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CIAO DATE: 10/04
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
Main Trends of International Relations
A. Bovin *
We are all living in a prison of events and problems, domestic issues in the first place, that call for instant decisions and immediate actions. Developments at home are the most painful spots, the more troubling sores worse than Goethe's tragedies. International developments likewise cause concern: lack of clarity in our relations with Byelorussia, the vague situation around Kaliningrad, and 9/11. Political storms in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula call daily for emergency measures.
Each day has enough trouble of its own; no matter how crucial these troubles are, no matter how deeply we are engrossed in them intellectually and emotionally let us try to push aside daily problems in order not to miss the forest for the trees. Let us try to guess how we shall live in new Russia and which role this country will play in the world and which place it will get in the system of international relations.
There is an obvious gap between what awaits Russia at home and abroad: our future at home depends on us, our ability to comprehend our past and emerge to a new historical expanse. Russia's future on the world scene demands different approaches: the way the international relations develop does not depend on Russia or even on the United States. The United States and even Russia are among the key factors of international developments yet the general trends result from an intertwining of circumstances and clashes of varied and even contradictory interests. Today, we can see how objective historical trends are emerging out of a tangle of chance deviations.
To find its place in the world and acquire a unique role Russia should adjust itself to the new conditions and new trends - but first we should grasp their meaning. Discussions are going on and will go on for some time to come.
Here are several hypotheses.
The processes that taken together can be described as globalization are the main trend of world development.
We should push aside the opinion that globalization was invented and is being abused by the "golden billion" and the United States in the first place. Let's try to argue reasonably.
Strictly speaking, the term is applied to describe two groups of processes. First, it describes the so-called global problems of our time, that is, the problems that call for concerted efforts if not of entire mankind then a considerable part of it. The list first drawn at the turn of the 1970s included non-proliferation of arms race and nuclear disarmament followed by demographic and ecological problems and the snowballing fuel and energy, transport, foodstuffs and other disbalances. Globalistics was concerned both with the problems and the ways to deal with them.
Little has changed in the last several decades. True, the end of the Cold War and several fundamental nuclear arms agreements have somewhat blunted the edge of the disarmament issue. Other dangers and risks have moved to the top of the list of priorities; they are born by the alarming and probably irreversible split of the world into the prospering and progressing minority (the states to which the umbrella term "the North" is traditionally applied) and the apathetic majority (called "the South"). Quite logically, international terrorism became active along the split where hopelessness had developed into despair. The crisis caused by interaction between the technosphere and biosphere (the second and first nature) obvious along the same line of the split is even more frightening and even more alarming.
There is another group of problems, also called globalization, born by increasing interaction among the subjects of international communication and internationalization developing in politics, economics and cultures of all nations and states despite state borders. The way of life is unifying: in all countries people use the same appliances, watch the same films, and listen to the same music. They are aware of the time in the similar way. The process that started long before the 20th century will hardly be completed in the 21st century. It cannot be avoided and cannot be reversed.
In the same way bitter rivalry inside the globalized world cannot be avoided. Globalization has nothing in common with charity - it is a natural historical process. Globalization that can also be described as internationalization of life on Earth is moving ahead; it sweeps away certain contradictions and creates new ones; it breaks down resistance of some social groups and replaces them with others. The fruits and the advantages and disadvantages of this unification are distributed unevenly. The weak and the poor are always disadvantaged. America that has rushed ahead profits from globalization to a much greater extent than Russia or East Timor. Traditional cultures rooted in hoary antiquity have to move aside to give space to all sorts of aggressive subcultures supported by the material means of the vanguard of globalization.
Protest has given birth to anti-globalism, which is doomed as Luddites were doomed in their time. Its moderate forms are useful - they shed light on the unacceptable extremes of globalization, look for ways and means of preserving variety in unity, and attract attention to alternative variants and quests for a qualitatively different civilization.
Globalization (both as a quest for global solutions of global problems and as an internationalization of life of the worldwide socium) is an objective historical reality. It cannot be avoided, it cannot be talked into non-existence - it should be comprehended and accepted.
