The Breaking of Nations
eBook - ePub

The Breaking of Nations

Robert Cooper

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Breaking of Nations

Robert Cooper

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

In this book, Robert Cooper sets out his radical interpretation of the new world order that has emerged from the debris of communism. It is an essential account of the times in which we live.

'A fluent, stimulating and often original book' Brendan Simms, Sunday Times
'An excellent new analysis of the cracks in today's geopolitical landscape.'Philip Stephens, Financial Times
'Intelligent and stylish' Robert Skidelsky, New Statesman'A seminal work: a brilliant and successful attempt to bring intellectual order to the chaos of the twenty-first century.' François Heisbourg, International Institute for Strategic Studies

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The Breaking of Nations an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The Breaking of Nations by Robert Cooper in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Politics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2011
ISBN
9780857895639

PART ONE

THE CONDITION OF THE WORLD

INTRODUCTION

The year 1989 marks a break in European history. What happened then was more far-reaching than the events of 1789, 1815 or 1919. Those dates stand for revolutions, the break-up of empires and the re-ordering of spheres of influence. But until 1989, change took place within the established framework of the balance of power and the sovereign independent state. Nineteen eighty-nine was different. To the dramatic changes of that year – the revolutions and the re-ordering of alliances – must be added a fundamental change in the European state system itself.
What happened in 1989 was not just the cessation the Cold War, but also the end of the balance-of-power system in Europe. This change is less obvious and less dramatic than the lifting of the Iron Curtain or the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it is deeper and more important. And, in fact, the change in the system is closely associated with both of these events and perhaps was even a precondition for them.
Historically, the best point of comparison is 1648, the end of the Thirty Years War when the modern European state system emerged at the Peace of Westphalia. What has been emerging into the daylight since 1989 is not a rearrangement of the old system but a new system. Behind this lies a new form of statehood, or at least states that are behaving in a radically different way from the past. Alliances that survive in peace as well as in war, interference in each other’s domestic affairs and the acceptance of jurisdiction of international courts mean that states today are less absolute in their sovereignty and independence than before.
In a curious symmetry these changes have also come about following a second thirty years’ war: 1914 to 1945. The First and Second World Wars brought a level of destruction that Europe had not seen since the first Thirty Years War. In both cases, 1648 and 1945, the result was a recognition that there had been a radical failure and the system was changed. A second important factor was the nuclear confrontation of the Cold War: this offered the possibility of devastation on a scale without historical precedent. At the same time, it froze Europe for forty years. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear confrontation was a reason to put aside the normal quarrels that had bedevilled European politics. The Iron Curtain provided a clear border and led to a stable alliance structure under American leadership. All of this allowed a breathing space for new ideas and new systems to emerge. A change in the state system in Europe was clearly required: if the existing system was producing such unacceptable levels of actual and potential destruction, it was not performing its function. We should not, therefore, be surprised to see a new form of state system emerging.
Thinking about foreign affairs – like any other kind of thinking – requires a conceptual map, which, as maps do, simplifies the landscape and focuses on the main features. Before 1648, the key organizing concept for Europe was the unity of Christendom (the term ‘Europe’ was hardly used until the late seventeenth century). After the Peace of Westphalia, it was the balance of power. Since 1648 the European order, and the policies that predominated within it, have been given a variety of names: ‘the concert of Europe’, ‘collective security’ and ‘containment’. Each of these was in fact the name for a variation on the nation state and the balance of power (collective security under the League of Nations was a special and particularly unsuccessful variation). If, as this essay argues, Europe has now moved beyond the balance-of-power system, we need to understand the new system on which our security is based. It requires a new vocabulary and, up to a point, new policies.
A particular problem in understanding the international system – as opposed to the European system – is that it has become less unified since the end of the Cold War.
The Cold War brought the international system together in a global confrontation and seemed to invest even obscure corners of the world with strategic significance. Most foreign policy issues could be viewed in the light of a single overwhelming question: was it good for Us or for Them, for the West or the Soviet Bloc, capitalism or communism? With the end of the Cold War this artificial unity of vision has been lost, and with it perhaps some of the uniting leadership of the United States. Unity has also been lost in another sense. As will be argued later on, while Europe is developing a new and more orderly security system, other parts of the world are becoming more disorderly. It was perhaps natural that with one global order gone, statesmen should want to hail the arrival of a new one, as President Bush did after Gulf War I. But, as is now obvious, this is a poor description of the actual state of affairs.
Understanding the kind of world we live in is important. The costs of intellectual errors in foreign affairs are enormous. Wars are sometimes fought by mistake. Suez was a mistake, at least for Britain: it was fought on the basis that Nasser was a new Hitler and a threat to order, but neither the threat nor the order really existed. Algeria was a mistake: France was fighting for a concept of the state that was no longer sustainable. Vietnam was a mistake: the United States thought it was fighting the Cold War, when in reality it was continuing a French colonial campaign. These conceptual errors had heavy costs. Clarity of thought is a contribution to peace.
The purpose of this essay is to explain the changes that have taken place and to offer a framework for understanding the post-Cold War world. The central focus will be on Europe. It is Europe that has dominated,first actively and then passively,the international stage for about 500 years. It is also in Europe that systemic change has taken place: the nation state balance-of-power system first came into being in Europe; and now the post-balance system of postmodern states has also begun in Europe. But in the age of globalization no continent is an island and the key question for Europe has ceased to be how it can end its fratricidal conflicts and become instead, how it can live in a world where conflicts, missiles and terrorists ignore borders, and where the familiar certainties of the Cold War and its alliances have gone.

