Article
Variable Geometry
A nonpolar international system is emerging from the false starts and misleading visions that characterized the post-Cold War years. No clear leadership role is exerted by a single, preeminent power. In different regions, and from crisis to crisis, different states and combinations of states will take the lead. The UN is only one option among many.
In his State of the Union address in 1992, President George H.W. Bush -de-clared: “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” This view of the past led seamlessly to a US-centric view of the future:
A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America. And this they regard with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right.1
How remote this speech now seems. Its self-congratulatory tone and hubristic vision of the world has disappeared—and not only because of the difficulties of an ill-judged and poorly planned US-led venture in Iraq since 2003 and Russia’s reassertion of its military power in Georgia in 2008. Already toward the end of the Clinton presidency, US dominance was waning. The world-wide move toward democracy had encountered setbacks in several countries, including Russia. The international sanctions regime against Iraq was as much of a running sore for its perpetrators as for its intended target. Nuclear weapons proliferation expanded, especially in the Indian subcontinent. Somalia, despite the US-led intervention in 1993, found itself among the many failed states producing refugees and providing havens for terrorists. Afghanistan had been saved from Soviet control only to fall under the Taliban and to provide a base for Osama bin Laden. The United States refused to participate in several key international legal regimes. US-led attempts to address the Israel-Palestine problem also failed. The United States, far from leading a consensual international order, was the most frequent wielder of the veto in the UN Security Council.
The US inability to lead may be temporary. The United States has many -attributes that will bring it back into a close relation with other states. These skills include patient cooperation, as shown in the Cold War, and a unique capacity to deploy and use force distant from its own shores. The United States remains the one power that maintains a world-wide network of alliances. Moreover, the US body politic is genetically imprinted with a vision of the United States as the savior of a corrupt and troubled world. Yet the United States is caught up in the consequences of maintaining its vision and its interventions on the cheap, without resorting to either conscription or taxation. The initial US response to the Russian intervention in Georgia—the bluster not matched by effective action—confirmed that US power is operating under severe constraints. Even under a new president, and with the worst of Iraq behind it, the US capacity to embark on a revived global role will be limited.
Naturally, many have concluded that if there is neither the bipolar order of the Cold War years nor the unipolar order conjured up by President Bush in 1992, then the world must be entering a multipolar order. The utility of such a description of the world is questionable on several grounds. The very point of thinking about the world in “polar” terms is that poles are few and far between, and form the center of constellations of power. In the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union had exactly this capacity, symbolizing each in its own way a distinctive approach to international order and indeed to the destiny of human society. Both formed world-wide networks and alliances.
Such a capacity is much less evident in the post-Cold War world. The newly emerging major powers, especially India and China, have impressive achievements to their credit, extensive interests abroad, and distinctive foreign policies. Yet their rise as great powers has coincided with a diminution of earlier rhetoric in which India presented itself as a global standard-bearer for non-alignment, and China carved out a role as the defender of revolutionary purity against Soviet social imperialism. As they have become great powers they have ceased to be beacons. They are certainly not poles. Similarly, post-Soviet Russia is hardly a pole: It sees itself as defending Russian interests, standing up for Russians who live in various post-Soviet states, becoming powerful regionally, and perhaps even as leading the fight against US hegemony. It does not see itself as offering a distinct political and social system for the world.
There has always been reason to doubt the value of thinking in “polar” terms. The countries of the world never were, and are certainly not now, mere iron -filings, ever ready to align themselves with the strongest magnetic field. On the contrary, each has its own interests and its distinctive political culture. The -history of the Cold War, and of its end, is partly the history of states and their peoples refusing to fit into the rigid ideological straitjackets imposed upon them. Ceasing to talk of poles may liberate us from some of the limitations of polar thought.
Yet there are hazards aplenty in the nonpolar world. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is right to warn that “nonpolarity will be difficult and dangerous,” and to call for a degree of organization and order which he terms “concerted nonpolarity.”2 This is the key issue: Can nonpolarity be consistent with the maintenance of norms and the preservation of order? Is a nonpolar world a fragile world?
Today, a notably wide range of possible risks and challenges appear to confirm the fragility of world order. The events in Georgia have graphically substantiated the built-in danger of the much-vaunted new principle for the conduct of international relations in the 21st century, the “responsibility to protect.” As events have shown, this principle can easily be distorted and abused as a cover for the extension of national power, and may actually exacerbate the problems of international relations. In addition, possible threats in the next 30 years include climate change, population pressures, resource competition, the emergence of major new powers, nuclear proliferation, transnational terrorism, and religious and ideological fundamentalism. All could contribute to the outbreak of armed conflicts.3 The threats that we face lie also in ourselves and in our own societies—for example in our own poor management of intelligence and poor understanding of foreign countries and cultures.
