Non-Hegemony

More than three decades ago, John Ruggie offered a definition of one of the most vexed terms in political science. Multilateralism, he wrote, was a group of “institutional forms which coordinate relations among three or more states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct” and operate “without regard to the particularistic interests of the parties or the strategic exigencies that may exist in any specific occurrence.” Today, amid rapidly resurgent economic nationalism and increasing geopolitical tension, it has become clear that the postwar system of multilateral institutions is under direct and sustained assault—often from its erstwhile sponsors. 

In trade, the US’ obstruction of the WTO system has rendered the global regime dysfunctional, contributing to deepening protectionism and the multiplication of trade restrictions. In security, the UN notes that “paralysis in the Security Council and deliberations of disarmament bodies, as well as persistent geopolitical rivalries, are alarming signs of a multilateralism that has run out of steam.” The credibility of international law has foundered, as Israel and Russia have blatantly dismissed rulings and injunctions from the UN and the International Court of Justice. The UN Secretary General has affirmed that the institution faces “imminent financial collapse” as over 80 percent of states have not paid their membership fees to the organization. 

NATO likewise faces existential threats from within its own ranks, while remilitarization has deepened fragmentation in security arrangements. In global health, the politicization of vaccine distribution during the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the empty promise of multilateralism in responding to major global crises. Climate governance is in peril, with UN environmental conferences captured by fossil fuel interests and the second Trump Administration engaging in prolific climate obstructionism.

In short, multilateral cooperation has been thrown into visible disarray across a number of issue areas, as leading states increasingly pursue unilateral actions, obstruct mechanisms, and bypass or disengage from traditional institutions. What explains this turn against multilateralism, and what might take shape in its place? Here we will trace the cause of the breakdown to the crisis of the neoliberal order, marked by US hegemonic decay, the rise of state capitalism, erosion of liberal internationalist norms, and the “Second Cold War.” This crisis has produced a non-hegemonic world order in which powerful actors are encouraged to reconfigure multilateralism or abandon it entirely. The emerging post-multilateral world, we argue, resembles Colin Crouch’s conception of “post-democracy”: institutions persist, but with their internal logics and functions hollowed out. 

A Declining Order

Each cycle of capitalist development generates new hegemonic orders: new constellations of ideas, states, and social structures that legitimate its governing apparatus and coerce subordinated classes in the system. The post-WWII order was constructed by the US and sustained through such a combination of coercion and consent. On the one hand, it rested on domestic repression of communists and radical labour movements, and support for military coups and interventions in the newly decolonized world. On the other, the rules within Bretton Woods institutions were developed through multilateral means, negotiated between the leading states, and framed as promoting the collective good, rather than advancing narrow American interests.

The multilateral order was thus a historically-contingent phenomenon, one also shaped by the bipolar structure of the international system, as the US and leading social forces extended concessions to subordinate states and cross-class coalitions in the face of the Soviet alternative. While those concessions diminished significantly after the Cold War, the order retained some degree of consent, and continued to center on the US as architect and arbiter of international rules and norms.

But hegemonic orders periodically break down, as new forms of production and new social relations erode their institutional and ideological foundations. The present conjuncture represents such a period of organic crisis. Around the world, neoliberalism’s accumulation model is exhausted, its institutions are under assault, and its orthodoxies are being overturned. Yet, despite this, no single actor has articulated an encompassing alternative, resulting in an apolar, non-hegemonic condition characterized by multiple centres of power. None has the capacity to provide either the hegemonic leadership or the public goods necessary for stable regional, let alone global, order. 

In this context, intensifying geopolitical rivalries alongside the resurgence of state capitalism have altered the incentive structure for states to support and engage with multilateral institutions. The result is the proliferation of post-multilateral orientations, wherein states increasingly attack or circumvent institutions they perceive to constrain their strategic action.

This situation is the result of two successive hegemonic crises. The first, taking place in the 1970s, challenged the postwar regime of Fordist accumulation centred on mechanized, standardised mass production and consumption of consumer goods. Out of the decline of this order emerged a new, neoliberal consensus that revived growth and profitability through offshoring, financial deregulation, privatization, commodification, and a new flexible labour regime. 

Yet the very success of neoliberalism produced the conditions for its unravelling. New poles of accumulation emerged across the global economy, particularly in the Global South, where integration into global value chains and transnational networks of finance, trade, and ownership empowered new business classes. The growing international presence of transnational corporations, state-owned enterprises, and sovereign wealth funds from these regions reshaped global competition and generated geoeconomic tensions. Although these actors did not directly challenge US primacy, they demanded greater representation within global governance institutions. Despite some adaptation, such as the creation of the G20 after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), multilateral institutions became increasingly gridlocked, unable to accommodate the widening array of interests. 

