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Plenary Session 5: Adam Roberts

Prof Sir Adam Roberts, GSR, 2007
 

 International Institute for Strategic Studies

5th Global Strategic Review Conference

 

Managing Global Security and Risk:

Characterizing the Twenty-first Century World Order

 

© Adam Roberts, 2007

 

There is a Babel-like confusion about how to characterize the contemporary system of international relations, and equally about how to assess its inherent robustness or, alternatively, fragility. In any era, addressing these issues is a hard task: there have always been grounds for reservations about the inherent superficiality of characterizing international order in any one catchphrase. The task has proved particularly tricky in the confusing and paradoxical decades since the end of the Cold War.

 

In this attempt to characterize contemporary international relations I will consider four basic questions, with most emphasis on the first:

1. What is world order?

2. How fragile is world order today?

3. Which countries take the lead in preserving order?

4. What is the role of international organizations?

 

1. What is World Order?

a. The history of the term

 

The notion of ‘world order’ does not have a wonderful intellectual history. Like ‘grand strategy’, it verges on the pretentious. It is associated with past attempts at world government, and with Anglo-American schemes aimed at remodelling the world in our own respective images. Any use of the phrase ‘world order’ today should be tempered by awareness that there is a lot of disorder in the contemporary world, and that the phrase is more aspirational than descriptive. Perhaps the very term needs rethinking. Yet the term, as I will suggest, is necessary, at least as a starting point.

 

The term ‘world order’ has religious as well as secular origins and meanings. Its use often reflects the inclination of adherents of the great religions to overcome the division of mankind into separate sovereign states. In several religions, including Islam and Christianity, there are strong traditions of thought about, and advocacy of, world order. The Byzantine notion of Christ as Pantocrator (Ruler of All) was one reflection of such ideas, which have continued in many different forms. In the USA, from 1935 onwards, there was a journal entitled World Order that was produced by National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

 

However, in the past two centuries – especially in the first half of the twentieth century – an at least purportedly secular approach to the concept of world order has predominated. During the two world wars, there were intense discussions of world order in the UK and USA, resulting in the plans for, and the subsequent structure of, both the League of Nations and the United Nations. In the Second World War the discussions, sharpened by an awareness of the failure of the League’s attempt at world order, were notably rich. In Britain, remarkably, the concern about a future world order was evident even in the dark times at the very beginning of UK involvement in the war.[1] The US interest in world order even while the war was in its early stages was also striking.[2] A key issue was, as it remains today, how to ensure that US interest in world order would be more continuous than in the past. In this connection, one thoughtful American work in the field underwent an instructive change of title: what was America, Partner in World Rule when published in New York in 1945 appeared the next year in London as World Order or Chaos.[3] So ‘world order’ really was, at least in that version, a convenient euphemism for a US global role!

 

The Anglo-American debates on a future world order in the years 1939–45, while not restricted to thinking about a successor organization to the League of Nations, had a profound effect on the plans for the United Nations. The UN Charter reflected these debates, and indeed is a document infused with Anglo-Saxon ideas, particularly as regards the connections between human rights and security. One continuous theme of the subsequent history of the UN, from the Cold War to Iraq, has been the sheer difficulty of imposing such visions of world order on a recalcitrant world.

 

American and British visions of world order were not, and are not, by any means identical. In these two countries there are strong and different traditions of thought about how world order should be conceived and implemented. The US is heir to a revolutionary tradition that sees the rest of the world as composed of monarchical, reactionary and dictatorial systems of government, the departure of which would enable peoples, freed from their shackles, to pursue their common goals. Hence, the unique (and to foreign eyes peculiar or even threatening) custom of the US legislature of passing acts pronouncing the liberation of this or that state, as in the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.[4] The UK has tended to see world order more in terms of an international order of sovereign states, in which the future will not be completely different from the past, and in which moves towards democracy and human rights are seen as being fundamentally an issue within the state concerned, even if outside assistance may on occasion be important. It was a reflection of this tradition that, even when joining the US in its transformative venture in Iraq, the UK was much more concerned with respecting existing international legal rules and organizational procedures than was the US.[5]

 

After the Second World War, the interest in the idea of world order continued, on both sides of the Atlantic, but within these different political and mental frameworks. The British literature on world order was characterized by a strong historical perspective, and a concern with enduring issues in international relations. Thus a book on world order by the historian John Bowle, published in 1963, had as its central preoccupation the role of ideologies, including the destructive effects of unbridled nationalism, as well as a more immediate concern about nuclear weapons.[6] In his work and that of others, the great movement of decolonization, with all its attendant hopes and sometimes disappointments, contributed powerfully to views of world order – principally by bringing into existence a huge number of new states, many of them with contested political systems and equally contested frontiers. Peter Calvocoressi, writing about world order at the same time as Bowle, was similarly preoccupied with the process of decolonization and its consequences for international order.[7] By contrast, in the United States a more abstract cast of mind produced more abstract set of thoughts about world order.