1

THE OLD WORLD ORDER

To understand the present we must first understand the past. In a sense, the past is still with us. International order used to be based either on hegemony or on balance. Hegemony came first. In the ancient world, order meant empire: Alexander’s Empire, the Roman Empire, the Mogul, Ottoman or Chinese Empires. The choice, for the ancient and medieval worlds, was between empire and chaos. In those days imperialism was not yet a dirty word. Those within the empire had order, culture and civilization. Outside the empire were barbarians, chaos and disorder.
The image of peace and order through a single hegemonic power centre has remained strong ever since. It was first present in late medieval dreams of the restoration of Christendom (by such writers as Dante), or in the many proposals for world or European government made over the years by idealists such as Immanuel Kant, Saint-Simon, Victor Hugo or Andrew Carnegie; it is still visible today in calls for a United States of Europe. The idea of the United Nations as a world government (which it was never intended to be) still survives; and the United Nations is often criticized for failing to be one.
However, it was not the empires but the small states that proved to be a dynamic force in the world. Empires are ill-designed for promoting change. Holding the empire together – and it is the essence of empires that they bring together diverse communities under a single rule – usually requires an authoritarian political style; innovation, especially in society and politics, leads to instability. Thus the standard instructions to a provincial governor in the Chinese Empire were to ensure that nothing changed. Historically speaking, empires have generally been static.
Europe’s world leadership came out of that uniquely European contribution, the small state. In Europe, a third way was found between the stasis of chaos and the stasis of empire. In the particular circumstances of medieval Europe, empire had become loose and fragmented. A tangled mass of jurisdictions competed for control: landowners, free cities, holders of feudal rights, guilds and the king. Above all the Church, representing what remained of the Christian empire, still held considerable power and authority, competing with the secular powers.
The success of the small state came from its achievement in establishing a concentration of power – especially the power to make and to enforce the law – at a single point: that is to say in the establishment of sovereignty. Unlike the Church, whose claim was to universal rule, the state’s secular authority was limited geographically. Thus Europe changed from a weak system of universal order to a pattern of stronger but geographically limited sovereign authorities without any overall framework of law. The war of all against all that Hobbes feared was prevented by the concentration of legitimate force at a series of single points; but both legitimacy and force were exclusive to single states. Hobbes’ primary concern was domestic order; he had lived through the Civil War in England. But the concentration of power at home left the international order without the shelter – admittedly now a very leaky one – that the Church had provided in the shape of a system of law and authority to which even kings were subject. Domestic order was purchased at the price of international anarchy.
The diversity of the small European states created competition. And competition, sometimes in the form of war, was a source of social, political and technological progress. The difficulty of the European state system, however, was that it was threatened on either side. On the one hand, there was the risk of war getting out of control and the system relapsing into chaos. On the other, there was a risk of a single power winning the wars and imposing a single hegemony on Europe.
The solution to this, the essential problem of a small-state system, was the balance of power. This worked neither so perfectly nor so automatically as is sometimes imagined. The idea that the states of Europe would, by some semiautomatic Newtonian process, find an equilibrium among themselves that would prevent any one of them dominating the continent nevertheless retains a powerful grip on the historical imagination. For a hundred years the principle of maintaining a balance of power in the European continent was written into the annual Mutiny Acts of the British Parliament. Nevertheless, whatever the conceptual confusions (to which the US National Security Strategy has just added with its references to a ‘balance of power for peace’ – which seems to mean the same thing as US dominance), when it came to the point that the European state system was threatened by imperial ambitions from Spain, France or Germany, coalitions were put together to thwart those ambitions. This ran with the grain of the system: a sovereign power is naturally inclined to protect its sovereignty. This system also had a certain legitimacy; statesmen were conscious of the desirability of balance. Over the decades following the Thirty Years War, a consensus grew among governments and elites that the pluralism of European states should be maintained. Many saw this as a condition of liberty in Europe.
With the balance of power went the doctrine of raison d’état . Machiavelli first put forward the proposition that states should not be subject to the same moral constraints as individuals. This philosophy – that moral rules do not apply to states – was the counterpart of the changes by which the state ceased to be the private property of its ruler. At the same time it reflected the breakdown of the Church’s universal authority. Acceptance of raison d’état grew from the Renaissance onwards until, by the end of the nineteenth century, it was the accepted wisdom and questions that had troubled Aquinas and Augustine about whether or not wars were just were no longer considered relevant.
Nevertheless, the balance of power had an inherent instability. It was the system in which a war was always waiting to happen. The end of the system came about as a result of three factors. The first was German unification in 1871. Here, for the first time, was a state that was too large and too dynamic to be contained within the traditional European system. Restraining German ambitions twice required the intervention of non-traditional European powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. And on the second occasion both remained behind, changing the nature of the system for ever.
The second factor was the change in technology in the late nineteenth century, which brought the Industrial Revolution on to the battlefield. War was inherent in the balance-of-power system: but by the beginning of the twentieth century, technology was raising the price of warfare to unaffordable levels.
The third change came with the second. The Industrial Revolution brought with it not just the means of moving the masses to the battlefield, but also mass society and democratic politics. This meant that war and peace could no longer be left to the judgement of a small and internationally orientated élite. Balance-of-power thinking could be maintained in the Treaty of Utrecht or the Congress of Vienna or in Bismarck’s Treaty with Austria after the war of 1866. But already in 1871 the influence of popular national feeling was playing a part. Bismarck’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, against his own better judgement, showed that the Bismarckian days, when states could be juggled and balanced, were coming to an end.2 By the time of the Versailles Conference, the kind of peace negotiations that Talleyrand and Metternich had conducted were no longer possible. The idea of the balance of power was already dead in 1919, although the Second World War saw one final coalition to save the European state system.
If the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and up to a point the first half of the twentieth century) was one of the balance of power, the world system was one of empires. The empires were, for the most part, the European system writ large. And the wars of empires – for example the Seven Years War – were essentially European wars. Empires added wealth and prestige and provided the background for European politics – whether in the Congress of Berlin or in the Agadir Incident – but the heart of the system still lay in Europe.3 That European powers had empires overseas was natural given their relative strength and their acquisitiveness, but it was also a paradox. The paradox was that powers which operated a system of balance in their own continent – with its acceptance of national states and international pluralism – operated empires overseas that suppressed nationalism and were hostile to pluralism. This paradox was at the bottom of the unravelling of the empires in the second half of the twentieth century.
But empires were also natural. It is an assumption of the balance-of-power system that states are fundamentally aggressive or at least that some states are aggressive some of the time. A system designed to thwart hegemonic ambitions makes the assumption that such ambitions are common. And, since balance in Europe prevented expansion there, it was natural for that expansion to take place overseas. This is another reason why Germany was a disturbing factor. By the time of Germany’s emergence most of the available chaos had already been converted into empire (and some of the non-chaos, too) or had been declared empire-free (South America under the Monroe Doctrine). This left little room for Germany or Japan.

