Portland Community College�May 8, 2024��Norm Contestation and the Liberal International Order

İsmail Yaylacı

Marmara University

Institute for the Study of the Middle East and Islamic Countries

A world of contestation

• We live in a world where international norms are increasingly being challenged
• Norms were always contested to some degree, but now more…
• Economic protectionism, authoritarian nationalism, political tribalism, superpower unilateralism
• Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine and annexation of its territory
• Authoritarian capitalism… the Beijing Consensus…
• The anti-Muslim legislations in India by Modi’s BJP endorsing the Hindutva ideology
• Rise of far right and protofascistic popülist regimes throughout the world
• Israel massively violating international humanitarian law and human rights law, standing guilty of a still ongoing genocide in Gaza
• Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, Feb 15, 2024: «Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order»
• Germany’s massive violations of human rights by restricting free speech, penalizing dissent by firing professors, etc.
• US Senators threatening the ICC prosecutor and his family

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Signed by 12 US Senators

Norms and Norm Contestation in World Politics

• Study of norms in International Relations: diffusion, socialization, learning, conditionality
• Weaknesses of this literature:
• Eurocentric
• Non-West as passive recipients of norms—question of agency
• Positing hierarchies between West and non-West—infantilization, stigmatization.
• New scholarship focuses on aspects that account for the agency of the non-West in norm processes
• Localization (Amitav Acharya)
• Translation
• Appropriation
• Renewed interest in norm contestation as «discourses and practices that disapproval of norms» (Wiener 2014,1)
• It can take different forms: applicatory, meaning, and validity.

Liberal International Order (LIO): The Concept

• Post-WW II international order characterized by:
• Rules-based and open international order (international law)
• Multilateral institutions (UN system)
• Economic liberalism (open markets, Bretton Woods system )
• Liberal norms: Human Rights (Universal Declaration, International Human Rights Regime (ICCPR, ICSPR, ECtHR, ICC) (Helsinki Act)
• Liberal norms: Democracy and Rule of Law

LIO: A Misnomer?

• Was LIO ever liberal?
• Tension between liberal and order «It was often the West that broke the rules of the security order.» (Kundnani 2017)
• NATO military intervention in Serbia in 1999. Invasion of Iraq 2003.
• US routinely supported regimes which conducted systematic and massive human rights violations. And it supported or organized coup d’etats in tens of different countries. (Stephen Walt 2017)
• Hyper-globalization (Dani Rodrik) (national autonomy vs. economic globalization)

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Strategies of Contestation

• Gregorio Bettiza and David Lewis (2020): Power politics of ideas and identity. Norm contestation as the expression of battles for influence in world politics that take place at the ideational level and through symbolic instruments. 4 strategies:
• Liberal Performance (ex: China publishes HR reports on Western countries. The role of the Liberal watchdog.)
• Liberal Mimicry (adopt liberal discourse but give it a nonliberal content. Ex: Russia’s use of R2P to legitimize its interventions in Georgia and Ukraine.)
• Civilizational Essentialism (naturalize differences, harden boundaries. Claim of difference) (ex: Putin called Russia «a state civilization», Pye 1990: China is a civilization pretending to be a state.») provincializes liberal norms as Western product.
• Counter Norm-entrepreneurship: attempt to promote a coherent set of illiberal ideas, institutions and practices.
• The first 2 modes of contestation challenge the West’s monopoly over the application and meaning of liberal principles, and in the process undermine the influence of liberal structures.
• The latter 2 modes contest the universal validity of liberal conceptions of domestic and international order by articulating non-liberal identities and normative frameworks intended to mobilize support for themselves.

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Strategies of Contestation

• Cultural Translation: filtering norms through a cultural repertoire
• Strategies of Appropriation
• Performative Contradiction (colonized people’s invocation of equality or democracy)
• Inscription of Difference
• Grafting (ban on chemical weapons grafted on ban on poison)
• Paleonymy (keep the term sovereignty but change its content to responsibility)
• Catachresis (misuse)
• Mimicry (difference)

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Contesting International Order

• Contestation in the post-cold war era is a product of this period’s intrusive post-national liberal chracter. (Börzel and Zürn 2021)
• Ideational counter-balancing (Bettiza and Lewis 2020)
• Endogenous sources of contestation: Challenging hegemony and hypocrisy. Order-challenging vs. Order-consistent contestation (Goddard et.al 2024)

Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Islamic Democracy

• Islamic civil state and Islamic democracy
• Adopt sharia as the law or source of law
• Translating democracy as shura (consultation)
• Accepting democracy as a norm but challenging secularism as its core aspect
• «as our nations heads toward liberty, we disagree with the claims that the only options in Egypt are a purely secular, liberal democracy or an authoritarian theocracy. Secular liberal democracy of the American and European variety, with its firm rejection of religion in public life, is not the exclusive model for a legitimate democracy.» (Jan 9, 2011)

China, Norm Contestation and LIO

• Fu Ying, the chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress, distinguished, in her speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2016, between 3 elements of the «US-led world order»: the American value system, the US military alignment system, and the international institutions including the UN system.
• China supports international order in the third sense (rules-based order) not others (based on western values like democracy)

China, Norm Contestation and LIO

• Summit for Democracy in December 2021
• «extensive, whole process, socialist democracy» «a new model of democracy»
• State of Democracy in the US Report by China’s State Council Information Office in the Foreign Ministry. American democracy is «ineffective, hollow, money-driven, corrupt» «it degenerated and deviated from the essence of democracy and its original design»
• «Money politics, identity politics, wrangling between political parties, political polarization, social division, racial tension and wealth gap.»
• «big companies, a small group of rich people, and interest groups.»
• «democracy is established and developed based on a country’s own history and adapted to its national context, and each country’s democracy has its unique value.» (both affirm democracy and contest it)

Conclusion

• The norms of Liberal International Order are increasingly being challenged in ways that put the future of this order at risk—while some questioning it ever existed at all.
• The rise of challenging great powers, especially China places a lot of pressure on the capacity of the LIO to absorb difference
• The endogenous/internal sources of decay are also as significant as external/exogenous ones: violation of the international law, international trade law, human rights law, humanitarian law risks undermining the entire order.
• Where does this lead us to?