what political scientist Robert Keohane has called “diffuse reciprocity,” or the belief that the advantages and disadvantages of this modus operandi are balanced out over time – even if one’s own party is sometimes on the losing end.
The basis for diffuse reciprocity is that all participants submit to a set of principles they regard as universally valid. Within the framework of the World Trade Organization, this is the most-favored-nation principle, according to which trade advantages must be granted to all contracting parties. If there is no trust that advantages and disadvantages will eventually balance each other out, the basis of multilateralism crumbles.
“We must defend the liberal international order.”
Which order? For many, multilateralism is indeed about defending the “liberal international order,” a term that US researcher John Ikenberry coined in the 1990s. Many of today’s politicians in the West also use the phrase, but it is misleading. For some time after 1989, the West was able to indulge in the illusion that such an order could actually be established on a global level. Today we know that this was a pipe dream. A modern China and Russia will not confine themselves into such an architecture any more than the Soviet Union was part of a “liberal international order” during the Cold War.
Champions of the concept tend to forget that the liberal international order during the Cold War was very much a bounded order. NATO, GATT, the OECD, the G7 and company were reserved for the Western club, while the Eastern bloc relied on its own institutions (such as the Warsaw Pact and COMECON). In addition, there were global multilateral institutions like the UN in which states struggled for order amid fierce competition.
Today, a realistic view equally presumes various different circles of multilateral order. One circle encompasses the cooperation among liberal democracies. Others involve the multilateral cooperation with non-democracies or states that are not market economies. On the one hand, this cooperation takes place competitively within the framework of the United Nations – a forum with universal membership. On the other hand, it involves cooperating on global common goods such as combating pandemics or tackling the climate crisis.
When it comes to these genuinely global problems, it makes little sense to differentiate between states according to their domestic set-up. Liberal democracies and market economies will have to work with authoritarian, state-capitalist regimes if they want to address these issues.
The situation becomes difficult when there is no compelling need for cooperation. The current problems of the World Trade Organization, for example, are largely due to the fact that the institution was created for cooperation between market economies – and for their interaction with weaker developing countries. However, the WTO was not designed for the membership of a large and economically strong authoritarian state-capitalist country like China. The remaining states (especially the US, but increasingly also the EU) lack the belief in the “diffuse reciprocity” of dealing with China within the WTO framework.
