Reverse Causality and the Illusion of the Global Rules-Based Order
If the rules-based order does not exist, one must wonder: how and why does it remain alive in strategic discourse? ‘How’ is via a dual-layered causal fallacy. ‘Why’ is another question entirely.
When I describe the international order as an illusion, I do not mean to insinuate that the individuals and institutions who created the complex collection of treaties and bodies we refer to as international law have acted disingenuously or that there was never a real intention among advocates to tame the interactions between states. Especially after the Second World War, when our current 'order' was formed with the ratification of the UN charter, there was massive enthusiasm for creating a body of international governance, and Australians were notably involved at the San Francisco conference where the charter was developed. There was an enormous effort by many individuals to cement a system of international governance that would disallow the atrocities and violence witnessed in the preceding years. There was also great rhetorical support from states, but their actions did not bear out. The rule-making bodies were provided no independent strength with which to make their rules meaningful. The sovereign never got its sword, and the rules-based order never came to be. We can see this in the behavioural outcomes of the system. In an order, actors obey by the given rules. If they do not, there is no order.
How then, does the illusion persist? The perception that the international legal system has a significant effect on the behaviour of states arises from a dual-layered causal fallacy. It is true that state actions largely correspond with the rules; however, to think they are therefore shaped by the rules is a mistake. There are two origins for this correlation that can be easily misread. We have already touched on one: states are susceptible to public whim and public whim has been affected by the same humanitarian philosophy that originally underwrote the rules, leading to an indirect connection that is confused as being direct. This was particularly influential in the unipolar period due to the generally stable nature of a unipolar power structure and the specifically democratic nature of the hegemon of the time.
There is in fact a direct connection between state behaviour and the rules, but it is often read in reverse, resulting in the second common error that feeds the rules-based order fallacy. A large part of the correlation between the actions of states and the rules produced by the international legal system is the result not of the states’ deference to the system but the system’s deference to the states. Obedience to the powerful is mistaken for obedience to the law because the lawmakers are also obedient to the powerful.
International law is created by agreements or bodies formed from agreements. An agreement will only be endorsed by signatories that want its outcomes to occur; a treaty that curtails a state’s actions in a way it does not willingly accept cannot come into being, and so a change would have to occur in a state’s leadership or circumstances from those responsible for the signing for it to even have a compulsion to breach an agreement.
An organisation is more likely to create dissent since it has some capacity to produce an outcome unforeseen by its members at the time of their joining, but the possibility of this is foreseen and so their design usually limits the likelihood or the effect of an adverse eventuality. The International Criminal Court, the most serious attempt by the global community to create a body capable of enforcing international law, is entirely dependent on state acquiescence. The arrest warrants it issued last year against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Mohammad Deif were simply ignored. Deif, to be fair, may have already been dead.
Those institutions that are not wholly impotent are instead controlled. The United Nations, the mainstay of the current system, mirrors the natural state of global politics, providing greater power to the greater powers. The strongest states of 1945 were granted permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council and the capacity to veto any resolution. As a result, the UNSC is incapable of ever taking a consequential action on international security without the support of the powers that already determine it. Official criticism of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine had to come via the slower, weaker, and equivocal General Assembly. Similarly, economic institutions like the IMF are structured to defer to wealthy powers. The three seats of the 24 on the IMF board that represent African nations collectively wield a smaller voting share than the single member that exclusively represents the US, whose share is so large it is in effect a veto.[1] The conditionality of IMF loans and American aid spearheaded the neoliberal movement, forcing open markets that would often have preferred to remain closed. While the US experienced an unprecedented economic boom in the 1990s, 50 of the poorest countries, mostly African, grew poorer.[2]
The rules-based order does not govern the states; the states govern it under the same hierarchy of power that directs them. Rules are not permitted to exist unless the powerful accept them and so of course those that exist are generally observed. The belief that the international legal system has some control over state behaviour is the result of misinterpreting this cause and effect relationship as the reverse of how it truly functions. If the rules had command over the states however, they would be obeyed even when inconvenient. As we have seen, they are not.
Which adds an interesting complication: if the states are not obedient to the order, they must not be fooled by the fallacy. Yet the perception of an order would collapse without the support of the states. Another element is required to explain how the rules-based order myth persists: it is actively being encouraged by the likes of us. That finally begs the question: why?
