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“If the postcolonial world is unwilling to punish such a clear violation of the principle of non-interference, it is because they do not care about international rules, because they resent the West and its values. “The argument could be made that it must be because they’re doing it, or for some reason they’re doing it because of Putin’s grace,” Brazilian political scientist Matias Spector said Friday at a lecture at the Brookings Institution, a major think tank in Washington. This was explained in a substantive lecture given.
Spector, a professor at the Fondazione Getulio Vargas School of International Relations in São Paulo, Brazil, says that this framework supports the belief that “the future of international law depends on changing the balance of power between Western liberals and domestic powers.” He argued that it depends on. Enemies exist both within the West and outside the West. ” and that “a large number of non-aligned developing countries, clearly lacking strong moral commitments, are taking advantage of the current situation to avoid risks rather than take sides with rising dictators or Western powers.” Trying to”.
Spector then set out to dismantle this worldview. I attended his talk and moderated a panel of respected American international law experts who responded to Specter’s remarks. In today’s newsletter, I develop the argument he put forward. (You can also watch the entire Brookings event online.)
He put an interesting twist on the traditional understanding of the “rules-based order,” the set of norms, institutions, and laws that underpin world politics. For some in the Western world, including senior U.S. government officials, the “rules-based order” is the foundation of the classical liberal status quo, one that blooms with peace and prosperity. For others, it is a polite euphemism for nearly a century of American hegemony.
But Spector argued that the “rules-based order” and its liberal elements “were not created by Western legalism.” Rather, they are the product of decades of debate and diplomatic struggle through the era of decolonization, the emergence and consolidation of human rights principles in international law, and global public debate.
For example, he argued that “resistance to Western domination from Angola to Vietnam, from Algeria to Afghanistan, paved the way for many of the rules that limit the use of force today.” “Trade law as we know it today was deeply shaped by former colonies claiming permanent jurisdiction over natural resources and by coalitions of countries in the postcolonial world who opposed Western protectionism. .”
In Mr. Specter’s view, “liberal” powers are just as likely to undermine the rules-based order as revisionist dictatorships.. He points out that the United States is definitely at the peak of its period of “unipolarization,” a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of a new and devastating era of conflict in the Middle East.
“Post-9/11 decisions marked a significant departure from decades of strengthening the rules-based order,” Specter argued, adding to the debate surrounding the legality of various U.S. operations and the use of torture. It pointed out. “Strong constraints on the use of force were overturned first in Iraq and then in Libya.”
For many onlookers around the world, the incident exposed the hypocrisy and pretense surrounding Western talk of a “rules-based order.” However, this does not necessarily mean that the “rules-based order” is of no value to other countries. Although Russia and China pose an authoritarian threat in the minds of Western strategists, they are, in their own ways, custodians of the same institutions and norms, from which both can profit or break. I’ve been doing a lot of things.
“China and Russia, like other great powers, including the United States, try to break rules they don’t like, push rules they like wherever possible, and are hypocritical in justifying their ways. “It will be,” Spector said.
This is why many in the Global South are not convinced by the Biden administration’s democracy versus authoritarianism agenda.. They argue that “rather than the tension between a world safe for democracy and a world safe for authoritarianism, the tension is between a world in which the strong are not constrained by a global legal order and a world in which the strong must act. I understand the tension,” Spector explained. Because there is a check on their power. ”
Spector suggested that in an era of global competition, Western governments and policymakers need to be more proactive about accusations of hypocrisy, rather than simply ignoring them. This increases its international legitimacy and gives it a much better standing than other acts of coercion and coercion.
He also wanted to move the conversation about “rules-based order” away from the broad contexts in which it sometimes ends up. Spector describes the “civilized” standard applied to debates about liberalism and international law, that is, one in which certain cultural or national characteristics are more welcoming of liberal and democratic values than others. and reject the legacy of Western imperial domination.
This ignores how, in his view, such paternalistic thinking laid the foundations for many of the abuses and injustices of colonialism. This also obscures the extent to which illiberalism has progressed even within Western societies.
“Rather than fictionalizing the differences between the enlightened West and the backward ‘standards of civilization,’ shouldn’t we instead promote universal ‘standards of truth’?” Spector asked.
This will force politicians and geeks to develop “some ability to see the world through other people’s eyes,” he says. That may now seem like an uncomfortable and perhaps unattainable level of empathy to be expected from the elites in power in Western capitals.
But Specter said: “If we succeed, and condemn the use of indiscriminate violence against civilians by our adversaries, we will be able to hold our allies and partners, and indeed ourselves, to the same standards. “We may come to that conclusion,” he added.
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