Who’s undermining the global order?
has also criticised multilateral agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Transpacific Partnership (TPP) that could restrain China — for example, by setting or preserving information and communication technology (ICT) standards that would impede China trying to set Chinese technology as the standard for the hard infrastructure of Internet connectivity.
China too has rejected or violated the shared ideas of some of the international institutions it has joined — it has not, for example, ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (although neither has the US) and argues that it is compliant with international human rights norms. But as Columbia University professor, Andrew Nathan, points out, it has also partially or wholly complied with many other shared ideas, particularly because in many cases it has served its interests to do so. Its embrace of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), for example, has been highly selective and biased towards its own interests — in accordance with the norms of UNCLOS, it expects to dispatch spy ships into other countries’ exclusive economic zones to monitor both their economic (which is legal) and military activities (subject to interpretation) without incident but objects to and occasionally harasses other countries for allegedly violating its own space in the South China Sea.
Its embrace of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been more wholehearted and straightforward where it has worked to make domestic changes in order to bring China into compliance with the WTO’S accession agreement, leading one study to conclude that Beijing operates within the WTO system. And as its share of global investment has increased, many experts have found that Beijing has become a defender of the interests of capital, borrowing its norms directly from the West.
What we find from these examples is that countries that we expect to buy into the current order may revise aspects of it while countries we expect not to buy into the order may accommodate important parts of it, especially when it speaks to their interests. Nor can we assume that the builder of international order, in this case the US, will also be the upholder of it in every issue area. Finally, it’s worth remembering that since creating and sharing the norms of the international order rests on a concert of countries, this leaves room for multiple influential actors and not simply the most powerful ones.