 

This is best illustrated by the ‘World Order Models Project’, established at Princeton University in the early 1970s. WOMP’s history is instructive for thinking about world order today. This project was expressly devoted to the creation of ‘relevant utopias’ – a glorious aim that proved hard to achieve. By soliciting contributions from many different cultures and countries, the project came up with results that served to ‘render the original research scheme unfeasible.’[8] In other words, it discovered the elementary and terrible truth that different societies and different countries do not share a common vision of how human life, or world politics, should be organized; nor do they have a common understanding of what are the main obstacles to international order. There is a lesson here than remains applicable today.

 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the very term ‘world order’, with its implicit prescriptive message, has gone in and out of fashion in the USA. This is illustrated by the history of the World Policy Institute. It was founded in 1948 in Washington DC as the Association for Education in World Government. In 1952 it changed its name to the Institute for International Government. In 1954, it was renamed the Institute for International Order. It was reconstituted in 1973 as the Institute for World Order. In 1982 it acquired its present title of the World Policy Institute.[9] Five titles in four decades!

 

The notion of world order is not tied exclusively to Anglo-Saxon ideas for reforming the world. Hedley Bull’s magisterial study of the roots of international order, far removed temperamentally and analytically from the World Order Models Project and similar schemes, was entitled The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. Bull accepted that the term ‘world order’ was not vacuous:

 

… since the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century there has arisen for the first time a single political system that is genuinely global. Order on a global scale has ceased to be simply the sum of the various political systems that produce order on a local scale; it is also the product of what may be called a world political system.[10]

 

Bull also pointed to the special value of the term ‘world order’:

World order is wider than international order because to give an account of it we have to deal not only with order among states but also with order on a domestic or municipal scale, provided within particular states, and with order within the wider world political system of which the states system is only part.[11]

 

For some purposes it is useful to preserve the term ‘international order’. When the focus is on relations between states, it has obvious value. Further, it makes sense to use it when what is being described is a regional international order, or one which may go beyond regions, yet not encompass the entire globe – as, for example, with the concept of ‘liberal international order’.

 

The term ‘world order’ comes with baggage – particularly the habitual prescriptive emphasis on global solutions, the belief that order can be imposed from on top, and the assumption that grand generalizations can be made with minimal attempt to understand the particular and the local. This inheritance is quite properly questioned in the post-Cold War era. Yet, despite all its faults, the term is useful today. This is because the problem of order is not just international (in the limited sense that it involves relations between governments of states), but also has other dimensions. The problem of order is internal, in that the structure and effectiveness of the state has a major impact on its ability to live at peace with other states; it involves the roles of non-governmental and international organizations of many different kinds; and above all it is characterized by the fact that we are in an age of global issues and global political processes. ‘World order’ captures at least some of these dimensions.

 

b. Pitfalls of ‘polar’ terminology

 

Throughout the period since 1945, and often in parallel with the language of world order, there has been a tendency – among academics in International Relations and also, if to a lesser extent, among policy-makers – to characterize world politics as uni-, bi-, or multi-polar. Such characterizations imply, not just that there is a single world order, but that the over-arching structure of that order has particular importance in shaping, and helping us to explain, events. There are plenty grounds for scepticism, not about the idea of world order as such, but about the adequacy of defining it in polar terms.

 

In the Cold War era it made only limited sense to call the world bi-polar. The concept of bipolarity did nothing to illuminate key aspects of the international system, and indeed arguably obscured them. Such aspects included the continuing importance of national interest in the policies of all states; the rivalries within each bloc; and the varied character of the causes of conflicts, which (especially in the post-colonial world) often had little to do with the Cold War.

