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2002
Déjà vu, the unipolar world
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What a short window it's been between the end of the Cold War and the start of
another global struggle. In the 12 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall
1989 and the collapse of the twin towers 2001, we've had The End of History, the
end of the economic cycle, and the end of both these illusions.
In that intervening period, quite a few people have remarked how unique it was that world politics was dominated by a single superpower. Never before in history, they pointed out, and then wondered if we might be on the threshold of a new political experience. I come from the old world. On the flimsy basis of my Chinese ancestry, I claim the right to see history in epochal cycles. I deny the fantasy of believing there is anything really new about the human condition -- and politics is essentially the human condition writ large.
Through these 12 years, I've often wondered why so many Americans failed to
see that we've been here before. Many times. There is nothing really unique
about a unipolar world. In fact, historically, it's been quite common. The 'world' is relative First, we must understand what "world" means. It doesn't mean the globe. It means the extent of human awareness of places and peoples. It's only recently that our world became coterminous with the globe. Through most of history, China dominated its world, which stretched from Turkestan to the Ryuku Islands, from Ceylon to the Amur River. Through the first few centuries of the Christian era, Rome, later Constantinople, dominated its world, which stretched from Britain to Persia. On the American continents, at different times, the Incas and the Aztecs dominated their respective worlds.
I have long suspected that there will be parallels between the experiences of
these historical powers, and what we're going to see in the coming decades. And
I didn't think those parallels would be quite like some of the assumptions made
during the 1990s.
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The Wilsonian concert of nations What were those assumptions? If we look back at that decade, there was quite a bit of hope that there'd be a bigger role for multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organisation. We spoke about global treaties on the environment, international war crimes tribunals, free trade and worldwide labour standards. The common strand to all these hopes was a Wilsonian conception of world affairs, where nation states would come together like civilised folks, discuss and negotiate and agree upon international norms. That somehow the new world would be a grander extension of the civil, democratic and republican values that made America. It has struck me for some years now that nowhere in the histories of China, the Roman Empire, the Early Islamic Caliphate, and certainly not the human-sacrificing Aztecs, was such a polite concert of nations ever conceived, let alone tried in their respective worlds. The reality, then as now, was that states were not equal. They were not equal in their economic size, technological prowess or military might. More importantly - and it's something we all too often forget today - states were not equal in their existential reality. Yes, some states had governments that could control their territories and populations effectively: they could marshal resources for state objectives, like irrigation works, temple-building, trade and defence. They could live up to their international obligations. But other states were barely functioning. Some were very small, with neither enough power nor resources to control much territory. In fact, there was never any real distinguishing line between a state and a mere tribe. And finally, at the extreme margins, they diminish into autonomous bandits or pirates that acknowledged no sovereign. If one looks around the world today, without the rose-tinted glasses that the Wilsonian ideal makes us wear, this is exactly what we see. Here and there are failed states that exist only in name: Somalia, Congo, Liberia. On the ground, the reality is one of warlords and rampaging armies, bandits and refugees. Other states have governments that, to varying degrees, are unable to control the territory or the population that is nominally theirs. In large parts of such countries, e.g. Georgia, Indonesia, Colombia, or Pakistan, actual power lies with drug lords, tribal chiefs or private militias. Nor should we forget that most countries on this earth have bureaucracies riddled with corruption. Governmental policies are thwarted and subverted by personal interests at every level. With so many thugs, thieves and incompetents around, how we can still believe
in a Wilsonian concert of nations, I have never understood. How does one
negotiate with governments that can't deliver?
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Concentric rings If we give ourselves a reality check, we'll see the world as concentric rings around the sole superpower.
In such worlds, the greatest threat to the superpower can come from the anarchic fringe. China built the Great Wall across thousands of kilometres of its northern frontier to keep the barbarians out. Rome for centuries was preoccupied with the Goths, the Huns and other invading tribes, and built Hadrian's Wall in Britain to keep the uncivlised Picts out. Now America has been forced to take border controls seriously, in the belated recognition that other people don't share the same values as Americans; in fact, they rather hate America. Far from being a new human epoch, this post-Cold War struggle between the US
and al Qaeda harks back to many earlier ages. Imperial overreach, internal decay and colliding worlds There is a further sobering lesson from history: no matter how much each old superpower dominated its world, it could never control its world totally, nor determine its own fate. At its margins, it was always at risk of imperial overreach, at its centre at risk of internal conflict or decay. At different times, there was always some sort of balance between the might of the superpower and the tenacity of the minor contestants, between its own dynamism and stasis (or worse, implosion). Sometimes, the superpower is toppled by upstarts. Alexander, from the little state of Macedonia, seized the Persian Empire for himself in just a few years. Genghis Khan, roaming from one end of the Eurasian steppe to the other, must have surprised himself to have ended up possessing China, the Great Wall notwithstanding. The most dramatic historical discontinuities usually occur when worlds collide. When the maritime European countries muscled into East Asia, China's dominant position in its world vanished. When the Spanish conquistadors marched into the Mexican highlands, the Aztec's unipolar world collapsed nearly overnight. What other worlds out there may one day collide into ours? © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes None Addenda None
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