Iiab 111

Two emerging international orders?
China and the United States
JOHN M. OWEN *
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To paraphrase the editors of this special issue, deglobalization is the ongoing
reversal of the complex interconnectedness of societies that had been increasing
in recent decades. If globalization is the progressive opening of more and more
state borders to greater flows of money, goods, services, people, ideas, and so on,
then deglobalization is the progressive reclosing of those state borders. Deglo-
balization is endogenous to some extent: globalization has redistributed money
and power within societies and removed a portion of their sovereignty and self-
determination, which in turn has generated resistance within them and policy
reversals in some. The editors link the modern version of globalization to the
liberal international order (LIO), the set of ideas and institutions that the United
States and its industrial–democratic allies set up after the Second World War to
regulate economic relations, promote democracy and strengthen global gover-
nance across a number of issue areas.1 That link suggests that deglobalization must
cast the future of the LIO into doubt.2
If deglobalization is real and is putting the LIO in jeopardy, what kind of
global order can we expect will follow? In principle, the world could return to the
relatively closed norm of the late nineteenth century, where international inter-
dependence is low and Great Powers worry acutely about access to raw materials,
compete for territorial rights, and risk and threaten major wars with some regular-
ity.3 Concern about the prospect of that kind of world is part of what spurs us on
to think about this entire problem. Another possible equilibrium is a muddling
through, in which openness and a rule-based international order persist in reduced
or stagnant form. This outcome is plausible because powerful actors in wealthy
* This article is part of the September 2021 special issue of International Affairs on ‘Deglobalization? The future of
the liberal international order’, guest-edited by T. V. Paul and Markus Kornprobst. The author presented earlier
versions of this article at the University of British Columbia, the Catholic University of Portugal, the University
of Virginia and George Washington University. The author thanks T. V. Paul, Markus Kornprobst, Norrin
Ripsman, Mark Brawley, Xiaojun Li, Lilit Klein, Julie Thompson-Gomez, Alec Lennon, Amoz Hor, Michael
Barnett and Alex Downes for comments. Any errors in reasoning or fact are the author’s sole responsibility.
1
Markus Kornprobst and T. V. Paul, ‘Globalization, deglobalization and the liberal international order’, Inter-
national Affairs 97: 5, 2021, pp. 1305–16.
2
For a sceptical view of the utility of the concept of the LIO, see Charles L. Glaser, ‘A flawed framework: why
the liberal international order concept is misguided’, International Security 43: 4, 2019, pp. 51–87.
3
Mingjiang Li, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative: geo-economics and Indo-Pacific security competition’, Interna-
tional Affairs 96: 1, 2020, pp. 169–88.
International Affairs 97: 5 (2021) 1415–1431; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab111

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John M. Owen
states, including the United States, the EU and China, retain a strong interest in
openness. A third possibility is a rejuvenation of globalization, spurred by China’s
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and renewed growth, competitiveness and political
stability in North America and Europe.
In this article, I explore a fourth possible outcome of deglobalization: the emer-
gence of two overlapping international orders, each relatively open internally but
relatively closed to the other. One, a reduced version of the LIO, would be led by
the United States and Europe. The other, led by China, might be termed an authori-
tarian–capitalist international order (ACIO), emphasizing authoritarian govern-
ment, state-led development (but also trade and investment) and state sovereignty.

Goods, services, capital, people and ideas would continue to move back and forth
between the LIO and ACIO, but to a lower degree than they move within each
order. The different domestic models that drove this equilibrium would probably
prevent global commerce and wealth from reaching their maximum possible levels,
and would produce different rules in areas such as internet governance and human
rights. The overall global order, comprising these two international orders, might
be similar to the Cold War order after the inauguration of detente in the early
1970s, when there was trade and technological cooperation between the Soviet- and
US-led blocs and the threat of war was relatively low.
The empirical bases of my argument are twofold. First, recent studies argue
that the regional and global spread and contraction of regime types varies with
the regime type of the hegemon.4 The mechanisms of expansion and contraction
include learning, emulation and active regime promotion by established and rising
hegemons.5 Second, qualitative evidence suggests that governments often believe
that the international environment, broadly conceived, can be biased for or against
not only their country but their country’s domestic regime. Governments often
take active efforts to alter their environment to favour their regime, so that they
may flourish without having to undergo a regime change.6
We can already discern the shape of things to come from China’s actions. At the
UN, Beijing is trying to alter conceptions of and mechanisms for human rights
and norms of internet governance. Through the BRI, it is using an estimated
US$1 trillion to build interdependence with mostly countries of the global South,
from south-east Asia to east Africa and the Middle East. It is exporting techniques
and technologies that facilitate the perpetuation of authoritarian rule. These
and other measures by China proceed from a complex set of motives by various
configurations of actors, headed by Xi Jinping and the central committee of the
4
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Michael D. Ward, ‘Diffusion and the international context of democratisation’,
International Organization 60: 4, 2006, pp. 911–33; Carles Boix, ‘Democracy, development, and the interna-
tional system’, American Political Science Review 105: 4, 2011, pp. 809–28; Seva Gunitsky, Aftershocks: Great Powers
and domestic reform in the twentieth century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
5
John M. Owen, The clash of ideas in world politics: transnational networks, states, and regime change 1510–2010 (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten argue that attempts to
impose regimes on foreign states seldom work: see their ‘Forced to be free: why foreign-imposed regime
change rarely leads to democratisation’, International Security 37: 4, 2013, pp. 90–131.
6
G. John Ikenberry, A world safe for democracy: liberal internationalism and the crises of global order (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2020); Kyle Lascurettes, Orders of exclusion: Great Powers and the strategic sources of founda-
tional rules in international relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
1416
International Affairs 97: 5, 2021

Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Among these motives are the desires to sustain
economic growth, to increase China’s global leverage and status, and, most funda-
mentally, to maintain the CCP’s monopoly on political power within China. I
argue that the CCP’s determination to have all of these things creates an unavoid-
able conflict of interest with the liberal democracies, and that an important effect
of these policies may be the emergence of an ACIO.
China’s rulers evidently want their country to remain open and for globaliza-
tion to renew at full speed. They almost certainly do not intend an ACIO in the
way that the United States intended to build an LIO at the end of the Second
World War. Then, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations manipulated the

international environment so as to safeguard liberal democracy, not only in the
United States but also in Japan, Canada and the industrialized states of western
Europe, against an emergent Soviet communist bloc.7 Today, Xi and his govern-
ment claim to be working towards a more pluralistic world of globalization, one
in which an array of domestic regime types from previously neglected regions can
flourish in a ‘shared future for mankind’.8 Part of that effort involves seeking to
remove what they correctly see as the liberal democratic bias in the LIO, a bias that
handicaps China under its current domestic regime. Their efforts to remove that
liberal bias are working in tandem with China’s own national successes to enable
autocracy outside China and to construct international institutions and practices
that will entrench it. In so far as China succeeds in infusing an authoritarian bias
into the international environment, the United States and other democracies will
be compelled to segregate elements of their international order, leading to the
coexistence of an LIO and an ACIO, overlapping but separate.
To make the case that China is effectively building an international order that
helps safeguard ‘Market-Leninism’ but will alienate liberal democracies, I borrow
logic and mechanisms from evolutionary theory in biology. The essential insight
comes from the concepts of niche construction and co-evolution. For any population
of organisms, the environment selects for certain traits; the organisms can also
shape that environment (construct a niche) so as to favour themselves in some
way; and the reshaped environment can then select for a different set of traits in
the population. By analogy, states’ environments can select for certain traits,
including domestic regimes. A domestic regime endures as long as the balance of
power within the state favours its adherents; regime change will happen when that
balance changes sufficiently. Factors in a state’s environment—including interna-
tional rules and practices, and the successes and failures of various regime types
in other states—can affect that domestic balance. An autocrat who wishes to fend
off democracy, then, will endeavour to shape his or her state’s external environ-
ment—alter rules and practices and weaken the performance of other democra-
7
Lascurettes, Orders of exclusion; Ikenberry, A world safe for democracy.
8
Xi Jinping quoted in Marek Hrubec, ‘From China’s reform to the world’s reform’, International Critical Thought
10: 2, 2020, p. 294. Hrubec argues that the BRI is a world-transformative initiative that signals a ‘great conver-
gence’ of models and has inaugurated ‘Globalization 2.0’: Hrubec, ‘From China’s reform’, pp. 282–95. See
also Jiang Jie, ‘China’s Belt and Road Initiative ushers in “Globalization 2.0”: experts’, People’s Daily Online,
12 April 2017, http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0412/c90000-9202011.html. (Unless otherwise noted at point of
citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 12 June 2021.)
1417

John M. Owen
cies—so as to maintain a domestic balance of power in favour of autocracy. In so
far as the autocrat succeeds, the more authoritarian international environment will
then work to promote the spread and solidification of autocracy in other states.9
In what follows, I explicate this evolutionary logic and apply it to Great
Powers’ attempts to mould their international environments. I narrate the origins
and operation of the LIO as a postwar project of niche construction by govern-
ments of western industrial democracies to perpetuate liberal democracy in
their countries. I discuss China’s worries about liberal democracy, its efforts to
construct a different niche to help safeguard its domestic regime, and the (possibly
unintended) resulting ACIO. (I do not discuss the ongoing crisis of the LIO itself

within many industrial democracies and how that might be reversed.) I conclude
with some provisional thoughts about the emergence of two international orders.
Evolutionary theory and domestic regime selection

Social scientists have made use of evolutionary arguments since Darwin published
his influential works in the nineteenth century. Racists used evolution to ratio-
nalize their theories of hierarchy and survival. Other uses of the theory have
been more defensible, scientifically and morally. Social evolutionary research
programmes are thriving in anthropology and economics.10 Many of these set
aside claims about biology and genetics and focus instead on the evolution of social
phenomena. In International Relations (IR), scholars have used evolutionary logic
to explain the emergence of international rules and practices,11 of globalization,12
of sovereign states,13 and of world politics itself.14 Like them, I use evolutionary
logic without appeal to biology, that is, to physical genes. Unlike them, I use the
logic to help explain continuity and change in states’ domestic regimes.
IR scholars generally accept that states exist in an environment, system or
structure that affects their actions and interests. What that environment consists of
9
For an argument that is similar but not focused on domestic regime type, see Xiaoyu Pu and Shiping Tang,
‘China and the liberal world order: challenger, supporter, or niche constructor?’, paper presented at the annual
meeting of the International Studies Association, Toronto, 26–30 March 2019.
10
See, respectively, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Culture and the evolutionary process (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1985); Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An evolutionary theory of economic change
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
11
George Modelski, ‘Is world politics evolutionary learning?’, International Organization 44: 1, 1990, pp. 1–24;
Ann Florini, ‘The evolution of international norms’, International Studies Quarterly 40: 3, 1996, pp. 363–89;
Alexander Wendt, Social theory of international politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael
Barnett, ‘Evolution without progress? Humanitarianism in a world of hurt’, International Organization 63: 4,
2009, pp. 621–63; Iver B. Neumann, Diplomatic tenses: a social evolutionary perspective on diplomacy (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2020).
12
George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas and William R. Thompson, eds, Globalization as evolutionary process:
modelling global change (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); Herman Mark Schwartz, ‘An evolutionary approach to
global political economy’, in Ronen Palan, ed., Global political economy: contemporary theories (Abingdon: Rout-
ledge, 2012), pp. 129–39.
13
Hendrik Spruyt, The sovereign state and its competitors: an analysis of systems change (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1994).
14
Miles Kahler, ‘Evolution, choice, and international change’, in David A. Lake and Robert Powell, eds, Strategic
choice in international relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 165–98; Shiping Tang, The social
evolution of international politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Emanuel Adler, World ordering: a
social theory of cognitive evolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
1418

is contested. Structural realists take a minimalist view that the ordering principle
(anarchy) and the distribution of military power are the only important compo-
nents. Institutionalists and the English School add, in different ways, the presence
and type of rules by which states interact. Constructivists add norms, identities
or practices to states’ environment. These differing conceptions of the interna-
tional structure or environment yield different claims about their effects on states.
Structural realists predict that states will form balances of power; institutional-
ists, cooperation to secure public or club goods; constructivists, common and
opposing identities or practices.
With a few exceptions, IR scholars also take seriously states’ agency, or their

