The growing geopolitical tensions in the international system, in particular  between the United States and China and also with Russia, have led to a chorus of voices urging on middle powers to greater efforts in maintaining  and even strengthening a rules-based order. Roland Paris in a major Chatham House Brief titled: “Can Middle Powers Save the Liberal World Order?” pointed at various urgent calls from international experts:

Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times columnist, has proposed a ‘middle-powers alliance’ to ‘preserve a world based around rules and rights, rather than power and force’. Two eminent American foreign-policy experts, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, have also called on US allies to ‘leverage their collective economic and military might to save the liberal world order’.

The urgency and calls for middle power action rose perceptively, of course, with ‘America First’  from the Trump Presidency and from the failure of the leading powers – the United States and China – to organize global governance efforts to tackle the global pandemic. Indeed the global pandemic has seemingly ‘lit a fire’ under experts and officials issuing a rising chorus of calls for greater middle power action in the face of leading power failure. An  evident instance is a recent article from  Foreign Affairs from our colleague Bruce Jones from Brookings titled:“Can middle powers lead the world out of the pandemic? Because the United States and China have shown that they can’t”.

In Part 1 of this Post series we attempted to identify which states experts were referring to when they issued the call for middle power action. We ended up with a variety of categories. There were the traditional states, Canada, Australia and maybe South Korea and Singapore. There were states that fell within the top 20 economic powers  – way too many states but lots of familiar powers. And then there were all those states , identified by Jeffrey Robertson in his insightful article: “Middle-power definitions: confusion reigns supreme” in the Australian Journal of International Affairs (2017. 71(4): 355-370, with an interest in and “capacity (material resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.)resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.) to work proactively in concert with similar states to contribute to the development and strengthening of institutions for the governance of the global commons.” And in fact there seemed to be a bit of a marriage between middle powers and multilateralism in the newly created “Alliance for Multilateralism” created by the foreign ministers of France and Germany that umbrellaed at its creation some 40 states.

The linkage between middle powers, multilateralism and contemporary international policy progress has come to an enhanced focus during the ‘America First’ Trump years. Roland Paris described some of the critical efforts:

It was Canada that undertook the initial diplomacy that led to the forging of the International Criminal Court, and the concept of the ‘responsibility to protect’. It was Australia that led the effort—over initial American opposition—to create a Chemical Weapons Convention. More recently, Japan led the way in creating the TPP-11, to fill the vacuum left when the United States walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But there were other actions that middle powers initiated, and chronicled by Bruce Jones in his FA apiece, “Can Middle Powers Lead the World Out of the Pandemic?” arising from the pandemic and with many of this actions directly related to the pandemic’s spread:

• • • The UK took on the role of leading the Coronavirus Global Response Summit, to raise funds for vaccine development;
    • the UK, the Dutch and the Swedes took the lead in World Bank efforts to deploy more than $14 billion in surge financing to developing countries;
    • the UK, the largest donor to GAVI hosted a replenishment conference raising a further $8.8 billion in funding;
    • Sweden and Spain co-convened a virtual meeting of foreign ministers from every region to help coordinate vaccine production;
    • Australia helped to broker a critical outcome at the World Health Assembly, generating support for a proposal for an investigation into the sources of the pandemic; and
    • Norway and Switzerland together with the WHO took the lead in coordinating advanced treatment and vaccine trials (the WHO Solidarity program).

As Paris suggested over these middle power efforts, and more:

If these and other countries worked together in a concerted campaign, they might succeed in slowing the erosion of the current order, and perhaps even strengthen and modernize parts of it. It certainly seems worth trying. After all, if the world’s middle powers do not take on this task, who will?

The method for such action, he believes:

Form should follow function – Each coalition should begin with a small group of states that share a common assessment of the problem at hand and possess the means to do something about it. Once this core group devises a general plan of action, others should be encouraged to join the coalition, contribute to its efforts, and refine its goals. Participation in the coalition should depend on its subject matter and objectives.

 

The Several Forms of Multilateralism

But what form would these multilateral arrangements take? Now one form of multilateralism that was urged, deriving in part from the emergence of the G20 Leaders Summit in 2008, is the multilateralism built on a ‘shifting coalition of consensus’. This multilateral arrangement was, as you will see, was built on a G20 foundation and was keyed to US actions in this informal institutional setting. As I wrote in ‘Effective Multilateralism’*:

The G20 offered promise of what Stewart Patrick (2010, 358), and others suggested would be a ‘shifting coalition of consensus’[1]: “As the G20 matures and expands its agenda, it has the potential to shake up the geopolitical order, introducing greater flexibility into global diplomacy and transcending the stultifying bloc politics that have too often hamstrung cooperation in formal, treaty based institutions (including the United Nations).” Instead of blocs that emerged frequently in formal institutions and settings generated by structure and politics. Of the era, new ‘shifting coalitions of consensus’ could emerge in this post bipolar world and the coalitions could well vary depending on the issue in this new setting of global governance. The shifting coalitions of consensus were seen as particularly likely to support American efforts to promote collaboration and advance policy making at the global governance level. As Stewart Patrick (2010, 358-9) suggested: “The very size and diversity of the G20 – while not without drawbacks – may inject new dynamism into global governance by facilitating the formation of shifting coalitions of interest. As such, the G20 presents particular strategic advantages for the United States, which will likely remain the indispensable partner for most for most winning coalitions within the new steering group.” What wasn’t anticipated at the time – at the Unipolar Moment’ however – was an ‘America First’ policy that spurned multilateralism and operated largely by transactional and bilateral policy making. And of course, that is exactly what has impacted contemporary multilateralism and is reshaping the global order.

 

[1] For a further elaboration of the concept of ‘shifting coalitions of consensus’ see the video segment by Colin Bradford. 2013. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTRGmgPgW4U

The shifting coalitions of consensus was conceived to be a moveable arrangement of states furthering global governance effort but it seems built off of US multilateral actions. The concept though, it seems to me, has evolved. This is so not least because of the unilateralism of Trump foreign policy and its distaste for multilateralism. As a result ‘shifting coalitions of  consensus’ may no longer envisage US leadership or even US involvement.

It is evident that this form of multilateralism builds off the informal leadership institutions, in this instance the G20. But what if that institutional arrangement is no longer salient to promoting multilateralism in the global order of today. This is the perspective that our colleague Bruce Jones takes with Jeffrey Feltman and Will Moreland in “Competitive Multilateralism: Adapting Institutions to Meet the New Geopolitical Environment”. Jones and his colleagues, take the position that the rise of geopolitics has altered the forms of multilateralism available:

As the world shifts into a period of renewed geopolitical competition, the multilateral order is straining to adapt. Both governments and the institutions that serve them recognize that circumstances are changing, and that multilateralism must change too — but so far, they have not agreed on a way forward.

And further they conclude:

Twenty-first century multilateralism must be fit to its strategic environment. Multilateralism defined by the post-Cold War hallmarks — a focus on utilizing existing, universal institutions to spur cooperation on shared challenges — is insufficient for a world where great-power competition has returned as a driving, structural force in global affairs. Multilateralism’s advocates must revive, and build on, lessons from the Cold War past in order to refurbish these tools for the current climate. 

But Jones is not yet done. More recently he has argued, I presume beyond ‘competitive multilateralism’, there is yet another configuration: this ‘democratic multilateralism’. In a recent article with Adam Twardowski titled: “Bolstering democracies in a changing international order: The case for democratic multilateralism” the two argue:

The United States should adopt a strategy we call “democratic multilateralism” — seeking to advance coordination and cooperation among the democracies, but within the contours of the multilateral order. The U.S. — or another leading democracy — should establish a mechanism for tight coordination among the democratic states on both policy and funding for issues of technology, global health, and climate change. Going further, the U.S. could establish a “Partners Council on International Security,” which would operate in parallel to the U.N. Security Council and invite to this Partners Council its most important democratic allies and partners. These mechanisms would bolster multilateralism, not erode it, and they would keep open the necessary mechanisms for coordination with illiberal states on global issues.

Here then is a multilateral world situated, according to Jones and Twardowski, in the growing rivalry of US and China. They two reflect the development of informal multilateral arrangements but not separating from China through the traditional institutions:

Greater coordination among democracies is an obvious part of the answer. The less obvious part is how to arrange it — as a way of subverting the existing arrangements of the multilateral order, or to defend them? Orchestrating tighter coordination of the democracies within the existing mechanisms of the international order is both more likely to attract the needed coalition and can achieve the same goals at lower risk, while simultaneously leaving intact the framework needed for managing global public goods.

Tom Wright at Brookings identified this approach as well in his new piece titled, “Advancing multilateralism in a populist age”. He referred to it as “reinvigorating the free world”. Realistically, however these new arrangements are constructed, it seems to me,  without China’s involvement. While the formal institutions maintain Chinese and Russian participation as well, presumably they are no longer ‘the heart’ of multilateral world of action. It appears to be a growing bifurcated global order. And one then needs to ask the question “is that a good thing?” If not, is it a necessary configuration? More on that later.

* “The Possibilities for ‘Effective Multilateralism’ in the Coming Global Order”. Research Memo. December 9, 2020.

Image Credit: Belfercenter.org