 

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a tendency to speak of a ‘uni-polar world’ or at least a ‘uni-polar moment’, and to conflate the distinct ideas of the US role and of international order. It is questionable whether it ever made sense to speak of a ‘uni-polar world’. The pervasive belief that this is a single united world has been buttressed by the rhetoric of globalization; by the belief in the West that democracy is a panacea; and by a reluctance to understand the extent and depth of different world views.

 

Yet if unipolarity and its relative, globalization, are flawed both as description and prescription, can any other ‘polar’ characterizations do better? One distinguished scholar of International Relations, Samuel Huntington, has defined the post-Cold War world as ‘uni-multi-polar’ – which in his hands is a purely descriptive term:

This four-level structure of global politics is basically a uni-multi-polar world. The United States cannot dictate what goes on all by itself. It needs the cooperation of some of these major regional powers to accomplish anything in world affairs. But, on the other hand, the United States, as the only superpower, is generally able to veto international actions proposed by any coalition of these other major actors.

In this new power structure, a natural antagonism exists between the superpower and the major regional powers. The United States thinks it has, and in large part it does have, a significant interest in every part of the world. Each of the major regional powers, however, thinks it should be able to shape what goes on in its part of the world and clearly resents US efforts to do that.[12]

 

Huntington’s explanation does reflect realities of the contemporary world. However, the term ‘uni-multi-polar’, which sounds like a way to hedge one’s bets, is more convoluted than illuminating. He himself has all but abandoned it. His conclusion (speaking in 2005) is that the US should be much less aggressive in its management of international order, and should especially avoid attempts to impose democracy on others. He noted the existence of ‘efforts to change the structure of global politics from what I have awkwardly called a uni-multi-polar world into a truly multi-polar world. That is the way in which inevitably the world is moving, and both the world and the United States will probably be much better off once we get there.’[13]

 

‘Multi-polarity’ does indeed have possible value both as description and prescription. It is free of the implicit arrogance and hubris of ‘uni-polar’ claims. It recognizes the changing facts of economic and military power. However, like other ‘polar’ ideas, its weakness may be in its implicit assumption that the world consists of something akin to magnetic poles and iron filings. Does this really fit the pattern of relations in the post-Cold War era? Perhaps the ‘polar’ tradition of thought about world order has served its purpose, and other language needs to be found.

 

c. The Post-Cold War era

 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Cold War subsided, it sometimes seemed as if the waters of a reservoir were going down and old landmarks reappearing. Some of the features that emerged into view – such as failed states, and conflicts with an ethnic dimension – were only too familiar to historians. However, there were also some developments which were new, or which continued processes that had already become significant in the Cold War years. These included the world-wide move toward democracy, an emphasis on acting collectively that went far beyond previous practices such as the geographically and institutionally limited role of the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century, and a number of strong challenges to the previous dominance of European or Western ideas about how the world should be ordered. The phrase ‘post-Cold War Era’ usefully captured the sense that this was a new age, but in itself was mercifully free of hype about a new world order.

 

The changes at around the time of the end of the Cold War seemed to some observers to offer hope for a new world order – one in which international law, great power co-operation, international organizations, and democratic political systems would all play a larger part than they had been able to do for most of the 20th century. There were several distinct visions of such an order.

 

Suggestions that some kind of new world order was emerging, or at least that the opportunity to create one existed, long antedate the Iraq–Kuwait crisis of 1990–91. However, it was after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait of 2 August 1990 that the term ‘new world order’ attracted fame. Despite certain assertions to the contrary, its most famous expression was not presented as a claim of what already exists, but as an aspiration. On 11 September 1990 President George Bush Sr., appearing before a joint session of both houses of Congress, reiterated four ‘simple principles’ that he had earlier outlined regarding the Gulf crisis, and then added a fifth:

 

Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge; a new era – freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace, an era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.

A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavour. Today, that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we have known, a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice, a world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.[14]

 

A cynical interpretation might be that preparation for a large and risky military operation overseas (in this case to expel Iraq from Kuwait) always involves an escalation of rhetoric, and this was no worse than most. It is not surprising that, after such wild promises, the United States experienced a post-1991 Iraq War hangover. A world beset by civil wars, dictatorial regimes, natural and man-made humanitarian disasters, and the moral opprobrium of the sanctions policy against Iraq, was not quite what Americans were led to expect. The Iraq War of 2003 has prolonged the hangover it was intended to cure.

 

Perhaps the talk of a new world order was essentially a new world phenomenon: no more than a survival of those philosophies, which both the United States and the Soviet Union inherited from their respective revolutions, that reject the unsatisfactory state of international relations, and seek to bring about a better order based on universal values.

