The West and the Global Power Shift

Transatlantic Relations and Global Governance

Riccardo Alcaro, John Peterson, Ettore Greco, Riccardo Alcaro, John Peterson, Ettore Greco

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137574862
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica europea

This book assesses the state of transatlantic relations in an era of emerging powers and growing interconnectedness, and discusses the limits and potential of transatlantic leadership in creating effective governance structures. The authors first resort to theory and history to understand the transatlantic relationship. They then consider the domestic and systemic factors that might set the relationship between the United States and Europe on a different path. Finally, the authors locate the potential for transatlantic leadership in the context of the global power shift. The world of the 21 st century displays different power configurations in different policy domains. This changing structure of power complicates the exercise of leadership. Leadership requires not only greater power and authority, but also persuasion, bargaining and moral suasion, all necessary strategies to build coalitions and manage conflicts between great powers.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Riccardo Alcaro, John Peterson and Ettore Greco (eds.)The West and the Global Power ShiftPalgrave Studies in European Union Politics10.1057/978-1-137-57486-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Where Things Stand and What Happens Next

John Peterson¹

(1)

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

I am grateful to Nathalie Tocci for valuable comments on the early drafts of this chapter.

End Abstract

‘May you live in interesting times’ may seem an innocuous and even benevolent wish. The 2010s are nothing if not interesting times, given the explosion of new technologies (think of 3-D printing and the internet of things), path-breaking business models (such as Google or Alibaba) and predictions of a global power shift. Yet, the ‘interesting times’ aspiration one might offer another actually originated as a Chinese curse, used to damn its recipient to endure uncertain and dangerous times. In Chinese culture, which has been influenced by the enormous and painful upheavals that have historically beset the world’s largest civilization, it is obvious why the phrase ‘may you live’ might be a curse. That the phrase loses a great deal of true meaning in its translation to English might be viewed as a metaphor for how international relations (IR) are in transition. By one view, enormous, uncertain, dangerous and potentially painful consequences loom for the international order. Alternatively, changes afoot internationally could lead to a more prosperous, interconnected and harmonious international society.

Some of the biggest questions about the differences between what has come before and what lies ahead concern relations between the USA and Europe. Transatlantic solidarity was a defining feature of the second half of the twentieth century. As we write, the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War (WWII) was being observed, with special significance attached to the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Collective action between the USA and anti-Axis Europe during the war made this dramatic change possible by paving the way for modern liberal democracy in Western Europe. It also was instrumental in establishing key institutions of global governance including the United Nations (UN) and the Bretton Woods institutions. The post-WWII global order was tense and dangerous given the geopolitical rivalry between the West and the Soviet-dominated eastern part of Europe (as well as rivalry with China in Asia). But that order eventually gave way to a new era after 1989–91 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The new international order featured ‘American hegemony’, an opportunity for a united Europe to export its habits of cooperation, and the dream of ‘the end of history’ with liberal democracy becoming the ‘final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1992).

A quarter century on, things look very different. The US-European relationship has splintered (or, at best, stumbled) over a series of elemental questions of IR, including climate change, the 2003 war in Iraq, the civil war in Syria and rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and how to cope with a muscular and nationalist Russia. Meanwhile, a group of emerging powers—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (collective known as the BRICS)—are on the rise, not least because the gap between their and Western growth rates has widened in the decade beginning in 2010. One effect is to raise new questions about whether America and Europe are drifting apart and are no longer a collective force in IR in an era of transition.

Contributors to this volume test the notion that the transatlantic alliance is a bygone phenomenon of a bygone era. By extension, they also investigate the extent to which the international order of the 2010s differs from the immediately earlier era in IR when the West was, or was claimed to be, dominant. All chapters in this book confront two central, primordial questions. First, how much has the international order really changed over the past 25 or so years? Second, to what extent are America and Europe still partners with collective power in IR and, crucially, the will and capacity to use it?

A careful division of labour between our authors allows us to arrive at a comprehensive overview of the US-European relationship. Yet, all confront three drivers of change in contemporary IR. Specifically, all consider the rise of new powers, the differential diffusion of power in selected policy domains, the evolution of the international economy and what the implications of each are for the transatlantic relationship.

In many chapters, new light is shed on the West’s capacity for leadership, its ability to define normative frameworks (or rules) and its potential to shape mechanisms for international governance. Each contributor offers an appraisal of the extent to which transatlantic relations are influenced by internal or external actors: that is, by the USA and the EU and its member states themselves, or by other powers (especially but not exclusively the BRICS).

In this chapter, we begin by outlining the conceptual framework that guides analysis throughout the volume. We then consider debates about whether the shift to a more multipolar era in IR is real or not. A third section zeroes in on the state of contemporary global governance and the standing of the USA and Europe within it. We then assess the veracity of what sometimes seems a new accepted wisdom: that America and Europe, particularly the European Union (EU), have become so internally dysfunctional that their capacity for collective action—or action of any kind—in IR has declined, and in a way that is now irretrievable.