The Danger of the Rules-Based Order Myth
Australia is an adroit international actor. A wily middle power, we unabashedly use the rules rather than follow them. It is evident in our own behaviour that we do not consider the rules to actually be inviolable. So why is our strategic discussion absorbed in veneration for an order we do not observe? Why do we flaunt these clothes we cannot see? Let us not do its authors the disservice of assuming this myth is being perpetuated by mistake. The rules-based order is more than a misnomer; it is a myth, and a good myth is a means of control.
Something does not have to be real to be useful. People are not guided by reality; they are guided by their perception of reality. Narratives, although unreal, can shape that perception and in turn the behaviour of those who believe in them. A nation is a narrative; it does not exist in any objective sense, and yet it has massive influence over how people act. Power too is mostly narrative. Belief in might, not actual might is what shapes strategy and state behaviour.[3] Only a small portion of what we achieve politically arises from the physical exertion of our strength. If it were necessary to touch someone with a sword to influence them, an empire could never arise. Alexander the Great would have struggled to maintain control of two subjects at once. The narrative that surrounds one’s power compounds it, creating most of its effect. Backed by narrative, the promise or threat of power is able to achieve far more than the actual deployment of it can. Consider how Napoleon’s armies were able to conquer Europe but not Haiti, how the British Empire cowed colonies all over the world but not the Boers, how the United States could coerce China and the USSR but not Vietnam or Cuba. The narrative of power is often more important than the reality of it.
A critical component of the narrative of power is belief in the legitimacy of its use. If one recognises that a person has the right to exercise their power in a certain way, they are unlikely to resist it. The perceived legitimacy of the police and courts is essential for their operation. They could not possibly achieve the control they have without the assent of the bulk of the population, which is given, based on the popular belief that they have a right to enforce law. When that belief erodes, their work becomes far more difficult and dangerous. Legitimacy is what the narrative of the rules-based order provides for states. When the use of power is perceived as being in accordance with a set of rules, it is harder to challenge. When it is portrayed as being against the rules, it is easier to oppose.
Of course, a narrative is still ultimately nothing. It has its impact through people, and so to matter it has to be taken up by someone potentially impactful, or many people that are minorly impactful. We should assume that the strategic leaders of other states are as clever as our own. The broader public however is noticeably less discerning. Yet, as we have discussed, the public has power. If you can guide the public’s perception, you can guide that power, and in turn, the behaviour of another state. The narrative of the rules-based order allows us to do exactly that.
The idea of the rules-based order continues to have influence on the public because it remains globally greatly popular. That popularity is rooted in the same event that inspired the last attempt to make it a reality: the Second World War. A culmination of a long-running escalation in the scale of inter-state violence, the war speared unprecedented magnitudes and styles of destruction into the consciousness of the global public and in doing so irrevocably shifted its worldview. The Holocaust and the atom bomb seemed to have threatened not just the participants of the conflict, but the human race as a whole. They unveiled new forms of Evil that required a revised conception of Good to properly explain. Thus, humanitarian ethics surged. The human, separated from its nationality or creed, was accepted to have an inalienable value, and that translated into inalienable rights and inescapable responsibilities. The possibility for these rights to be denied implied a new class of crime, the crime against humanity, which neatly justified the common perception that what was done in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Jiangsu was a new kind of wrongdoing and required a new kind of punishment. In turn, the need for a new system of governance was logically inferred. The same crises that had led to our conception of these crimes also proved that the system of nation-states in anarchy could not be trusted to prevent them. A new order, one superior to the states and representative of humanity as a whole, was envisaged that could. That order never took hold, but the notions that inspired it still remain, as widespread and foundational in the global population as its memories of the World Wars, of Hiroshima, Nanking, the Blitz, Pearl Harbor, and Treblinka. While those memories remain, the concept of the rules-based order will continue to be popular and powerful.
That makes the rules-based order a potential source of legitimacy if we convince others we are acting on its behalf. As long as we can maintain the illusion that an order exists, then with clever framing we can play off its popularity to generate permissiveness to our states’ activity and deny it to others.