 

In the wake of the early 1990s optimism about the ‘new world order’, and the stunning victory of the US-led forces in the 1991 Gulf War, many writings in the USA sought to advance the idea that there were new and important opportunities for the US and the UN to impose restraint in distant conflicts;[15] and to bring the sovereignty of states under some kind of beneficent control.[16] Then cynicism set in.

 

Although the particular visions of the new world order that flourished in the first half of the 1990s ran into trouble, the idea that we are in a defining period of international relations still survives, and has influenced policy-making in many countries. Even in the USA, disillusioned by much of the experience of the 1990s, the idea of completely reshaping the world found new forms of expression. One of these was ‘neoconservatism’ – a cluster of ideas that seems, at least to a benighted non-American, to be oddly mis-named, and to have more in common with French revolutionary Bonapartism than with philosophical conservatism. Iraq 2003 was in part a product of that cluster of ideas. However, the coherence of this body of ideas is increasingly in doubt. There is an unresolved tension in the vision of George Bush Jr – especially the simultaneous explicit denial and implied defence of imposing democracy on others – as illustrated by his 2005 State of the Union address:

The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else. That is one of the main differences between us and our enemies. They seek to impose and expand an empire of oppression, in which a tiny group of brutal, self-appointed rulers control every aspect of every life. Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens, and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbours, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.[17]

 

There is a common view that there was a sharp disjunction between the world of Bush the Elder and that of Bush the Younger; and more generally between the 1990s and the present decade. The events of 9/11 are seen as marking the end of one age and the beginning of the other. Robert Litwak has referred to the 1990s as a ‘misleadingly tranquil decade’ which then ended with 9/11. [18] This view is open to contestation. When President Clinton left office at the beginning of 2001, the liberal and transformational project which he had set out in 1993 had been itself transformed. Although it was still possible to see a general trend towards democratic governance, there were many warning signs long before 9/11.

  • The US continued to take a semi-detached view of much contemporary international law. It had made it clear that it would not become a party to any of a range of international normative agreements, including the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, the 1997 Anti-personnel Mines Convention, the 1998 Convention on the International Criminal Court, and the 1998 Kyoto Protocol on the Environment.
  • In the Palestine-Israel conflict, the Oslo peace process, initiated in 1993, had run into trouble. The US appeared unwilling, or helpless, to get the process back on track.
  • US-UN relations, already difficult, had been exacerbated by the experiences of Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo.
  • ‘Nation-building’ in East Timor, Haiti, Kosovo and Bosnia was proving slow and difficult.
  • There was growing awareness that the process of democratic development in hitherto non-democratic states was hazard-strewn. It was increasingly recognized that the mere holding of elections, in the absence of the evolution of the rule of law and all the other preconditions of honest government, could exacerbate rather than resolve conflicts.
  • Problems of so-called ‘rogue states’ (a category including Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea) were unresolved. Iraq involved the US and others in a combination of two forms of pressure, both controversial: sanctions and strategic coercion/compellence.
  • In addition, certain other societies remained obdurately hostile to Western liberal approaches to international order: not only Afghanistan under the Taliban theocracy, the latter-day communist system in Cuba, and the vicious dictatorship in Burma, but also some notionally friendly countries in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere.
  • Terrorism was a major concern of US policy-makers, especially after the 1998 East African bombings and the 2000 attack on USS Cole.

 

Because the 1990s were no blissful dawn, and because there are numerous continuities between that period and the present, the case for saying that the post-Cold War era ended on 11 September 2001 seems weak. ‘Post-Cold War Era’ is still as good a catchphrase as any to characterize the age in which we live. That conclusion, however, fails to answer the questions, explored in turn below. Can the US recover the degree of international influence that it had in the late 1990s? What are the key characteristics of the order in the present century? And is today’s world order inherently fragile?

 

d. World order not identical to the US role

 

If world order is seen as identical to a US-led order, then it is in trouble today. Indeed, the US is often seen as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution. Seven factors can be cited as evidence of the difficulty of the idea and reality of US leadership today.

