Читать книгу A World Transformed - Danilo Türk - Страница 11
ОглавлениеA Unipolar or Multipolar World?
The basic structure of the international system has been a lively subject of discussion since the end of the Cold War and continues to be of central importance today.1 Has the world become unipolar since the end of the Cold War? Is today’s world, almost a generation later, moving in the direction of multipolarity or has it already become multipolar? What are the implications of the current evolution?
These questions can be answered in three stages:
First, it is necessary to recognize the growing body of opinion that the world is becoming increasingly polycentric and, in some ways, clearly multipolar. In fact, the period of the seemingly unipolar world has been relatively short and always open to question.
Second, it is useful to keep in mind both the nature of change in the past few years and the nature of the current type of multipolarity. While there are certain similarities between our era and the one before World War I, there are also very important differences. These distinctions make our world very different, perhaps less dangerous, but also more complicated to manage, than the world that existed a century ago.
Third, general characterizations in terms of unipolarity versus multipolarity do not help much when dealing with the existing problems of international peace, security and development. It is therefore important to juxtapose the evolving general pattern of international relations with ones which are more specific ←3 | 4→and geographically defined, such as the patterns in Eurasia, in particular. This is necessary because the actual issues of international relations always arise in geographically-defined circumstances that also offer a large part of the solutions – to the extent that solutions are possible.
Let us therefore try to answer the questions in three stages.
First, a perfectly unipolar world is not possible and has never existed since the international scene constituted itself in the form of a pluralistic international community several centuries ago. The phenomenon of a pluralistic international system is usually traced back to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended religious wars in Europe. These questions of unipolarity and multipolarity can be discussed in the global context as well.
Unipolar systems did exist during a period of the Roman Empire, in the first centuries AD and in the Chinese Empire of the same period, during the Han Dynasty. Each of these empires represented the “known world” at the time and were characterized by a central, unipolar authority. In later historical periods, several empires existed simultaneously. For example, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Moghul Empire and the Chinese Empire existed simultaneously in the sixteenth century. However, their interaction was limited, and it would be inaccurate to describe their simultaneous existence as a “multipolar world”. Multipolarity, as a meaningful political concept is a product of later periods of history, especially the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Subsequently, this multipolarity was changed into the bipolarity of the Cold War, which dominated the second half of the twentieth century.
In the 1990s, during the post-cold war era, the prevalence of the United States was sometimes compared to that of Ancient Rome. However, that was more an effective metaphor than a serious analytical proposition. A careful look at this era reveals a more complex relationship among the most powerful international players expressed, for example, in the trade-offs made in the United Nations Security Council in 1994, when Security Council permanent members tacitly agreed on their respective leading roles in the crisis situations in Haiti, the Caucasus and Rwanda. The geographic and historical reasons for the distribution of leading roles among the US, Russia and France were clear and were thus accepted de facto by the wider international community. The result was not unipolarity comparable with the Roman Empire, but rather a cooperative scheme resembling the concert of powers of the nineteenth century.
In the 1990s, the United States, the world’s leading military, economic and political power, was described as the “indispensable nation” by Madeleine Albright, the US Ambassador to the UN and later US Secretary of State.2 Let us think about this choice of words which conveys two messages: American power and centrality ←4 | 5→in international relations and also an invitation to cooperate. Indispensability is a two-way street: the central player is indispensable to the others, but it can only succeed with an appropriate level of cooperation provided by the others. Multipolarity is implicit here and in practice, it depends on the quality of cooperation among the key players. The UN has witnessed many examples of this pattern. Various crises around the world could not have been successfully addressed without the participation of the US, the indispensable nation, but each of the solutions required the cooperation of others, in some cases, the key regional players and in others, additional permanent members of the Security Council.
Developments in the late 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a cooperative pattern which strengthened the role of the United Nations and the UN Security Council in particular, as a place of coordination and cooperation among the major powers. While not perfect, this pattern dominated the UN’s work and reached many areas of international relations, allowing for a high level of global strategic stability. This is an important achievement: strategic stability existed despite clear military imbalance. US military spending, the sole remaining superpower, was higher than that of all the other major powers (i.e. Russia, China, India, Japan and Europe) combined. Strategic stability in this situation of imbalance was an important element of global peace. It preserved, at least for the time being, the necessary rational state behavior with regard to nuclear weapons and enhanced the importance of nuclear non-proliferation as a central point for global peace.
