Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 243–252
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I
The global economic crisis has everyone focused on the Great Depression. Not since the 1930s – or so we repeatedly read in the newspapers – has global finance seized up so quickly, growth slowed so sharply and unemployment risen so dramatically. Such analogies are at best imprecise and a range of voices do dispute them. Nevertheless, the parallels are close enough to brand a whole range of economic policies as lessons from the past.
The same is not true for foreign affairs. No matter how closely the economic situation mirrors conditions in the inter-war period, the political situation does not. Radical Islam is not fascism and neither Russian- nor Chinese-style authoritarianism bears any similarity to the communist threat. Robert Kagan may pause to celebrate the Return of History and the End of Dreams, but it is to herald a new ‘age of divergence’ and not to signal precise parallels with the past.
To find an appropriate political analogy we should look to the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period when international turmoil coincided with a crisis of governability. Then, as now, America’s moral authority suffered the stigma of an unpopular war even as contradictions in the American economy contributed to the breakdown of global finance. This dual challenge to American hegemony coincided with a crisis in political legitimacy: across the globe, student protest, labour unrest and even political violence captured government attention at home even as political leaders sought to adapt to the changing structure of relations abroad. The old certainties of the Cold War crumbled and writers began to speculate about the future of the West.
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed an important flourishing of the study of power beyond the traditional notionsof the classical realist period. Where classical realists like E.H. Carr or Hans J. Morgenthau focused on the exercise of power as a function of wealth and capabilities, the writers of the late 1960s and early 1970s were more concerned with the possibility that groups without obvious endowments could nevertheless force changes to the status quo. Traditional concepts of power were set aside in favour of new relational notions that underscored the importance of managing interdependence, manipulating uncertainty and redefining the possible in a changed world.
These relational concepts of power are increasingly important today. With all the talk of hard power and soft power, smart power and network power, we risk losing sight of the dynamics that emerge when politics collapses into disorder. A reconsideration of the 1970s not only helps us better understand events as they unfold in the current crisis, but also forces us to reconsider the appropriate balance between American leadership and the international rule of law.
II
The usual presumption is that if one country gets another to do something it otherwise would not do, or prevents it from doing something it otherwise would, the explanation can be traced to some attribute of the country in charge: the strength of its army, the wealth of its economy, or the hold...
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Erik Jones is Professor of European Studies at the SAIS Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University and Contributing Editor of Survival.
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