The second leading trend of international development is a drift to multipolarity; by this I mean gradual and uneven "ripening" of new poles (centers of power) outside the "Magnificent Eight."
There are three systems of international relations where polarity is concerned: one-polar, bipolar and multipolar.
The unipolar system is dominated by one center of power, or one pole. This is a rare phenomenon: Ancient Rome and the United States of America in the early 21st century.
The unipolar world is highly convenient (especially for the pole): it cannot be attacked for obvious reasons; its preeminence helps it maintain discipline and balance in the world and restore broken order.
Everything is relative under the Sun: order, discipline and balance on the political surface often conceal latent discontent and contradictions to develop, in critical situations, into a riot, even if on knees. This possibility keeps the hegemon constantly alerted.
The bipolar world we remember only too well is much less stable: it did not involve two states; it was based on the rivalry of two opposing ideologies and two antagonistic social systems. Peaceful coexistence between the USSR and the U.S. did not rule out a destructive war between them: to exclude this possibility, the countries had to reach a missile-nuclear parity and to agree on mutual guaranteed extermination.
The bipolar world required strict discipline within the blocs. At all times the blocs and the confrontation centers were preparing to a large war; they themselves prevented it by pushing local military conflicts to the periphery of the ecumene.
Continued arms race was the most dangerous outcome of this rivalry. Americans used their technical and economic advantages to move ahead to force the other pole to catch up with them. We managed to maintain the missile-nuclear parity at the expense of the basic economic proportions. The burden the country shouldered proved to be beyond its strength.
We have first-hand experience of the bipolar and the unipolar world while the multipolar world still belongs to the history of diplomacy.
The world community that relies on an interaction and balance among several power centers is much more complicated and potentially more dangerous that the world ruled by one or two centers. In fact the two world wars happened because the balance among the great powers designed to keep them away from hazardous steps had been disrupted. Indeed, the larger the number of independent elements in a system the harder it is to reach a balance among them and to main tain it. Hence a question: If the world leaders of the 21st century have the same ideas about politics and war as their predecessors of the 19th and 20th centuries is it wise to tempt fate? The prospering Pax Americana or the habitual confrontation between two superpowers will suit mankind more than incessant squabbles among the new actors on the world scene.
This is probably true yet the question was incorrectly formulated: there is no choice. New power centers arise, develop and find niches because of continued globalization that causes spontaneous economic and political shifts and changes the balance of forces rather than due to efforts of Atlantists of all sorts, Masons, etc.
The picture of the coming multi-dimensional world is no secret: China, West Europe, and Japan have already approached America; India, Brazil, and Indonesia are approaching; all sorts of possible conglomerates of Arab, African and Indo-American countries are dimly seen on the horizon. Russia is a special case.
Multipolarity will inevitably affect the nature of globalization processes. New centers of power each with its closest allies bearing a "civilizational" stamp of its own will create favorable conditions in which the polyphony of world cultures will have a better chance to survive. At the same time, against the background of internationalizing world history, the relationships among these centers of power will be regulated by mechanisms of peaceful coexistence, to borrow the term from not so distant past. This will allow us to reduce to naught a possibility of clash of civilizations with which Samuel Huntington scared us.
The drift toward multipolarity means that the American share in world economy and world politics will decrease, that the unipolar world will be dissolved in a different structure of international relations. The world's dependence on the United States is shrinking. This process as one more leading trend of world development will proceed unevenly and will take probably fifteen to twenty years to become completed.
One should bear in mind that the United States became the only superpower, a certain singularity of world history, because of several synchronous spontaneous circumstances. First, America is far removed from the center of world storms and upheavals; second, the second pole of international life suddenly left international scene on its own will.
The American political elite rose to the occasion: it has extracted the maximum advantages for its country. It has even probably gone too far: there are ardent state supporters everywhere. Even though the Russian ardent state supporters did their best to help their American colleagues at the official level the goal of preserving the system of international relations as an America-centered one had not been clearly formulated.
