A kick up the pants

Multilateralism is not necessarily under threat from populist anti-globalism.

The rise of populism in democracies does not inevitably threaten the rules-based international order (that tired but vital staple of Australian policy-speak). On the contrary, this populist moment creates opportunities to make international institutions more legitimate and effective by pushing for long-overdue reforms.

In theory, and where they are capable and neutral, global governance bodies from the well-known (such as World Health Organization) to the less high-profile (such as the UN International Telecommunications Union) can coordinate action and set standards on shared global challenges.

They are also vital to advancing Australia’s own interests as a relatively vulnerable and trade-dependent power. Yet the purpose and value of multilateral bodies is probably not evident to the average voter. The ‘rules-based international order’ has become an easy but lazy phrase routinely rolled out in our policymaking.

If nothing else, popular scepticism about global governance is an opportunity—even within Canberra policy circles—to work smarter at always making a compelling, practical and positive case for why multilateral engagement matters.

‘Populism’ can signify many things. In foreign policy terms, it refers to domestic political portrayal of global governance bodies as illegitimate technocratic elites, foreign anti-sovereign impositions frustrating the will of the people. Scholars write of a populist ‘backlash’ against the international order, beginning in the mid-2010s, one that is strongest in the very Western powers that have long championed and benefited from that order.

Think of how pro-Brexit advocates scapegoated the European Court of Human Rights—which Britain helped establish and which has no connection to the EU—as a bunch of patronising ‘foreign’ judges out of touch with ordinary Britons’ reasonable concerns about deporting murder-preaching radical clerics.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Council and the World Health Organisation for domestic political gain. Arch-populist Rodrigo Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the International Criminal Court during his presidency. From Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Viktor Orban in Hungary, the prevailing view is that the past decade’s notable rise in populist rhetoric creates something of an existential crisis for multilateralism.

Yet this prevailing view is questionable. Research from the Australian National University shows that populist political rhetoric at the national level does not necessarily result in actual disengagement at the supra-national level. Even when it does, withdrawal or de-funding (or threats of both) may have unexpected positives.

It may catalyse much-needed reform, or stimulate previously complacent partners to revitalise their institutional engagement. For instance, when the US left the Human Rights Council in 2018, northern European countries realised that if they were to draw the US back in, they needed finally to take long-standing (pre-Trump) US claims about imbalance and hypocrisy in the council’s agenda seriously.

Beyond their questionable validity, many commonly held criticisms of populism are also problematic. They caricature populists as bad and international institutions as good, passive victims of some irrational reactionary external pathology. Ironically, intellectual and bureaucratic elites who hold these views fulfil the stereotype (powerfully deployed by populists) of being patronising and unempathetic. Such people dismiss the populist backlash as nonsensical, inexplicable and backward.

This is unhelpful, because policymakers should be asking a very different set of questions. How did such institutions become so vulnerable to populist critiques? How have processes of global law-making, decision-making and governance come to be perceived as remote, as having lost touch with the concerns of ordinary people, their supposedly universal values taken as self-evidently superior? How did the operation and messaging of global governance itself lead to populism? How have international institutions overreached their mandates, underperformed them, or rendered them hostage to powerful undemocratic states?

Finally, the prevailing view is also misleading and distracting. Yes, populism in the West sometimes calls into question or even directly attacks the legitimacy of multilateral bodies. But while populism is a hot topic, it simply isn’t the greatest objective threat to the future of principled, effective and cooperative problem-solving, standard-setting and dialogue-enabling institutions grounded in UN Charter values.

In fact, the greater risk, from an Australian and Pacific perspective, is being passive and naive in multilateral arenas while autocratic powers capture and re-shape the institutions and agendas of the post-1945 order.

If populist attacks help to break this Western sleepwalk and to catalyse much-needed engagement, reform and revitalisation of parts of that order, they might unintentionally offset some of the damage their own rhetoric may do the legitimacy of those bodies. At very least, the backlash will force Canberra policymakers to unpack assumptions, orthodoxies and value-propositions currently lazily wrapped in the familiar ‘rules-based international order’ mantra.

This article was published by The Strategist.