The twenty-first century started with a shock when the US was attacked on September 11, 2001. The superpower’s response was strong and dominated by an overly militarized reaction to the threat of terrorism, called the “the war on terror”. This response culminated in the war against Iraq in 2003. Now, more than ten years after the war, it is clear that one of the war’s many effects was to demonstrate the limits of American unilateral action. In the aftermath of the war, the US returned to its role as the indispensable nation, the phrase coined a decade and a half earlier, and thus buried the notion of unipolarity.
This brings us to the second-stage answer. The first decade of the twenty-first century brought rise to several phenomena, long in the making, which define our world as essentially pluralistic, if not clearly multipolar. China’s economic rise, the emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group and the G20 all marked an important change in the global economic balance of power, one with the necessary though not yet visible strategic and military consequences.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 made its own contribution to the change. The EU’s relative decline of power and influence is probably not irreversible, but the EU will have to make a great effort to establish itself as a major global player. The US, on the other hand, was more successful in overcoming the crisis and opened ←5 | 6→a new chapter in its global role, which initially looked much more collective than unilateral in its outlook.
These changes cited above had a major impact on the global security, economic and political landscape which has moved towards multipolarity. However, a note of caution is necessary here. The situation now cannot be equated with the multipolarity and balance of power of the nineteenth century. Similar to earlier historical periods, the major powers of our era compete and cooperate, but unlike previous periods, today’s cooperation levels and interdependence is qualitatively much higher. Interdependence is measured daily in stock markets around the world and is a constant reminder that competition must be kept within limits. None of today’s major powers can afford competition which would destroy the existing economic equilibrium. The cost would simply be too high and would necessarily have political and security consequences beyond acceptable levels for each of these global players.
An additional feature of the current global pluralism is the growing importance of various security arrangements, both global and regional. These have been strengthened in the past two decades and have produced positive effects for global security and development. The number of large-scale armed conflicts had been decreasing until 2011, and there was a growing contribution to this trend by international security structures, underpinned by real power. The UN Security Council continued to play its role as the global body with primary responsibility for international peace and security. However, in the period following 2011, the situation deteriorated. The military conflicts in Libya, Syria and Ukraine were the main hotbeds of crisis, while, international security weakened and relations among the main powers were deteriorating.
On the other hand, international cooperative regimes such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Bretton Woods institutions have been largely maintained. They need further change and reform to better represent the changing distribution of economic and financial power, but this is not an impossible task. Reform and adjustment should be the order of the day for all international institutions, including the United Nations.
Third, how do these changes affect security issues today? This question can only be fully be answered with reference to regionally defined realities. The past two decades have continued to demonstrate the critical importance of the geographic imperative in today’s increasingly multipolar world. Therefore, I suggest that the third, and most important part of the answer to the question of multipolarity should be considered in relation to these geographic realities, especially Eurasia.
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When Sir Halford Mackinder, a British geographer and political thinker, and founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), published his celebrated article “The Geographical Pivot of History” in 1904, he explained global geography as consisting of the “global ocean” covering nine-twelfths of the globe, the “World-Island” consisting of Eurasia and Africa, and the lands of the “Outer Insular Crescent” included the Americas, Australia and smaller islands. He argued that the World-Island dominated the world, and that Europe and Asia were intrinsically linked. In his analysis, Europe was, in essence, a peninsula with a disproportionately long seacoast, which made it a strong maritime power and helped establish its historically dominant role. Nevertheless, Europe remained a peninsula, while the pivot area on which the fate of great world empires rested was the Heartland of Central Asia.3
Mackinder’s theory strongly influenced political thinking in the twentieth century and inspired much of the geostrategic thinking leading to World War II as well as post-war arrangements. Europe lost its earlier dominant role after World War II and was replaced by the North Atlantic Alliance. Together with the United States, the main part of the “Outer Insular Crescent,” Europe is no longer a mere peninsula, but an important part of a strong transatlantic power, capable of projecting global influence.
For most of the twentieth century, the Asian part of the “World-Island” was dominated by the existence of the Soviet Union and its relations with China. This has changed dramatically since the collapse of Soviet Union and the rise of China, but this pivot area in Central Asia remains as important as ever.
The geopolitics of the post-cold war era has not yet fully crystallized and the outcome that might be expected from the current development of global multipolarity has not emerged yet.4 Assuming that war is not the preferred option for any of the principal players, there are two main strategic behavior options for the main power in the future: containment and partnership.
