For three decades after the end of the Cold War, non-traditional threats and their management dominated the perception and understanding of international security. Intra-state conflicts and humanitarian interventions, the war on terror, the financial crisis, migration or the pandemic sketched the main lines of a political and intellectual landscape prone to notice a continuous erosion of the traditional foci on nation-states and their military preoccupations due to the processes of globalization. Facing these challenges, the major powers, connected by a certain consensus on fundamental issues, commonly coped with the ubiquitous crises. The outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war dramatically marked the slow, even unnoticed, change of this perspective. As the ‘classical’ optics regains its privileged position as the main approach to international security, this conflict also indicates a revision of the international order, too.
The aim of this paper is to question the noticeable current changes of the international order, based on three main arguments. Firstly, a certain de-legitimization of the great powers’ military interventions accompanies the reassertion of the statist understanding of international security. Secondly, the liberal values are still the very basis of the international order, as they were in the last thirty years. In this realm, the focus moves from trans-national actors, policies, and institutions towards national and international ones, a Wilsonian conception slightly replacing the cosmopolitan approach, of Kantian inspiration. Finally, the global issues do not disappear, but become the premises of the present reshaping of the international order.
Keywords: international order, globalization, liberal values, great power politics, Russo-Ukrainian war