ABSTRACT
For many European observers of international affairs, a gradual transition from the hegemonic order of the 1990s, when the US was the sole superpower, to a more complicated international system in which several poles – including Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and Russia – have weight or the potential to develop it is taking place. Many Europeans are rather relaxed about this evolution, though it makes the more Atlanticist among them feel uncomfortable. Americans, unsurprisingly, tend to be less sanguine about this trend. Given
that some of those who have talked most about multipolarity – including the former French President Jacques Chirac and the former Russian President Vladimir Putin – have also, at times, been very critical of the US, Americans can be forgiven for seeing the concept as anti-American. Economics, and notably the rapid growth of the ‘BRIC’ economies (Brazil,
Russia, India and China), is driving this change. According to predictions by the Economist Intelligence Unit, by 2020 the American, EU and Chinese economies will each account for just under 20 per cent of global GDP (calculated on the basis of purchasing power parity). It predicts that by 2030, the Chinese economy will be the largest in the world, while the relative weights of the US and the EU will continue to fall. Although much uncertainty surrounds such figures, the trend seems clear. Of course, military and diplomatic power does not always correlate closely
with economic output. At the moment, the US accounts for almost half the entire world’s defence spending, and it is likely to remain the supreme military power for many decades ahead. But there is little doubt that in the long term, the West (in the sense of the North Americans and the Europeans) is becoming weaker, relative to the rest of the world. Newspaper headlines in the past few years have brought home this shift to
the European public. Two companies of Indian origin, Mittal and Tata Steel, bought the two largest steel producers in Europe, Arcelor and Corus, respectively. Chinese and Indian firms have bought up the remnants of what was once the British Leyland car group. When American and European banks suffered massive losses in the 2007 credit crunch, sovereign wealth funds from China, Kuwait, Singapore and elsewhere bought billion-dollar stakes in the
likes of Citi, Merrill Lynch and UBS. And in July 2008, India’s and China’s desire to protect their farmers helped cause the collapse of the World Trade Organization talks (though the US must share the blame). The rise of the new economic powers is affecting the fabric of international
diplomacy. The UN created a new Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2006, yet the new body has not only avoided criticism of the lack of civil and political freedoms in Muslim countries, but also passed a resolution backed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and opposed by the EU which condoned limits to free speech on religious matters. Nor has the council criticized Russia or China, which jointly prevented it from scrutinizing Belarus in 2006. The main institutions of global governance, such as the UN Security
Council, the G8 or the IMF, are steadily losing legitimacy and authority because of the under-representation of new powers and the developing world within them.1 They are also losing their effectiveness: in Africa, for example, China’s ‘no-strings-attached’ loans have undermined the efforts of international financial institutions (and western governments) to improve governance through making aid conditional. Although the trend towards multipolarity is indisputable, the nature of the
multipolar system that emerges is not. Two kinds of multipolarity seem plausible: one competitive, the other cooperative; one based on the assertion of national power, the other on multilateral rules and organizations. The leading countries, or poles, could line up in two competing camps,
driven by ideology or some other set of interests, as happened during the Cold War. For example, Robert Kagan, the American author, believes that the
underlying political values of the various poles will determine who their best friends are. If his analysis was correct, Russia and China could form an ‘axis of autocracies’, united by their dislike of western political liberalism. They would face an axis of democracies, consisting of the US, Europe, Japan and possibly India.2