Several of the threats faced today expose inadequacies in the policies of major powers. Nuclear proliferation is the most obvious case in point. The policy of nuclear nonproliferation on which so many countries have placed emphasis requires a serious rationale for why some countries should have -nuclear weapons and others not. Such a rationale is not impossible to develop but has been positively hindered by simplistic interpretations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as a deal imposed by the nuclear powers (ignoring the major impetus of nonnuclear states in the negotiations for the NPT), or as a deal in which the nuclear powers promised to get rid of their own nuclear weapons completely (ignoring the extremely careful language that embodies a more limited and prudent -undertaking). Nuclear nonproliferation worked for a generation partly because the Cold War alliance systems provided powerful disincentives for the development of nuclear weapons. Building a serious rationale for nuclear nonproliferation is one of the most difficult challenges faced in the nonpolar world.
Despite the grave crisis over Georgia, and the seriousness of the whole range of new challenges, world order seems to have survived—at least for the present. The weakening of US standing in the world since 2003 has not, or at least not yet, changed the basic facts about the order in which we live. International collaboration today is at a remarkably high level by almost any measure: the range of subject-areas covered, the adoption of international standards in a wide range of technical matters, the movements of goods and people, and the extent to which collaboration involves societies as a whole and not just their foreign ministries. Furthermore, other specific facts and trends suggest that the international order is robust:
• We are still in an era in which international wars are fewer and less destructive than in previous centuries. There has been no big change in the historic post-1945 trend;
• Participation in the international order on a cooperative basis remains an attractive option for many states—as Libya’s decision in late 2003 to come in from the cold may suggest;
• The United Nations and its charter remain, battered but unbowed, as the nearest thing we have to a global international constitution; and the United Nations is busy addressing international security issues, evidenced by the high number of peacekeeping operations that continue to be established;
• There has been significant development of regional organizations, and ad hoc regional diplomatic processes have been vital in addressing particular problems, such as the North Korea nuclear weapons issue;
• NATO—despite numerous predictions of its demise and the inherent difficulties of its roles in Afghanistan and Georgia—remains an important institution;
• The European Union has been astonishingly successful in some key respects. It has helped to reduce the risk of war from the very states that provided the tinder for the start of two world wars;
• Some stalemated problems, such as those relating to the border between Russia and China, have moved toward resolution. China has reached agreements with all the successor states of the Soviet Union on its borders, including Russia itself.4
Developments such as these suggest that the international order is not exactly fragile. Indeed, it is robust. This is partly because of the sheer strength, depth, and “stickiness” of habits of cooperation. It is also because the most obvious ideological challenges to the international order—whether they be terrorist movements, or that very small group of states that appear to reject many of the values on which the contemporary international is based—have remarkably little purchase outside their own notably narrow constituencies. They simply are not as serious as the German, Italian, and Japanese revisionism of 1930-45, nor do they have the broad appeal that international communism could command at various times in the years between 1917 and 1989. The absence of major ideological challenge helps to explain how, up to now, the international order has been able to survive despite the degree of incapacitation that the United States has suffered.
The proposition that certain powers “take the lead” in maintaining international order is of very long standing. It is how the role of great powers (also sometimes called the “great responsibles”) was conceived in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, by its very nature this proposition about great powers has always been open to challenge. Among its many difficulties has been the question—alive today in relation to the United States—as to whether those states that conceive of themselves as maintainers of order are at the same time bound by the normal rules of international law that they seek to impose on others. Today the term “great power,” but not the reality of it, is out of fashion. Hence, in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the meetings of major powers to take forward possible solutions for the countries concerned was called the “contact group”—great powers disguised as social workers.
“Taking the lead” can easily imply taking the military lead. While such military leadership is often necessary (as it was in the 1991 Gulf War and in the 1999 Kosovo intervention), it can also lead directly into quagmires, as today in Iraq. Leadership, if it is to result in other states following, needs to be combined with wisdom, judiciousness, restraint, and respect—qualities not always evident in UK and US policies in recent years.
The particular choice of methods, military and otherwise, by which order is secured needs to be addressed head-on. The use of military force is a grave if sometimes necessary step. In many cases, though certainly not in all, other methods may be more effective. One of these is the process that might be called “induction.” The term encompasses both bringing about a change by proximity (as in magnetic induction), and preparing the country concerned for membership (as in induction to a club or organization). Induction has played a crucial part in the unification of Europe. Yet military leadership and induction are not simple alternatives: each has its function, and Europe is weaker at the first of them.
