When precisely did the rules-based order die? Mark Carney’s speech last week at Davos was the first time a western head of state has said outright what has been hanging over political proceedings for some time. The rules-based order is “fading”, in the middle of a “rupture” and there’s no going back. But outside Davos, the G7 and Nato, that is old news – many believed the rules-based order had expired long ago, depending on what moment you take as your watershed.
There were several components to the order, which of course was a layered, complex thing. The first is structural, that is, the agreement between powerful and prosperous countries that there would be certain mechanisms and protocols to maintain political stability, contain the outbreak of wars and promote their mutual economic interests. All the bodies that direct international traffic – the EU, Nato, the UN, the WTO, the IMF – make up that top layer of organisation.
The second was more abstract, the norms that those countries adhered to in action and rhetoric. They would not launch aggressive protectionist economic policies against each other, definitely not have designs on each other’s territory and not pass opinion on each other’s domestic affairs.
The third was the ideological glue that held it all together, one that advanced the impression that these were not simply transactional arrangements in everyone’s interest, but something rooted in liberal ideals: the promotion of universal human rights, rights to self-determination and the sanctity of individual freedoms.
In many ways, the final component was the most important, what Carney called a “pleasant fiction”. This pretence that the whole thing wasn’t fundamentally about American hegemony. The US and its allies committed violations of international law frequently, or endorsed them, or let them pass – but broadly put in the effort to make those actions seem coherent. They had to sometimes violate the order so they could save it. They did so not because they could, but because they must, as the custodians of moral standards and global security.
The “war on terror” was the first challenge to that argument. If there was any faith that powerful countries would not indulge their imperial rights to invade other countries, rendition people illegally and imprison them for years without due process, it ended then. The victims of the “war on terror” did not have the privilege of being able to partake of the pleasant fiction, as their lands became theatres for foreign troops. Their countries succumbed to years of war and fracture with disastrous results, proliferation of sectarian violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a handing back to the Taliban when the spasm of post-9/11 temper subsided. But the architects of the “war on terror” could still offer the consolation to themselves and their public that it was all in the service of combating the great threat of Islamic terrorism, and that its calamitous consequences were unfortunately due to “unknown unknowns”.
That consolation became near impossible in Gaza, where another part of the order died and the necrosis spread. Every feature of the genocide throttled the pretence that the order was rooted in any ideals – or rather that those ideals applied to anyone but those at the top of the hierarchy. The scale of killing, the violation of every rule in the book, from the wholesale murder of non-combatants to depriving them of food and medicine, obliterated the fiction.
But it wasn’t just that. It was that Israel was both armed and given diplomatic cover to pursue its campaign, rendering its allies not just bystanders but partners in crime. This was not a genocide enacted in an African country by a party remote from Washington or Brussels, allowing for hand-wringing and condemnation from afar. It was a joint venture that continued only because Israel is a close ally, making it clear that the rules were applied selectively.
But Gaza was also destructive and catalysing in other ways, because it introduced an internal tension between the parts of the order that had spoiled and those that still worked. In maintaining support for Israel, some European countries and the US went to war with their own institutions, refusing to respect the rulings of the international criminal court when it came to the indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and, in the case of the US, imposing sanctions on the court. Gaza exposed that these institutions are only allowed to function as a sort of international club in which insiders were immune.
And then, the most recent death, in which the constituent parts of that order became the targets of the American hegemon, rather than its handmaidens. This encompasses Trump’s designs on Greenland, his contempt for European allies and Nato, and his tariff wars against them. They are now reckoning with how to coexist on new terms, hastily and violently rewritten by a US that has decided covert supremacy is for the birds.
Carney’s intervention is welcome, though exasperating to many who felt he was stating the obvious. He only felt compelled to make it once the rot reached his own door, and it was made worse by his admission that the grounds of the order were always false and unjust, but that the “bargain” had hitherto always worked.
But, in fairness, his was a realisation that was, if anything, more challenging to Canada and other US allies than it was to those nations who always knew they were dispensable, and who were never closely enmeshed with the US. For those fully integrated within the American security, economic and ideological complex, the US’s new hostility towards them is a game-changing breach of fraternal compact, rather than business as usual.
As the custodians of the rules-based order contemplate its death and what may replace it, what they will realise is that much of it still has a pulse. This won’t just be a matter of pivoting away from the US on foreign policy, but unpicking an entire system, much of it practical – globalised capital, trade agreements, dollarisation of international commerce. But much of the system is also one of coding, values, norms and persistent contempt for those outside the club. It was notable that, as Carney detailed the hypocrisies of the old way, there was no acknowledgment of the people who have always suffered them.
The solutions proposed so far – more middle-power coordination to create groupings that act as a counterweight to the US, higher investment in defence spending, lowering taxes and trade hurdles to make up for the US’s isolationism – are policies that continue the security and economic supremacy of the old order. Those looking to spring free of it are still imprisoned by the very structures they created and continue to believe in. The question for them now isn’t what can they can realistically build out of the ruins of the old order – that would suggest a clean break. The real question is how much of that order remains within them.
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Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