Thus we call out China’s pestering of Taiwan as if it is materially different to the United States’ interactions with revolutionary Cuba, pushing the dragon—not that we have had to push hard—into the frame of the aggressor and our bloc into that of the defenders of peace, staking out the moral high ground as Henry V took the woods at Agincourt. This is targeted not only towards the state itself but perhaps more effectively towards others in the region, such as India and Vietnam, to try to draw their support. In return, those of us in the naval profession have become familiar with the PLA-N’s use of confrontational vessel posturing, video editing, and COLREGs to make foreign vessels practising freedom of navigation within its expansive sea claims appear belligerent and unprofessional. Similarly, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao’s infamous release of a doctored image of an Australian soldier killing a child in 2020 was an uncouth but potently visceral political capitalisation on the exposure of credible allegations that Australian Special Forces had committed a litany of war crimes in Afghanistan, a stab at a gap in the armour of our narrative.
Therein lies the problem. Internationally, the myth of the rules-based order is a useful tool, but in a multipolar world it is a communal one, available to all. For the continuation of the myth to be beneficial in our dealings with others it would require us to be better at using it than the competition. For the last two periods of power relations we have been—the USSR’s Iron Curtain having capitulated early narrative superiority to the West during the Cold War. There is little reason to believe, though, that we will continue to be. After three decades of hegemony much of the world is tired of Western pontification and well caught up to its game. Meanwhile, China’s gradual evolution towards soft power sophistication is being achieved in tandem with the United States’ retreat to transactional diplomacy. The current American administration has obviously moved on and dropped the pretence of caring about the rules, adopting instead an aggressive realpolitik better adapted to the developing power structure (though only if one is actually able to discern what is real). Without the US to play magician to our assistant, our moralising will not have the effect on the international stage that it used to. Considering that as a multicultural liberal democracy with a relatively lax censorship regime we are particularly susceptible to manipulation by public sentiment, shouldn’t we move on too?
You might be more inclined to think so if you consider the further internal costs the questionable benefit of the rules-based order comes with. Our discourse confuses our policy-users, undermines our democracy, and restrains our ability to act in our own interests.
The damage of rules-based order rhetoric comes first to our public service. Foreigners read our white papers, so to lie convincingly abroad we are forced as well to lie to ourselves, creating chaos in our own camp. Our dedication to maintaining our picture of the order in spite of both reality and our behaviour leaves our policy inconsistent with our actual actions, and that leaves public servants, including ADF members, without clarity when they need it. The resulting confusion is potentially a huge problem. Policy provides direction to the diverse and behemoth arms of government that are otherwise uncontrollable, and there may not be an opportunity for those arms to seek better direction when they find they need it. Troubles now move at hypersonic speeds. How exactly should a punter with the National Defence Strategy in one hand and an SM-6 in the other react to a sudden, unexpected crisis of territorial integrity when violations of Taiwan’s borders—not a recognised state—are criminal but bombing raids on Iran—recognised as a state with an inherent right to sovereignty—are very cool? If we are caught naked we may not have time to get dressed. The disjunct between rhetoric and reality from our strategic leaders feeds down into uncertainty for those beneath them which could lead to dangerous and greatly consequential missteps. The chaos the rules-based order myth generates within the public service is a major hindrance and its first sin. Its second sin is its effect on the public.
Our public is just as vulnerable to the rules-based order narrative as any other. The rhetoric our government provides on the rules-based order, even if targeted externally, will unavoidably affect them. It is worryingly easy for someone with power to see this as a boon. The public is silly and ignorant and our strategic reality is multi-layered and labyrinthine. Honesty is hard and reality is unwieldy. Why go to the effort of involved, tumultuous truth-telling when you can just do the easy thing and lie for the same result like a jockey putting blinders on a horse in order to be able to steer it more simply? Would it not be more efficient, rather than explaining the full complexity of a plan, to just proclaim ‘this is a rule!’ and have the country follow? One may even perceive a necessity to do so; in a competing electoral system one takes a risk trying to sell a complex truth when it may be beaten by a digestible lie–another prisoner’s dilemma. If Party A tries to platform an authentic, nuanced vision of affairs, they leave themselves vulnerable to Party B’s popular, nescient fiction and vice versa, so they must both go low. This is obviously a disrespectful and indolent way to think, but it is also terribly short-sighted.
