Editor’s note for April 25, 2023

Dear reader:

South Africa will quit the International Criminal Court (ICC), which last month issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to President Cyril Ramaphosa.

The proximate cause: South Africa is hosting a meeting of the leaders of the BRICS countries in March — the grouping that was originally the figment of a Goldman Sachs analyst’s imagination but has developed into a regular summit between the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Putin will attend the meeting, and under ICC rules, South Africa would have to detain him on arrival.

And so, if you’ll forgive an execrable pun, another brick falls from the wall of the rules-based international order. Some argue that the rules-based international order is a fiction anyway: The U.S., after all, is not even a signatory to the ICC (neither is China; Russia used to be but withdrew in 2016). It’s also a common argument, especially amongst apologists for Russia and China, that the rules-based international order just means the U.S. gets to do what it pleases. On the other hand, there is also growing suspicion that Beijing has bent the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other global groups to its own will.

But whatever your view of these matters, it’s unquestionable that many multilateral organizations are under increasing strain, and also that the Chinese government has, for a long time, been attempting to set up new organizations with rules that are more comfortable for it than many of the norms that came about after World War II. BRICS is one such organization — its first meeting was in 2006, when it was just BRIC, as South Africa had not yet joined.

Beijing is also forming new groups that don’t seem explicitly political in nature but are nonetheless aiming to give China greater “discourse power,” as Communist Party theorists like to call the ability to shape  global conversations.

Today, state media are trumpeting the newest such organization, which gives us our Word of the Day: China’s newly formed Asian Cultural Heritage Conservation Alliance (亚洲文化遗产保护联盟 yàzhōu wénhuà yíchǎn bǎohù liánméng).

This new “alliance” is today’s top story of both state news wire Xinhua (English, Chinese) and the Party paper the People’s Daily.

A decade from now, the “rules-based international order” is probably going to mean something very different, and there’s no going back.