The GFC also exposed the contradictions of debt-based accumulation and speculative finance, leading to stagnation in the productive economy. Subsequent policy responses deepened inequality, precarity, and political polarization, paving the way for ‘anti-globalist’ forces and populist leaders who, though still committed to neoliberal principles, rejected global governance itself. 

Global governance, already paralysed by gridlock, fragmented further in the 2010s as informal institutions and multi-stakeholder partnerships proliferated, both as pragmatic responses to the failures of multilateralism and as mechanisms to manage dissent within a neoliberal framework. With the rise of right-wing populism, the US grew increasingly reluctant to bear the costs of global leadership, resisting IMF and World Bank reforms that would acknowledge rising powers, and instead using these institutions to externalize the costs of its own post-crisis recovery onto the Global South.

State-led Governance

The historical sequence that followed has deepened this organic crisis through two interrelated transformations. First, capitalism has entered a phase of waning dynamism, characterized by industrial overcapacity across multiple sectors, saturation in global product markets, sluggish labour productivity, and weak manufacturing growth. These trends have enhanced geoeconomic rivalry in trade, investment, and technological leadership, as firms compete over dwindling market opportunities within an environment shaped by two disruptions: the green transition, and proliferation of digital general-purpose technologies. 

Second, states across North and South have responded to this tense environment—punctuated by crises such as Covid-19 and Russia’s war on Ukraine—by reinventing their roles as industrial policy actors, investor-shareholders, and direct owners of capital and assets, what some have called a new state capitalism. Under this regime, state-owned corporate entities that combine commercial and geopolitical mandates (such as investment funds, policy banks, state enterprises, and state-backed venture capital firms) have vastly expanded their assets across a wide range of sectors, including advanced technology, manufacturing, real estate, media, banking, clean energy, and infrastructure. 

These statist entities have become key vectors of global capital accumulation. Governments have also reverted to muscular statism, deploying industrial policies, spatial development strategies, economic nationalism, and trade and investment restrictions to reshape the transnational economic networks underpinning globalisation. Consequently, the connective tissue of the world economy—its financial, trade, production, energy, and technological networks—has become the locus of intense contestation among established powers, non-Western challengers, and mid-range states.

Unlike its twentieth-century predecessor, this Second Cold War is not defined by bloc-based rivalry or territorial containment, but by state-led struggles to control the strategic networks of global capitalism. Securing key nodes within these networks enables the weaponization of interdependence and confers competitive advantage, market share, resource access, and financial returns, while allowing states to erect barriers to rivals. As governments increasingly mobilize state ownership and intervention to pursue such geopolitical objectives, this new state capitalism has become the defining feature of the contemporary global economy.

These shifts pose significant challenges for multilateral global governance. Because global economic institutions were not designed for a world in which states play active economic roles, they have struggled to adapt to this new state-capitalist reality while attempting to preserve market-centric regulation. Their adaptive capacity is further constrained by the diverse and often conflicting state interests now playing out within and through them. At the same time, emerging network-based forms of geoeconomic competition make it increasingly difficult to harmonize transnational capitalist interests, even in ostensibly technical areas such as standard-setting. 

New coalitions of elites have formed, linking major capitalists in technology, energy, and advanced manufacturing with defence and national security institutions. These alliances fuse economic and security imperatives but show little evidence of constructing cross-class hegemonic projects through compromise with labour. This in turn intensifies the class contradictions of neoliberalism. 

At the global level, the US has largely abandoned its hegemonic role. Now merely dominant, it is increasingly unwilling to bear the costs of providing the public goods that once sustained multilateralism, instead using its economic might to advance mercantilist interests at the expense of both allies and rivals, in a manner that accelerates the decay of the neoliberal order. 

Yet with other states equally enmeshed in the crisis of neoliberalism, none is capable of filling this power vacuum. The result is an increasingly apolar geopolitical structure and non-hegemonic world order defined by competing and conflictual state capitalisms. A vestige of the old order, the multilateralism system is increasingly perceived as an obstacle to both national and capitalist interests, prompting states to sabotage, bypass, divert, or disengage from its rules. 