ability to act with some freedom within their environment. Wendt identified the
importance of the agent–structure problem in international relations: structures
condition states and their actions, but states produce and reproduce structures by
those same actions.15 Sometimes agents shape structures deliberately, as when a
state joins an alliance. Sometimes the shaping is unintended, as when joining an
alliance sharpens the security dilemma for others, which then form a counter-
alliance.16 Realism rightly insists that states with more power have more ability
to maintain or alter structures; that is part of what we mean by ‘power’. A central
claim of hegemonic stability theory is that a hegemon has the most sway over
international rules and their interpretation and enforcement.17 Even the spare
picture sketched by structural realism notes that states form international align-
ments to make themselves more secure.18 The result is the formation of various
endogenous relationships, for example between the balance of power and states’
alliance policies.
Less well understood is how the international environment affects the types
of regimes or domestic institutional complexes that characterize states. In a 1784
essay, Immanuel Kant argued that the rule of law among nations would need to
be established before republican government could be secured in any of them;
that the perpetual threat of war enabled the perpetuation of despotic govern-
ment.19 Subsequent writers developed this idea.20 But Kant and those others tell
only a small part of the story; many elements of international structure influence
whether states are democratic or autocratic, monarchical or republican, commu-
nist or fascist. The death rate of regimes may seem low, but it is higher than that
of states; revolutions, coups d’état and outside interventions are fairly common in
15
Alexander Wendt, ‘The agent–structure problem in International Relations theory’, International Organization
41: 3, 1987, pp. 335–70.
16
Robert Jervis, Perception and misperception in world politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), ch. 3.
17
Robert Gilpin, War and change in world politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); G. John Iken-
berry, After victory: institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of order after major wars (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
18
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of international politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); John J. Mearsheimer, The
tragedy of Great Power politics (New York: Norton, 2000).
19
Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea of a universal history with cosmopolitan intent’, in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual peace and
other essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), pp. 29–40.
20
Peter Gourevitch recounts versions of this argument by Otto Hintze and Perry Anderson: see Peter Goure-
vitch, ‘The second image reversed: the international sources of domestic politics’, International Organization
32: 4, 1978, pp. 881–912.
1419

John M. Owen
world politics. Civil unrest and regime changes sometimes happen in neighbouring
countries in rapid succession, suggesting a kind of environmental contagion.21
If a state’s environment can affect the survival of its domestic regime, then
a government can potentially affect its domestic regime’s survival by shaping
that same environment. For most governments, domestic regimes are of the first
importance; if the regime falls, the government falls with it.22 Thus we should
expect governments to try to shape the environment so as to perpetuate, rather
than undermine, their respective regimes.
An environment that favours some domestic regimes over others brings to
mind Darwinian evolution. In modern biology, evolution is typically defined as a

‘change in the frequency of DNA sequences ... in a population, from one genera-
tion to the next’.23 Evolution at the level of DNA, or genotype, produces change
in the species’ outward traits and behaviour, or phenotype. Biological evolution
is driven by natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and migration. Most promi-
nent are mutation (random changes in genetic material) and natural selection (bias
in an organism’s environment in favour of one trait over another). DNA for white
fur came to predominate among some animal species in snowy climes because
white animals were better able to hide from predators and prey, and hence had
more offspring, who in turn were more likely to survive, and so on.
Niche construction
But just as state leaders try to bend their international environment to their advan-
tage, organisms are not passive in the face of their natural environments; they
intentionally modify those environments to suit themselves, building ‘niches’.24
Obvious examples are bird nests and beaver dams. In recent years, biologists have
begun to argue further that although organisms construct niches to make their lives
easier, they can thereby effectively redirect the environment’s selection pressure.
In modifying the ecological inheritance of subsequent generations, organisms
sometimes unwittingly build a feedback loop that biases the outcomes of evolution
itself. Beavers with particularly large teeth and sociability build dams, which collect
the plants that beavers like to eat; thus dams give a reproductive advantage to
beavers with dam-building traits, leading over generations to the predominance of
large-toothed, sociable beavers, and the disappearance of small-toothed, anti-social
beavers. Put another way, some species co-evolve with their environments.25
21
Mark Katz, Revolutions and revolutionary waves (New York: Macmillan, 1999); Kurt Weyland, Making waves:
democratic contention in Europe and Latin America since the revolutions of 1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2014); John M. Owen, ‘Springs and their offspring: the international consequences of domestic uprisings’,
European Journal of International Security 1: 1, 2016, pp. 49–72.
22
An exception is leader who ‘authoritarianizes’: that is, is elected to head a democracy and then becomes a
dictator. See Barbara Geddes, Erica Frantz and Joseph Wright, How dictatorships work (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2018), p. 25.
23
Thomas C. Scott-Phillips, Kevin N. Laland, David M. Shuker, Thomas E. Dickins and Stuart A. West, ‘The
niche construction approach: a critical appraisal’, Evolution 68: 5, 2013, pp. 1232–43.
24
Richard Lewontin, The triple helix: gene, organism, and environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
25
Kevin Laland, Blake Matthews and Marcus W. Feldman, ‘An introduction to niche construction theory’,
1420