THE COLD WAR ORDER

The wars of 1914 to 1945 destroyed both the European balance of power in its traditional sense and also the European empires. The empires depended on prestige, and this was fatally undermined by the Japanese successes in the Second World War. In Europe itself, America and Russia were now needed to keep the system intact. What happened after 1945 was, however, not so much a radically new system as the concentration and culmination of the old one. The empires became spheres of influence of the superpowers. And the old multilateral balance of power in Europe became a bilateral balance of terror world-wide. In a strange way the old systems – balance in Europe and empire outside – were combined to produce something like a world order of balance between empires or blocs: a final culminating simplification of the balance of power.
The Cold War years were a period of wars and tension, but there was also an underlying order. This came in the shape of a tacit understanding that the United States and the Soviet Union would go to great lengths not to fight each other directly, as would their major allies. Behind this, of course, lay nuclear weapons. The other side of this coin was that the Soviet Union was free to invade its own allies without Western interference. These unwritten rules also permitted the Soviets to arm North Vietnam, and America to arm Afghan guerrillas; but neither sent conventional combat forces to a theatre where the other was committed. For the most part, the Cold War was fought with propaganda, bribery and subversion. Where there was military combat, it was most often for political or ideological control of a particular country – Nicaragua, Angola or Korea, for example – rather than between countries. Many of the actual battles of the Cold War took place in civil wars. Thus the system had a certain orderliness, since boundaries did not often change and major inter-state conflicts were usually outside the Cold War framework.
And yet the Cold War order was not built to last. Although it was stable on a military level it lacked legitimacy as a system. It was not just that many found the balance of terror repugnant – on the whole it was individuals rather than governments who had the moral doubts. Rather, the ideologies of both sides rejected the division of the world into two camps; each claimed a universal validity and a moral authority for their own version of how the world should be. (On the Western side, this was probably truer in America than in Europe.) In this sense, the Cold War balance differed from the European balance-of-power system, which was accepted by the governments of the day as legitimate and which, in some sense, matched the rationalist spirit of the times. The Cold War system of balance and division never suited the more universalistic, moralistic spirit of the late twentieth century. Moreover, both sides, within certain limits, were always ready to undermine it.
The end of the Cold War has brought not only the rearrangement of the international scene that usually follows hegemonic wars but also domestic change. Since the Cold War was a battle of ideas as much as one ...

Table of contents