How do we understand the emerging world order under the twin shocks of war in Europe and an American president determined to put “America First”? A forum on the English School approach, organized under the aegis of the Institute for International Economic Affairs in Athens on 27 May 2025 (IIER 2025) considered the question in terms of changes in the primary institutions of international society, including the balance of power, diplomacy, the regulation of war, great power management and the market. A summary of the findings follows, with an introduction on how the English School theorizes change in international society.
The ‘New Institutionalism’: How to Discern Change and Continuity in International Order
Relations between states traditionally are conceptualised as taking place within an international society, or a society of states. If states are members of a club, they need to participate in upholding a few common institutions, such as diplomacy, the balance of power, international law, management by the great powers, and war (Bull 1977). In the more recent literature, such institutions are often called primary institutions, distinguishing them from secondary institutions which are formalised versions of primary institutions (Buzan 2004), generally found in international organisations (Knudsen and Navari 2019). As a paradigmatic example, the primary institution of great power management is formalised as a secondary institution within the UN Security Council, especially the veto right of the P5. International society has often been seen as a rather static, historically established institutional settlement, dominated by the Western (especially European) powers. States from the rest of the world, if they wanted to join, had to conform to the “standard of civilization” defined by European insiders (Gong 1984). However, the more this process has been studied, the more the moving aspect of the standard has come to be emphasised, and the more the evolution of the rules and institutions of international society has been studied, the more mutual recognition, renegotiation and change have been emphasised. Similarly, the interplay between primary and secondary institutions is significant for understanding change and continuity in international society, and in international order more broadly (Friedner Parrat 2024).
Primary institutions, conceptualised as practices and their discursive legitimation – that is, how statespeople and influential observers justify them – remain stable when those agents reproduce the same practices and discursive legitimations, and change when they are practiced and legitimised differently. This brings the agents of international society to the centre-stage. The international society tradition is neither a structural theory, nor a theory in which agents are free to act as they wish. Instead, the situated agents induce change by questioning the premises they have been handed, or by manoeuvring creatively within the space that they have (Navari 2020). Secondary institutions can make things remain much as they were when the secondary institution was formalised – but also contribute to pushing rules in a certain direction before locking them in. International organisations function as arenas where primary institutions are negotiated and reproduced in an ongoing fashion, and where secondary institutions are sedimented (Friedner Parrat 2017). As such, they function as stabilisers of international order, but they also register changes within the order.
Applied to the twin shocks of war in Europe and a US president withdrawing from alliances and pursuing a narrow concept of national interest, the approach draws attention to the upending of the balance of power; to the emergence of Europe as a military power; to new practices of diplomacy, to challenges to the embedded norms on the use of forceand to the erosion of the liberal trading order in the global economy.
The Balance of Power
Martin Wight (1979), Hedley Bull (1977) and James Mayall (2000) have regarded the balance of power as one of the fundamental institutions of international society. For Hedley Bull (p. 106), the balance of power was fundamental for maintaining order in international society, to prevent the dominance of any single state or outright empire. According to the ‘nested hierarchy’ of international institutions, advanced by Barry Buzan (2004, 184), the balance of power is a “master institution” with anti-hegemonism, alliances, guarantees, neutrality, war and great power management viewed as its derivative ones. In theoretical terms, we should expect that today’s great powers will seek to manage their relations by preserving the general balance of power, avoiding and controlling crises, limiting the impact of war, unilaterally exercising local preponderance, and seeking to identify and maintain spheres of influence, interest, and responsibility. In any case, the balance of power is an essential institution of international society and one which other primary institutions depend on, such as international law. According to Emerich de Vattel, a balance of power reflects “a state of affairs such that no one power is in a position where it is preponderant and can lay down the law to others” (cited in J.B. Scott, 1916, 40). However, since the end of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States has sought to establish a global hegemony or primacy and therefore, Washington DC has been uninterested in pursuing a balance of power policy. The U.S. has sought to achieve primacy and establish a hegemonic international order “with no more than the ordinary degree of disregard for norms of sovereignty, equality and independence” (Bull 1977, 208), but, if necessary, by resorting to occasional and often reluctant use of force and the threat of force (p. 209).