  • Shrinking size of US-led coalitions. At least in the armed conflict phase, over four successive wars there has been a diminution in the number of allies of the US: Iraq 1990–91; Kosovo 1999; Afghanistan 2001; Iraq 2003.
  • Draining effect of the US war in Iraq. In some ways the tragic adventure in Iraq is similar to the earlier one in Vietnam. In both cases the US has believed it possible to support democracy in a post-colonial country with little experience of it. A major difference is that, whereas in South Vietnam there was a state structure (albeit a weak one) which was then taken over by an only-too-well organized state (North Vietnam), Iraq has been made into a failed state: the way back from that is long and hard. The most obvious result of the draining effect of Iraq is the inability of US to provide leadership in other crises – e.g. Darfur.
  • Lack of moral traction of US as a result of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc. The strong international condemnation of US policies on matters relating to detainee treatment and torture has been demonstrated in numerous international opinion polls, and has an effect in the unwillingness of governments to give support to US policies generally.
  • Difficulty of conducting US-led exercises in coercive diplomacy due to widespread distrust of US judgment. This especially concerns cases, such as Iran, over which there might be a need for strategic coercion to induce a state to desist from a particular course of action. In light of Iraq, allies do not have the same degree of trust as in earlier eras that the US will combine coercive diplomacy with restraint.
  • Lack of credibility of US efforts to encourage the spread of democracy. The US efforts in this direction face what could be called the ‘Comintern danger’: just as the communist international movement made itself the object of suspicion partly because it conveyed the unfortunate impression that it knew best what is good for the world, so the US faces a similar danger today. Again, Iran provides an example.
  • Widespread distrust of the US attempt to develop new doctrines of military intervention. This attempt – principally with regard to the use of force on a pre-emptive or preventive basis – has run into difficulties. It is hardly surprising that there is no prospect of general international agreement on this.
  • A hardening of Russian and Chinese positions vis-à-vis the USA and NATO. There is heightened suspicion of, and a more explicit articulation of their rights against, what is seen as an often-overbearing and insensitive US and NATO. The Russian announcement in March 2007 that Russia was developing a new doctrine to counter NATO’s relentless expansion into post-Soviet space, President Putin’s final state-of-the-union address on 26 April 2007, and the August 2007 announcement that it was to resume regular bomber patrols to demonstrate its readiness to protect Russia from outside pressure, are evidence of this hardening process.

 

These problems all suggest that, even if it might once have been at least plausible to speak of a ‘uni-polar world’ in the 1990s, it is not possible to do so now. Yet this does not mean the end of any conception of world order. On the contrary, the fact that the world seems to be enduring this plethora of problems, with much continuing cooperation and without major war, suggests that there is a different, larger and more diffuse form of world order out there.

 

e. Elements in the concept of ‘world order’

 

In today’s world, what are the necessary foundations for any serious idea of international order, whether regional or global? At a minimum, they are:

  • Recognition that there are many distinct visions of world order, emerging from different national, cultural, regional and ideological perspectives.
  • A substantial degree of agreement on facts, frontiers, and basic diplomatic rules.
  • A measure at least of agreement on norms and values, including in the areas of human rights, self-determination and democracy – alongside agreement to disagree about some aspects of these norms and their implementation.
  • Acceptance of common institutions – regional and global – to address and resolve conflicts and disputes.
  • Willingness of the members of the system, especially major states, to act in defence of international order when its basic norms are violated. To be effective, this requires such action to be viewed as legitimate by other states.

 

These minimum elements, which fall well short of the WOMP idea of a ‘relevant utopia’, build on much that already exists. If there were more capable leadership – not least in the USA and in European countries – more could be made of them. World order in this modest form is not an unattainable ideal, even if we sometimes seem far from it today.

 

2. How fragile is world order today?

Past eras tend to look more reassuring to us than they did at the time. Many past dangers can be safely ignored today because we now know that they failed to materialise, or were survivable. Both the scale of possible disaster, and its likelihood of occurrence, can appear menacing to one generation and be almost forgotten by the next. Indeed, it is very easy to be brave in respect of past risks, which no longer have the power to hurt. By contrast, the contemporary order – and our own place in it – is easily seen as fragile. It may even be desirable that we see things thus. A sense of fragility can induce prudence, that Burkean quality that merits a place in any international pantheon of virtues.

 

The post-Cold War world has been characterized, from the start, by the diversity of the threats faced. Today, there is a notably wide range of possible risks and challenges that would appear to confirm the fragility of world order. In 2007 a UK Ministry of Defence team has issued a report – admittedly, probability-based rather than predictive – outlining an extensive range of possible threats in the next thirty years. The threats 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.[19] 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, and elements of hypocrisy, in the policies of major powers. Nuclear proliferation is the most obvious case in point. The policy of nuclear non-proliferation 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 Non-Proliferation Treaty as a deal imposed by the nuclear powers (ignoring the major impetus of non-nuclear 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 which embodies a more limited and prudent undertaking).

