War, Peace and Hegemony in a Globalized World

The Changing Balance of Power in the Twenty-First Century

Chandra Chari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415596190
• eBook ISBN: 9781134077311
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on how the US could adapt its foreign policy initiatives to fit in with the growing aspirations of a multipolar world for a more balanced international order.

Written by leading scholars, such as Joseph Nye, Eric Hobsbawm and Akira Iriye, the volume examines if the absence of a superpower status would lead to anarchy, or if an alternative is possible. In view of the globalization process and the changing perceptions of US hegemony in the various regions of the world, it addresses the possibility of re-examining and redefining the nineteenth century classical balance of power.

Divided into two sections, it analyzes:

• global perspectives on war, peace and hegemony, and the role of the United States
• each region of the world in the context of the unfolding processes of globalization; the various ways in which economic and socio-political organizations are impacting inter- and intra-regionally; and the role of the United States vis-à-vis the individual countries and regions.

1 Introduction

Chandra Chari

The catalyst for this book was an article in Foreign Policy by Niall Ferguson¹ which leads the reader through history to paint a grim scenario if the international system were to look for alternatives to a sole superpower:

Critics of U.S. global dominance should pause and consider the alternative. If the United States retreats from its hegemonic role, who would supplant it? Not Europe, not China, not the Muslim world and certainly not the United Nations. Unfortunately, the alternative to a single superpower is not a multilateral utopia but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age.

Ferguson ends his article thus: ‘The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity – a global vacuum of power.’

This triggered off a desire to examine, as an interested bystander, if indeed the absence of a superpower would lead to anarchy, or whether an alternative is possible and emerging. Given the well-documented history of the dominance of the Anglo-American tradition in the study of international relations and the everpresent danger of succumbing to one form of ‘parochialism’ or the other in constructing International Relations theory,² Niall Ferguson’s prediction is not surprising. Ferguson is one of a growing number of neoconservative thinkers who seek to justify every US action, including its most glaring mistakes, on the grounds that these are the sometimes unfortunate and always unintended byproducts of a necessary exercise of hegemony, and that the alternative to the US’s exercise of its hegemony is chaos. But this view of the world confuses hegemony with military dominance, and ignores Gramsci’s profound observation that hegemony is power buttressed by moral authority. For dependent nations to accept the dominance of a hegemonic power, they need to be convinced that its interests converge – most, if not all of the time – with theirs. Ferguson also glosses over the fact that, while an established hegemony may be conducive to order, the competition to establish hegemony, or challenges to hegemony, leads to violence and instability.

The quest for hegemonic power by Germany in Europe after the weakening of British hegemony at the end of the nineteenth century gave the world the bloodiest half-century it had ever known. The competition for hegemonic power between the USA and the Soviet Union gave birth to the Cold War.³ During the Cold War, the escalating arms race provided the raison d’etre for avoiding conflict on the home base of the superpowers and thus led to arms control and mechanisms of viable deterrence. However, since power must be exercised to be meaningful, the scene of conflict shifted to the Third World. There it turned localized conflicts into unhealing sores. In more and more countries this is now causing the collapse of the state and the rise of predatory elite groups exploiting tribal, sub-regional and ethnic rivalries. Hegemonic designs that make pawns of states are thus inherently divisive and inimical to the development of a healthy and nurturing international order.

If hegemony is not to be based upon military power alone – indeed, the recent experience of the world suggests that it cannot be so based – then it can only be based upon some form of mutual consent. In short, while military power can be exercised unilaterally, hegemonic power must be exercised within a global, consensual framework.

The processes of globalization, which have economically empowered a large number of countries across the globe, which were, until a few decades ago, relatively powerless, have opened the way for a new attempt to build a multilateral world order. While it is undeniable that several aspects of globalization have distinct overtones of neo-imperialism, the outcome is less likely to be as onesided as the colonial order that was built during the era of the nation state. Globalization provides bargaining chips to the developing world which the developed world would have to contend with in international fora. This in turn generates a sense of confidence among the developing nations that can militate against the exercise of untrammelled hegemonic power.

Globalization and bargaining chips

Globalization, then, would seem to be the catalyst for a situation, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, that is not unlike what happened after the Russo-Japanese war. The processes of history took a dramatic turn when the defeat of a European power by an Asian one generated a confidence which ultimately, in five short decades, led to the unravelling of colonial empires in the last century.

The changing perceptions of power and dominance in a global context is further strengthened by several factors: the unprecedented information revolution that is shrinking the global space by the miracle of instant communication; an upward mobility in the populations of the developing world, which is a prime factor in the shifting of the economic balance of power to Asia; and an ironing out of the cultural nuances of ‘civilizational values’ on a global scale. Humanity, then, takes centre stage. But, on the minus side, the shrinking of the global space contains within itself the seeds of conflictual situations which endanger human security across the globe. Migration of human beings in search of education, employment, even life itself, carries with it a feeling of rootlessness, insecurity and fear which often manifests in conflicts to protect the cultural ethnicity of particular groups.

