ABSTRACT
Currently, the United States has a preponderance of power, but still faces hindrances when acting internationally. Many trends compete with the oldfashioned realist notion of the state as the decisive actor. The world has become globalized, sub-state actors are gaining terrain, most people no longer fear war between great powers or nuclear apocalypse, and many new theories and ways of conceiving theories have been put forward. Thus, it is easy to accept the end of ‘grand theories’ in International Relations (IR) and instead resort to conducting concrete analyses of lesser problems. One could think of many reasons not to write a book on unipolarity in the realist tradition. Yet there are reasons. There is a need to address how unipolarity contributes to explaining a time in history in which ‘low politics’ prevails, but in which there is also room for reforms both internationally and within states. Grand theories such as neorealism provide general frameworks for explanation and understanding. A specific model for unipolarity explains why we currently witness many small – rather than large – conflicts; why the only superpower both attracts and repels; and what the other states’ room for manoeuvre is like. General theory thus becomes the prerequisite and background for concrete analyses. States are still the important actors. They are still defended by their populations, and as Bob Holton wrote, they are still deeply wanted among groups of people who do not have a state (Holton 1998). Moreover, security problems still exist, even though the focus is on a different type of security than was the case during the Cold War and in the absence of wars between great powers. This was demonstrated in 9/11, in Iraq after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime and in Afghanistan. Some of these conflicts become subject to intervention, while
others develop as in the Sudan or Rwanda. A model for unipolarity is important in order to understand why a new type of conflict prevails and why some of these conflicts are subject to intervention. Furthermore, democratization has boomed since the end of the Cold War. Many new democracies have surfaced, and the United States has given priority to democracy internationally since 9/11. The model for unipolarity tells us why democratization has become an international issue and why competing political projects are struggling, as well as why the ‘world order’ plays a bigger role than has previously been the case. In a way, unipolarity also tells us why more and different theoretical approaches have emerged and why conventional approaches – as here – are being transformed or softened. The new world order, with only one superpower, is unique and demands special treatment, in both an academic and politicalstrategic sense. This is the reason for Unipolarity and World Politics. It has been written within the neorealist tradition, but the model for unipolarity is accommodated according to the relations of strength. Below, the point of departure is the neorealist theory according to Kenneth Waltz (1979), which is later expanded with a greater emphasis on the world order.