A general interest in cooperation is not enough: International order also requires a willingness to act, at least in those crises that threaten the basis of the order. The current order is more clearly decentralized than in the first years after the end of the Cold War, and it is characterized by variable -geometry. Different countries—and organizations—assume roles of special importance in particular crises. At its best, this situation could be seen as the “anarchical society” in action, maintaining order through the common will of states, especially major states. At its worst, this is a situation full of danger. It presents opportunities for conflict, for some governments to gang up with each other against the interests of their peoples, for great powers to act by proxy, and for regional hegemons to emerge without fear of being challenged militarily by another major power—clearly Russia’s intention in Georgia. In addition, there are obvious risks of ineffective management of power leading to renewed calls for outside involvement in regional conflicts.
An international order that can be characterized as nonpolar might easily be interpreted as presenting a special opportunity for international organizations. Such organizations, regional and global, do play a key role in security as well as other matters, but they do not, and are not likely to, exercise a monopoly in the sense of taking decision-making and action away from the state and to a supranational level.
Europe exemplifies the continued significance of regional bodies in the -security field—and the difficulty of agreeing on their precise roles. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has experienced difficulties throughout the post-Cold War era, not least because it cannot paper over all the cracks that exist between its remarkably large number of member states. The European Union, despite making significant advances in the fields of security, peacekeeping and peacebuilding—especially in the Balkans and in Africa—still has difficulty securing agreement on the use of force and providing an intervention capability relevant to current needs. NATO was unceremoniously brushed aside by the United States when it offered help in the aftermath of 9/11, and although it is now deeply involved in Afghanistan, the circumstances there are not of the kind one would choose if one wanted to prove the superior virtues of regional organizations as instruments for imposing order.
Despite these problems and many predictions to the contrary, throughout the post-Cold War era NATO has continued not just to exist, but to be the principal framework for joint European action in the military sphere, including in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. There is not a single European country in which there has been a well-supported and effective demand for a retreat to unilateralism in security policy.
A main weakness in the European debate about international order since 2003 is the tendency of some Europeans to blandly assert the virtues of multilateral over unilateral approaches. Interpreting issues thus is a nice way of implying European superiority over the United States, but there are circumstances in which, if there is to be effective international action, it needs to be unilateral—at least in the sense that it is not authorized by the UN Security Council. Over 60 years of experience in the United Nations has taught us that, despite the considerable merits of the organization, it cannot solve all problems.
Any attempt to capture the essence of the contemporary international system needs to encompass a clear and realistic view of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the United Nations. Different understandings of the United Nations’ actual and potential roles formed a fateful background to the European–US divide over Iraq in 2003, and are not yet resolved. A degree of common understanding could be based on recognition of four key points. First, the United Nations has been, and remains, an important framework within which states can act collectively, including in the security sphere. -Second, the United Nations does not at present constitute anything approaching a complete system of collective security. Indeed, to present it in that light may damage the United Nations by placing a greater weight of expectation on the organization than it can possibly bear. In particular, it cannot possibly play a central role in a crisis, such as that over Georgia, in which one of the five veto-wielding powers is directly involved. Third, the experience of the United Nations in the past six decades confirms that there remains a need for certain states to take the lead if the United Nations is to act effectively. This has especially been the case so far as the use of force has been concerned. And last, the United Nations exists, and will continue to exist, in parallel with the evolving system of sovereign states and with other dynamic developments in international society. It is one element in international order, but not the sole basis of that order.
In short, the emergence of a nonpolar order forces us to confront what has always been a central truth of international relations: in different regions and crises, different states and combinations of states take the lead. “Variable geometry” is the rule. Russia’s action in Georgia illustrates how open to abuse, and how dangerous, such a situation can be. Variable geometry, as distinct from simple polarity, may be as much a part of the problem of world order as it is of the solution, but it is likely to endure.
1) President George H.W. Bush, State of the Union address to the US Congress, January 28, 1992.
2) 2) Richard N.
Haass, “The Age of Nonpolarity: What Will Follow US
Dominance,” Foreign Affairs (May-June 2008), p.
56.
3) All these possible threats appear in a UK report,
The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme, 2007–2036
(Shrivenham: Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre, UK
Ministry of Defence, 2007), available at:
http://www.dcdc-strategictrends.org.uk.
4) The last border demarcation issues were settled
during President Putin’s visit to China in 2004.
Agreement on the eastern section of the border between Russia
and China was concluded in Beijing on October 14, 2004.
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