What is the Global Enduring Disorder?
Policymaking has always been lived by participants as comprised of reversals, tug-of-wars, and competition among power centres. But the post-2011 chaos on the international scene appears to differ not only in degree but in kind from what came before. Not only is the international system unmoored due to a lack of American leadership, a development that predated and will long outlast the Trump administration, but also because major powers have failed to create suitable institutional coordination mechanisms to deal with the new kinds of ‘collective action problems’ presented by the twenty-first century. This has led to a free-for-all.
What is Global Enduring Disorder
Policymaking has always been lived by participants as comprised of reversals, tug-of-wars, and competition among power centres. But the post-2011 chaos on the international scene appears to differ not only in degree but in kind from what came before. Not only is the international system unmoored due to a lack of American leadership, a development that predated and will long outlast the Trump administration, but also because major powers have failed to create suitable institutional coordination mechanisms to deal with the new kinds of ‘collective action problems’ presented by the twenty-first century. This has led to a free-for-all.
This is not the multipolarity of previous eras of competition—like the interwar period, where each aspirant to power strove to order and expand its own sphere of influence—but a new era of deliberate disorder, where major international players actively undermine global order, eschew collaboration, and block knowledge accumulation….
Various powers are muscling in on traditional American domains and perverting American information-gathering and the policy formation pro cess from the inside. These actors may not be ‘restoring a balance of power’, as ‘realist’ International Relations (IR) theorists have postulated that lesser powers automatically do as a hegemon declines. Furthermore, these ascending powers may not be concerned with an ordered or balanced international system…
Right from the collapse of the Qadhafi regime, the major European players were tugging in different directions and suspecting each other’s motives, clients, and actions in Libya, just as the memos sent by Blumenthal to Secretary Clinton suspected those of the British and French. The Western nations had acted out the ancient Bedouin proverb: ‘Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my brother, my cousin and I against the outsider.’ This proverb evokes the structure of an archetypal peninsular Arabian or Eastern Libyan tribe composed of equivalent and mutually opposed segments. The founder of social anthropology and renowned historian of Libya, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, dubbed such tribes ‘segmentary’. Ironically, during the Enduring Disorder, this famous proverb came to apply to the ineffective Western efforts at foreign policy coordination. It also encapsulates the post-2016 tribalization of politics and culture in many Western societies and the inability of factions to put aside feuds to focus on shared interests until forced to by existential threats.
Libya’s chaos interacts with the fallout from the Covid pandemic and illustrates crucial facets about the current state of the world: the political implications of the globalization of a particular form of neo-liberal capitalism, the implications of America’s retreat from the burdens of global hegemony, and the failure of the West to enshrine its Cold War victory into new global coordination bodies (the way the victory in the Second World War was institutionally cemented). Like a funhouse mirror, the closer we look at Libya, the more we see that the salient dynamics of the Wars of Post-Qadhafi Succession reflect selective distortions of the key features of our evolving international system and the post-pandemic world.
In Libya, as elsewhere, we have simultaneously more of a need for global governance than ever before and ironically less global governance than at any time in modern history. The current trendline, as well as historical parallels, suggests a seemingly bleak upcoming decade or two, independent of how the Biden administration or its successors approach global leadership. Multipolarity or a rebalancing of powers will not automatically follow from the decline in America’s relative power, just as the ensuing power vacuum in Libya in the wake of Qadhafi’s ouster has not, by some cosmic law, elicited either the creation of a new durable organizing force to fill the void or incentivized a dominant outside power to provide order. There are various indicators that the world has become increasingly ‘Libyan-ized’ by becoming thoroughly penetrated by the key features of the Enduring Disorder. Developments in key nodes, like Libya or Ukraine, produce and emit the violence, hot money, ideology, and media polarization that feed the spiral of the Enduring Disorder.