1 Conceptualizing US-European Relations

This volume’s conceptual framework for understanding the US-European relations is developed both in Chap. 2, written by Thomas Risse, and Chap. 3 (by Peterson et al.) on the multipolarity debate. In any work that ranges widely across such a broad subject, it would be constricting and unproductive to insist that each author test a highly specified and epistemologically dogmatic theory of transatlantic relations. Still, we have now seen enough evidence ¹ to be able to come to a judgment about what is the most conceptually profitable path to explain where the USA and Europe, as well as the global order, are and where they are headed. That path combines two main strands of theory.

The first has been developed primarily by Risse in numerous analyses of European integration (e.g., Risse 2009) but also transatlantic relations (Anderson et al. 2009). This work builds on Karl Deutsch’s 1957 classic study of NATO as a ‘pluralistic security community’. As Chap. 2 makes clear, Risse’s portrayal of the USA and Europe as a collective security community is based on an institutionalist version of social constructivism. A security community is conceptualized as a configuration of interests, identities, interdependence and institutions that interact with each other in ways that solve the security dilemma: that is, war between its members becomes unthinkable. Put another way, borrowing from Deutsch et al. (Deutsch (1957 has been changed to Deutsch et al. (1957) as per the reference list. Please check if okay.1957: 9), a security community ensures ‘dependable expectations of peaceful change’.

Such expectations may be particularly important in an era of shifts in material power in IR (Kupchan 2012). They may be moderated by ideational and institutional factors. Thus, commonly held values, norms and identities combine with strong, time-honoured institutions to make members of security communities less inclined to respond to the emergence of new powers by imposing costs on each other. Realists assume otherwise since, for them, all alliances are expedient and temporary, and are created to balance against common threats. For realists, just as the end of the Cold War portended the end of NATO, new economic opportunities engendered by the rise of the BRICS means the end of any special transatlantic relationship (economic or otherwise).

Rationalist institutionalists predict far less automaticity or conflict when power shifts. If anything, they view institutions as even more powerful mitigating factors than do social constructivists. But, institutionalists lean more towards the realist position that interests reflect changes in material power configurations. Cooperation thus will be driven by material interdependence more than ideational factors. To simplify only a little, realism predicts discord in transatlantic relations, while institutionalism predicts functional or selective cooperation in areas where interdependence is clear and institutions exist to manage it. Social constructivism is less explicitly predictive, but also insists that collective identities and common values matter.

Risse (2009: 158) cautions that ‘social constructivism does not represent a substantive theory of [European] integration’ or—it may be assumed—of transatlantic relations. Rather, it is ‘an ontological perspective or meta-theory’. Moreover, he insists in Chap. 2 of this volume that while earlier research including his own implied that security communities were more stable and secure than traditional alliances, there is no theoretical reason why security communities should not become prone to crisis if the underlying sources of their alliance start to shift. In any event, we find plenty of reasons in the strand of theory that Risse has developed to encourage our authors to consider the role of ideational factors in determining continuity or change in US-European relations.

The second strand of theory that underpins this volume is foreign policy analysis (FPA). It focuses on foreign policy decision-making and what determines it. FPA may be contrasted with IR theory which, by definition, is ‘systemic’ in that it looks to the distribution of power between states (and, for some institutionalists, institutions) in the international system. FPA is not unconcerned with the systemic balance of power. But it considers its impact to exist mostly in the minds of those who make foreign policy choices. More generally, foreign policy analysis is concerned with the factors that determine such choices. The list typically includes bureaucratic rivalries, partisan political competition, lobbying by other states or non-state actors and the extent to which prior decisions allocate resources to foreign policy.

In Chap. 3, we argue that systemic IR theory is likely to fall short in explaining the international behaviour of major powers—including the USA and EU—that are focused mostly on profound domestic or ‘sub-systemic’ challenges. The Eurozone crisis and sequestration in the USA (automatic budget cuts that have been in place since 2011) are two cases in point. Others include China’s slowing economic growth, Russia’s drastically reduced energy revenues or Brazil’s Petrobras corruption scandal. ² Some of these examples (such as China’s slowdown and declined energy prices) might seem more sourced at the structural level of IR than others. But they all have domestic roots and impact directly on the foreign policies of powerful states jockeying for international position.

In these circumstances, IR increasingly becomes theoretically the sum of its parts: that is, individual policy areas. The balance of economic power in the international system has changed, with the economic growth rates of the BRICS usually (though not always) racing ahead of those of the USA and Europe. But in the security arena, US military power remains unchallenged (except, perhaps, in the South China Sea). In the political-cultural arena, we find a mixed picture: Western notions of human security and ‘responsibility to protect’ arguably have become actionable norms in IR, not least because the West retains the power to enforce them, even if they must do so uni- or mini-laterally as rising powers question their legitimacy.

The point is that there is no single polar structure to modern IR, analogous to the bipolar order of the Cold War, since difference policy areas reveal different polarities. One upshot is that the framework for analysis in this book looks beyond material factors to examine also ideational ones, and insists that what is inside the state matters in transatlantic relations and IR more generally. Our authors uncover empirical evid...