Examining Paradigms of World Politics
In the field of foreign policy, there have long been efforts to generalize about the state of the world and global politics. Major recent ideas and conceits include globalization, “the end of history”, Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”, and political scientist Ian Bremmer’s concept of a G-Zero world. While these ideas generally have some merit, many of them have not aged well and fail in their framing to give us an accurate model of the world. Examining these previous ideas in turn can help form new paradigms going forward.
Globalization as a process certainly exists, with our world more interconnected then ever before in terms of communications, transportation, and the ability to share knowledge and information. Since World War II, tariffs and trade barriers are far less common, and international trade and investment has grown significantly. However, there is an increasing amount of backlash towards globalization, free trade, and multilateral institutions in Western countries, notably the US and the UK. Eurosceptic political parties are still powerful, despite decreased momentum for countries to actually leave the EU following Brexit. The extent of the social and cultural aspect of globalization is also debatable and controversial in many developing nations. For example, these nations may consider the influence of Western pop culture as undesirable “Americanization.” Yet that type of globalization works on a rather superficial level, and it seems clear that wide variation in cultural and social norms among nations will continue to exist. Globalization as a concept helps us understand some patterns and forces in today’s world, but as a frame of analysis it leaves much to be desired.
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama put forward a widely misunderstood idea: while history would not literally end, Fukuyama contended that “liberal democracy” had no serious ideological competition left as a political system. Individual states may face a long or winding road to liberal democracy, and some will revert to authoritarian systems. But in the long run, no alternative competitor exists following the demise of fascism and communism. While Fukuyama’s ideas fit within a long tradition of political philosophy including the Hegelian dialectic (more widely known as adopted by Karl Marx), the global trajectory of democracy over the last decade has gone in the opposite direction. Many countries have moved in nationalist and authoritarian directions, including countries once considered established democracies. Fukuyama himself was disturbed by the election of Donald Trump, arguing that a “global shift toward populist nationalism” was underway, accelerated by the dysfunction and “political decay” of the American system. This analysis directly challenges the notion of an end of history where mankind has no ideological struggles left to fight.
Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” has aged most poorly. In response to Fukuyama’s ideas, Huntington drew attention to basic differences in religion, language, culture, and history between civilizations, arguing that these traits are mostly static. In his analysis, globalization simply makes everyone more aware of these differences. While I think paying attention to these kinds of differences is important, Huntington’s model is critically flawed.
Huntington’s division of the world into civilizations is awkward at best and racist at worst. His focus on the “Islamic” civilization with “bloody borders” was controversial at the time and has little relevance today. Most recent conflicts in the Middle East have been civil wars, typically involving Muslims on both sides. Overwhelmingly, the actual victims of Islamic terrorism are not Americans or Europeans but Muslims. And while the United States played a key role in clawing back territory from the Islamic State, the entire region continues to suffer from poor governance and security issues. Syria has been ravaged by a decade of war, Iraq is dominated by militias, Lebanon’s corrupt and incompetent government was exposed by the tragic and devastating explosion in Beirut, and the Taliban are gaining ground in Afghanistan. These conflicts all involve state weakness and internal divides, not some sort of overarching conflict with the West.
Furthermore, Huntington’s prediction that states such as Vietnam and South Korea will join China’s side in civilizational conflict with the West was utterly wrong. His insinuation of a “Confucian-Islamic connection” as a sort of united front against the West is not at all reflected in reality. Finally, his categorization of civilizations made several baffling choices: he was unclear about whether to include Latin America as part of the West or by itself, placed Japan in its own category, and mentioned only in passing that an “African” civilization could “possibly” have enough influence to be counted.
I think Huntington’s model has little utility for understanding the world today. A more recent concept, Ian Bremmer’s “G-Zero”, takes the idea of the G20 but argues that no nation or bloc of nations has “the political and economic leverage” to drive a global agenda. First articulated a decade ago, I think Bremmer’s concept has aged relatively well as the US has lost relative political and economic power. In particular, the US has lost a lot of credibility when it comes to negotiating agreements and joining organizations or ad hoc coalitions thanks mostly to President
Trump. If the US is to abandon previous agreements such as the JCPOA with Iran and the Paris Climate Agreement simply due to a change in administration and party in power, how is it supposed to retain any kind of credibility going forward? If every initiative is subject to change every four or eight years, how can anything be accomplished?
To take a step back to general trends, China has overtaken the US as the world’s largest economy by GDP (PPP). Yet the US still has plenty of economic influence around the world, as well as security arrangements with NATO and Asian allies that were strained by President Trump but remain intact. But the United States’ political dysfunction and various domestic problems will sap its ability to pay attention to global challenges, much less lead in responding to them. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the extreme weakness of international institutions and made clear that we are quite far from living in an era of international cooperation. Yet it has also made clear how interdependent and interconnected the world is. There is no obvious global “leader” at the moment, but there does not have to be one.
It is sometimes easy to forget that the concept of a “nation” or “country” is fairly new in the scope of human history. Most history consists of various civilizations and the rise and fall of empires. Areas with no or little centralized government as we understand it today nevertheless had social structures and groups of people defined by language or ethnicity who migrated, fought each other, traded, and established religious and political institutions. Although the nation-state concept is not going anywhere soon, it may eventually diminish in importance if international organizations are reformed and strengthened. Global politics is a complex system, and today’s environment especially resists easy categorization. Previous paradigms, especially those developed in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR, are not good fits even as simplified models. In my next post, I will move on by examining the concept of polarity, apply it to past systems, and evaluate how well it fits the current environment.
Image By Tom Page - Flickr: IMG_1965, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25912446