 

Despite the seriousness of the new challenges that we already face, 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, some more specific facts and trends suggest that international order is robust.

  • We are still in an era where 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 co-operative basis remains an attractive option for many states – as Libya’s decision in late 2003 to come in from the cold may suggest.
  • A degree of international cooperation over major international crises is still possible – as has been seen over Iran in recent months.
  • The UN and its Charter remain, battered but unbowed, as the nearest thing we have to a global international constitution; and the UN is busy addressing international security issues problems, evidenced, for example, by the high number of peacekeeping operations that continue to be established.
  • Specialized agencies (such as WHO) in the UN system, and autonomous intergovernmental bodies (such as WTO), play a significant role in addressing a wide range of practical problems.
  • 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 despite the inherent difficulties of its role in Afghanistan today, remains an important institution.
  • The EU, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, has been astonishingly successful in some key respects. It has been one among many factors that have reduced the risk of war from the very states that provided the tinder for the start of two world wars. Moreover, both its very existence and certain aspects of its international policy have contributed to processes of democratization and benevolent change in both southern and eastern Europe, including the Balkans. They have done so largely through a process which can be termed ‘induction’, discussed further below.
  • Some ancient problems, such as those relating to the border between Russia and China, have moved towards resolution. China has reached agreements with all the successor states of the Soviet Union on its borders, including Russia itself – the remaining demarcation issues with the latter having been settled during President Putin’s visit to China in 2004.[20]

 

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 co-operation. 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/Japanese revisionism of 1930–45, nor do they have the broad appeal that international communism could command at various times in the years 1917–89. The absence of major ideological challenge helps to explain how, up to now, the international order has been able to survive the degree of incapacitation that the US has suffered. Over time, the US will no doubt recover some capacity for leadership, and this will be needed as some of the new challenges emerge.

 

3. Which countries take the lead in preserving order?

a. Leading – or inducing?

 

The proposition that certain countries are powers of particular importance and ‘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 eighteenth and nineteenth 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 USA – 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, 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 I would argue that it was the 1991 Gulf War and in the 1999 Kosovo War), 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. The Cold War ended, not by any single act of military intervention, but by a complex combination of factors, some involving a capacity for force, some not. One of these was the process that might be called ‘induction’ whereby Western countries assisted processes of change in the communist world. Similarly, the 2004 and 2007 rounds of European Union expansion happened by a process of induction. The term ‘induction’ encompasses both bringing about a change by proximity (as in magnetic induction), and in the sense of preparing the country concerned for membership (as in induction to any 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.

 

b. ‘Non-polar’ or ‘collegial’ international order

 

Two suggested descriptions of the contemporary international order – ‘non-polar’ and ‘collegial’ – contain implied suggestions that the US leadership role is in question. In early 2007, John Chipman suggested that the present international system can be characterized as ‘non-polar’. He did not mean that no country ever takes the lead, but rather that the US lacks sufficient power and prestige to control the international agenda, and no other state is, in a general way, able to assume any such role. Although the US is tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, no other country can take its place globally. A more positive way to characterize the same international order has been suggested by Prof. Michael Howard – ‘collegial’. This approach draws on the fact that large numbers of states perceive positive benefits in the contemporary international order, and support it by their rhetoric, their involvement in diplomacy, and their roles in regional organizations.

 

The terms ‘non-polar’ and ‘collegial’ both have their strengths, including that of brevity. They capture aspects of the present world order, but will they gain general currency? The ‘non-polar’ variant may understate the extent to which the US inability to lead is a temporary phenomenon, caused above all by the misadventure in Iraq. The US has many attributes that will bring it back into a closer relation with other states: these include a capacity for patient cooperation, as shown in the Cold War; and a phenomenal capacity to deploy and use force distant from its own shores. As to the description ‘collegial’, it may understate the continuing elements of conflict in the international system. Yet it does highlight the role of co-operation, including through the United Nations.

 

The proponent of both these ideas recognize that it is not enough to point to a general interest in co-operation: 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, say, that 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 by another major power. In addition, there are obvious risks of ineffective management of power leading to renewed calls for outside – even US – involvement in regional conflicts.