Table 1. Strategies to undermine multilateralism

Strategy	Definition
Sabotage	Deliberate efforts to weaken, obstruct, or dismantle multilateral institutions, norms, or principles
Bypassing	Creation or use of alternative, non-multilateral institutions or frameworks to circumvent multilateral processes
Diversion	Co-option or capture of multilateral institutions, redirecting their resources and agendas towards narrow or parochial interests
Disengagement	Partial or full withdrawal of major powers from multilateral institutions, ranging from non-attendance to complete exit

Post-Multilateral Development

State responses to this structural crisis have had a profound impact on multilateralism across various arenas. Take development. International development institutions have been deliberately sabotaged through deep cuts to foreign aid budgets and agencies, alongside persistent efforts to hollow out multilateral rules on aid provision. The US has long been the largest provider of foreign aid, or Official Development Assistance (ODA); in 2024 it contributed $63 billion of the total $213 billion allocated to aid recipients and multilateral organizations. Last year, however, the Trump Administration—adopting the view of foreign aid as “a massive and open-ended global entitlement program captured by—and enriching—the progressive Left”—issued executive orders that froze funds, withdrew from several multilateral development bodies (including the WHO and multiple UN fora), and suspended contributions to the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the main multilateral forum for Western aid cooperation. 

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has likewise been hollowed out, with 86 percent of its projects terminated in 2025. This represents an existential threat to the multilateral development regime. Given US’s centrality in the system, the gutting of USAID and the broader ODA cuts have stripped funding from over 40 percent of the global humanitarian aid network, with UN agencies bearing the brunt. Beyond withdrawing funds, the Administration is repurposing aid as a “tool to dismantle global governance”, as USAID surveys now require recipients to confirm that their programs do not depend on international organizations—principally the UN—viewed as constraining US sovereignty and interests. Support for multilateral engagement has thus been replaced by a regime of “transactional sovereignty enforcement” in which alignment with US interests is a precondition for accessing what remains of US aid.

Beyond the US, major Western donors have also announced major aid cuts to channel resources towards rising defence spending. In February 2025, the UK announced it would reduce aid spending to 0.3 percent of gross national income in 2027 (the lowest level since 1999). Since then, further cuts have been rumoured, including cuts to the UK’s contribution to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In July 2025, France announced a “historic” €700 million in cuts to its aid budget (roughly 5 percent of the total), while Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium are also taking similar decisions. As Sam Huckstep and his co-authors note, “2025 will likely go down in history as the year donors set fire to their international development commitments.” Like in the US, these cuts reflect the “nationalisation of aid” which has risen over the past decade amid growing public antipathy towards such programs.

This fiscal retrenchment intersects with an increasing share of ODA now directed to items of nationalist concern, including support for private sector instruments and contributions to donors’ own Development Finance Institutions, which enable them to pursue commercial opportunities in middle-income countries.  In-donor refugee management costs have meanwhile absorbed a growing portion of ODA budgets over the past decade. In 2024, the UK spent four times more on hosting refugees domestically than on global health or humanitarian assistance.

Such changes have undermined the credibility of the OECD DAC and eroded ODA’s status as a distinctly concessional and developmental resource. As Oxfam put it, “donors have turned their aid pledges into a farce. Not only have they underdelivered more than $193 billion, but they have also funnelled nearly $30 billion into their own pockets by mislabelling what counts as aid.” Through cuts and rule revisions, DAC donors have sought to deliberately sabotage the development regime in line with their parochial interests.

Alongside these strategies of sabotage there has been a persistent dynamic of disengagement. Over the past fifteen years, DAC donors have steadily withdrawn from the collective multilateral agendas of the post-Cold War era, most notably the Development Effectiveness agenda, whose principles used to be unanimously endorsed. Donor commitment to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is also in doubt. The Trump Administration has declared that “the US rejects and denounces the SDGs, and it will no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course.” Such declarations build on right-wing populist rhetoric that foreign aid must advance national interests over global needs.

Progress towards the SDGs themselves is stagnating: only 35 percent of targets are currently “on track or making moderate progress,” while “nearly half are moving too slowly and, alarmingly, 18 percent are in reverse.” The ambition of leveraging billions in aid to mobilise trillions in private finance has largely failed. For Adam Tooze, the SDGs “look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy;” the “age of a politically neutral, universally endorsed development agenda is over.” 

Yet such acts of sabotage and disengagement do not portend the end of aid provision altogether. Funds have rather been redirected into national or strategic channels, bypassing multilateral structures and recasting cooperation on explicitly geopolitical terms. What remains of the US aid budget has been channelled to national institutions such as the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), which does not provide concessional finance but instead offers loans at near-commercial rates and equity investments aligned with US geopolitical and state-capitalist interests. The DFC has, for example, supported US firms mining copper in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is exploring rare earth metal projects in Greenland, and has been tasked with financing data centres in the US and beyond.

