What does it mean that the present world order is threatened?

This article was first published by the Danish Institute of International Studies on April 3rd 2025.

There are many ways of approaching the idea of a world order. When spoken of in singular and essentialist terms, the underlying assumptions and premises are often unclear: Whose order, which order? There are at least three different approaches to the world order debate within mainstream International Relations, and in the different approaches, the diagnosis regarding what exactly the significant change is or isn’t varies considerably. 

Below we outline the three approaches, and then we ask in what sense we can talk about a fundamental crisis in international relations today - what exactly is challenged or changing?

The positivist or neorealist approach to world order is the classical way of thinking about power balance in international relations. The main analytical entity is the state, and the distribution of power between states is the primary subject of interest. Power is envisioned mainly as economic, military (and sometimes in terms of technological development). 

From this perspective, the US would still be the strongest military power in the world, and China might be challenging the US position economically, but not extensively enough to challenge its hegemonic status. Hence some would say that regardless of all the fuzz about change, the US is still the dominant powerholder globally, and we are still living in a unipolar world. 

The value-oriented approach to world order is more concerned with ideological and moral leadership or some kind of moral and ideological consensus (among a group of states). From this perspective the post-world war period (1945-) created a high degree of international consensus around the need to put constrains on power based on a certain reading of human beings and states as unable to control themselves. So, what is seen as the rules-based world order was based on the – somehow paradoxical - ambition of regulating and removing the ugly manifestations of repressive ideology through one dominant ideology: namely liberalism. The task ahead after the two world wars was to regulate power politics and situations where ideology and emotions and nationalism had proven to play a destructive role. From this perspective, the return of Trump is thus interpreted as a return both to “raw power” and ideological competition (letting loose the tamed beast of the world wars), but also as a move away from the perception of the possibility of global consensus around liberal values and the superiority of liberal ideas. Back to “raw power” hence also means back to a situation where competing ideologies have a larger impact on international relations.  The potential for a higher degree of ideological pluralism in international relations is the positive reading of recent developments.

Those who are concerned with the demise of the moral and ideological leadership of the West and the US, also talk about the rise of the global South, and an emerging order with a more pluralistic space for different ideologies of economy, morality and governance. From the perspective of the Global South (and/or those critical of the liberal West’s hegemonic dominance) this can be read as an empowering development. Looking at the world through this prism, leads to a conclusion about a foundational change: The West’s moral superiority is challenged, and the rule-based order as premised on liberal Western terms is under considerable pressure. The positive interpretation of the same development is that the international system is becoming more diverse, and there is a new – more empowered - role for the Global South. As such, it can also better address some of the systemic inequalities embedded within the US-dominated system. 

The epistemological or critical approach to world order is – in contrast to the other two approaches – not interested in measuring the “real state of order” but rather focused on the normative ideas including the readings of history and grand narratives that shape ideas of order. If we put on the lenses of this approach, then we’ll see that the “liberal world order” is not a neutral description of the state of the world and has never been. Liberal world order would not be treated as a descriptive category, but a worldview, which means it is one representation of order seen from a particular position. 

Representations of order can be hegemonic, but nonetheless they are conditioned by dominant narratives, and from this perspective it is more correct to talk about multiple visions of order, hence discussions on the state of the world order only make sense in plural. That means that every discussion of world order is part of a normative terrain: conditioned by certain interpretations of history and ideas about governance, best value systems, and civilizational self-representations. In public debates the point of departure is often that the existing order is threatened, and the world order is described in singular terms. Those who go about it from an epistemological or critical approach would argue that the crisis of world order is not universal. The state of order can in contrast be interpreted in different ways depending on our perspective, and divisions will occur around whether  we at all currently are in a crisis or not. Or around how to interpret history: Was the post-Cold War era a stable order or merely a period of temporary disorder?

Overall, the three approaches show that there is a difference in how to interpret changes taking place in the world today, often evolving around topics such as Trump being back in power, the role of China in world politics and global governance, Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the West’s relative decline and the so-called Global South’s increased centrality in setting the agenda, as in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.

Related reading:

• Trump, Global Order, and the Liberal West

What has then changed?

It is worth noting that the crisis-terminology is often connected to regional security concerns in Europe or transatlantic security and is often conflated or confused with the more global world order discussions. Hence, there is a failure to separate between regional and world order. The crisis in the relationship between Europe and the US is of course not a “world crisis”, though it affects the balance of power globally and drastically impacts what has been a relatively stable status quo within a Western regional order since WWII. 

The claim that the West has been the representative and defender of liberal democracy at home, and liberal values abroad, has always been premised on persistent ideological blindspots. There is for the non-West thus also a great deal of continuity in how Donald Trump is currently behaving, whether through threatening military action or as expressed in relationship to the continued US (and Western) support for the untamed Israeli war in Gaza. Trump is by no means wholly anthetical to that which preceded him. Yet the need to recognize continuity aside, his administration’s explicit dismantling and targeting of democracy and liberal values at home and central international institutions as such also undoubtedly represents a significant rupture in both domestic and global politics. Throughout the 2000s, the Far Right has been mainstreamed within the West, and Trump’s second administration is a radical expression of that development, including its dehumanization of vulnerable minorities. The sweeping global tarrifs announded on April 2 furthermore upends the system governing international trade.