We can recast the argument set out above by saying that state leaders who
believe their domestic regime to be vulnerable should attempt niche construction
to safeguard it, and that leaders of more powerful states will sometimes succeed.
State leaders are more intelligent than beavers—humans are capable of reflection
and strategy, among other things—but leaders, like beavers, act intentionally to
alter the constraints and opportunities presented by their environments.26 Leaders
cannot create or wholly change their states’ environments, and are constrained
by the environments they reshape; they have constrained agency. To simplify
matters, I will focus here on the domestic balance of power among advocates
of two competing regimes as the state’s ‘genetic material’. Regime change—by

revolution, coup or gradual ‘reform’—will happen when the balance of power
among ideological groups of elites in a state shifts sufficiently.27 Democratic State
S will become authoritarian when enough powerful people in S become authori-
tarians. State S will remain a democracy to the degree that the power of democrats
exceeds that of authoritarians. The international environment is far from the only
factor affecting this ideological balance of power, but it can have serious effects.
A vital task for S’s democratic government, then, is to shape its environment so as
to make sure that, within S, democracy remains stronger than authoritarianism.
Some of that shaping entails simply working for national success in general,
including wealth, security and power, which indirectly supports S’s democratic
regime; some of it entails working for the spread of democracies in the world and
for international rules that favour democracies and handicap autocracies.
A state’s international environment is, in other words, extremely complex.
Elements of the environment that affect the survival of a state’s domestic regime
include:
• the international distribution of regime types, including which states have
which regimes, how powerful they are, and where they are located in space;28
• information about the relative performance of regime types in terms of security,
stability and wealth;29 and
• predominant state norms, rules and practices, including how far states respect
one another’s sovereignty—e.g. over human rights—how far they institution-
alize cooperation, and so on.30
Evolutionary Ecology 30: 2, 2016, pp. 191–202.

26
The place of rationality in evolutionary theory is contested. In Darwin’s view, people were better described
as habitual than as reasoning creatures. In general, social evolutionists accept the importance of beliefs, inten-
tions and ratiocination in human action, but seek to explain them via mechanisms of adaptation. See e.g.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, Darwin’s conjecture: the search for general principles of social and
economic evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 41–3, 229–31.
27
Gleditsch and Ward, ‘Diffusion and the international context’; Thomas Risse and Nelli Babayan, ‘Democracy
promotion and the challenge of illiberal regional powers’, Democratization 22: 3, 2015, pp. 381–99.
28
Gleditsch and Ward, ‘Diffusion and the international context’; Boix, ‘Democracy, development’; Gunitsky,
Aftershocks.
29
Michael K. Miller, ‘Democracy by example? Why democracy spreads when the world’s democracies prosper’,
Comparative Politics 49: 1, 2016, pp. 83–116.
30
Owen, The clash of ideas; Bruce M. Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating peace (New York: Norton, 2000);
Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki effect: international norms, human rights, and the demise of communism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001); Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed forces: the transnational movement to end the Cold
War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
1421

John M. Owen
To reiterate, a government can unintentionally shape the environment in ways
that affect domestic regime survival. It can also act in error, intending to shape the
environment so as to perpetuate its regime but effectively undermining it. Making
the world select for a regime type is more difficult than it sounds.
Liberal internationalism as niche construction

An outstanding example of comprehensive international niche construction is the
liberal internationalism of the industrial democracies in Europe, North America
and Japan starting at the end of the Second World War. Liberal internationalism

is at once a set of foreign policies and a set of multilateral institutions (often called
the liberal international order, LIO). The literature on this general subject is vast,
covering how institutions foster cooperation, the phenomenon of US hegemony,
efforts to contain the Soviet Union or communism, the benefits to western capital,
and the waning of formal European imperialism and rise of US informal imperi-
alism in the developing world.31 Here I consider liberal internationalism as a
deliberate effort by its founding governments—pre-eminently that of the United
States—to safeguard constitutional democracy in the core industrial states of
western Europe, North America and Japan. The grand strategy was also intended
to counterbalance Soviet power, but in principle Washington could have done
that without the particularly liberal features of its strategy; American balancing
cannot be understood without taking the country’s liberal democratic character
into account. Prior to this period, predominant US thinking was that preserving
the republic meant holding aloof from Europe and its system of Great Power
rivalry and hierarchical societies. But the traumas of the 1930s and early 1940s
taught the Americans that no democracy was an island and that in the modern
world, the survival of this form of government and way of life that they cherished
required deliberate changes in how democracies related to one another and to the
rest of the world.32
First, democracies had to coordinate their monetary and trading relations
through a set of multilateral institutions.33 The result was the ‘embedded liber-
alism’ protected by the matrix of multilateral entities that rescued the democracies
from balance of payments crises and helped them negotiate and coordinate reduc-
tions in trade barriers.34 With respect to trade, Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of
State, wrote:
The withdrawal by a nation from orderly trade relations with the rest of the world inevitably
leads to regimentation of all phases of national life, to the suppression of human rights, and
all too frequently to preparations for war and a provocative attitude toward other nations.35
31
Joseph S. Nye, Jr, ‘The rise and fall of American hegemony from Wilson to Trump’, International Affairs 95: 1,
2019, pp. 63–80; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, ‘Empires after 1919: old, new and transformed’, Inter-
32
Ikenberry, A world safe for democracy.
33
Barry Eichengreen, ‘Versailles, the economic legacy’, International Affairs 95: 1, 2019, pp. 7–24.
34
John Gerard Ruggie, ‘International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar
economic order’, International Organization 36: 2, 1982, pp. 379–415.
35
Quoted in Ikenberry, A world safe for democracy, p. 191.
1422

‘In fact the three—peace, freedom, and world trade—are inseparable,’ said
Truman.36
Second, extremist ideologies of left and right had to be kept out of power in
advanced industrial states. In the United States, elites in government, business,
academia and journalism saw that new technologies of warfare and transportation
meant that an eastern hemisphere dominated by totalitarians endangered Ameri-
can democracy. Thus US leaders had a new stake in the preservation and spread
of democracy in faraway industrial countries, and after the Second World War
Washington intervened in (western) Germany, Italy and Japan to ensure that these
former enemies would become stable liberal democracies. To increase employment

