Opinion: Hands up all those feeling cynical about what’s known as the “international rules-based order”. Don’t be afraid to hold ‘em high. Because you are not alone.
The head of the European Union’s foreign service shares your concerns, as do the President of France and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, not to mention editors at some of Europe’s most influential publications.
“The world’s rules-based order is cracking,” UK magazine the Economist wrote earlier this year. “The concept of the rules-based international order risks becoming a dead letter,” the conservative New Statesman agreed a few weeks later. And late last month, Spain’s El País newspaper wrote of “a broken world order”, based on a speech Guterres gave at the UN’s General Assembly in New York on September 24.
“Today, a growing number of governments and others feel they … can trample international law, violate the Charter of the United Nations, turn a blind eye to international human rights conventions or the decisions of international courts, invade another country, lay waste to whole societies or utterly disregard the welfare of their own people,” Guterres complained. When they do break the rules, nothing happens anyway, he lamented.
Interestingly, what the “international rules-based order” is is more debated than you might think. Some say it’s an amorphous system of shared norms and values agreed upon after the horrors of two world wars, which includes the UN, a bunch of treaties and various international courts, all meant to make sure that kind of bad behaviour never happens again.
Others suggest it’s something that became more popular only at the turn of this century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and when former US president Barack Obama started using the phrase as a sort of proud shorthand for liberal and democratic values, plus capitalism.
Another argument says the term is seen by some users as simply (and possibly erroneously) synonymous with international law.
No matter how you slice it, the two wars that currently dominate headlines, in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, provide perfect examples of why the international rules-based order is eroding.
These conflicts have shown everyone that you can send tanks across the border of a neighbouring country and start killing or torturing its citizens. That you can bomb the crap out of your own open-air prison for a year, killing close to 42,000 people – including, according to the UN, about 15,000 children, more than 100 journalists, 800 medical personnel and 200 aid workers.
Such villainy will see almost all the countries in the world condemn you when they get together at the UN. It will result in crowds of angry protesters chanting your name in a threatening manner. It may even end up with the international criminal court putting out an arrest warrant. But none of that has mattered.
These conflicts have also seen European leaders charged with hypocrisy as they treat events in Ukraine and Gaza so differently, even though in both cases “rules” are being broken.
“Wherever I go, I find myself confronted with the accusations of double standards,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s straight-talking top diplomat, said last year.
All of the above is why you probably shouldn’t mourn the international rules-based order too much. Whatever it once was, it’s being replaced. If your hands are still in the air, you can put them down now, then put them together. Because it’s time to welcome a new catchphrase. As Guterres put it in New York last month, the “politically indefensible and morally intolerable” “age of impunity” is just getting started.
