Contesting the Selective Moralism of the Liberal International Order: A Behavioural Political Economy of Trust, Legitimacy and Sovereignty in the Non-Western World

Abstract

Why do non-Western states keep falling back on sovereignty and non-interference when liberal partners would prefer them to do otherwise? Treating that question as clashing values, or regime survival alone, misses what the diplomats themselves often say more bluntly — the rules are not applied the same way to everyone. This article works through the intuition with the tools of behavioural political economy. I read non-Western contestation of the liberal order, and specifically the diplomatic grammar of ASEAN and its neighbours, as a calibrated response to repeated experience of selective moralism: identical human-rights, use-of-force and sanctions claims pressed hard against some, waved through for others. The argument unfolds across three cases drawn from a corpus built in Scopus, Web of Science and HeinOnline (2014–2025), together with regional declarations and UN General Assembly resolutions — ASEAN's handling of the post-2021 Myanmar crisis; the uneven Southeast Asian reception of the 2016 South China Sea award; and the remarkably stable non-Western coalition against unilateral coercive measures. Drawing on Mayer, Davis and Schoorman (1995), Levi (1998), Tyler (2006), Beetham (1991) and Tallberg and Zürn (2019), and on fieldwork-informed observation across Asia, Africa and the Persian Gulf, I find that sovereignty operates here less as ideology than as commitment device — cheap to signal, costly to break, reassuring to neighbours whose regimes look nothing like each other but who share an interest in not being singled out next. Ontological security sharpens the pattern wherever outside pressure reaches the constitutive features of the political self. The implication is uncomfortable for Western reformers: legitimacy beyond the North Atlantic depends less on adding new substantive norms than on demonstrating procedural consistency, and reformers who skip the procedural work tend to deepen the contestation they meant to dissolve. The contribution is a synthesis and a tractable analytical model, the Trust–Legitimacy–Sovereignty (TLS) model, for political science, international law and Southeast Asian studies.