Does the decline of U.S. geopolitical hegemony make multilateral global governance less likely or more likely?
A feature story on the CBS Sunday Morning program yesterday dealt with the shifting world economy and particularly with the rise of economic power in Asia.
I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two graphics:
They show GDP as a percentage of total world output. Note the dramatic reversal in just five years. How much more will it change in the next five or the next ten years?
Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine includes a related article by Parag Khanna titled “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.” Khanna writes:
From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country—friend of America’s or not—wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance.
And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries—the so-called Stans—China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the “NATO of the East.”
The upshot of this changing balance is a swift reduction of U.S. strength as a global hegemon. Khanna adds:
At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership.
So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing—and losing—in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules—their own rules—without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.
The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.
According to this analysis, it seems that the next international order after U.S. unipolar power has already begun. You’ll recall that we wrote about this a few months ago, and wondered:
How long will the current order last? If you accept my argument that we’re living today in the fourth different period of the last 100 years, it should be obvious that this is not a permanent state.
What comes next? How can we anticipate it? How might we shape it? And how will the development of powerful new technologies, such as molecular manufacturing, fit into that big picture?
The two previous periods of international order in the 20th century lasted for 30 years and then 40 years (see graphic below). Now it appears that the current order may have met its demise after less than 20 years.
CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE
Assuming we’ve entered a new phase, as Khanna suggests, then how long will this one last? Can the Era of Global Multipolarity maintain stability for more than a decade or two?
We’re reminded again of Jamais Cascio’s trenchant 2006 analysis of a “Post-Hegemonic Future” for the United States, in which he wrote:
Eventually, the US, too, will become just another country. This is not a partisan position, but a historical observation. And as fundamental changes to the international power structure rarely happen without major disruptions, it’s wise to think through what might lead us to a world where the US is no longer king of the hill.
Jamais proposed a four-box set of scenarios to analyze a future where the US loses its position of dominance from either absolute decline or relative decline, and where future global competition comes from either traditional nation-states or from non-state actors.
One point Jamais didn’t mention—which I said at the time was not only conceivable but probable—was the potential for emergence of some form of global governance that effectively replaces the nation-state as the key entity in geopolitics.
Does the recent rise of emerging economies and the evident decline of U.S. unipolar power make that global governance scenario less likely or more likely?
(Hat tip to The Washington Note)
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