So, back to the Conference and the Rountable. The other members of the Roundtable included: Pascale Massot, Assistant Professor, soon to be Associate Professor, in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Harukata Takenaka, Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) at Tokyo, Andrew Cooper, Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, Yves Tiberghien, Professor of Political Science and Konwakai Chair in Japanese Research at the University of British Columbia and Amitav Acharya the UNESCO Chair in Transitional Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University. The group joined Arthur and I on Thursday morning of the Conference.

So what was the premise of this Roundtable? The intro posed the contrasting views of the RBOs existence.  There are clear statements from the Biden Administration,  NATO partners and other European countries of Russia’s violation of the RBO with its war on Ukraine. We then zeroed in on the Russian view, expressed by among others, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister who described the state of the global order as seen from Moscow: “Now the UN-centric system is undergoing a deep crisis, the root cause of which was brought on by the decision of certain UN members to replace international law and the UN Charter with some rules-based international order”. A similar view was expressed by Chen Wenqing, a chief security official from China who declared: “Individual states are trying to use the pretext of protesting  [for] democracy to substitute the existing world order based on international law with an artificial rules-based order…”. On the one side an evident and declared rules-based order and on the other something very different. This view declares that international order and international law are something very distinct from this apparent Western construct – The Rules-based Order. And it led us, at this Roundtable to raise the evident question: “… do we even have an RBO? If an RBO does not exist are we condemned to growing rivalry and conflict? If an RBO does exist, then what are the limits on conflict?”

The participants brought a variety of views to this Roundtable and the folks that joined us for the session. They expressed  perspectives and viewpoints from the major powers but not only and took a bird’s eye view of the evolving order and its relationship to the RBO. In the end the participants described the construction and the current state of the house that states, and now others, have built.

Let me try and capture just some of the participant perspectives. Let’s start with two valuable points, among many, that Amitav expressed at the Roundtable. First, according to Amitav, such RBO rules have been developed, shaped and reshaped by states over many centuries. He described a variety of RBOs: rules of diplomacy that go back to the 13 century; the Geneva Convention that goes back to the Code of Manon from 200 BC; the freedom of the seas from the 1th century but before that from small Asian states in Mombasa, Calicut, Malacca and more. Not a single order but a variety of orders. Secondly, the contemporary RBO is the product of a shared effort at San Francisco and not just a US creation. For some time the rules, and in many instances norms, have been refined, and in many cases came together in the 19th century and the West had much to do with it, but so did others.

As described by a number of participants, power shifts can and often do challenge the rules and norms but as pointed out by Pascale institutions can survive power shifts if the legitimacy of purpose can be maintained by some. Different futures are fashioned by states  for each RBO ecosystem – and we witness different evolutions for humanitarian law, from trade, from freedom of the seas and other orders. But the powerful may, and often do, ignore the norms time and time again for convenience. When the powerful are tired, or inconvenienced, they go around the rules and norms. There is a huge amount of arbitrariness in the order,  as described by Andrew. And further, as noted by Arthur all rules have exceptions and cheaters. Rules are created for violating the rules and, as identified for example in trade agreements, such agreements have escape clauses. States at one time or another are willing to enforce rules and on other occasions are all too ready to cheat on the same rules. And it is the case, and it should be noted that when a country complains about others being hypocrites, that state is in fact complaining about the actor being hypocrite, not the rule itself. For Harukata the RBO can be maintained but requires the commitment of leading states to expressly maintain such norms and rules.

Finally, our colleague, Yves described 7 flaws as he saw them  in the contemporary RBO. Among the 7 it is evident that the RBO is weak and needs commitment especially from the more powerful to sustain the order or orders. As he pointed out, in a Westphalian world, any global order is a weak superstructure that requires agreement of major states at creation, and indeed to survive. Like several others Yves suggested hypocrisy, especially, among the leading powers can undermine the RBO but as he notes the power of habits and socialization, even if the order is organized hypocrisy can grow on the members of the order. Norms get integrated. The ideal standards of the RBIO can bestow legitimacy even where hypocrisy lives. Institutional gravity and stickiness as well as the entrepreneurial role of staffers in the IOs can keep the RBO alive, note recent agreements: the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the High Seas Treaty 2023. For Yves, if we really want to promote cooperation and collective commitment toward meeting common challenges and common rules, we have to focus more on the pragmatic as opposed to the high pitched rhetoric demanding adherence to an ideal RBO that does exist.

The session with my colleagues was both revealing and satisfying. They undertook a wide and deep examination of the RBO and realistically examined the contemporary order that as all pointed out is under stress, hindered by hypocrisy but still capable of maintaining constraint and order in the face of a complex interstate environment but also today an engaged substate and non-state set of actors.