and industrial output, Washington extended approximately US$130 billion (in 2020
dollars) in Marshall Aid to Japan and western Europe to rebuild national economies
and restore full employment (of adult males); that in turn would augment the
credibility of constitutional self-government as against communism.37 The United
States promoted democracy in Europe and Japan not out of altruism but out of a
conviction that by doing so it was helping to secure its own democracy.38
Democracy was also promoted indirectly via the development and use of soft
power, or the ability to get others to want what you want them to want.39 Official
organs such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and the US Information
Agency narrated world events from a point of view friendly to US-style democ-
racy. American soft power also emerged organically from the country’s status as
the world’s leading economy and its vast exports of material consumer goods and
cultural products that made capitalism and individualism attractive to millions.
Finally, the US government and civil society, including universities, brought
many thousands of foreigners to the United States to learn directly and indirectly
about multiparty constitutional democracy.40
Third, democracies needed to protect one another from attack and intimida-
tion by authoritarian states. During these early postwar years, the Soviet Union
became an enemy because it joined massive conventional military power to an
anti-democratic purpose; its regime was threatened by liberal democracy and it
tried to keep that regime far away. Until the Soviets developed an atomic bomb in
August 1949, the United States was secure from Soviet attack. But the Red Army
remained in the east European countries it had liberated from Nazi Germany,
including Berlin and the surrounding German states, giving the Soviets the power
to intimidate the west European democracies. Those with North Sea or Atlantic
coastlines were exposed to the Soviet navy. In 1948, British Foreign Secretary
36
Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the communist threat (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 20.
37
Paterson, Meeting the communist threat, pp. 19–20.
38
Owen, The clash of ideas, pp. 181–5. Until the late 1980s, blocking communism in less developed states—in
Latin America, Asia and Africa—meant enabling authoritarianism rather than promoting liberal democracy.
Successive US administrations did not trust democrats in such states to keep communists out of government.
Constructing a democratic niche for wealthy democracies entailed constructing an authoritarian one in the
Third World. See John M. Owen and Michael Poznansky, ‘When does America drop dictators?’, European
Journal of International Relations 20: 4, 2014, pp. 1072–1099.
39
Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Soft power: the means to success in world politics (Washington DC: Public Affairs, 2005).
40
Outside the core of wealthy democracies, US intergovernmental programmes enabled anti-communist
authoritarians—particularly the School of the Americas in Georgia.
1423

John M. Owen
Ernest Bevin led several European governments into forming the Brussels Pact,
a defensive alliance against the Soviets. The Europeans then negotiated with the
United States to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.41
In 1952, Washington signed a similar treaty with Japan, which was in a similarly
exposed geographic position.
In enacting this three-legged liberal internationalism—democracy promotion,
intra-democratic alliances and multilateralism—the fundamental goal of the US
government was not enriching capitalists (although it did that), and certainly not
bringing about a universal liberal utopia. Rather, it was to safeguard democracy in
the United States itself. As President Truman put it when defending the Marshall

Plan before Congress:
Our deepest concern with European recovery is that it is essential to the maintenance of
the civilization in which American life is rooted ... If Europe fails to recover, the people
of these countries might be driven to the philosophy ... which contends that their basic
wants can be met only by the surrender of their basic rights to totalitarian control.42
US policy-makers were convinced that preserving self-government in the indus-

trial era required preserving it in other industrial democracies—and that, in turn,
required more consultation and more institutions than it had in earlier eras so as
to assure the prosperity of the middle and working classes.
The grand strategy of democratic niche construction did what it was designed
to do. Within the mature, wealthy democracies of Europe, North America and
Japan, the balance of power among ideological groups remained decisively in
favour of liberal democrats. There were moments when that balance wobbled—
as in 1968, in France and elsewhere—but it held. The industrial democracies grew
richer together while reluctantly relinquishing their overseas empires.
Indeed, liberal internationalism may have played a causal role in extending the
‘third wave of democratization’ that rolled from the mid-1970s through to the
1990s.43 During a good deal of that struggle, Washington actively worked against
democratization in much of the developing world, to the point of backing coups
in a number of countries that put anti-communist autocrats in power.44 But as the
superior fitness of democratic capitalism to communism or state socialism became
evident in the 1980s—a fitness enhanced by the LIO—US administrations began
to drop their autocratic clients and to strike bargains with centre-left parties, as
they had done in Europe earlier in the Cold War.45 Furthermore, lobbyists and
Congress put pressure on administrations to make continuing close relations with
security partners conditional on the latters’ implementing human rights and other
41
Erica Peacock, ‘One man’s vision: Ernest Bevin and the creation of NATO’ (London: National Archives, 4
April 2019), https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/one-mans-vision-ernest-bevin-creation-nato/. As Peacock
notes, Spain was excluded from NATO because it was a dictatorship.
42
Quoted in Lascurettes, Orders of exclusion, p. 197.
43
Samuel P. Huntington, The third wave: democratization in the late twentieth century (Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press, 1991).
44
David F. Schmitz, ‘Thank God they’re on our side!’ The United States and right-wing dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
45
Owen and Poznansky, ‘When does America drop dictators?’.
1424

reforms.46 Late in the Cold War, then, authoritarian states evidently felt some
pressure to move into the liberal democratic international niche.
As for the Soviet Union, owing to inadequacies in its communist political
economy, here too the ideological balance of power began to tilt towards democ-
racy in the 1980s, leading first to Gorbachev’s reforms and then to the state’s
collapse in 1991. In the 1990s, much of the world—including countries such as
Brazil and democratic India, that had long been partial ‘members’, belonging to
the IMF and accepting western investment—joined the LIO wholeheartedly.
There appeared no alternative to its combination of market economics, democ-
racy and multilateralism.47

China: building a niche that selects for autocracy
Liberal internationalism has itself evolved since the 1990s, to the point where some
of its features no longer select for democracy.48 Our subject, however, is the effects
on international order of the ongoing rise of China. Beginning with the accession
to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China began moving towards the liberal inter-
national niche. It adopted market mechanisms for most of its economy, yet resisted
pressures to become a constitutional democracy—pressures to which the Soviet
Union succumbed and which eventually dissolved that country. Still, China’s lead-
ers continue to feel those pressures today and have set about neutralizing them.
From the disasters of Mao Zedong’s rule and the comparative successes of
smaller east Asian neighbours such as South Korea and Taiwan, Deng recognized
that China must begin to participate in the global capitalist economy. It must
liberalize its domestic economy, welcome (but regulate) foreign investment, and
export material goods rather than revolution. Deng never intended for China to
become a liberal democracy; he was adamant that the ruling Communist Party
must retain its monopoly on political power. Entering the liberal niche, then, was
risky, for it was designed to select for multiparty constitutional democracy, not
just market economics. Still, in the late 1980s Deng permitted reformers led by
Hu Yaobang to loosen some party controls over speech and the press. And, after
the Soviet Union moved into the liberal niche in the late 1980s and liberalized
its political system even more, the risk to the CCP became manifest with the
Tiananmen Square protests of May 1989.
Deng, Li Peng and the CCP saw off the threat with the massacre of 4 June
1989, the purging of reformers such as Hu and Zhao Ziyang, and the reimposi-
tion of party control over civil society. In 1992, Deng’s ‘southern tour’ restarted
economic liberalization, but party control over politics has persisted and even
tightened since then. The CCP’s general strategy has been to sustain its legiti-
46
C. William Walldorf, Jr, Just politics: human rights and the foreign policies of Great Powers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2008); Mark Peceny, Democracy at the point of bayonets (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1999).
47
Michael Mandelbaum, The ideas that conquered the world: peace, democracy, and free markets in the twenty-first century
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2004).
48
John M. Owen, ‘To make the world select for democracy’, Hedgehog Review 22: 3, 2020, pp. 32–45.
1425