Despite his sporadic rhetoric, President Trump has not differed from his predecessors. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he was surrounded by people who were proponents of either a balance of power policy or a concert of powers approach. However, following his election, President Trump has chosen to work with people with a neoconservative agenda, who seek to promote U.S. global hegemony and/or ensure U.S. primacy. Moreover, it seems that President Trump is also prepared to promote U.S. dominance by a habitual use of military force or the threat of force, as well as by using economic means, such as sanctions and tariffs. In so doing, he has recently demonstrated a “habitual disregard of the universal norms of interstate behavior that confer rights of sovereignty, equality and independence upon other states” (Bull 1977, 207).
Bull makes a distinction between a “simple” balance of power, which is made up of two powers, from a “complex” one consisting of three or more (Bull 1977, 97). He also distinguishes between a balance of power that is “fortuitous” and one that is “contrived” (p.100). A fortuitous balance of power is one that arises without any conscious effort on the part of either of the parties to bring it into being. A contrived balance of power is one that owes its existence at least partly to the conscious policies of one or both sides. As a result of the U.S. efforts to maintain its global hegemony and primacy, China and Russia, and with the possible inclusion of India, will pursue an anti-hegemonic balance of power. This will be a complex balance of power that will be contrived by Russia, China and perhaps India, and to which the U.S. must react. If we consider the balance of power as a master institution, then we should expect that it will impact its derivative institutions, such as alliances (i.e., NATO, CSTO, and SCO), war and great power management. Moreover, the pursuance of balance of power will have an impact – both positive and negative – on the institutions of diplomacy and international law, and as an extension to secondary institutions, such as the United Nations and/or sub-global or regional international organizations. The effects on the institution of diplomacy follow.
Pariah Diplomacy and the Trump Presidency
As a primary institution of international society, diplomacy sustains order by managing estrangement, facilitating recognition, and negotiating the terms of coexistence among sovereign states (Berridge 2022). Yet diplomacy is not always practiced in ways that reinforce order. Its opposite could be termed Pariah diplomacy and refers to those instances when states engage in behavior that constitutes a source of disorder, whether by contravening binding legal commitments or flouting the shared, though nonbinding, norms and values that underpin membership in international society (Banai 2016). It is less a rejection of diplomacy than it is as a tool of disruption: a mode of engagement through which states dramatize grievances, justify extra-legal or disruptive conduct, and press for alternative terms of legitimacy and coexistence.
President Trump embodies this practice with unusual clarity. From his first term, the “America First” agenda recast alliances and agreements as constraints to be shaken off or monetized, while secondary institutions such as NATO and the WTO were treated less as key pillars of international society than as obstacles to national autonomy. Thus far in his second term, these tendencies have sharpened into a methodical, albeit chaotically executed, agenda to remake international order. The roll-out of sweeping tariffs on allies and rivals alike have disrupted global trade flows and financial markets, not to mention the mockery they have made of trade and commercial agreements championed by the United States itself. At the same time, Trump has publicly and repeatedly suggested that Canada should become America’s fifty-first state, entertained annexation of Greenland, and threatened to seize the Panama Canal. These postures – both material and rhetorical – not only have set in motion the dismantling of the postwar liberal international order that helped nourish and sustain American primacy for more than a century but also give permission to other states to behave in a similar manner, thus hastening the demise of common rules, norms, and practices that sustained international order.
Trump’s pariah diplomacy augurs a troubling future for international legitimacy. In international society, legitimacy rests on shared understandings of rightful membership and rightful conduct, however contingent and contested these may be. By flouting multilateral norms, withdrawing from collective agreements, and elevating coercion and spectacle over reciprocity and restraint, the Trump administration demonstrates how easily these foundations can erode when great powers themselves disregard them. The result is not the collapse of international society but its reconfiguration around thinner, more transactional forms of legitimacy, where sheer power and ad hoc bargains outweigh rules and norms. Legitimacy, once anchored in a commitment to order and mutual recognition, becomes conditional, shifting with the preferences of dominant actors.
