ABSTRACT
It is often fashionable in academic and policy debates to ask: does multilateralism have a future? A more appropriate question, in my view, would be this: which multilateralism has a future? There is little question, short of a global cataclysm, that some form of multilateralism will continue to characterize the global order. But the traditional conceptualization of multilateralism is under challenge. That concept of multilateralism privileged the state, American power, Western leadership, transnational activists and the global level of interactions. What is coming in their place is as yet indeterminate, but in this chapter, I will propose one possible direction, which I would characterize as “post-hegemonic multilateralism.” In the sections that follow, I outline the dominant concept of multilateralism in the post-war period. Then I look at three principal challenges to it: namely, civil society and transnational actors, emerging powers and the relatively less noticed challenge from regionalism, both in terms of their strengths and limitations. In the final section, I discuss the cumulative impact of these challenges against the backdrop of a relatively declining US, as well as in redefining the residual elements of the multilateral order that had developed under American hegemony. While some Liberal defenders of hegemonic multilateralism believe that the old multilateralism would outlive American hegemony (partly because that hegemony will persist even in a less direct or visible form), I argue that the prospects for change are much greater, even short of a major war or hegemonic victory that has been viewed in the past as the basis for reinventing world order.
