Working in theory

National Interest, The, Winter, 2004 by George Modelski, John M. Owen, IV

As a life-long student of international relations with a penchant for theory, I feel challenged to comment on the theoretical portion of Clifford Kupchan's "Real Democratik" (Fall 2004)--in particular the prediction that "the contemporary international order", viewed as both "normatively good" and "empirically inevitable", will be marked for the next several decades by "unprecedented American unipolarity."

Like its cousins, bipolarity and multipolarity, unipolarity has been a key term of international relations. But the time has come to take another look at it. The conventional view equates polarity with raw power--a concentrated distribution of military and economic capacity. (I used this approach in my 1974 monograph, World Power Concentrations, one of the first, if not the first, attempts actually to measure unipolarity.) That is the metric (indexed by military expenses) basically used by Kupchan.

The main reason for taking another look at the "raw power" metric is the rising complexity of contemporary world politics. Most day-today international problems are increasingly processed in institutional and multilateral contexts, such as summit meetings, regional bodies, international financial institutions and the like. In this context, institutional power means decisional or voting power. Unipolarity here means control of a "one party" system, and is measured by the ability to obtain favorable outcomes--and one of the relevant metrics is world public opinion.

I tend to agree with Kupchan that in today's international system, unipolarity probably prevails in terms of raw (military) power, but I do not think it obviously does so in relation to institutional power. In fact, some recent trends point toward the growth of a "bi- or multiparty" system in that area.

Multipolarity is a fact in the world economy. Two or three decades ahead, unipolarity is still probable for forces of global reach (commanding sea, air and space) but not for all the aspects of military power.

If unipolarity claims to be the unique source of the public goods of world order, then its exercise labors under all the well-known burdens and criticisms of monopoly power: excessive costs combined with underperformance. Because it yields high profits but deteriorates into incompetence, a monopoly attracts competition and generates serious conflicts.

On such grounds, a monopoly is morally suspect, but there is an exception: when a monopoly naturally emerges from a process of innovation. In public life, the general interest in innovation is usually protected by patent law that grants the inventor a temporary privilege. Similarly, in world politics we might argue that world powers earn a temporary relief from the inevitable pressures and criticisms of monopoly in recognition of their inventive solutions of critical global problems. The early phases of the exercise of global leadership by the United States, Britain (twice), the Dutch republic and Portugal demonstrate that point. But does this hold for the current situation? Claims of benignity or benevolence are not enough.

All in all, Kupchan would be well advised not to use "inevitable" or "entrenched" unipolarity as the principal pillar of his analysis. As for the longevity of unipolarity, he might consider looking into the findings of the theory of long cycles.

GEORGE MODELSKI

Professor Emeritus

University of Washington

Clifford Kupchan is to be congratulated for his thoughtful and timely call on his fellow Democrats to attend to the fact, and the desirability, of unipolarity--that is, that the United States has unprecedented international power and that it ought to seek to preserve that power. Indeed, as one of those rare academics who tend to vote Republican, I would like to see a corresponding Real Republikan approach that would recognize the common interest that the United States and its democratic allies have in preserving and extending the post-World War II international order. It would strive to keep the bargain on which that order is based, including the agreement to render U.S. actions predictable by binding America to some extent through international institutions. It would also insist that catastrophic terrorism is a grave threat to that order and the countries that subscribe to it.

Real Republikan would differ from Real Demokratik, however, by recognizing just how difficult unipolarity makes voluntary international cooperation. Unipolarity not only tempts America to act in ways and regions previously off limits, it also causes other countries to worry more about whatever the United States does. When America uses force in Afghanistan or Iraq, more people than ever around the world suspect that we are building a world empire. Most concerned countries have good reasons not to try to form a serious anti-U.S, alliance, but they use various low-cost tools, including diplomacy and passivity, to block perceived expansions in U.S. power. Iraq is where the costs of this resistance are felt most keenly today.