The Emerging Landscape of World Order

The analytical challenge goes well beyond distinguishing Chinese and American approaches to global governance. A growing array of emerging powers are asserting themselves and demanding a voice in the overhaul of extant global institutions. Their increasingly weighty preferences about multilateral rules of the road must be more precisely understood, since they will help determine prospects for bridging East-West and North-South divides and reaching agreement on the details of a reformed global order in the next decade and beyond.

This Carnegie Endowment initiative aims to fill this analytical gap, and in the process reveal where global preferences align and depart from narrower U.S and Western ones. It will elucidate the distinctive world order visions of approximately fifteen established and emerging powers, from Brazil to Germany to Turkey to India and beyond. The goal is to clarify areas of normative convergence and divergence in major power attitudes concerning the foundational rules that should govern state conduct and the appropriate design of international institutions to meet shared challenges. The initiative will focus on six critical domains, ranging from international security to climate change to advanced technologies.

Building on limited academic studies of the world order visions of major powers and broad policy articles, the initiative will highlight how rising normative diversity and rule-setting disputes affect international cooperation. Few previous efforts have linked the world order orientations of individual powers to more specific policy preferences across several domains. In doing so, the project will seek to identify tangible possibilities for multilateral cooperation in the emerging multipolar moment. The initiative will also illuminate the potential for “compartmentalizing” collective action on certain shared challenges, even where powers are elsewhere locked into strategic global or regional competition.

Planned Work

The Global Order and Institutions (GOI) program will form a working group comprising world class experts (including from Carnegie), charged with analyzing and comparing the distinct approaches to world order and multilateral cooperation of approximately fifteen globally and regionally important powers. Although subject to refinement, promising candidates include the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India, Brazil, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and the European Union. Such a level-setting exercise is essential, since the major players often hold distinct attitudes toward world order, their appropriate role within it, and the requirements of effective global governance.

This initiative will include four virtual meetings and two in-person workshops (one in the U.S., the other abroad). Each workshop will culminate in an edited compendium of approximately 15 essays, published online.

The first two virtual meetings will allow participants to describe, compare, and contrast their respective powers’ approaches towards world order and multilateral cooperation, as shaped not only by their strategic circumstances and calculations of material interest but also by their unique historical experiences, ideological commitments, domestic political systems, and senses of cultural (and civilizational) identity. Among other topics, contributors will analyze each power’s posture towards multilateral vehicles, ranging from universal membership organizations (e.g., UN, IFIs, WTO), regional and subregional organizations, less formal multilateral frameworks (e.g., G20, BRICS, more fleeting coalitions), and multistakeholder arrangements.

The two workshops identify areas of agreement and disagreement on the principles, norms, and rules that should govern state conduct in six domains where existing multilateral frameworks fail to meet current challenges.

• The first workshop will focus on (1) fundamental principles of world order (e.g., regarding sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the use of force); (2) international security (e.g., nuclear non-proliferation and terrorism); and (3) regulation of advanced technologies (particularly AI).
• The second workshop will focus on (4) the global economy (e.g., trade, finance, and development); (5) climate change; and (6) the global commons (e.g., outer space and oceans).

A primary audience for this initiative is the U.S. policymaking community, which will appreciate a more nuanced mapping of where U.S. notions of rules and institutional preferences compare with those of other major powers—and what potential avenues of cooperation might exist. Other important audiences include officials from national governments and international organizations, seeking promising venues to bridge mutual understanding and insulate areas of practical cooperation from those that generate conflict.