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Shift in Multilateralism
It can be said that powerful states can grow to where involvements in institutions and multilateralism could be harmful to their effectiveness. It means that a state powerful enough, might taken unilateral and bilateral actions instead of multilateral. As an example, during the Bush administration, the US mostly used unilateral solutions rather than multilateral frameworks to pursue its interests. These cases includes, the US using ‘national security’ risks to perform military interventions without mandates from the UNSC. The withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. The refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. and more.
During the Obama administration though, they changed and recognized the consequences of dismantling the multilateral order. As setting the norm of actions unilaterally could cause collateral damage for national interests in the long run.
We live in a world of increasing mutual dependency, with a natural tendency in the direction of regime-building in order to reach more predictable negotiation results. If negotiation processes are embedded in strong and stable international structure, it will make guaranteed outcomes possible.
However, there are challenges in regime-building that we must cope with.
Coping With Challenges
We can observe that new international orders and regimes come into being mostly after man-made disasters. That means states need to see the cost, before they’re willing to pay the price. For example, World War 1 created the League of Nations, only for World War 2 to create United Nations after it. The Cold War created NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Then the 3 times German-French Wars created the European Union.
Even with the costly man-made disasters, it still requires strict conditions for a regime to be born.
- It is that only if the threatened states cannot deal with the threat on its own and need allies
- If the threatend state is very strong, having a regime would hamper its capabilities instead
- Another condition is that only if Ad-Hoc coalitions, created just to address this one problem, cannot help, and a institutionalized structure is need that they are made
Therefore there is a dilemma, where creating a new institution means creating a bargaining platform for states, but at the same time it would restrict the bargaining range and freedom of more powerful states, making them less likely to participate, which is bad for everyone.
However, sometimes these new challenges could revive existing organizations that were never really used or lost its usefulness. Such in the cases of the African Union to address the need for peacekeeping in Africa. And the Need for security, stability, protection of human rights that revived the CSCE and the OSCE.
Possible Future Development
So what’s possible for the future development of negotiation processes and its context? A regime is only one part of international order. It requires an equilibrium or a peace maintaining instrument or structure for regimes to mature and flourish over time. And this can take the first half of the 21st century. In the past, these had been Mutually Assured Destruction, risk management systems, the Concert of Europe, or a balance of interests.
Regimes, being about multilateral relations, doesn’t mean it doesn’t need lesser structured modes of cooperation. For regimes to strengthen, states will still need to use ad-hoc negotiation processes and bilateral bargaining.
And there are other problems to look out for such as
Level of negotiation where some governments in the European Union push their national problems to the EU to handle and blame them for not being effective
And also Inclusiveness is also important as inclusiveness can bring both opportunities but also problems and exclusions even more so.
So in conclusion the main takeaways from this Chapter about Processes and Context are
- bargaining with boundaries is a viable alternative to warfare and other tools of conflict management,
- However boundaries could pose problems to effective cooperation that we have to undo.
- Regimes build networks to deal with negative aspects of boundaries
- Context and processes affect and shape each other in the long run.