Filenews 23 February 2023
By Andreas Kluth
If the US secret services are right and China is really going to arm Russia in its genocidal war against Ukraine, perhaps we are entering a new era in international relations. Even more dangerous? That remains to be seen.
Essentially, Chinese military support for Russia would eventually turn the Ukrainian conflict into a proxy war between two enemy blocs, with a third trying to stay out of the fight. The USA, the European Union and the geopolitical "West" - from Canada to Japan and Australia - would supply Kiev. China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus and a few other "pariahs" - let's call them "East" - would help Moscow.
Meanwhile, most other countries - from India to Brazil and much of Africa - would navigate between these two camps. Today we collectively call them the 'Global South'. In the past, they were referred to as the 'Non-Aligned Movement' - led by India and the former Yugoslavia - or simply as the 'Third World', a term that only later began to denote 'poor countries'.
Memories
Do you sound familiar? The world order that seems to emerge from the Ukrainian ruins is very similar to that of the Cold War. A democratic and capitalist First World would once again face an authoritarian (and generally kleptocratic-capitalist or "post-communist") Second World, with the Third once again feeling pressured, ignored, indignant and restless.
International relations boasts fancy polysyllabic words for such configurations. The "order" of the Cold War was bipolar. This meant neither that the era was full of rational order, nor that there were only two powerful forces. It merely indicated the two main centres of geopolitical power, in Washington and Moscow.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to end bipolarity and usher in a new unipolar era — or "moment," depending on your view of its resilience. The US, as the only remaining superpower, would in fact act as a global "policeman". Another fancy term for this role is "hegemonic power". Depending on where in the world one was, this was either great or the worst possible news.
New era
In any case, it was an ephemeral treaty. For at least the past decade, diplomats and scholars have felt confident that we have moved into a new era. Josep Borrell, the EU's high representative for foreign policy, calls it "complex multipolarity". The main players in this system, he believes, are the US, China and the EU - it works in Brussels after all - with other middle powers having room for their 'antics', including Russia, Turkey and India. Far from being happy with this "arrangement", Borrell worries that such multipolarity actually makes a rules-based multilateral order more difficult.
Scholars of international relations often "argue about which of these three systemic models is most conducive to stability." Unipolar precedents include the Roman Empire and the Chinese Tang and Ming dynasties. One problem is that the superpower, over time, perceives its hegemony less as a privilege and more as a burden, since it often has to put the interests of the system above its own. Another issue is that all other powers are inevitably tempted either to move free of constraints, or to clash with the powerful factor.
Bipolarity also has historical precedents, from Sparta and Athens in the 5th century BC to Britain and France in the 18th century. AD and, of course, the USA and the Soviet Union in the 20th. If you lived through the Cuban missile crisis, you might remember this kind of confrontation as scary. Bipolarity, however, can also simplify the theory of games between two superpowers and lead to stability, such as the "Mutually Assured Destruction" (with the highly appropriate abbreviation MAD) which saved us from the nuclear holocaust during the Cold War.
Examples of multipolarity include the Europe of the 17th century, that of the 19th after the Napoleonic Wars or that of the 20th, after the First World War. Her admirers include scholars of the classical "realist" tradition, who believe that stability results from a change in the balance of power between many factors. And multipolar systems, however, eventually collapse. The 17th century was tested in the Thirty Years' War, which left about one in three Central Europeans dead. The interwar class of the 20th century, as it was formed, was personified in Mussolini, Franco, Hitler and Stalin.
Cold war;
Another Cold War - provided it remains cold - would therefore not necessarily mean the end of the world, simply because it would have become bipolar. It would, however, require new approaches. One difference is that the cast of characters has changed. The US and NATO are still the main protagonists on the one hand. But while during the Cold War their main competitor was Moscow, while Beijing was something of a poor relative of the latter, the roles here have now been reversed.
At the moment, Russia under President Vladimir Putin is the agent of chaos that threatens the system as a whole, but without being a counterpart to the US or the West in the long run. Venturing his anger in a two-hour speech this week, Putin looked more like a frantic dictator than a potential co-ruler.
China under President Xi Jinping is the opposite. It is the only power that could challenge the US for supremacy, but it also has an increasing interest in keeping the system as such. This week's insinuations from Wang Yi, China's head of diplomacy, that Beijing will seek to mediate a negotiated peace in Ukraine should therefore be treated with caution, but at the same time not dismissed.
Regardless of whether one characterizes our era as multipolar or bipolar, it is unlikely to turn out to be pleasant. Thinking in terms of "spheres of influence" is back in vogue, at the expense of smaller countries that see themselves becoming pawns on the chessboards of others. Multilateralism - that is, regulated cooperation between all or at least most actors - will become an increasingly elusive goal, even as climate change makes it necessary. Only academics would call any of this a "class."