The Trump presidency demonstrates that diplomacy can endure as an institution even as it becomes a vehicle for disruption. Disorder does not arise solely from outsiders at the margins of international society; it can also be generated by great powers at its very core. In such moments, diplomacy is not abandoned but reshaped through pariah practices that unsettle established rules, norms, and values, placing the prospects for cooperation and coexistence under significant strain. Taken together, these dynamics reveal not only the corrosion of diplomatic norms but also the emboldening of conduct that openly defies the legal and moral restraints underpinning international order. As diplomacy is instrumentalised to justify coercion and spectacle, the distinction between persuasion and force begins to blur. It is to this erosion of the prohibition on the use of force – and its implications for the survival of international society – that the discussion turns.
The Use of Force
The rules governing the use of force hold a central position in the conception of society. Hedley Bull, when contemplating the nature of order in world politics, theorised security as one of the elementary goals of social life, for “unless men enjoy some measure of security …, they are not able to devote energy or attention enough to other objects to be able to accomplish them” (Bull 1977, 5). Over the past 200 years, international society has developed extensive legal regimes for regulating and governing armed conflict among its members, with the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as the core norm. According to much of the international law community, recent events suggest that the prohibition is unraveling, facing its greatest challenges yet (Hathaway and Stewart 2025):
The combination of rising multipolarity, declining American hegemony, and increasingly brazen violations threatens to transform the prohibition on the use of force from a foundational principle of international order into what skeptics always claimed it was: a paper tiger that collapses when confronted with raw power politics.
The English School helps to frame this argument in two ways. The first frame has to do with the constitutive nature of international law, understood as a primary (or fundamental) institution. As a historically evolved social practice that connects political ordering to discourse about war and violence, the laws of war have become deeply entrenched in the normative fabric of contemporary international society. Blatant violations of Article 2(4), such as the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, but also the US and Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, are “brazen violations” of the rules in play, but they do not themselves carry the sufficient discursive weight to transform institutional practices of ordering. Much of this, it seems, will depend on how coalitions of key states are willing to defend key rules around non-use of force as a basic practice of legitimate conduct in the face of great power contestation. The EU has notably proved willing, alongside the ASEAN group.
The second frame has to do with the significant structure of secondary institutions concerned with the nature and regulation of war. International courts, most notably the ICJ and the ICC, and the institutions of the United Nations have played active parts in the current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. As public forums of discursive practice, they can help to apply, reaffirm, and clarify the fundamental principles governing the use of force, which has reciprocal effects on deeper-seated normative developments. Again, much will hinge on the extent to which members of international society are willing to rely on the secondary institutional architecture they have created.
With regard to the latter, on 23 February 2023, the UN General Assembly, taking over the role of the Security Council, passed A/RES/ES-11/6 (Ukraine) reaffirming by 141 to 7 Article 2 of the Charter that obliges all states to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, reaffirming the non-use of force by states outside of self-defense. On 27 October 2023 by a vote of 121 to 14, theGeneral Assembly passed A/Res/ES-10/21 calling for an “immediate and sustained” humanitarian truce and cessation of hostilities and condemning “all acts of violence aimed at Palestinian and Israeli civilians”, reaffirming the humanitarian war codes with reference to civilian immunity, voting again on12 December 2023 by a large majority for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Given the uncertain status of the GA in respect of acting for a divided Security Council, these are not sufficient for securing the humanitarian war codes. One key question is how actors that have traditionally promoted international humanitarian law and strict interpretations of Article 2(4) will behave. As a self-declared “normative power” (Manners 2002), the EU will be a case in point.
