The Selective Moralism Trap: Trust, Legitimacy, and Sovereignty in the Contestation of the Liberal International Order

Federico  Verri

doi:10.60027/iarj.2026.e301992

ผู้แต่ง

Federico Verri British School of Timișoara, Timișoara, Romania https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5841-0674

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60027/iarj.2026.e301992

คำสำคัญ:

Behavioural Political Economy, Trust and Legitimacy, Selective Moralism, Multipolarity, Sovereignty and Security

บทคัดย่อ

Background and Aims: This conceptual review article examines why accusations of Western double standards have become a durable frame in the contestation of the liberal international order. Existing international-relations scholarship has explained this contestation mainly through changes in material power, norm diffusion, or status politics. Less attention has been given to the behavioral micro-foundations through which perceived hypocrisy becomes a self-reinforcing source of mistrust. The article, therefore, asks how perceptions of selective moralism are aggregated into state-level diplomatic behavior and what this mechanism means for trust, legitimacy, sovereignty, and security in a multiplex world order.

Methodology: The study uses a conceptual review design. It synthesizes literature on liberal-order contestation, political trust, procedural justice, and behavioral political economy. Five paired historical episodes from 1999 to 2024 are used as illustrative cases, selected because each pair contains a comparable norm claim but divergent Western framing. The cases are not treated as a coded dataset; they are used for theory-building comparison, mechanism clarification, boundary-condition identification, and the development of falsifiable expectations.

Results: The review reveals that the selective-moralism frame resonates because it transforms diffuse resentments into perceptions of hypocrisy. These perceptions are then mediated by leaders’ narrative strategies, bureaucratic pathologies, media hype, partisan competition, and coalition calculus. The two episodes illustrate a common pattern: asymmetric norm enforcement, perception of fairness violations, motivated social cognition, trust displacement, and hedging. Structural realist theories point to enabling conditions; constructivist theories point to normative contestation. Behavioral political economy explains how the accusation of hypocrisy becomes pervasive and durable.

Conclusion: The selective-moralism trap is conceptualized here as a behavioral force multiplier, not as an analytical substitute for structural realism or constructivism. Institutions that seek to rebuild trust also need to mitigate perceptions of procedural unfairness on their own merits, through consistency, transparency, correctability, and representativeness. Three practical measures are proposed: procedural-fairness audits, reform of international-relations curricula, and early-warning indicators linking legitimacy shortfalls to conflict-prevention mechanisms. Keywords: behavioral political economy; selective moralism; liberal international order; procedural justice; multipolarity.

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