Still a Western World? Continuity and Change in Global Order

Africa, Latin America and the 'Asian century'

Sergio Fabbrini, Raffaele Marchetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315444826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Today, the debate on world order is intense. As is always the case in times of transition, the global restructuring of international affairs is generating a deep reflection on how the world is, and how it should be reorganized. After the long frozen period of the cold war and the subsequent years marked by US unipolarism, the world has begun the new millennium with profound shifts. The relative decline of the USA, the crisis in the European Union, the consolidation of the BRIC emerging economies, and the diffusion of the power to non-state actors all constitute significant elements that demand a new conceptualization of the rules of the global game.

In this pluralist and changing context, a number of different narratives are presented by the key actors in the international system. This book analyses these narratives in comparative terms by putting them in the wider framework of the transformation in global governance.

Part I Trends in global governance

DOI: 10.4324/9781315444840-2

1 Our new and better world

Robert Jervis

DOI: 10.4324/9781315444840-3

As many commentators have observed, much is new in international politics since the end of the Cold War. Contrary to the view of Kenneth Waltz and others who see the anarchic structure of international politics as both unchanging and establishing the most important patterns of international life (Waltz, 1959 and 1979),¹ even without a world government momentous changes can and have occurred. But, contrary to what is often argued, the key changes are not the spread of democracy, the rise of civil society and non-governmental organizations, the development of new norms and networks, and the concomitant decline of state power (and perhaps of power itself) (Naim, 2013), but the spread of peace, especially among the leading powers of the world, the end of much of the game of international politics played for the highest stakes, and the reduced prospects for other enormous changes in the near future.

My argument will proceed in three sections. After an introduction, I will elaborate the basic argument for the decline of great-power war, follow this with an analysis of what the new world means, and conclude by discussing the implications for when and why the US should resort to the use of force.

Introduction

What I want to discuss can be summarized in three quotations. The first is the question that Marshal Ferdinand Foch asked of any conflict of issue: “De quoi s’agit-il?” – “What is it all about?”² To simplify greatly, in the eighteenth century international relations (IR) was all about monarchs and dynasties jockeying for power, wealth, and glory; in the nineteenth century, it was about coping with social upheaval and the resulting clashes of classes and nationalisms; the twentieth century started out in this vein, but after the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Hitler became the clash of ideologies. Some observers have tried to make parallel summaries of the current era. Perhaps most famously, Samuel Huntington called it the clash of civilizations (Huntington, 1996). Others see new forms of global democracy, and related is the claim that IR now revolves less around states than around congeries of private actors, albeit ones often concerned with public issues. There is something to these claims, but I think most striking is the very fact that we have trouble answering the question. That is, although we can locate, or at least argue about, what particular conflicts are all about, I think it is hard to provide an overall characterization of our era in these terms. Of course it may simply be that we are still living through it and lack the wisdom that hindsight will provide, but I think the reason is deeper than that – there no longer is a straightforward answer to Foch’s question. The central explanation for this is that, as I will discuss below, the leading powers no longer pose security threats to each other, and this removal of the prime goal of international politics allows for the development of a plethora of others.

The second summary quotation is that “We live in the best of all possible worlds.” I do not mean this in the sense that Leibniz, who coined it, did, and I am not arguing that evil is necessary for good to become manifest. Even less do I mean it in the sense that Voltaire did when he ridiculed it by linking the phrase to blind optimism. Rather, I want to couple the enormous importance of the era of peace among the leading powers with the less pleasant news that, while we can readily imagine even better worlds, it is not likely that we can achieve them in the immediate future. Thus, with all its defects, this may be the best, not of all worlds, but of all possible worlds.

The third quotation is the question asked on the cover of a recent issue of the Economist, “What would America fight for?”³ Although the cover attributes this question to America’s allies, the text makes clear that the journal shares the concerns. What is interesting for my purposes is that it never tries to answer the question, let alone to ask what Britain and other European countries are or should be willing to fight for. Wars are a serious business, and Iraq taught those who had forgotten it that even small wars can have large costs. Clearly, the US or any other country should fight only when it has to, when the stakes are high, and there are no alternatives. Today this set is small for the US and Europe.

Here is probably the appropriate place to note that my analysis is centered on the US and, to a lesser extent, on Japan and the countries in the EU. In part, this reflects the extent of my knowledge, but I think it also is justified by the importance of these countries.

A better world – at least for the leading states

The fact that it is hard to answer Foch’s question is good news. It means that we can no longer detect a dominant divide in world politics or a motive for large-scale war, at least among the leading states. As I have argued previously, the states of North America, West and Central Europe, and Japan both are those with the greatest hard and soft power and form a security community (Jervis, 2002 and 2011). (The European Union is of course a subset of the security community, and its development is both a cause and an effect of war among them being unthinkable. For all its cost and problems, the EU is one of our era’s crowning achievements.) According to Karl Deutsch, a security community is a group of countries who not only are at peace, but among whom war is unthinkable (Deutsch, 1957; Adler and Barnett, 1998). This is a very restricted category. Even countries who remain at peace with each other for prolonged periods often think about and plan for war with one another. It is exceedingly rare for major states to fail to do so, and when they do put the thought of war between them out of their minds, the reason often is the pressing threat from a common enemy. Indeed it was the perception of a common threat from the USSR that was partly responsible for the rise of the security community, but that country’s demise has not led to the community’s. This break with the past hardly can be exaggerated: it is not an exaggeration to say that the history of world politics has been dominated by war and the shadow of war among the most powerful states. It is the blessed turning off of this engine of world politics that makes Foch’s question so hard to answer.

