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The next U.S. government and future international order
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Christian Harijanto, Jakarta
❍ When teachers strike
News of the United States domestic political dynamics related to the upcoming general election at the end of this year
A choice between
has obviously become the focus of attention not only by Americans. With its global economic, military and cultural clout
❍

morality and humanity the country has over the rest of the world, every other country in the world feels the urgent need to understand what the
❍ Climate change threatens future U.S. leader will do about, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rising global temperature, international
peace trading negotiations stuck under the World Trade Organization's Doha Round, the crisis in Darfur and almost all other
things you can find under the sun.
❍ Unnecessary panic
❍ The next U.S. Although it is inappropriate to look to U.S. policies for a solution to every global problem, it is understandable that
government and future people all over the world are curious to know what the future U.S. administration will do to maintain international order,
international order an order that some say has crumbled thanks to unwise foreign policies under the present administration.
❍ Who are Indonesia's
ethnic Chinese? In every human society, an order can be created and maintained if and only if two conditions are present: socially-
❍ Jusuf Kalla's intervention accepted norms and the power to enforce those norms. Having the first without the second means a lack of social
control, while the second without the first creates an authoritarian, coerced society. Both are unstable.

● Archives Within a local community, customs constitute the norms that bind its members together, while the power to uphold
these norms lies in the hands of respected counsel. Within a nation, the citizens accept the laws as accepted norms
Select Month
and the state holds the power to punish those who break them.

● Categories International society also has certain all-binding norms that tie its members together. The difference between this and
other types of societies is that an international society has states instead of individuals as its members. The norm to
Select Category hold this type of society intact is therefore binding to the states.

● Of all the norms listed by many experts in this subject, the equality of states can be said to be the most important to
keep society in order, because it guarantees that the very basic unit composing this society, the state, will not be
January 2008
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The next U.S. government and future international order

violated.
M T W T F S S
« Dec In terms of power, international society has neither moral nor legal institutions to enforce the norms. The power, and
1 2 3 4 5 6 thus the obligation, to enforce norms and keep international society intact, falls to the most economically and militarily
powerful state, sometimes referred to as the hegemony or the superpower.
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 In international society, the hegemony has two roles to play with regards to the maintenance of international order,
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 namely as an enforcer and a guarantor.
28 29 30 31
First, the hegemony enforces the norms by using its power both as a deterrence factor and as punishment to those
More Photos seeking to change the norms in international society. Second, the hegemony guarantees member states, by committing
● Democracy itself to international free trade and other international arrangements, that they will benefit from their obedience to the
norms. Two tracks, one goal: to perpetuate international society.

Through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other regional security organizations the U.S. took on the
enforcer role during the Cold War, while through the General Agreements on Tariff and Trade (GATT) the country
provided a forum for countries to strike deals in international trade during the same period. The record was satisfactory
for the U.S. from 1945 to 1990.

Problems occurred when the Cold War was over and the U.S. was left with victory and freedom to determine the
direction of the future international order. Democracy and liberal economy are two new norms this hegemony intended
to inject into the vein of international society.

So the U.S. started to project these two norms onto the global order. Interventions here and there; some were in the
name of human rights, some were in the name of democracy, and most were both. Not all were well-received, though,
especially in the case of Iraq where the hegemony was accused of benefiting its oil companies and its oil-thirsty
population instead of truly advancing democracy.

The U.S. agenda of liberalizing developing countries' economies has also been met with great suspicion. The agenda
was thought to bestow advantages on American companies to profit at the expense of the populations of developing
countries.

The problems with democracy and liberal economy promoted by the U.S. is that these two norms are sometimes at
odds with the most basic norm of equality of states in international society. In efforts to advance democracy and liberal
economy, the U.S. is accused of being heavily intrusive in other countries' domestic affairs.

This meddlesome behavior does not only annoy people in other countries but also the domestic population in the U.S.
One of the reasons it has been hard lately for the Republicans to maintain their clout is because more and more
Americans want their government to quit the war in Iraq.

Why they want this is easy to grasp: they want their children to be safe at home instead of risking their lives going to
war in foreign countries. They also want their kids to get a good education, something hard to achieve when the military
spending constitutes half the total national expenditure.

Usually, the move from one extreme of the pendulum is to the other extreme. The next administration can be expected

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The next U.S. government and future international order

to rule out intervention as its foreign policy tool, thus considering the promotion of democracy only in the manner
accordant to the norm of equality of states.

The same can be expected of the next administration in terms of the promotion of liberal economy. With some
countries strongly rejecting the liberal economic creed, the U.S. will need to be more considerate in considering other
possibilities, at least for other countries, in running national economies.

While adjusting its foreign policies to the norm of equality of states is a propitious move for the maintenance of
international order, the policy of lessening the military capacity as the result of pressure from the domestic population in
the population might not bode well for the international society.

As argued earlier, to maintain order in a society takes more than certain accepted norms. Especially in international
society, it requires a power strong enough to enforce the norms.

At this moment in history, when the U.S. is the most suitable country to take the role of a hegemony and when threats
are looming in a non-conventional manner, a more thoughtful America is surely needed to see peace and stability in
the world, but certainly not a weak one. One can only hope the next U.S. administration acknowledges the urgency of
this condition.

The writer is a lecturer of international relations at the University of Indonesia, and can be reached at christian@ui.edu.

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