Common sense typical of Americans curbed their typical presumption and reliance on force. Even the National Security Strategy of the United States of America published on 20 September 2002, permeated with the "great power sentiments," says in part: "We are also guided by the conviction that no nation can build a safer, better world alone. Alliances and multilateral institutions can multiply the strength of freedom-loving nations. The United States is committed to lasting institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of American States, and NATO as well as other long-standing alliances. Coalitions of the willing can augment these permanent institutions."
This is absolutely correct if one prefers to ignore a certain measure of insincerity of the above. Strictly speaking, there is no, and has never been a unipolar world - at all times there was a share of "quasi" in it. At all times America had to look at the rest of the world. The share of quasi is increasing together with America's dependence on other countries. Intelligent people in Washington are aware of this; the not so intelligent will recognize this with time, I hope.
I do hope that in Moscow, too, politicians will grow wiser. While holding forth about the multipolar world not all of them have learned to leave their anti-American views behind and to treat America as a global partner rather than a global rival. Hence, their bias toward anti-American combinations and the desire to set up anti-American structures. The notorious Moscow-Beijing-Delhi triangle that scared the Chinese and the Indians more than the Americans is one of such imaginary constructs. The Iraqi crisis channeled the "multipolar" thought along the European corridors of power. Certain Moscow politicians were naive enough to count on the France-Germany-Russia anti-American structure. Nobody paid the slightest attention to them.
The multipolar world should not be an anti-American, or anti-Chinese, anti-Russian, etc for that matter. Otherwise it will be nothing else but an introduction to another war incomparable to anything we knew in the 20th century.
The constantly complicating network of social relations and potentially much worse consequences of spontaneous and uncontrolled developments caused numerous attempts at regulating the course of events. The League of Nations was a product of World War I; its sad fate reflected the no less sad fate of mankind that made the first feeble attempts at controlling the destructive power of history.
World War II added intensity and efficiency to these efforts. The experience of regulating domestic problems and harmonizing domestic contradictions was consistently applied to world developments. Individual cases and individual decisions were gradually shaping an important trend. The UN was gradually enveloped by a dense mass of institutions, structures, and organizations acting practically in all spheres of public life. Yet realizable decisions and "deliberate channeling" of world events had not yet been attained. Mankind was accumulating experience of conscious observation, analysis, and studies of social realities to be later used as practical recommendations. The number of people well versed in the state of affairs in different corners of the world and in comparative analysis was rapidly growing.
Formally, economics was keeping pace with politics - in fact, was outstripping it. Since the late 1940s, the IBRD and the IMF have become important economic factors; they concentrated on maintaining ties between the world finances and the monetary issues and macro- and microeconomic development at the level of individual countries and regions. The Cold War, confrontation between two world ideologies and two world systems and their orientation on the zero sum game undermined all attempts at creating a common economic and political climate on the global scale. The East dismissed all deliberations about global governance as idle talk and sank deep into intellectual isolation while the West would have very much preferred to get rid of the East when talking of global governance. Meanwhile it was trying to complete intellectual isolation of the East with its political and economic isolation.
In this context official international organizations had no role to play - the sides started working independently. In 1954, the first absolutely secret meeting of very important (yet not officially employed) persons from the United States and Western Europe took place in the Netherlands. They met to discuss issues of global importance: how capitalism could be adjusted to new historical conditions and how Europe could be protected against communism, in order to offer specific recommendations to the governments. They sit in the Bilderberg Hotel, hence the name the Bilderberg Group.
It took the West twenty years to complete the informal trans-Atlantic assembly with another structure. In 1973, on an initiative of David Rockefeller a Trilateral Commission was set up. It united representative of business and political circles of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan resolved to address the same problems: global strategy of capitalist stabilization and opposition to communist pressure.