Our track is not clear or well laid. We know the structure of world power is shifting, with the greatest changes happening in our very region. We will need to be agile. Blinding the horse will make it harder to turn. Australia is structurally designed to be guided by the will of its public. That public may not recognise falsehoods, but it will recognise inconsistency. If our narrative suddenly does not fit with the path we need to take, it cannot be changed at whim. The public will not react well to an overnight shift in reality. To extend the horse metaphor to its limit: we will buck. Our narrative thus restrains us. If we declare an act illegal today, it will be hard to accept tomorrow. If we call someone a criminal, it will be harder to work with them when we need to. We are slowly wrapping ourselves in our own rhetoric, mummifying ourselves in myth. That was fine when the world order was stable and in our favour. In the emerging power structure, the predictability the myth has relied upon will go. The contradictions between our rhetoric and reality will be more frequent and more apparent, and the broader the gap the more damaging they will be. Our public holds the reins. In order for it to navigate us safely it must be informed, clear-sighted, and respected.
That potential for the myth to confuse the public and waylay its will leads to its third sin: the damage it can cause to democracy as an institution.
Every state has a governing elite; it is logistically unviable to make to have day-to-day decisions be made by the whole of a community. Being positionally different, these elite will inevitably have some divergent interests from the general public. Democracies attempt to keep the actions of these elite aligned with the public’s general will by giving the public control over their access to power, theoretically tying their interests to the community’s. But as the public often relies on those in power for their knowledge of affairs, the elite have some opportunity to undermine this system. They may do this out of simple laziness as described above, or a more insidious vice. Rather than match their actions with the public interest, they may attempt to confound the public’s perception of its interests to match their own.
There is no evidence such an egomaniacal intent is responsible for or influential upon our perpetuation of the rules-based order myth, but the mere plausibility of such a thing occurring is sufficient reason alone to abandon all myth-making and scour all inaccuracy from our rhetoric. The intent of a lie can never be proven—who would trust a liar to be honest about why they lied?—and so the worst may be inferred. Regardless of how noble or innocent the reason for a falsehood, suspicion follows the revelation of a lie like E. coli in a sewage spill. Trust is too crucial for our society for us to risk it for temporary gain.
Even if we believe Australia as a nation is better than such behaviour and somehow invulnerable to it, we know our patron is manifestly not. Members of the government of the United States actively misrepresented their strategic situation in the Gulf of Tonkin incident[4] and their claims of an Iraqi WMD threat in order to propel their public into wars against their own interests. Both wars were disasters for the country but temporarily politically and sometimes financially[5] advantageous to the elite who encouraged them. If ordinary Australians do not have a thorough understanding of our strategic state of affairs, we risk being exposed to the same duping—as we were on both of these occasions to great cost. Yet the greatest cost fell on the dupers. The revelation of these falsehoods has led to mass loss of confidence in the US government and the devolution of American politics. The United States’ disrespect for its public has fed a public contempt for the state, and the acid of that distrust has caused the erosion of its economy, health, and order. This is the consequence of myth-making.
We must improve our rhetoric on our strategic state of affairs. Sheltered by a favourable power structure, we have relied for too long on an evidently inaccurate picture of our strategic situation. That situation is now changing and our discourse must change with it to match the complexity and nuance of its challenges. Our public and our public servants need to be prepared. They need to be immunised from the fable of the rules and ready to react to the challenges to come. That is not to say we should abandon the norms we have and nihilistically embrace anarchy. What culture of co-operation does exist between states is greatly valuable to us, not only as a middle power but as a collection of individual human beings who presumably have greater aspirations for ourselves or our species than the simple expansion of our state’s wealth and power. The norms have helped preserve peace and build together what we could never have achieved apart. They have saved us from the worst excesses of warfare, the zero-sum extension of fighting into murder, conflict into destruction. Being untrue about the nature of our norms however does not strengthen them; it weakens them. Exploiting them for momentary political gain hollows them out, dissolving the goodwill all harmony relies upon. Importantly, it robs us of the chance to make them better. The idea of a rules-based order for good reason remains immensely popular. We could try again to create it, and use the failure of our last attempt to inform the next, if only we could admit we do not have one.
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