Description
International orders are sets of institutions that define the fundamental guidelines of what states can, must, and must not do, and their nature varies according to their political substance, the scope of their jurisdiction, and the decision-making depth. Orders may range from a minimalist scope where the political substance is normatively thin, most policy areas are covered by states, and where decision-making is intergovernmental, to a maximalist framework where one finds the combination of thick normativity, a wide scope, and supranational depth. The current liberal international order combines a maximalist substance and scope with an intermediate depth, considering the prevalence of intergovernmental procedures, and it is currently being challenged by factors internal and external to the group of liberal states – the West – that have been promoting it since the end of World War II. To understand the nature of international orders is challenging due to the high complexity of the topic, considering the multiplicity of potential actors, interests and causal conditions behind the creation, alteration, and destruction of those orders. The literature in International Relations has either offered monocausal explanations or multi-causal explanations that do fail to pinpoint the fundamental dynamics of causality. This paper seeks to build upon the efforts of the latter type of literature, offering a novel tridimensional realist framework that integrates the complexity of multicausal dynamics, but at the same time remains parsimonious by identifying the factors that fundamentally shape international orders. According to the framework, international politics are shaped by three hierarchically differentiated causal factors. Polarity, material interdependence, and ideational compatibility are the three dimensions that shape, essentially, the behaviour of states in the international system. The framework explains the current decline of the liberal international order, essentially a function of multipolarization combined with weakening material interdependence and ideational incompatibility between major actors.