The best minds of the academic world working on global problems, their definitions and possible solutions were also pooling forces at the non-governmental level. The so-called Club of Rome set up in 1968 was the leader. Its discussions were less anti-communist; the members were deeply concerned with the real sores of progress. For many years its famous descriptions of the illnesses of civilization, their diagnoses, and methods of treatment were read as bestsellers-regrettably, in libraries rather than government offices.
No matter how wise recommendations supplied by the elite that has no power they are often either outdated or can be used in the distant future. It was said: "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (Matt 6:34). The oil prices that soared up because of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and an economic "thrombosis" that hit capitalism forced the leaders of seven developed Western countries to set up mechanisms of regular contacts. They were obviously guided by the principle "The rescue of a drowning man is the drowning man's own job."
This is no exaggeration. President Giscard d'Estaing said in 1974: "The world is unhappy because it doesn't know where it is going and because it senses that, if it knew, it would discover that it was heading to disaster." Disaster was avoided thanks, to a great extent, to regular meeting of the captains of capitalism, "the magnificent seven." They met for the first time in 1975 in Rambouillet, outside Paris. At first the G-7 was mainly engrossed in economic matters; little by little it extended its sphere of interest to the entire range of global issues.
A superficial observer could probably detect nothing but a paradox: in each specific case recommendations of the elite clubs and the decisions of the captains of capitalism were not realized in full. On the whole, however, the results were achieved. Unlike its social opponent the West managed to tap the advantages of the scientific and technological revolution to the full to strengthen capitalism politically and economically.
Crisis of world socialism and its disintegration, the Soviet Union's voluntary withdrawal from the scene and the end of the Cold War created a fundamentally new situation. Despite dividing lines mankind became much more homogenous. Little by little there emerged conditions for global governance capable of maintaining law and order in world community. The most important thing is to prevent military-political crises and, in case of their emergence, to withdraw from them fast and without much pain.
The UN will inevitably revive: contrary to what is written today the Iraqi crisis is not an end of the United Nations but the beginning of its true history.
The beginning is not an easy one: radical reforms are needed to put an end to the relicts of World War II still very much in evidence in the UN, an organization designed to perpetuate the advantages of the victors. The right of veto will undoubtedly cause large-scale debates. One thing is clear, though: it is doomed in its present form. It can be probably replaced with a changed composition of the Security Council and various combinations of consensuses and compromises.
A multipolar world is, in essence, a world of oligarchs, which means that in the 21st century centers of power, the world oligarchs, will alone have a real possibility to affect the course of international politics and economics. This possibility will hardly need the right of veto.
This type of world order is hardly desirable yet hardly avoidable. One can surmise that as the world elite will be embracing the democratic principles the oligarchs' rejection of the basic principles of the UN Charter will gradually disappear.
In the course of globalization the share and role of the liberal-democratic principles of public life will increase; the relations among the world centers of power will be able to withstand even more severe tests and general democratization and demilitarization of international relations will make it possible to set up efficient institutes and mechanisms within the UN frameworks to minimize the risks and threats.
Little by little the epicenter of these risks and threats are shifting toward the sphere of ecology yet as long as tyrannical and despotic regimes that exploit human weaknesses remain anywhere in the world there will always be the threat of genocide and civil wars, aggressions and WMD proliferation. This will obviously call for efforts to collectively sort things out or to prevent such complications altogether. In this context we can logically raise the "humanitarian intervention" issue. In other words, the UN Security Council will obtain the right to use international peacekeeping forces (or armed forces of the UN members) to bring peace and order even if this requires to violate sovereignty of any state and interfere in the affairs that traditional international law describes as domestic. Hegel used to describe history as "the progress in the consciousness of freedom." He was right even though centuries and countries fell through the appalling "black holes" of "lack of freedom." The main development trends obvious in international relations show that progress to freedom in the Western, liberal-democratic sense continues. Russia's ability to recover speedily and its role in world history will depend on its ability to adequately and fully integrate itself into this freedom from the point of view of domestic changes and its adjustment to the requirements of the new world order.
Endnotes
Note *: Aleksandr Bovin, head, Department of Journalism, State Humanities University of Russia. Back