Images of the coming international system

ORBIS, Fall, 1997 by Robert E. Harkavy

The astonishing fact about the end of the cold war is that the events of 1989-92 ushered in a new international system, perhaps for the fast time in history, without a hegemonic war. The unraveling of the Soviet empire was, of course, the centerpiece of this change, ending as it did forty-five years of bipolar, global ideologically driven conflict and giving birth to - what? If indeed the present new era of history has any defining feature it is surely the widespread confusion over how to characterize contemporary global politics and project trends and scenarios into the future. Thus, Henry Kissinger recently stated that "never before have the components of world order, their capacity to interact and their goals all changed quite so rapidly, so deeply, or so globally."(1) In the same vein, Stanley Hoffman has stated that we live today in "a completely unprecedented world. It's very difficult to call this world anything . . . when you don't know what a thing is, you call it post-something else."(2)

Nowadays, policymakers and academic theorists alike purvey a profuse variety of clashing and contradictory classifications, theories, images, paradigms, and historical analogies, in every case bereft of the familiar signposts once provided by a dear ideological spectrum.(3) Former political antagonists now often sing from the same page, while former cold war bedfellows have drifted apart and embraced new identifications and alignments. No two observers seem to agree on whether the present indefinable international system will itself exhibit more or less stability than did the bipolar system, or whether the current period will prove to be only a brief interregnum, and thus not really a "system" at all. Kissinger, for instance, has stated that the new world order "is still in a period of gestation, and its final form will not be visible until well into the next century."(4)

Competing Images of the Emerging System

The profuse literature on the state of post-cold war international politics appears to offer seven discrete images, models, or paradigms which, their proponents assert, succeed in capturing the fundamentals of the emerging international reality. They include:

The three-bloc neo-mercantilist thesis, a.k.a., geoeconomics.

The multipolar balance of power model hinged on the traditional "realist" and/or neo-realist frameworks.

The controversial "clash of civilizations" thesis.

The unipolar dominance model, related to the traditional geopolitical "long cycle" theory and to theories of "hegemonic stability."

The "zones of peace" versus "zones of turmoil" model based on the apparently widening gulf between the developed and developing worlds.

The "global village" model based on the apparent shift of power and sovereignty from nation-states to international or non-governmental organizations, and the growth of functional global regimes.

The bipolar-redux model anticipating either a future challenge to U.S. dominance by China, Russia, Japan, or Europe, or a return to some sort of bipolar bloc structure.

These seven models do not exhaust the possibilities, nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive. Samuel Huntington himself suggests that a world otherwise defined by the "clash of civilizations" might be alternatively characterized by (1) "One World: Euphoria and Harmony," (2) "Two Worlds: Us and Them," (3) "184 States, More or Less," or (4) "Sheer Chaos." The fast parallels Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis predicated on the global acceptance of representative government and market economics. The second involves several possible bifurcations, i.e., between rich and poor, zones of peace and turmoil, or the West and the rest.(5) The third is derived from the classic "realist" theory of international relations, while the fourth is more or less congruent with the "zones of turmoil" thesis which predicts breakdowns of governmental authority, breakups of states, ethnic and tribal conflicts, refugee nightmares, proliferation, and terrorism across much of the developing world. Alexander Nacht, meanwhile, offers a typology consisting of "the end of history," "the dash of civilizations," balance of power, the primacy of economics, and a final catch-all category of "humanitarianism and global trends" focusing on issues such as resource allocation, the environment, and world population.(6)

The Three-Bloc Geoeconomics Model

The theory that held sway in the early years of the Clinton administration posited a new international system in which geoeconomics replaced geopolitics as the most crucial determinant of the rise or decline of nations, and that military power was thus becoming increasingly less relevant, hence wasteful, in the context of global competition. Some writers have spied in this current shift an expression of a long-established historical cyclicality characterized by periods in which national security dominates the agendas of major powers and periods in which those same powers have tended, relatively speaking, to compete through trade and investment.(7) On the other hand, some analyses have claimed that traditional balance of power politics, stressing the primacy of national security, are never absent. Looking at the period since 1989, when the Soviet empire effectively collapsed, they would be inclined to predict that a temporary interregnum during which the major powers attempt to act in concert will inevitably give way to renewed discord among those powers and a return to a classic balance of power.(8)