The EU and the New World Order: Joining the Balance of Power
In English School theory, the EU counts as a secondary institution in international society, a derivative of the primary institutions of the balance of power, diplomacy and law, but also instantiating basic principles of sovereignty and the market (Bull 1977; Holsti 2004; Buzan 2004). Secondary institutions like the EU have the capacity to socialize member states, partners and other states into the rules and practices of international society and, importantly, to introduce change into the more fundamental ones (Wendt and Duval 1989; Knudsen and Navari 2019). The ongoing power transition, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the promotion of anti-liberal values by state leaders like Putin, Xi, Modi, Erdogan and Trump have triggered profound changes within the EU including a massive rearmament, direct military support to Ukraine and a drive for strategic autonomy from competing power centers including the US (Jørgensen, Knudsen and Landorff 2025). The EU has played a key role in the mobilization of a collective European response to Russian aggression, the organization of economic and military support to Ukraine, and broader European rearmament. The White Paper for European Defence Readiness 2030 (the ‘ReArm Europe’ plan), by which the European Commission (2025) proposed to leverage more than 800 billion Euro for European defense, is a cornerstone in this process. Among other things, the plan supports collective defense investments (with priority to European production) and allows member states and partners to apply for EU-backed loans for national rearmaments as well as military donations to Ukraine.
These developments have had important ramifications for the fundamental institutions of international society and thereby the world order. First, the EU has joined the balance of power as a great-power player rather than a “civilian power” (Bull 1982; Manners 2002). This means military, economic and political balancing against Russian power and aggression, a delicate attempt to obtain greater military autonomy from the US without endangering the NATO-alliance, and a still unresolved dilemma of how to situate EU-Europe in the full-scale rivalry between the US and China. Second, the EU has come to the obvious conclusion that the ideal of a great-power concert seems unrealistic in anything but the long run. Instead, member states have set a new course in which balancing and counter balancing is a necessary condition for great-power compromises and international order. Third, the EU has embarked on a collective defense of basic, pluralist principles of international law, including sovereignty, non-intervention and non-aggression, rather than the post-Cold War promotion of democracy (Navari 2022). Solidarist principles of humanitarian intervention, humanitarian law and the Responsibility to Protect still matter, but depend on cooperation with especially African organizations (Jakobsen and Knudsen 2025) and the ability of member states to agree, as in the critical case of Gaza.
As evident, the EU is developing a new grand strategy for the defense of a rule-based world order and liberal-internationalist values, as well as for its own security. From an institutionalist perspective, the EU seeks to shape the evolving world order by means of a full engagement in the balance of power, great power management and the use of force alongside international law and diplomacy (Jørgensen, Knudsen and Landorff 2025). The EU holds on to its liberal-internationalist foreign policy paradigm but seeks to defend and promote it also by military means. However, the EU is facing numerous challenges stemming from a changing world order and new institutional dynamics. In the market, these include a rising economic nationalism, tough competition with the US and China among others, and the problem of aligning economic interests with liberal values.
The Market
The global market is a historically changing institution with differing governing principles (Buzan and Falkner 2024). Its present emerging form is an economic nationalism aimed at “catch[ing] up” and protecting export markets, “utilizing both mercantilist and liberal policies” (Falkner 2025). Its new institutions are regionalization, trade diversion and sustained efforts at ‘de-dollarisation’. Accelerated by the weaponisation of the international financial system under former US President Biden (the seizure of Russian assets and the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT international payments system), economic nationalism has now been further advanced by the United States’ decision under Trump to end America’s long history of trade liberalization and to impose a global system of tariffs.
Regionalization has not upended the WTO trade rules. According to Eero Palmujoki (2022) both the new Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) have adapted evolving WTO trade rules to regional settings. The same may be observed in the EU’s move to limit the number of Chinese electric vehicles entering its market via a tariff determined by strict adherence to WTO subsidy rules. Countries continue to take their trade disputes to The World Trade Organization whose panels continue to issue judgments. In 2022, the WTO had warned that the Russo-Ukrainian war could lead to global trade fragmentation into two blocs that set their own rules. In the event, Trump’s trade policies targeting friend and foe alike shut down that prospect and, judging by initiatives on the part of the EU, the present direction appears to be a potential expansion of the RCEP as a working alternative to the WTO.