If we should point at some issues that are not only a regional security concern in the West, but connects more broadly to changes with global implications then some of the main disruption or crisis today concern: 

• The significance of the state as the main actor that holds power or impacts international relations. The state as the most powerful entity is for instance threatened by supranational processes, forces, and interests operating outside of its direct control; regional actors and alliances (for example BRICS+ representing over 40% of the world’s population); the increasing centrality of civilizational narratives that either explicitly transcends or challenges the state; and private companies, including big tech companies that influence the world and our societies in ways still difficult to fully decipher. Some of the tech oligarchs that have become deeply influential in US politics explicitly seek to move beyond the classical nation-state in search for their capitalist, post-democratic havens, to take but one telling example.  So, when we talk about the state of the world order through a prism centered on the balance of power between states in terms of their military and economic capacity we don’t always see the full picture. Adding to this, systemic issues like climate change that have traditionally been treated as a “soft security” issue or a challenge to be managed, today appear as a disruptive factor in international security. The significant global crises of our times – ecological, financial, social - explicitly cuts across state boundaries, but also state power. 
• The narrative of a liberal Western civilizational and ideological victory that dominated since the end of the Cold War. The crisis of Western leadership is not global and in some parts of the world not considered to be a crisis at all, but a possibility for empowerment, justice, and global equality. Generally, the assumption that it was the ‘West’ that held ownership to the post-1945 consensus centered on the UN Charter and the UN in a broader sense, and thus also all ideas of universality, has been premised on the exclusion of non-Western agency. The ‘West’ is no longer ideologically cohesive or united in relation to liberal democracy at home or ‘liberal order’ abroad, and has lost both geopolitical and moral clout globally. This also opens up for renewed debates on how to create a more pluralistic, fairer, and representative global order, which actively gives more institutional power to non-great powers and Western states. Part of this debate is about a dire need to reform UN decision-making bodies in a more democratic and inclusive direction.
• Fragmentation of Western consensus and the ambiguity of the role of liberalism. ‘Liberalism’ has always contained divergent projects in relation to the global sphere, from a liberalism that formally recognizes pluralism, difference, and diversity between states, to a liberalism that seeks to mold the world in it’s own image; to a more narrow but extensive neoliberal project that has drastically altered global governance since the early 1990s. The liberalism that was expressed in relation to the 1945 UN Charter was explicitly premised on the recognition of states as formally equal, irrespective of their governing form. The global liberalism espoused by the US, and drastically transformative of international institutions in the 1990s, was in contrast premised on exporting a narrower form of domestic liberal ideal onto others. Within the post-Cold War era, this anti-pluralist form of liberalism became increasingly presented as ‘universal’ and technocratic rather than ideological. Increasingly, the anti-pluralist form of liberalism is rejected not only by actors outside the West, but also within the West. Most notably, this concerns actors within the Far Right, who explicitly define themselves both in opposition to central aspects of liberal democracy, and liberal internationalism in global politics. As these actors have become widely mainstreamed within the West during the 2000s, it means two things: One, that the ‘West’ is no longer a cohesive ideological project, and two, that there is a broad convergence across both the West and non-West in pushing back against a narrow liberal Western hegemony in global politics. In their opposition to both liberal internationalism and liberal Western hegemony, it places the US under Trump ideologically closer to Russia under Putin than to the liberal transatlantic value community. Both Trump and Putin also notably view their own states as great civilizational powers with particular ‘spheres of influence’, thus also undercutting and undermining the calls to sovereignty that are otherwise uniting actors against liberal universalism and interventionism. 

Changes are taking place on different levels, and new battlegrounds are manifesting themselves as we speak. Donald Trump is radically transformative not only in relation to the transatlantic regional relationship and its baseline premise and self-image of it being a liberal-democratic community of values, but also the formal post-1945 UN order and international law. He is threatening to behave towards the West, as the US has historically on occasion behaved towards the non-allied ‘rest’. At the same time, neither Trump nor the other ‘illiberal’ challengers are systematically challenging what has been perhaps the most transformative structural change from the 1990s and onwards: the global dominance of capitalism. His drastic imposition of global tarrifs nevertheless underscores the extent to which his administration also represents an explicit rupture to many of the institutions that have previously been part of a US-dominated order.

Academically the world order debates open up for old questions about what is most important to focus on: the international system of states, the construction and power of grand narratives, or powerful political, financial, ideological, and economic actors, interest, and ideas that wield particular hegemonic or dominant positions within world politics. It also opens up for highly necessary debates about whose perspectives are represented in the very definition of a ‘world order’, challenging the dominant liberal (Western) premise that has presented the West as the de facto owner and representative of universal values and commitments post-1945. With Trump in power, we might see big man theories, sliding back from being used on Africa to be used on the West and we will still see the old schism between those who hold on to traditional international relations theories on anarchy and power balances, and those who will emphasize the power of ideas, ideology, and representations. Hopefully we will also see a renewed interest in examining questions of world order and governance from perspectives that don’t start with a reified dichotomy between the implicitly always liberal West, and the ‘rest’.