 

4. What is the role of international organizations?

 

The fact that there is an international order that can be characterized by such terms as ‘non-polar’ or ‘collegial’ 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 supra-national level.

 

Europe exemplifies the continued role of regional bodies in the security field. Their importance is of course always under challenge. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been in difficulties throughout the post-Cold War era, not least because it cannot paper over all the cracks that exist between some of its remarkably large number of member states. The European Union, despite making significant advances in the fields of security, peacekeeping and peace-building – especially in the Balkans – still has difficulty in securing agreement on the use of force and in providing an intervention capability relevant to current needs. NATO was unceremoniously brushed aside by the US when if 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. Yet despite these problems, and despite 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 retreat to unilateralism in security policy.

 

A main weakness in the European debate about international order since 2003 concerns the tendency of some Europeans blandly to assert the virtues of multilateral as against unilateral approaches. Interpreting issues thus is a nice way of implying European superiority over the US, but actually it presents a false choice. 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. Moreover, over sixty years of experience of 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 UN’s 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. (1) The UN has been, and remains, an important framework within which states can act collectively, including in the security sphere. (2) The UN does not at present constitute anything approaching a complete system of collective security: indeed, to present it in that light may damage the UN by placing a greater weight of expectation on the organization than it can possibly bear. (3) The experience of the UN in the past six decades confirms that there remains a need for certain states to take the lead it the UN is to act effectively: this has especially been the case so far as the use of force has been concerned, with the US often cast in the role of leading UN-authorized coalitions. (4) The UN 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.

 

5. Conclusions: the Post-Cold War Order

 

The Babel-like confusion about the nature of the present world order – and how, in a phrase, it can be described – arises because of genuine complexities in the structure of power, the pattern of events, and the ways of thinking about them. While this confusion is not likely to be resolved quickly, the single phrase that best encapsulates the contemporary world order is still ‘the post-Cold War era’. It has the merit of anchoring our understanding of international politics in the great change that occurred in 1989–91, of avoiding language that suggests a complete divorce from the past, and of recognizing that 9/11 did not usher in a totally new era. This phrase does not itself provide an answer to any of the questions posed at the start, which will therefore be briefly reviewed with possible responses in summary form:

 

1. What is world order? The term is useful today partly because such order as exists is not just about international activities (i.e. between states) but also involves other levels: the internal order within states, and the activities of non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations. However, the term comes with much questionable baggage: in the past, it has often been associated with imposing Western values without much sensitivity about the history and culture of particular peoples and places. Any approach to world order today needs to start from a frank recognition that there are many distinct visions of how the world is and should be ordered, emerging from different national, cultural, regional and ideological perspectives. Too often, the language of ‘globalization’ and of ‘new world order’ has concealed this central requirement.

 

2. How fragile is world order today? Despite the seriousness of new challenges, international collaboration today is at a remarkably high level by almost any measure: the range of topics covered, the adoption of international standards in a wide range of technical matters, the movements of goods and people, and the extent to which co-operation involves societies as a whole and not just their foreign ministries. At the same time, international wars are fewer and less destructive than in previous centuries, and the challengers to the present world order do not offer an ideology that is likely to be widely shared. International order appears to be sufficiently robust to be able to survive the part-incapacitation of the US due to Iraq. Whether it could survive a further US-led military action (e.g. in Iran) if it were widely perceived as illegitimate is doubtful. An essentially plural or even ‘anarchic’ order, however well functioning today, is not inherently a strong framework for addressing such challenges as nuclear proliferation, population movements, resource crises, and the effects of global warming: there has to be space within it for effective leadership whether by major powers or by international organizations.

 

3. Which countries take the lead in preserving order? The idea of ‘taking the lead’ is not limited to taking military action. It also encompasses peaceful processes of ‘induction’ into the world order – processes that have been part of the EU’s effective record of assisting change in neighbouring states. However, the idea of ‘taking the lead’ does also need to encompass a capacity and willingness to use force for certain purposes. The US was a main provider of military force in the 1990s, but due to Iraq and Guantanamo it has reduced its reputation, capacity and will for leadership – as has the UK. This does not rule out action by the major Western powers to maintain order, and in time they will recover. However, the present weakened role of these powers forces us to confront what has always been a central truth of international relations: that in different regions and crises, different states and combinations of states take the lead. ‘Variable geometry’ is the rule. This may sometimes be as much a part of the problem of world order as it is of the solution, but it is likely to endure.