Containment has been historically tested and lends itself easily to the military logic of the threat of war while the preferred objective is avoiding war. This worked in the distant as well as recent past. At the time of the “Great Game” during the nineteenth century, the protection of British India inspired Great Britain to apply the policy of containment towards Russia. This led to the arrangements between the two countries with regards to Afghanistan and Iran, and to the multilateral arrangements for the Eastern Mediterranean (the Regime of the Straits of Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and the arrangement for Cyprus).
During the Cold War, the US-led containment policy of the Soviet Union was central to the whole bipolar system of that era. In the past two decades, various forms of containment have been applied by Russia and China, against the ←7 | 8→perceived threat of radical Islam in Central Asia. The United States applied the policy of containment against Iran and against the perceived possibility of restoration, in one form or another, of Russian domination of Central Asia.
Containment is historically known, and it is tempting to replicate or develop it in an appropriately modified form. It is easy today to imagine the philosophy of containment applied by the US and its allies to China regarding the East and South China Seas. The practice and potential variety of containment policies is rich indeed. While there are situations where containment is the necessary policy option, it is hardly ever the optimum one. It is therefore necessary to explore the alternatives: engagement, cooperation and partnership.
Partnership, on the other end of the policy choice spectrum, is not easy to establish. It requires a high level of trust, well-developed practical cooperation and a shared vision of the future, based, ideally, upon shared values. Taken together, these requirements represent a very tall order. They also require a great amount of practical innovation. All this must be kept in mind during discussions aimed at partnerships in the Eurasian region. States have to carefully measure specific initiatives and practical policy steps by the high standards implied in the concept of partnership.
The experience of Turkey – the country in the middle of Eurasia – is particularly important. Turkey’s initiatives vis-a-vis its immediate neighbors in 2009 to 2014 were motivated by the wish to resolve some of the persistent problems in the region and, through that, to raise the level of trust needed for future cooperation and partnerships. The initiatives concerning Turkish relations with Armenia, Cyprus and Iraq were the clearest examples. The efforts of those years (2009–2013) to settle the situation with the Kurdish population within Turkey fell into this category also. Turkey’s role in the effort to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and the joint Turkish-Brazilian initiative of 2010 dealing with the Iranian nuclear program are examples of efforts to build the necessary trust for effective problem-solving to identify solutions to the most complex issues in the Eurasian region. It is important to note that all these initiatives demonstrated strong commitment and a vigorous spirit of innovation. However, these promising initiatives were blocked due to a combination of international obstacles and domestic developments in Turkey. They showed, once again, how difficult it is to develop genuine partnerships in areas characterized by historic grievances and current political complications. Optimism is sometimes understandable, but it can rarely serve as a reliable guide towards the future.
So, what does the experience of the post-cold war era suggest for the future? Here are some tentative suggestions:
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First, the movement towards a new multipolar world is clearly visible and most probably irreversible.
Second, the multipolarity of the twenty-first century is characterized by an unprecedented level of economic interdependence which calls for extremely careful management of security issues. Security in the multipolarity of our era requires much more than pondering on the military might of the main powers.
Third, the multipolarity of the twenty-first century is not totally dependent on the US, China and Russia, the key global political players and nuclear powers. However, their specific responsibility is to continue to ensure the strategic stability of the world and rationality about nuclear weapons, including the continued viability of nuclear non-proliferation. All states, however, can contribute to the management of security issues.
Fourth, developments in Eurasia will continue to have a critical influence on the evolution of multipolarity. Cooperation among the key players in the stabilization of the situation in Afghanistan, for example, will be an important indicator of the quality of future multipolarity. Relations among the main powers of our era can lead to either new types of cooperation and partnership or degenerate into a host of containment policies and, in the worst case, armed conflicts. The importance of international security mechanisms, especially regional mechanisms is growing. There is thus a need to develop regional security arrangements in Asia, in Central Asia and Northeast Asia in particular.
(Address at the Eurasian Economic Summit, Marmara Forum, Istanbul, 11 April 2013)
Notes
1. 1 Among the vast literature on the subject, the following sample could be suggested: henry Kissinger, World Order, Penguin Press, New York 2014; Charles Kupchan, No One’s World, Oxford University Press, 2012, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power. For a more optimistic view see Kishore Mahbubani, The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World, Public affairs, New York 2013.
2. 2 A succinct reflection on this concept in Xenia Wickett, Why US Remains an Indispensable Nation, Chatham House, 30 June 2015.
3. 3 Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: London, Penguin, 1944; originally published London: Constable, 1922.
4. 4 For a more recent discussion see Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, Random House, 2013.
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