Then again, on the international stage, civilians being no longer beyond conflict zones, vast numbers of hapless human beings are often caught in the crossfire, maimed and scarred for life in body and mind. This too has the potential for a different kind of conflict – the non-state actor who uses terror as a tool to translate insecurities and frustrations into direct action.

Thus, the most important factor that points to multilateralism as the path of choice is that the threats to human security cut across boundaries of state and citizenship, and humanity is intermeshed as one entity. Hegemony has been seen to be divisive and globalization could strengthen the processes of multilateral action to combat the new threats to human security.

All of the above, seemingly disconnected/unconnected events and trends, however, constitute a jigsaw puzzle which may be a kaleidoscopic blur today and yet display all the signs of an international system in search of a new paradigm. In the aftermath of the crumbling of colonial empires, such revolutionary thinking was clearly in evidence among the Third World leaders who spoke in a new vocabulary – of non-alignment, of equality among the sovereign states and, above all, of total disarmament which would open up avenues of peace and global prosperity.

However, that vocabulary in the latter half of the twentieth century was being used from a platform of powerlessness and was hence little more than the wail of the weak. Therefore, the voice of sanity in fact could sound not so much as ideology but as an unworkable blueprint for a utopia. The developing world, struggling against enormous odds to overcome the degradation that colonial empires had subjected it to, and the resultant poverty, was hostage to the developed world. The two superpowers could, with the tools of military and economic aid, divide the Third World into spheres of influence. However, the new millennium and the shift in the economic balance of power to the East, the rise of China and India, the renaissance of the Left in Latin America and other parts of the world, and the new assertiveness of a resurgent Russia could be the framework to provide a new meaning to the vocabulary coined by postcolonial leaders of the Third World in the last century.

About this book

The twentieth century thus provides a spectacular framework from which the twenty-first century can learn valuable lessons in the area of international relations management. To progress from a state of fear, insecurities, misperceptions of the other’s motives and designs, all of which characterized superpower rivalry in the second half of the twentieth century, to a more transparent, equitable stance, from competition to cooperation, all lie within the art of the possible.

This study, then, seeks to pose the questions that are troubling scholars, policymakers, statesmen and citizens all over the world. I have gone by Eric Hobsbawm’s prescription that the

test of a book about the current situation of the globe is not whether it is hopeful or disenchanted, but whether it helps us to understand it, that is to say, whether it shows a historical understanding of the present crisis.⁴

It is hoped that by providing an overview of how every region of the world stands today vis-à-vis its neighbours and the regions beyond, and in particular with the USA, the most powerful nation in the world, the reader would form a better understanding of current realities. The book is not meant as an agenda for a utopia on the world order model but is an attempt to understand the nature of power and how it seeks to express itself in the international order, and whether the alternative to hegemony is an anarchical system or if glimmerings of a ‘method in madness’ are visible. In inviting 18 scholars from across the globe to contribute to this volume, the effort has been to ground the framework in the here-and-now of the existing relationships and the pointers that are emerging out of a kaleidoscopic pattern to build a theoretical model for the games nations will play in the twenty-first century.

An edited work, a collection of chapters, such as this book, is at risk of some repetition and at times disjunctures in thought. However, 30 years of editing a book review journal in India has ingrained in one the habit of ‘editing’ with a light touch. Repetitiveness could be read as resonance of ideas from one chapter to another.

The international system seems like a jigsaw puzzle and the contributors have been allowed to reflect that in the book. To have homogenized the contributions with a ruthless pen would have almost certainly detracted from what the book has tried to do – to introduce the reader to seemingly unconnected events and ideas that are likely to loom larger in the international system in the decades to come.

In ‘War, peace and world hegemony at the beginning of the twenty-first century’, Eric Hobsbawm casts a savant’s eye over the twentieth century to highlight the dramatic and sudden break in world history as it has unfolded 10,000 years after the invention of sedentary agriculture. The chapter analyses the social factors which have contributed to this sudden break, then moves on to a discussion of what the new millennium may hold for the international system and the changing balance of power, the impact on it of the swift forces of change wrought by globalization in a unipolar world.

Complementing Eric Hobsbawm’s chapter is Akira Iriye’s ‘Global governance in the age of transnationalism’, which looks at the emergence of the international system by analysing a very complex notion of transnational entities, events and processes that cut across national boundaries. He compares and contrasts the post-war international system as defined by the Cold War, in which its protagonists were engaged in an arms race to annihilate the world, with the emergence of other international systems like regional communities, economic transactions and agencies promoting social and cultural interconnections across borders.

Seen across all parameters, the USA will continue to be the predominant power in the world, especially militarily. However, even in a position of predominance, the vulnerabilities are peeping through the cracks. Conditions of interdependence are being created, and a fork in the road would seem to have been reached. Conservative scholarship in the USA argues against any form of isolationism and advocates that multilateralism must be preceded by unilateralism if American interests and the world order are to be preserved. But the USA is no monolith, and within the United States dissent against unilateralism is widespread.⁵ A sustainable American foreign policy in the years to come will require invoking the greater cooperation of others, even if that means that its freedom of action is narrowed, and in according a more substantive role to other states, the United States would end up embracing some form of multilateralism.