My definition of leading powers excludes Russia and the PRC, and a skeptic might argue that it was designed with that purpose in mind. Nevertheless, even if a war involving these two countries remains possible, one reason why these possibilities receive as much attention as they do is the lack of greater dangers. Furthermore, when we look at the possible causes of a war between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia or the US (and/or Japan) and China we see that, despite some overheated rhetoric growing out of the conflict over Ukraine, the issues are not direct and vital. That is, only those with overheated imaginations can envision Russia as a military threat to Europe (the leverage gained by Europe’s partial dependence on Russian gas, although certainly significant, is not of the same magnitude as the previous Soviet threat was assumed to be), and the danger to the US arising from China’s rise is indirect only, stemming as it does from the maintenance of America’s Cold War alliances in East Asia.

In other words, the leading powers now have an unprecedented degree of security, or at least security against threats from other countries (I am leaving aside the dangers of climate change, for example), and the result is to give greater salience to a wide range of issues of different types that produce and result from shifting alignments and that tap into different fears and hopes.

This means that many of the issues that receive so much attention are in a large gray area between vital and trivial. This is true, for example, of the Ukraine crisis. Leaving aside the rights and the wrongs of the issue, both morally and pragmatically (and I think blame is to be quite widely distributed), the salient point in this context is that it fits somewhere on this continuum. Few would say that the issue does not affect Europe or the US at all, but it is equally clear that it is not worth a war. Russian dominance or even absorption of the Ukraine would certainly be unfortunate for its inhabitants, perhaps would solidify authoritarian rule in Russia, and could weaken norms that the West believes are conducive to peace and good governments (although the Russian charge that the West has violated them when doing so serves Western interests has much to be said for it), such eventualities could hardly be seen as the first steps in a Russian plot to dominate West Europe. It then does not rise to the level of a vital interest, a term reserved for interests important enough to merit fighting or threatening to do so. On the other hand, the issue is not trivial. The West does have a stake in Ukraine, in seeing that the continent is not divided again, in reassuring the new members of NATO, in discouraging the idea that countries have a unilateral right to protect their co-ethnics in other countries (not that the Russians in Crimea were actually threatened), and in putting relations with Russia on a good footing.

In this regard, the Cold War’s preoccupation with security leaves us with two harmful intellectual legacies. First, scholars and leaders suffered an atrophy of their skills in dealing with non-vital interests and with conflicts that were significant but that did not endanger the state. This is what world politics among the leading powers, and between them and others, will be dominated by, but we have lost at least some of our skills in both understanding and dealing with them. Second, the Cold War fear of the USSR (granted that this fear was greater in the US than in the EU) compounded the inherently difficult problem of maintaining a sense of proportion in the problems we now face. To return to the case of Ukraine, putting aside the question of how we got here, Putin’s Russia certainly is now a problem for the West. Indeed, it may be one of the greatest foreign policy challenges the West now faces. But saying this does not tell us how great this problem is. It looms large in part because there are so few other dangers. Similarly, cyber conflict, especially but not only with the PRC, certainly is a danger worth taking seriously. But how large the stakes are and how important the menace is is difficult to determine. The same is true for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, another issue high on the American agenda. Even those who reject the argument that proliferation will be stabilizing have difficulty estimating the magnitude of the danger, and therefore the level of effort and resources that should be arrayed against it. Although rank ordering these and other threats is difficult, more difficult still is putting them on some absolute scale. The result, I believe, is that the American leadership if not the mass public has lost its sense of proportion in the international dangers being posed, and concomitantly has failed to see how much safer we are now thanks to the existence of the security community.

International politics after the end of history

Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992). Understood – or rather misunderstood – as the claim that history and conflict had come to an end, this is clearly incorrect. But this is not what Fukuyama argued. His claim is that we have seen the end of clashing ideologies that purport to be universally valid and that, as such, seek to spread themselves throughout the world.⁴ There is much to this. It is not so much that the ideology of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism has converted everyone as it is that there is no other general contender such as fascism or communism. Islamic fundamentalism (the term is imprecise if not misleading, but there is no other term in widespread use) rejects and seeks to exclude Western liberalism, but in no realistic sense aspires to spread its truth to the entire world. The PRC has also followed its own path, and the combination of some degree of economic liberalization coupled with authoritarian rule and enriching the leaders has produced dramatic results. But China has not touted this as a model for others to follow, its success may depend on factors particularly Chinese, and others have not flocked to approach. A generation ago, Lee Kuan Yew proclaimed that “Asian values” were a true alternative to the West, but despite Singapore’s own success this claim has attracted few followers.

A recent entrant into the possible competition for an alternative ideology is more interesting, however. In a speech in January 2012, Putin issued a challenge to the West, or rather issued a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Europa Regional Perspectives
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: The debate on global order in a changing world
• Part I Trends in global governance
• Part II Regional perspectives
• Part III Conclusions
• Index