London: Oxford University Press, 2021. US$29.00, cloth. ISBN 9780197647950.
Ongoing territorial wars in Europe and the Middle East and trade feuds between the United States and China signal the decline of America’s global hegemony and the unravelling of the liberal international order it has dominated since 1945. Concurrently, economic problems, political instability, and ethnic violence in Western societies are undermining liberal democracy as a legitimate system of governance. International relations (IR) scholars and political scientists have sought explanations for these crises in specific historical developments within nation-states or abstract forces and global institutions spearheaded by the US and its European allies. Justifying their stance, theorists have argued that the liberal international order was, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, confined to the West. In the post-Cold War decades, too, only Russia and China, great powers which could likely upend it, mattered. States in Asia and Africa were left out of its ambit, with little significance attached to how they contributed to the shaping up or the fraying of the international order and the principles of liberalism underpinning it.
Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean, is a corrective to this one-dimensional, Anglo-American perspective on the history and future of the liberal international order. It approaches the liberal international order not as an overarching framework of institutions, structures, and norms but as an incessant negotiation between different states, societies, and markets and the various hegemonic powers struggling to dominate it at various historical junctures. To make this argument, the editors pick an unusual vantage point: the maritime geography of the Indian Ocean and its “extraordinary pluriformity of political orders” (229), ranging from unambiguously liberal and illiberal democracies to authoritarian regimes, monarchies, and failed states. Contributors exemplify how these heterogenous political systems in the Indian Ocean—each with its unique trajectory of state formation and set of domestic political institutions—appropriate, adapt, mediate, resist, and impinge on the liberal international order through interactions with “an irregularly present order-building superpower,” only capable of what Verhoeven calls “thin hegemony.” Verhoeven brings into sharp relief the Indian Ocean’s striking contrast with the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, where the US has remarkable political clout and a permanent military presence, rendering it a valuable site to study the making and unmaking of the liberal international order.
The Indian Ocean is a tough analytical choice, not just because it is politically, economically, and culturally diverse but also because of its geographical fluidity and almost inbuilt adaptability to the currents of history. Traditionally, scholars of the Indian Ocean have steered clear of debates in IR, specializing instead on inter-regional trade networks or religious and diasporic connections and their shifting geographies over the longue durée. The book draws on the argument that such networks laid the foundations for the the British Empire and liberalism which the empire managed through an international order called Pax Britannica. The paradox of Pax Britannica, however, affirms Verhoeven, was that the Indian Ocean, which nurtured liberalism and its corollary international law, at once became the “Oppositional Other” to the liberal West and its ideals of civilization.
The book’s introduction pivots on this paradox, generating momentum for the chapters that tease out how the liberal and the illiberal consorted with each other in different historical, geographical, and political contexts in the Indian Ocean. While Thomas Blom Hansen’s essay on “distributed sovereignty” probes the coexistence of the liberal and the illiberal and the logic of colonialism that justified it, Chua Beng Huat and others focus on how the collusions and tensions between the two played out in postcolonial and post-Cold War contexts. Singapore, for instance, champions and invests heavily in the liberal international order even while it works as a single-party dominant state and pursues ruthlessly illiberal domestic policies.
One significant contribution the book makes is raising the analytical mileage of the Indian Ocean as a maritime political geography in the post-war milieu of nation-states. With the decline of the British Empire, the Indian Ocean lost its political and geographic coherence, and a certain scholarly lethargy around its relevance for contemporary interstate relations and international politics set in. Looking at the liberal international order from the Indian Ocean in its post-war decades, the contributors plug gaps in the temporal canvas of Indian Ocean studies, infuse new scholarly energy into the field, and further expand its interdisciplinary scope. Bringing IR into conversation with history, anthropology, sociology, and political science the authors throw light on the diverse events, processes, and practices that helped Indian Ocean states, societies, and markets shape the liberal international order and in turn be shaped by it.
International relations theorists studying the transition from British imperialism to American hegemony in the aftermath of World War II have broadly projected the history of the international order in terms of a rupture. Inverting the focus from the hegemon to the Indian Ocean as the cradle of the liberal international order and one of its permanent curators, Beyond Liberal Order provides a thread of continuity, revealing how it has played out much the same under Britain and the United States. Even when the US attempted to convert its “thin hegemony” into “thick hegemony” in the 1990s by coercing developing nations to throw open their borders to globalization, its success in the Indian Ocean was moderate and short-lived.
The embedding of global forces within a geographically fluid, economically supple, and politically malleable Indian Ocean carries within it the seeds of destruction of the existing liberal international order and possibilities for the rise of a new order. This emerging order, as yet inchoate and shapeless, is tossing up a new likely hegemon in China, which is now building naval bases and expanding its footprint to protect its Belt and Road Initiative and other infrastructure investments across the ocean. However, the ever-transforming dynamic of the “global Indian Ocean,” cautions Rana Mitter in his chapter, “China in the Indian Ocean: The Search for a New Hegemon?” will make it difficult for China to have the hegemonic moment that the United States and Britain before it did. China will have to operate in a multipolar world, where India, Japan, and Australia as middle powers, and the United States as the existing hegemon, work together to halt the drift of global and regional trade in its favour.
Nisha Mathew
Mahindra University, Hyderabad