“If the postcolonial world is unwilling to punish such a glaring violation of the principle of nonintervention, the argument goes, it must be because they don’t care for international rules, because they resent the West and its values, or because they are somehow beholden to Putin,” explained Brazilian political scientist Matias Spektor, in a substantive lecture delivered at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington think tank, on Friday.
Spektor, a professor at the School of International Relations at the Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo, Brazil, argued this framing was contingent on the belief that “the future of international law hinges upon the changing balance of power between liberals in the West and their enemies both within the West itself and beyond it.” And that a “multitude of nonaligned developing countries that, apparently devoid of any strong moral commitments, seek to take advantage of the current situation, hedging their bets rather than siding either with the rising autocrats or the West.”
Spektor then set about dismantling this worldview. I attended his lecture and moderated a panel of respected American international law experts who reacted to Spektor’s remarks. In today’s newsletter, I’m laying out the argument he put forward. (You can also watch the whole Brookings event online.)
He offered an interesting tweak to the conventional understanding of the “rules-based order” — the set of norms, institutions and laws that underpin global politics. To some in the West, including top U.S. officials, the “rules-based order” is the bedrock of a classically liberal status quo, allowing for peace and prosperity to bloom. To others, it is a polite euphemism for a near-century of U.S. hegemony.
But Spektor insisted that the “rules-based order” and its liberal elements “were not created by Western fiat.” Rather, they are the product of decades of contestation and diplomatic battles that ran through an era of decolonization and through the emergence and consolidation of principles of human rights in international law and the global public debate.
For example, “resistance to Western dominance from Angola to Vietnam, Algeria to Afghanistan, paved the way for many of the rules constraining the use of force today,” he argued. “The trade law that we now know was deeply shaped by former colonies asserting permanent jurisdiction over their natural resources, and by coalitions of countries from the postcolonial world who pushed against Western protectionism.”
In Spektor’s view, great “liberal” powers are as likely to undermine the rules-based order as revisionist autocracy. He points to the United States at the arguable peak of its “unipolar” moment: A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and at the start of a new harrowing age of conflict in the Middle East.
“The decisions that followed 9/11 marked a major departure from the decades-long consolidation of the rules-based order,” Spektor argued, noting the debates over the legality of various U.S. campaigns, as well as the use of torture. “Powerful constraints on the use of force were upended first in Iraq and then in Libya.”
To many onlookers around the world, it laid bare certain hypocrisies and pretensions that surrounded Western talk about a “rules-based order.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean the “rules-based order” doesn’t have value for nations elsewhere. For all the autocratic threat Russia and China pose in the minds of Western strategists, they are, in their own way, custodians of the same institutions and norms, and have both benefited from them and broken them.
“China and Russia, like all great powers, including the United States, will break the rules they don’t like, try as much as possible to push for the rules they like, and be hypocritical when justifying their ways,” Spektor said.
That’s why many in the “Global South” aren’t convinced by the “democracy versus autocracy” agenda driven by the Biden administration. They see, Spektor explained, the tensions “not so much between a world safe for democracy versus a world safe for autocracy, but a world where the strong are unconstrained by the global legal order versus a world where the strong have to go through the motions of international law because there are checks on their power.”
Spektor proposed that, in an era of global competition, Western governments and policymakers need to reckon more positively with accusations of hypocrisy, rather than simply shrugging them off. This would boost their international legitimacy and standing far greater than other acts of coercion or pressure.
He also wanted to pull the conversation about the “rules-based order” away from the cruder contexts where it sometimes goes. Spektor rejects the “civilizational” standard applied to discussions about liberalism and international law — the afterlife of a legacy of Western imperial domination that assumes certain cultural characteristics or national traits are more hospitable to liberal, democratic values than others.
This ignores, in his view, the ways in which such paternalistic thinking laid the foundations for the many abuses and injustices of colonialism. It also elides the extent to which illiberalism is on the march within Western societies, as well.
“Rather than fictionalize the differences between an Enlightened West and a backwards rest around a ‘standard of civilization,’ should we not be pushing for a universal ‘standard of truth’ instead?” Spektor asked.
This would force politicians and wonks to develop “some ability to see the world through the eyes of others,” he said. That may seem now a perhaps uncomfortable and unattainable level of empathy to expect of elites in power in Western capitals.
But, Spektor added, “if we succeed, we might conclude that if we condemn the indiscriminate use of violence against civilians by our enemies, we should be able to hold our allies, our partners, and indeed ourselves, to the same standard.”
