Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies, and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean

Beyond Liberal Order, a collection of essays by historians, political scientists, and international relations scholars, is an elegant and thought-provoking exercise. It seeks to link the dizzyingly varied transnational histories of eastern Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania in the two registers: first, the “Global Indian Ocean” (prominent in the history discipline) and, second, the notion of the liberal international order in international relations and a key precept of the Biden administration's foreign policy. In the introductory essay that frames the collection, Harry Verhoeven sets out the core theoretical problematique that provides the impetus for the collection. The Pax Americana that has dominated the international system since the end of the Second World War and especially since the end of the Cold War has been, at least notionally, built on universalizing liberal norms of cooperation and openness. However, the most powerful institutions that lend force to these norms are geographically specific and quite distant from the Indian Ocean, in the security and economic community of the North Atlantic and the United States’ “hub-and-spoke” system of alliances that have drawn together the prosperous countries of the Asia-Pacific: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as well as Australia and New Zealand.1 This gives rise to a theoretically rich set of questions: How have the countries of the Indian Ocean littoral engaged with the norms of this liberalism at the heart of the American empire, given its geographical distance from the institutional instantiation of these norms? Is there anything liberal, or even liberalizing, about that engagement? Whither the liberal order in the Indian Ocean?To understand the meaning and import of the so-called liberal international order beyond the North Atlantic and East Asia, Verhoeven formulates the concept of thin hegemony—“a hierarchical system with heterogenous and relatively homogenous constituent parts that interact intensely and often consensually but whose normative preferences need not converge, nor do they mirror those of the dominant power which loosely structures (some of) the system and provides some public goods” (4)—as contrapuntal to the more dense, institutionalized liberal order in the (North) Atlantic and among some countries of the eastern Pacific. The rest of the Verhoeven essay and much of the rest of the volume's contributions spell out what this more contingent and often hypocritical engagement of the liberal order means in practice for the states, societies, and economies that border the Indian Ocean.Internal chapters lay out these dynamics in region- and subject-specific ways. Hansen historically situates the linkages of peoples, sovereignties, and suzerainties in the region in the nineteenth century. Chapters by Hertog and Huat discuss how US-allied small states with deeply illiberal politics undergo specific processes of state-building while integrating themselves into the system. Chapters by Mohmand and Karim discuss the hollowness of liberalism in relation to clientistic forms of hybrid democracy and neoliberal models of development in Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively. Chapters by Woldemariam and Reno survey cases of internal conflict in the Horn of Africa and discuss models of pacted partitions and humanitarian interventions as means to consolidate the power of entrenched illiberal structures while serving Western security interests. The penultimate contribution, by Rana Mitter, levies a sharp critique of foreign policy based on liberal norms. He argues that the rise of China, widely recognized as the United States’ greatest foreign policy challenge, is not fundamentally challenging the liberal international order but rather adapting the system to serve its own interests—reflecting malleability in practice. Lieven's concluding essay ably draws lessons from previous contributions by suggesting that the Indian Ocean world is increasingly rejecting Western liberal models and is concerned with the search for effective statehood and nationhood on their own terms—all suggesting that America's claims to leadership based on the “emaciated” (234) international liberal order are rather futile.Together, the essays in the collection are devastatingly successful at undercutting the coherence and explanatory force of the liberal international order, at least in much of the world outside the direct spheres of influence in the United States. It also needs to be felicitated as a rare and excellent example of experts from different world regions and disciplinary traditions speaking effectively to one another on a shared set of questions. Readers of the volume would benefit tremendously from the richness of individual essays and the theoretical exploration of the meaning of the liberal international order, which is rarely (if ever) subject to the rigors of empirical analysis in a specific context.Is this collection offering anything more than a trenchant critique? At one level, this an unfair question: any edited volume is made up of individual contributions that can reflect on a common theme but are unlikely to cohere into a singular thesis. Moreover, readers benefit from the individual voices of contributors, even if the conversation is sometimes at cross-purposes. At the same time, however, the Indian Ocean may be too diverse and varied an intellectual terrain to be treated to the expectations of social science, even in the more inclusive field of international relations. The Global Indian Ocean arrived in history as a means to subvert state-centric approaches and focus instead on peoples, commercial communities, trade-based economies, and alternative sovereignties that spanned, for instance, eastern Africa and the Middle East, or South and Southeast Asia. European overseas empires facilitated the persistence of these linkages even though they were orthogonal to the land-based surplus-extractive state formation projects.2 The last seventy-five years have not been kind to these alternative conceptions of transnational governance, however, with migrant trading communities facing expulsion or discrimination in eastern Africa and Southeast Asia and cosmopolitan port cities falling in national prominence relative to inland national capitals.Postcolonial state formation projects have certainly maintained the thinness of ideological purposes that Verhoeven brilliantly characterizes. It is not quite as clear what is particularly oceanic about them, however. It may be enough to suggest that states, economies, and societies in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia only ever engaged with American liberal hegemony in a limited way. As a result, these states, economies, and societies need to be studied on their own terms to understand political order in these regions. I'm not sure we need a large body of water to convene such an excellent collaboration on these themes.