Joseph Nye’s ‘The future of American power’ looks at the debate on American power today and whether American preponderance will lead to a sustained hegemony of the USA. He examines the problem of looking at the nature of power and power distribution in the international system over long periods of time, and the difficulties of understanding the rise and fall of great powers throughout history.

The djinn that came out of the bottle in 1945 has plagued the world ever since with its inherent threat of total annihilation of mankind. International Relations theory post-Second World War is dominated by the attempt of the protagonists, the nuclear weapons powers, to manage and control this deadly offshoot of modern technology. William Walker’s chapter on ‘The troubled quest for international nuclear order’ examines these efforts to establish an international nuclear order that was effective, legitimate and lasting, and the predicaments faced by its architects at various times. Is the threat of a nuclear war greater in the twenty-first century? Or, is the international order capable of making a determined effort to eliminate nuclear weapons and disband their associated infrastructures?

Globalization, the new theology of the modern world, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, cuts across national boundaries and in a few short decades has brought about economic changes so profound that the entire international order is in flux. The fall-outs could mean anything – neo-imperialism that would tighten the stranglehold on the world’s populations and widen the gap between the rich and the poor; or it could create interdependence in ways that would take on a counter-hegemonic role by providing bargaining chips to the developing world to contain the hegemony of one or more powers in the future. Prem Shankar Jha’s chapter on ‘Globalization, hegemony and the failure of empire’ highlights the dangers inherent in the processes of globalization of ‘systemic chaos’, and analyses the prospects for the continued existence of the nation state.

The world has, in more ways than one, shrunk in just a few short decades into a global village. Humanity then takes centre-stage, cutting across national boundaries and borders. Many new threats to humanity have emerged in the latter half of the century: prospects of scarcity of essential resources like oil, food and water, non-state actors like terrorist or fundamentalist religious groups, human migration in search of labour, ethnic conflict in civil society and drug pedalling. All of these contain within themselves the potential for conflict. Two chapters have been included, one by T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan and the other by Paul Evans, to focus on the new and potential threats to global peace and prosperity on the one hand, and the concept of ‘human security’ which must of necessity make humanity central to security issues, on the other.

T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan’s ‘Global prosperity and the prospect of war in the twenty-first century’ is structured around the games that market economics will lead the international order to play and the consequences that are likely to follow. The millennium has to unfold for the story to be told.

Paul M. Evans’s ‘Human security in Asia in a conservative era: against the odds, twice’ analyses the concept of human security, as opposed to the more commonly accepted concerns of national security, to seek answers to what a human security framework may have to offer. What are the obstacles to it being implemented? What do reactions to a human-security approach tell us about broader patterns in global affairs, especially responses to a more assertive America? The chapter takes the East Asian paradigm as its base, but nonetheless seeks to situate the arguments within the academic and policy discourse of human security. The coming decades will provide answers to whether Asian leaders will not merely be responding to the international debate on human security, but would be shaping it if a ‘people-centric’ world order becomes more feasible than a unilateralist paradigm.

Discussions around the concept of hegemony and its various theoretical models occupied centre-stage in international relations theory throughout the twentieth century. The debate has been intensified since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the hegemonic nature of a sole superpower is facing challenges from the international system. It is an open question as to how nations react to American hegemony in the twenty-first century. Is ‘balancing’ an option? Or will nations try to ‘stay below the radar’ as China and Japan have tended to do? Or will nations invoke the vocabulary of the non-aligned leaders of the last century to try to evolve ‘counterhegemony by moral force’? Or, again, is the world likely to see the unfolding of yet another ‘peaceful hegemonic transition’?⁶

The central idea behind this book has been to put forth a theoretical model that is removed from the generally accepted western models for the current debate on hegemony, and whether its absence is likely to lead the international system into anarchy. While the chapters on the different regions provide the ground realities, Chapter 9, by Kanti Bajpai and Varun Sahni, ‘Hegemony and strategic choice’, plays out the theoretical constructs around which the debate on war, peace and world hegemony in the twenty-first century may be analysed. The authors examine the nature of American hegemony and the possible responses to it, an important part of which is an attempt to construct a typology of an ‘Indian grand strategic thought’ to analyse the efficacy of some of these postures. The chapter then goes into the question of the constraints on American power and the theory of hegemony.

‘Europe, NATO and the emergence of a polycentric world’, by Chandrasekhar Dasgupta, takes the debate on the nature of power in the international system a step further by analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the European Union and how the western alliance is situated today. Europe accepts the benefits of US hard power as a guarantee of its own security in lieu of having to increase its own expenditure on defence. This underpins the premise on which the American and European relationship subsists, despite small turbulences. On the other hand, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Global perspectives
• Part II Regional perspectives
• Select reading