John M. Owen
macy with high economic growth and nationalism, the combination of which is
supposed to weaken any drive for democratization.49 Coupled with high levels
of surveillance and punishment, and severe limits on civil society, these measures
have helped keep the regime in place. In recent years, the government has turned
the internet and social media from threats to supports, harnessing them to enhance
surveillance and control.50
What kind of domestic regime does China have? Article I of the country’s
constitution labels it a ‘socialist state under the people’s democratic dictator-
ship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants’.
Article III refers to ‘democratic centralism’.51 Western analysts label it authori-

tarian capitalist,52 fragmented–authoritarian,53 Market-Leninist,54 democratic–
meritocratic,55 or simply the ‘Beijing Consensus’.56 There is at best a developing
ideology to articulate and justify the regime’s principles. ‘Market-Leninist’ is
an especially helpful label for capturing both the fact that China’s economy is
roughly 60 per cent privately owned,57 and the fact that the CCP acts to forestall
the emergence of any domestic political competitor.
However we characterize China’s regime, it has successfully resisted the LIO’s
selection pressure to become a liberal democracy. Indeed, opinion polls show that
most Chinese believe that China is a democracy in its own right, and an especially
well-governed one.58 It is proving adept at using new digital technologies to
entrench its power.59 Still, the CCP remains worried about the durability of
public and elite support for the party-state regime. A sharp and sustained slowing
of economic growth, coupled with a significant rise in support for multiparty
democracy (or some other alternative regime), would endanger authoritarian
capitalism. It is the latter threat that the party believes the LIO presents. Indeed,
Xi and the current leadership evidently regard liberalism as the most serious
ideological threat to the regime. Document No. 9, circulated in the party in 2013,
spells out various principles of liberal democracy—‘the separation of powers,
the multi-party system, general elections, independent judiciaries, nationalised
armies, and other characteristics’—and calls them not only alien to China, but
49
Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and power: China’s long march to the twenty-first century (New York:
Random House, 2013), ch. 12.
50
Seva Gunitsky, ‘Corrupting the cyber-commons: social media as a tool of autocratic stability’, Perspectives on
Politics 13: 1, 2015, pp. 42–54.
51
See http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/content_1372963.htm.
52
Azar Gat, ‘The return of authoritarian great powers’, Foreign Affairs 86: 4, 2007, pp. 59–69.
53
Kenneth G. Lieberthal and David M. Lampton, eds, Bureaucracy, politics, and decision-making in post-Maoist China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
54
Nicholas Kristof, ‘China sees “Market-Leninism” as way to future’, New York Times, 6 Sept. 1993.
55
Daniel Bell, The China model: political meritocracy and the limits of democracy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015).
56
Stephan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: legitimizing authoritarianism in our time (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
57
‘Economic Watch: China accelerates reform to empower private sector amid COVID-19’, XinhuaNet, 9 Sept.
2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-09/09/c_139355807.htm.
58
Edward Cunningham, Tony Saich and Jesse Turiel, Understanding CCP resilience: surveying Chinese public opinion
through time (Cambridge, MA: Ash Center, Harvard Kennedy School, June 2020), https://ash.harvard.edu/
files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7.6.2020.pdf.
59
Jinghan Zeng, ‘Artificial intelligence and China’s authoritarian governance’, International Affairs 96: 6, 2020, pp.
1441–59.
1426

liable to bring about division, disorder, and a ‘colour revolution’ such as those that
have occurred in other autocracies.60 Beijing’s ruthless weakening of Hong Kong’s
autonomy in 2020–2021 is further evidence of this worry about what liberal ideas
and actors would do to CCP rule and to China’s national unity.
CCP officials explicitly state that the LIO is biased against China and seek to
decrease that bias. Nadège Rolland notes that official discourse about international
order frequently uses the phrase ‘unfair and unreasonable’ (bu gongzheng, bu heli).
Chinese officials distinguish ‘international order’ from ‘world order’. International
order is the legal system that recognizes the sovereign equality of all states, and
China accepts it as legitimate. World order, however, is unfair because it is a Pax

Americana that seeks to maintain the dominance of the West and to keep China
and other less developed countries down. It is unreasonable because it aims to
impose western values and institutions on countries to which they are ill suited;
for instance, the revolutions of the Arab Spring brought disorder and extremism
to an entire region.61
China’s government, then, would like to make the international system fairer
and more reasonable towards its own system.62 On the whole, its methods of
niche construction are not as direct as those of the United States after the Second
World War. China is not building military alliances with other autocratic states
to defend against possible American attack and intimidation. It is not using overt
or covert force to promote Market-Leninism or to roll back liberal democracy in
foreign lands. Its methods are less lethal. One route is increased efforts to integrate
foreign economies with China’s economy, for which the primary mechanism is
the BRI. The seaports, airports, railways, highways, pipelines and power grids
constructed under this programme are designed to increase China’s trade with
dozens of countries. Clearly Xi and the party envisage the BRI as a way to
ensure long-term economic growth for China. But the BRI would do more. In
so far as it succeeds, it will make host countries dependent on China—through
indebtedness, trans-shipment and imports—which in turn could make those host
countries less beholden to the wealthy democracies, thereby reducing pressure on
China to democratize its political system. Participants in the BRI include some
liberal democracies, such as Italy and Portugal, which shows that the boundaries
between the LIO and the potential ACIO will be blurred; Beijing’s object is to
weaken any opposition to its domestic institutions and practices, and making at
least some of the democracies dependent on its investment can only help. The BRI
also strengthens China’s state-owned infrastructure-building sector, which in turn
helps make its strong-state model more robust.63
60
‘Communiqué on the current state of the ideological sphere (Document No. 9 of General Office of Chinese
Communist Party)’, China File, 8 Nov. 2013, https://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation.
61
Nadège Rolland, China’s vision for a new world order (Washington DC: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2020),
pp. 14–15. On China’s narrative uses of historic western injustices, see Rosemary Foot, ‘Remembering the
past to secure the present: Versailles legacies in a resurgent China’, International Affairs 95: 1, 2019, pp. 143–60.
62
Maximilian Mayer, ‘China’s historical statecraft and the return of history’, International Affairs 94: 6, 2018, pp.
1217–36.
63
Matthew D. Stephen and David Skidmore, ‘The AIIB in the liberal international order’, Chinese Journal of
International Politics 12: 1, 2019, pp. 61–91, doi: 10.1093/cjip/poy021. The chief financer of the BRI is the state-
1427