The BRICS, acting under Russian initiatives, implemented some alternative and competing global banking and other financial institutions following the 2014 sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea. A New Development Bank was set up in July 2015 giving every member one vote and with no veto powers, in contrast to the IMF arrangements. (China contributed 41% to the original capitalization and can draw on 21% of the facility while South Africa contributed 5% and can draw 10%.) The weaponising of the global financial system following Russia’s attack on Ukraine led to more energetic efforts to diversify the methods for currency exchanges and payments. Russia immediately demanded that Europe pay for Russian gas in rubles and has finalized agreements with Iran, India and Indonesia to trade in local currencies.
Alternative payments systems have grown apace. The Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), created in 2015 to ease international use of the Yuan and operational from 2019, had gained 168 Direct Participants (central banks) by December 2024. The African Union (AU) launched the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) in January 2022 and a Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) that allows for secure and instant cross-border payments in Africa. During their summit in 2024 in Kazan, the BRICS leaders announced an alternative named “Unit”, potentially backed by a basket of local currencies and gold that could circumvent dollar domination.
The WTO (2025) has proposed that world trade would drop by 1.8% in 2026, and that exports from North America would drop by 12.6%. The McKinsey Global Institute has forecast that trade channels between Asian destinations, such as China–ASEAN and India–ASEAN are likely to be least affected by trade diversion, while channels between US–China, EU–China, South Korea–China and Japan–China are likely to be most affected (White et al. 2025). These changes suggest an emerging market order of plural payment systems that supplement, rather than displace the role of the dollar and a fragmented trading order, where coalitions of countries maintain rules-based trade despite US and Chinese disengagement. The new market order reflects the failure of Great Power management.
The Great Irresponsibles? The (Limited) Prospects for Great Power Cooperation
The starting point for this conclusion is the basic assumption that relations among the great powers are crucial to comprehend peace, war, and international order. Great power management embodies one of the ‘primary’ institutions of the international society. This is the case because great powers are not only associated with power, but also, they bear a certain degree of organizational responsibility and international legitimacy. Conversely, the great powers have been also the most irresponsible actors in international relations, being the perpetrators of the most violent wars with the highest casualties, from the two world wars to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Chan 2021; Kacowicz 2025, 49-51). Although great powers tend to prefer stability to change, they resort to war to change the status quo within their spheres of influence, out of ideological concerns, or strategic (mis)calculations. Thus, there has been a tendency for great powers to intervene militarily in regional theatres, often based upon strategic myths and lack of proper exit plans, evidentially in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and presently Ukraine.
For great powers to manage and cooperate in the international system, three conditions should be in place: (a) a stable and agreed distribution of power in the international system; (b) a minimal normative consensus among the great powers; and (c) clear and explicit rules of the game, as an expression of great power management. When assessing the current turbulent and uncertain international order, we can tentatively conclude that these conditions are not in place. First, it is difficult to speculate and forecast about the future of great power management, due to the end of the U.S. unipolarity and the uncertain power transition(s) taking place, considering the number of important regional powers from the Global South that are not taking part in the ideological and geopolitical contests between the West (the United States and Europe) vs. Russia and China, alongside the U.S. giving up its mantle in leading the post-World War II order. Second, there is not much of a minimal consensus among the great powers in normative terms regarding international law, tarnished by the wars between Russia and Ukraine and Israel-Hamas in Gaza. Third, the rules of the game are neither clear nor explicit. Yet, there seems to be a predilection for a ‘transactional approach,’ which might circumvent ideological differences and recreate, potentially, some kind of Great Power diplomacy.
The erratic behaviour of President Trump and his push for MAGA might unintentionally result in a Chinese century of MCGA (Make China Great Again). In any case, rational blueprints for recreating a Concert as a way of managing great power relations will have to wait until the aftermath of the Russian-Ukraine war and the insertion of Russia back into the international community, if at all. Meanwhile, the prospects for great power cooperation will remain very limited. The Global International Society will survive, though it will be neither under the aegis of the hegemonic Liberal International Order nor a bipolar Cold War-type order. Instead, we are moving into the uncharted waters of a ‘multi-aligned’ world, with the rise of middle and regional powers (such as India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, and South Africa) hedging their bets and shying from rigid alignments. This will be, after all, “no one’s world” (Kupchan 2012).
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Further Reading on E-International Relations
