By Brahma Chellaney
The Tata Group's new "Nano" car for the masses: a symbol of India's rise.
While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar as it had been from the time of the Soviet Union's collapse to the end of the 1990s -- a period in which America failed to fashion a new liberal world order under its direction. What we have today is a world in transition. This may appear to some as a nonpolar world in which multiple engagements between and among different actors have become a strategic imperative. But with the emergence of new players in the geopolitical marketplace, it is only a matter of time before multipolarity begins to characterize the international order.
The ongoing power shifts are primarily linked to Asia's phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. Seat of ancient civilizations and home to the majority of the world's population, Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline. Asia's share of the world's economy totaled 60 percent in 1820 at the advent of the industrial revolution. It then went into sharp decline over the next 125 years. Today, it accounts for 40 percent of global production -- a figure that could, according to some projections, rise to 60 percent within the next quarter of a century.
The shifts in economic and political power foretell a much different world -- a world characterized by a greater distribution of power, but also by new uncertainties. Tectonic shifts in power are rarely quiet. They usually create volatility in the international system, even if such instability is short-lived. The new international divisiveness may reflect such a reality. But, unlike in the past, the qualitative reordering of power now underway is due not to battlefield victories or military realignments but to a peaceful factor: rapid economic growth.
The paradox is that the power shifts are happening even as the United States remains the world's sole superpower and, thus, militarily preeminent. Still, after the triumphalism of the 1990s, this decade has helped underscore an erosion of US soft and hard power, with many seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and the Middle East muddle as symbols of such decline. Today's international divisiveness, in part, mirrors the reality that power and influence are no longer one and the same in international relations. Despite its preeminence, the United States' influence has declined -- a trend unlikely to be reversed even with a new administration. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the United States to set the international agenda, either on its own or with its allies. To secure issue-based support, the United States now has to reach out to states beyond its network of traditional allies. At the same time, for the foreseeable future, the United States is likely to remain the most decisive force in international politics and security.
Another factor has also contributed to the divisiveness: While we know the world is in transition, we still do not know what the new order will look like. The impasse or lack of movement on key international issues, therefore, should not come as a surprise. These issues include climate change, nuclear disarmament, international terrorism, and global pandemics. The most pressing challenges today are international in nature and thus demand international solutions. Yet the existing international institutions, including the United Nations, are inadequate to deal with such global challenges, in part because such institutions no longer reflect the prevailing distribution of power. This representational deficit and inability to play an effective, forward-looking role have become glaring.
The more the world changes, however, the more it remains the same in some critical aspects. The information age and globalization, despite spurring profound changes in economy and security, have not altered the nature of international relations. In fact, the rapid pace of technological and economic change is itself a consequence of nations competing fiercely and seeking relative advantage in an international system based largely on national security.
We live in a Hobbesian world, with power coterminous with national security and success. The past century was the most momentous in history technologically, with innovations fostering not just rapid economic change, but bringing greater lethality to warfare. Consequently, the 20th century was the bloodiest ever. Weapons of mass destruction came to occupy a central military role. In the new century, the advance of technology and the absence of relevant safeguards or regimes evoke scenarios of deadly information and space warfare. Such are the challenges from the accelerated weaponization of science that, instead of disarmament, rearmament today looms large on the horizon, with the arms race being extended to outer space.
Once the economic power structure changes internationally, shifts in military power will inevitably follow, even if in stages. Seen against the ongoing changes, the trans-Atlantic order of the past 60 years will have to give way to a truly international order. The new order, unlike the current one founded on the ruins of a world war, will have to be established in an era of international peace and thus be designed to reinforce that peace. That means it will need to be more reflective of the consensual needs of today and have a democratic decision-making structure.
Until that happens, the new global fault lines will continue to signal rising geopolitical risks. The tensions between internationalism and nationalism in an era of a supposed single "global village," for instance, have raised troubling questions about international peace and stability. With greater public awareness from advances in information and communications technologies encouraging individuals and even some states to more clearly define their identity in terms of religion and ethnicity, a divide has emerged between multiculturalism and artificially enforced monoculturalism. The rise of international terrorism shows that increased access to information is both an integrating and dividing force.
The political, economic, and security divides are no less invidious. The world is moving beyond the North-South split to a four-tier economic division: the prosperous West; rapidly growing economies like those in Asia; countries that have run into stagnation after reaching middle-income status; and a forgotten billion people living on the margins of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa. These marginalized people have no stake in globalization. The international neglect of Africa has created a vacuum that China has sought to exploit by aggressively building commercial and political links with a number of African states.
There is also a global resource divide with the resource-hungry employing aid and arms exports as a diplomatic instrument for commodity outreach. As the specter of resource conflict has grown, the contours of a 21st-century version of the Great Game have emerged in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Competition over oil and gas resources, driven by rapid economic growth in Asia, indeed constitutes one key dimension of this emerging Great Game.
The ongoing global shifts in economic power are manifest from the changes occurring in the energy and materials sectors, with the growth in demand moving from the developed to the developing world, principally Asia. Energy prices are going to stay high and volatile for the foreseeable future, given these shifts and the soaring demand in countries like China and India, which together are projected to double their oil demand between 2003 and 2020. However, despite the total consumption of energy in the Asia Pacific having grown by 70 percent between 1992 and 2005, per capita energy consumption is still relatively low by international standards: 749 kilograms of oil equivalent in 2005, compared with the global average of 1,071. Not only will per capita consumption grow sharply in Asia but, "on the supply side, Asia's strong demand environment for energy and basic materials, coupled with its low labor costs, means that the region will increasingly become a global producer of aluminum, chemicals, paper, and steel."
Slaking the tremendous thirst of the fast-growing Asian economies and meeting the huge demands of the old economic giants in the West are at the core of the great energy dilemma facing the world this century. Finding an energy "fix" is imperative if the Asian and other emerging economies are to continue to grow and if the prosperous countries are to head off a slump. Such a fix will have to be rooted in three essential elements: low-cost, preferably renewable alternatives to fossil fuels; greater energy efficiency; and minimizing or eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions. The ongoing structural shifts in global energy markets carry important long-term political and economic implications, in addition to challenging the stability of these markets.
Also, with the rise of unconventional transnational challenges, a new security divide is mirrored both in the failure to fashion a concerted and effective international response to such threats, including transnational terrorism, and the divisiveness on issues like climate change. Efforts are needed to bridge the divide between the traditional security threats and the new, unconventional threats that are increasingly the focus of international attention and concern.
Yet another global divide is centered on political values. At a time when a qualitative reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting an axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, will guide their foreign policy strategy. Yet the Great Game under way plays up regime character as a key element.
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