John M. Owen
A second area of Chinese niche construction is international institutions and
norms. Beijing is building some multilateral institutions of its own, and attempting
to modify others, to help weaken potential dissent from China’s regime. The 1948
UN Declaration on Human Rights is clearly a liberal document, enumerating a
single set of universal rights. China is labouring to make human rights relative rather
than universal. Its 2017 South–South Human Rights Forum produced a Beijing
Declaration stating that human rights must take into account regional, national and
historical contexts.64 The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), established
by China in 2013, is officially neutral towards the political institutions of borrower
states, in direct contrast to the older international financial institutions such as the

World Bank and Asian Development Bank, which have used leverage to try to liber-
alize the political as well as the economic institutions of borrowers.65 In technical
areas as well, China is trying to modify international rules and norms. Of the 15
UN special agencies, four are currently headed by Chinese nationals: the Inter-
national Telecommunication Union, the International Civil Aviation Organiza-
tion, the UN Industrial Development Organization and the Food and Agricultural
Organization. These UN agencies historically embody a norm of service to the
putative global good rather than the political interests of any one nation. Accord-
ing to Melanie Hart, China sometimes goes against that international norm and
serves Chinese nationalism by trying to deny Taiwanese and Uighurs recognition
or a voice. In the area of global internet governance, China is pressing at the UN
for a norm of national sovereignty that would permit censorship rather than the
borderless laissez-faire norm that the United States has championed.66
Third, Beijing is trying to export elements of its model of government. It
is bringing officials of less developed countries to China for training in how to
develop an economy while maintaining a single party in power. The Baise Execu-
tive Leadership Academy in Guanxi Province, founded in 2017, has trained more
than 1,000 ASEAN officials in such topics as ‘how to “guide public opinion” online
when there are emergencies, and how to alleviate poverty in a “targeted” way’.
Beijing has focused particular attention on Cambodia. The Chinese government
also trains judges and police officers from member states of the Shanghai Coopera-
tion Organization (SCO).67 Hundreds of African officials have been trained in
owned China Development Bank. See ‘China Development Bank provides over $190 billion for Belt and
Road projects’, Reuters, 26 March 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-finance-cdb-bri/china-
development-bank-provides-over-190-billion-for-belt-and-road-projects-idUSKCN1R8095.
64
Melanie Hart, ‘Beijing’s promotion of alternative global norms and standards’, testimony before the US–
China Economic and Security Review Commission, Washington DC, 13 March 2020.
65
Pu and Tang, ‘China and the liberal world order’; Stephen and Skidmore, ‘The AIIB’, pp. 86–7. Stephen and
Skidmore (p. 90) point out that the AIIB is being ‘socialised’ into the norms of older lenders such as the Asian
Development Bank; but they conclude that ‘certain features of the AIIB also reflect the growing global pres-
ence of China’s particular political-economic order’.
66
Hart, ‘Beijing’s promotion’.
67
Chen Jia and Ding Qingfen, ‘Overseas officials head to Chinese classrooms’, China Daily, 5 Aug. 2010,
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-08/05/content_11098280.htm; He Huifeng, ‘In a remote corner
of China, Beijing is trying to export its model by training foreign officials the Chinese way’, South China
Morning Post, 14 July 2018, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2155203/remote-corner-
china-beijing-trying-export-its-model-training. The SCO includes Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
1428

China on extending state control over civil society through, for example, censor-
ship of social media. China has exported its advanced surveillance technology to
a number of states in Africa and Latin America, which plan to use the cameras and
storage to monitor citizens.68
Finally, China, like the United States before it, works to build and use soft
power. Here, the party’s path has not been as straightforward, for the consumer
goods that China exports—particularly digital hardware—enable individual
consumerism as much as anything the United States ever exported. China’s cultural
exports, particularly in music, film and sport, do not come close to rivalling those
of the United States, although China is using its market leverage to alter movies

and censor athletes and team owners to favour a Chinese point of view.69 With
cooperation from university campuses, Beijing has established hundreds of Confu-
cius Institutes in a dozens of countries to educate people in Chinese languages,
culture and history.70 These institutes have, however, been perceived on some
campuses as propaganda engines uninterested in the free exchange of ideas, and
some have been shut down.71 Recent surveys of Chinese scholars and officials
suggest a lack of confidence in the country’s ability to outdo the United States in
terms of soft power.72 Still, China is building a narrative of benevolence around the
BRI, depicting it not as the bid for empire perceived by suspicious foreigners, but as
an immense goodwill plan to develop economies and bring peoples together for the
benefit of all.73 Beijing has also leveraged its relative success in taming the COVID-
19 pandemic into a narrative about the superiority of its domestic system.74
A global system of two international orders?