 

4. What is the role of international organizations? Since the end of the Cold War both regional and global organizations have been the subject of exceptionally high hopes and occasional disappointments. In light of the difficulties experienced by the US in its largely unilateral management of Iraq since 2003, there is a tendency (especially but not only in Europe) to argue that multilateral approaches are inherently better than unilateral ones. This argument, which sets up a false dichotomy, fails to take account of the fact that there were some real problems of UN involvements in crises (including in Yugoslavia) that contributed to the US disenchantment with multilateralism. There is a need for a realistic appraisal of both the strengths and the weaknesses of multilateral approaches to security.

The post-Cold War world has been the subject of an extraordinary series of prescriptions and characterizations, from ‘new world order’ to ‘clash of civilizations’, from the ‘end of history’ to ‘global chaos’. Especially in the US, the changes in understanding, in awareness of fragility, and in policy recommendation have all been unprecedentedly fast and frequent. The Cold War period, by contrast, had greater consistency of Western diagnosis and prescription – and, in consequence, greater steadiness in Western policy-making. Today we should emulate that consistency and the steadiness. The post-Cold War world is more intellectually demanding than the Cold War, but it is not, or at least not yet, as dangerous.

end


[1] See e.g. the series of studies by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), World Order Papers (London: RIIA, 1939, 1940 & 1941).

[2] See e.g. Hans Cohn, World Order in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942). Written at an early point in US participation in the war, the author saw the war as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. Stating that ‘there is no time yet for premature blue prints’, the author expressed his faith that the allies ‘can establish a world order, based on the rule of law among nations and bills of rights and duties within nations. … Force used for the enforcement of law is necessary to the protection of civilized society against the inroads of barbarism.’ (pp. 280–1.)

[3] William Henry Chamberlin, America, Partner in World Rule (New York: Vanguard Press, 1945); the UK edition of which was given the title World Order or Chaos (London: Duckworth, 1946). Written in early 1945, it is a plea for honesty of information and analysis about international events. It reflects a reasoned scepticism about the Soviet Union’s international role, and a concern to find a stronger basis for a post-war world order than the projected United Nations was likely to provide.

[4] Resolution of the two houses of the US Congress (H.R. 4655), passed by the House of Representatives on 5 Oct.1998 and the Senate on 7 Oct. 1998.

[5] ‘Conditions for Military Action’, Secret Cabinet Office paper, 21 July 2002, esp. at para. 11. Available at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9112.htm.

[6] John Bowle made a plea for ‘world management’: ‘In the taming of power the Western constitutional states have been the more sophisticated and successful; the leadership, which present conditions demand, may well come from them; but the challenge extends to the whole world.’ Bowle, World Order or Catastrophe? (London: Ampersand, 1962), p. 142.

[7] Peter Calvocoressi, World Order and New States (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962).

[8] David Wilkinson, ‘World Order Models Project: First Fruits’, Political Science Quarterly, New York, vol. 91, no. 2 (Summer 1976), p. 332.

[9] The World Policy Institute is now under the wing of the New School in New York, whose website proclaims the School’s objective as to ‘bring actual, positive change to the world’. Information from the New School website, http://www.newschool.edu/about.html.

[10] Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 20. See also the 3rd edn, with forewords by Stanley Hoffmann and Andrew Hurrell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

[11] Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 22.

[12] Samuel Huntington, ‘The Great American Myth: There is No US Empire, but There is a Uni-Multi-Polar World’, talk in Toronto, 10 February 2005, available at:
http://www.aims.ca/library/huntington.pdf.

[13] Huntington, ‘Great American Myth’, p. 4.

[14] President George H.W. Bush, ‘Toward a New World Order’, US Department of State Dispatch, 17 September 1990, 1:3, p. 91.

[15] A group of US academics offer an interesting mixture of hopeful advocacy and sobering case studies in Lori Fisler Damrosch (ed.), Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993).

[16] For some not wholly convincing explorations of this theme by North American academics, see Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno (eds.), Beyond Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1995.

[17] George W. Bush, State of the Union add, r, ess, Washington DC, 2 February 2005.

[18] Robert Litwak, Regime Change: U.S. Strategy through the Prism of 9/11 (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007), p. 320.

[19] 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.

[20] Agreement on the eastern section of the border between Russia and China, concluded in Beijing on 14 October 2004.