The repurposing of DFC’s operations evidence rapid changes in the composition of the US state, with the growing presence and influence of hawkish Silicon Valley tech giants working in close collaboration with national security agencies, defence contractors, and energy and mining conglomerates in pursuit of geopolitical, economic and security objectives. The State Department’s FY2026 budget request, for instance, states that the “DFC provides a cost-effective approach to make a significant strategic impact and counter China and other strategic competitors’ influence around the world.”

While self-interest and geopolitical concerns were always part of development assistance, aid provision during the Cold War was at least premised on enabling the development of the Global South as a means of combating the spread of communism. In this sense, it was a hegemonic concession, and indeed the developmental dimension of Bretton Woods that at least partially emerged as a result of Southern demands. 

By contrast in the emerging post-multilateral era, development assistance is increasingly subordinated to geopolitical or commercial priorities, abandoning any pretense of promoting development as a hegemonic concession. Calls for the “reform” of multilateral development institutions are driven by rationales of containment and competition. D.J. Nordquist—the World Bank’s former US executive director and a newly appointed Deputy Director-General at the WTO—has recently argued that “it is time for democratic and capitalist nations, led by the US, to stop believing the fiction that China can be a productive, responsible force in international organizations like the World Bank and IMF. Instead, [through these organisations] the US should seek to challenge and marginalise China.” Under Trump the US has sought to use the ostensibly multilateral World Bank to counter China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while also pressing it to scale back climate commitments and expand fossil fuel financing in line with US material interests. 

Although the UN development system has been the primary multilateral target of USAID cuts, the IMF and World Bank have been assured continued US support “so long as both reformed;” that is, so long as they help the US “reduce the trade surplus of China.” Similarly, while the EU launched the Global Gateway with multiple of partners in 2023 to ostensibly promote global infrastructure investment based on “trust,” “equal partnership,” and “transparency,” the initiative is in fact designed to advance the bloc’s economic, geopolitical and security interests, in a context of strategic competition with China and other rivals. Indeed, the EU’s commissioner for international partnerships and Global Gateway overseer Jozef Síkela can declare in the same breath that he “deeply believe[s] in the value of the multilateral system” and that its purpose today is to compete with China’s BRI, defend the interests of the EU, secure “economic security and access to raw materials,” and “tackle the root causes of irregular migration.”

More broadly, diversion has intensified through the rise of “earmarked” lending to multilaterals over the past decade: the allocation of ODA on the condition that funds are spent on donors’ nationally determined projects and agendas. Although earmarking dates back to the Cold War, its rapid rise and current prevalence signals a shift “from collaborative approaches centred on aid effectiveness towards a paradigm driven by national interests and geopolitical strategies.” This trend undermines multilateral bureaucratic capacity by adding reporting and administrative burdens while core contributions stagnate or decline. It also accelerates the “bilateralization” of the multilateral system.

As core funding continues to fall alongside retrenched aid budgets, the normalization of earmarking further entrenches the instrumentalization of multilateral institutions for nationalist ends. That is to say, this shift both reflects and reinforces the post-multilateral condition, as multilateral bodies become tools for donor interests rather than collective problem-solving.

Towards a Southern Multilateralism

As we have argued, contemporary global governance is increasingly defined by a post-multilateral condition, characterized by the hollowing out of multilateral norms and principles. There are, however, simultaneous efforts to resist institutional decay and shore up existing structures by reforming and revising them. The most central protagonist in this respect is China. In the realm of global development, China has made explicit its ambition to lead through initiatives such as the Global Development Initiative (GDI, launched in 2021), the Global Security Initiative, Global Civilization Initiative, and the cross-cutting Global Governance Initiative. These initiatives are simultaneously embedded within current global governance arrangements (such as the SDGs) and reflect China’s broader vision of world order, framed as ‘true multilateralism:’ a UN-based governance system prioritizing pluralism and expanded state sovereignty. 

As an attempt to operationalize China’s vision of world order through its “Community of Shared Future for Mankind,” the GDI can be interpreted as an effort to revise the multilateral development agenda away from liberal principles by—inter alia—prioritizing the “right to development” over civic-political norms. China’s vision therefore advances a “minimalist” multilateralism premised on pluralism, non-interference, and China’s role within the UN as primus inter pares. Yet the scale of Chinese and broader Southern multilateralism remains limited to filling the the gaps left by Western retrenchment. Overall, Global South countries face a qualitatively different development regime: less multilateral, more fragmented and apolar, and lacking the collective hegemonic project that once provided a minimal degree of cohesion and stability.