Xi and China’s ruling party may not seek an ACIO. It is probably not in China’s
overall economic interest to have such an order; the opportunity costs would
be significant, as states that lead trading blocs are typically richer in capital than
68
Yau Tsz Yan, ‘Exporting China’s social credit system to central Asia’, Diplomat, 17 Jan. 2020, https://thedip-
lomat.com/2020/01/exporting-chinas-social-credit-system-to-central-asia/; Elizabeth Economy, ‘Exporting
the China model’, testimony before the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Washington
DC, 13 March 2020, p. 4.
69
Aynne Kokas, Hollywood made in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Amy Qin and Audrey
Carlsen, ‘How China is rewriting its own script’, New York Times, 18 Nov. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/
interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-movies.html.
70
For a list, see http://english.hanban.org/node_10971.htm.
71
The ongoing downward spiral in Sino-US relations has included a US designation of Confucius Institutes
as foreign missions of the Chinese government. See ‘China lashes out and US deems contentious Confu-
cius Institutes as [sic] foreign missions’, Associated Press, 14 Aug. 2020, https://globalnews.ca/news/7274718/
china-confucius-institute-foreign-mission/.
72
Huiyun Feng, Kai He and Xiaojun Li, How China sees the world: insights from China’s International Relations scholars
(Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 29–32.
73
Selina Ho, ‘Infrastructure and Chinese power’, International Affairs 96: 6, 2020, pp. 1461–85. Illuminating are
videos such as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0lJc3PMNIg.
74
Chris Buckley, ‘China’s combative nationalists see a world turning their way’, New York Times, 15 Dec. 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/world/asia/china-nationalists-covid.html. At least in the mature
democracies, opinion of China had deteriorated as of October 2020; see Laura Silver, Kat Devlin and Chris-
tine Huang, Unfavorable views of China reach historic highs in many countries (Washington DC: Pew Research
Center, 6 Oct. 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-
historic-highs-in-many-countries/.
1429

John M. Owen
China, and the ‘southern’ trading partners would not be as lucrative a set of collab-
orators as China is accustomed to having.75 Beijing’s goal seems, rather, to be
remain in the LIO but to deliberalize it. Success in that endeavour, though, would
require building a different bias into its international environment. The new bias
would favour states whose governments face no meaningful domestic compe-
tition, control flows of information and monitor their populations closely, are
immune from external pressure regarding civil liberties and political dissent, and
whose economies stress state-led infrastructure development over private enter-
prise. But US governments—with the possible exception of some officials in the
Trump administration—do not want the country to have to become authoritarian

in order to remain a predominant global power. Neither do the governments of
most liberal democracies want to move in an authoritarian direction.
Beijing and Washington both sense that an international order cannot select for
both liberal democracy and authoritarian capitalism. This has led to recent moves
by each to set the agenda for world order, with Washington countering China’s
BRI with its ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy.76 As a second-best outcome,
each might be resigned to an equilibrium of separate but overlapping interna-
tional orders—an LIO and an ACIO—existing within a larger global order. The
Obama administration tried to keep China away from the centre of the LIO, for
example by proposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which excluded China;
pressing allies not to join the China-centred AIIB; and joining Japan, India and
Australia in the so-called Quad group of democracies. President Trump withdrew
the United States from the TPP, but President Biden may try to put it back into the
rump group, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for a TPP (CPTPP).77
Meanwhile, China has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partner-
ship (RCEP), which is more tolerant of large state-owned sectors.
It is not difficult to think of barriers to the two-orders global system. First,
should China continue to avoid military alliances, an ACIO could be fragile or
not form at all. US security commitments have been integral to the core states of
the LIO, inasmuch as they have wanted protection from intimidation by authori-
tarian powers. It may be that Chinese client states would want similar guaran-
tees against US intimidation. Beijing could refuse, reasoning that to provide such
support would make a cold war with America more likely. Or it could reason that
America’s global alliance network exposes Beijing’s international interests to such
a degree that it must end its tradition of avoiding alliances, just as the United States
did in the 1940s. The BRI, with its political relationships and physical infrastruc-
ture such as ports, would lower the start-up costs of military alliances.
Second, the membership of a number of countries in both the RCEP and the
CPTPP alerts us to the certainty that many countries, particularly in south-east
75
I am indebted to Mark Brawley for this point.
76
Feng Liu, ‘The recalibration of Chinese assertiveness: China’s responses to the Indo-Pacific challenge’, Inter-
77
Daniel Allman, ‘Why President Biden could put the TPP back on the table’, Financial Review, 4 Jan. 2021,
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/why-president-biden-could-put-the-tpp-back-on-the-table-
20210103-p56rgx.
1430

Asia, will try mightily to avoid committing to either the LIO or ACIO.78 No
doubt the two orders will interpenetrate. It would seem safe to bet that in the
areas of human rights, internet governance and technology exports, the two will
be relatively separate. In trade, investment and environmental governance, on the
other hand, the two orders may connect. History provides precedents for two
distinct yet overlapping international orders. During the Cold War, many devel-
oping countries (for example, communist Romania) both accepted Soviet aid and
belonged to the IMF; from the early 1970s, the Soviet- and US-led blocs engaged
in trade. Neither Beijing nor Washington would want the ACIO and LIO to be
completely aloof from one another.

I have not discussed the LIO’s present and future. As the premise of this special
issue holds, the prognosis of that order has not been good, as support for the LIO
within the wealthy democracies—particularly the United States—has weakened
in the past 20 years. The coexistence of two international orders would obviously
require that the LIO itself regain strength and purpose. Whether the United States
and other mature liberal democracies can bring that about remains to be seen.
Should they do so, they would achieve greater integration among the world’s
liberal democracies but not necessarily greater harmony over global order.
A 1950s-style Sino-American cold war would benefit no one, and need not
emerge. But if deglobalization continues, it may produce two international orders
that help their core countries maintain their respectively preferred systems of
government and ways of life. The opportunity costs of such a world would be
real. But trade-offs are endemic in politics as in economics, and it may be that
sacrificing some wealth to preserve highly valued domestic regimes is better than
Sino-American competition for hegemony over a single global system.
78
See Seng Tan, ‘Consigned to hedge: south-east Asia and America’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy’,
International Affairs 96: 1, 2020, pp. 131–48.
1431

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Two emerging international orders?

China and the United States

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Evolutionary theory and domestic regime selection

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Evolutionary Ecology 30: 2, 2016, pp. 191–202.

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Liberal internationalism as niche construction

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US policy-makers were convinced that preserving self-government in the indus-

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A global system of two international orders?

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