Shifting Rhetorics on International Order among Global Leaders

• In Event: IOs and International Order

Abstract

Global leaders' rhetoric on the future of the international order has shifted in recent years, increasingly centring on the concepts of sovereignty, autonomy, and protection. Our paper investigates how globael leaders have rhetorically accommodated the growing tensions between the rules-based LIO and its primary challenger, the power-based "sovereign territorial order" (STO). In a first step, we use latent semantic scaling and apply it to the corpus of UN General Debate speeches to classify speeches along the latent dimension of liberal v. sovereign principles. Next, we posit that in the European political space, the institutionalization of political authority on both the national and the international level opens a discursive space for two further, intermediary notions of international order that move beyond the one-dimensional dualism between the LIO and the STO: "liberal nationalism" (rules-based & national) and "sovereign internationalism" (power-based & international). In the following empirical analysis, we test our expectation that European leaders have increasingly converged on these intermediary notions of international order in reaction to the dilemma between national community benefits and transnational scale benefits. We apply the latent scale developed above to a translated subset of the "EUSpeech" corpus of roughly 5,000 speeches of European leaders between 2007 and 2020 to classify speeches along the two dimensions of liberal v. sovereign principles and national v. international authority. Both conceptually and empirically, our paper adds to studies on the contemporary nature of European integration and the crisis of the liberal international order.

Author

• Jana Lipps, ETH Zurich