Anxiety surrounding the rise of China, the rise of the rest, or the “revisionism” of certain countries reflects more than fears that those governments will use their new strength to settle scores.

More worrying is the prospect of a restructuring of international relations and creation of a new “global order” with new rules and guiding principles.

Asia’s rise over the last three decades, its centrality to the global economy and the wealth that it has accumulated as a result have focused attention on regional thinking about preferred conceptions of order. The long-held belief that Asian societies have different preferences from those of the West, especially regarding the relationship between the individual and the state — most particularly when it comes to democracy and human rights — has spurred considerable hand-wringing about the impact of a greater Asian role in global rules-making.

A new assessment argues that concern is overstated. Asian societies have different views of how the world should work, but in many important ways, those differences are not so striking. They seek changes, but not wholesale reconstruction of the global order. In perhaps the most important ways, they prefer a restoration of principles first articulated by the West and a consistency in their application that truly aligns rhetoric with reality.

The conventional wisdom is that we live in a liberal international order, or LIO, constructed by the victors of World War II. The main features of the LIO are that states are the key actors and possessors of the primary rights and responsibilities; those states are independent, equal and their interactions are based on the rule of law; and it promotes “liberal” values, such as open markets and free trade in economic relations and democracy and human rights in politics.

Like most simplifications, that’s overly simple. Amitav Acharya, noted scholar of Southeast Asian affairs at American University, says that calling it “global” is hubris: “the Soviet bloc, China, India, Indonesia and a good part of the ‘Third World’ were outside of it ... that order was little more than the U.S.-U.K.-West Europe-Australasian configuration.” Harvard’s Alastair Iain Johnston identified at least eight issue-specific orders (e.g., military, trade, information and political development). And we can take as given the exceptions, exemptions and hypocrisies that leading powers have taken since the LIO’s inception that undermine any claim to equality or universality.

Those exceptions fuel fears that a redistribution of wealth would force a rethinking of order. The question then is whether we should expect a power transformation — new countries slipping into old roles (“meet the new boss, same as the old boss”) — or order transformation in which new rules, principles and procedures are articulated.

A decade or so ago, it was argued that China’s rise — a power shift — would yield a new order as Beijing imposed and the region accepted tianxia (a Chinese concept for global governance), in which it is the “Middle Kingdom” and other countries its tributaries. That isn’t going to happen, claim Kanti Bajpai of Singapore National University and Evan Laksmana of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Asian countries respect power but they won’t kowtow.

Instead, they argue in an important new collection of country studies that examine “Asian Conceptions of International Order” (available in a special edition of the journal International Affairs), “major Asian powers are largely supportive of the reigning constitutive as well as regulatory norms and institutions.” Southeast Asia may be suspicious of U.S. hegemony or a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” but the region isn’t implacably opposed to the LIO.

Governments throughout East Asia support independence, equality and the rule of law, concepts that facilitate their contribution to and shaping of international relations, despite power asymmetries. Those concepts gird their resistance to domination by outside powers — or any major power — and there is no indication that those governments would accept another hegemon in Washington’s place.

They are uncomfortable with the idea of “a progressive march toward liberal democracy,” but that doesn’t equate to outright opposition to the idea. Non-Western countries have made considerable contributions to international human rights law and institutions, with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations making particular efforts to embed them in its bodies.

So, rather than liberal international order, Asians prefer “rules-based international order,” or RIO. Discomfort with the word “liberal,” report Bajpai and Laksmana, reflects “fear they will be held to standards that they reject as being unfair or incompatible with their traditional or contemporary values.”

These findings shouldn’t be a surprise. Countries like Japan and South Korea may complain about status, but they are thriving democracies and market economies. The LIO reflects in large measure their values and interests.

While uncomfortable with its value-oriented components, Southeast Asian nations rely on foundational principles of the LIO — sovereignty, sovereign equality and multilateralism. Typical is the thinking of Malaysia, which according to Cheng Chwee Kiuk of the National University of Malaysia in the IA volume, views the LIO arrangements as “necessary, but flawed and problematic.” Dylan Loh, of Nanyang Technological University, explained that Singapore acknowledges the “crucial role” that the LIO has played in its development since independence, even though it seeks system reform to better reflect its interests and those of other small and developing states. A priority is the disassociation of “liberal” from international order to prevent the use of human rights as a cudgel in geopolitical fights.

Even Vietnam “increasingly identifies itself as a beneficiary, if not a stakeholder, of the LIO” — credit the economic rules and norms that have increasingly integrated the country into global supply chains — despite doubts about the “liberal” dimension as well.

As Bajpai and Laksmana point out, the LIO has provided those countries and others with real benefits — most especially the economic engagement that has spurred national development and conferred legitimacy (meaning popular support) for governments that improve the lives of their citizens.

Critical, however, are the LIO’s foundational principles — sovereignty, equality and rule of law — that protect regional countries from predation by big powers in the neighborhood. Whatever the cultural affinities, there is no appetite for subordination or hierarchy as an operating principle of regional order.

There may not have to be. While Indonesia and India, two of Asia’s largest powers, are unhappy with their status in the world, they still seek reform within the system, rather than its overturning. As Bajpai and Laksmana report, those governments want “recognition that they should be at the high table in global institutions and that they should increasingly transition from ‘norm takers’ to ‘norm shapers.’"

Neither of those governments poses the same challenge to the LIO as does China; but in this telling, even Beijing isn’t the revisionist power that it is sometimes assumed to be. In analysis that tracks that of other China scholars — Johnston among them — Ruonan Liu, of Beijing’s University of International Business and Economics, and Songpo Yang, with Tsinghua University, argue that China “continues to exhibit a significant degree of support” for the existing world order and shows no intent to replace it. It backs the core institutions of the LIO — the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank — and few governments are more fervent in their backing of the principles of sovereignty and sovereign equality. More concisely, Johnston claims that “the narrative of a U.S.-dominated liberal international order being challenged by a revisionist China makes little conceptual or empirical sense.”

Although Beijing can be considered a status quo power in some respects, Liu and Yang note that “it does wish to see an international order that recognizes its great power status, provides a more equitable distribution of benefits and allows resistance to some liberal norms that may jeopardize its core interest and harm its regime security.”

In an important book published a few years ago, Saadia Pekkanen of the University of Washington collected a gaggle of analyses that concluded that Asian governance would not depart significantly from prevailing models. The biggest change would be greater respect for sovereignty as states interacted.

Fortification of that principle of international order has been deemed “the Eastphalian model,” a twist on the legal order created by treaties signed in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War. In other words, Asia’s revisionist impulses are really a return to first principles; they are, concluded one international legal specialist, “the perfection of Westphalia.”

In other words, Asia’s rise looks like less of a threat to the world order than many feared. Regional governments recognize the realities of power but see current arrangements — including the U.S. alliance system — as protective of their sovereignty and national interests.

Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of “Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions” (Georgetown University Press, 2019).