Let me therefore return to the question I posed at the beginning of this essay. What changes in strategic priorities are necessary or desirable in the light of the emerging re-distribution of power in the world? Obviously to answer that in detail, even for the 12 or so powers which I have argued are ‘likely’ to be part of the central balance, would require an entire book in itself. Yet I believe one central and almost universal priority can be postulated: the necessity of avoiding hegemonial war.
By hegemonial war I mean war to determine the order of power in the world. The First and Second World Wars, and the Cold War were all hegemonial wars in that sense. So, in intent, is the present ‘Jihadists’ War’. The jihadists certainly want to demolish the current order of power in the world, which they regard as a structure of injustice and hypocrisy. Yet, to my mind, only a war that pits the major powers against each other would have the enormous destructive capacity of either the First or Second World Wars. It is therefore to avoiding another encounter of that sort that the society of states must devote its best efforts.
This brings my argument to a further two questions. What kind of diplomatic structure or institution has had the best historical ‘track record’ of avoiding hegemonial war? And can one see any possibility of anything similar being constructed in the next few decades?
The most hopeful augury for the future stability of the society of states is that there are already faint signs, even in this lame-duck period of Bush’s final term of office, that Washington is beginning to develop diplomatic strategies (perhaps also military strategies and new weapon designs) for the post-unipolar world—the emerging multipolar world. I would associate the initiative not with the US President, the Vice-President or any of the hopefuls for 2008, but with the State Department and the National Security Council. I would also argue (though admittedly with thin evidence as yet) that the thoughts of some relevant policymakers seem to have turned in two historically familiar directions: the ‘balance of power’ and the ‘concert of powers’. Dr Condoleezza Rice spoke earlier of ‘a balance of power favouring freedom’ and her hand must be seen in the 2006 operational signals of the building of the strategic basis of a future balance system in relations with India and Japan. Her deputy, Robert Zoellick (now President of the World Bank), ventured further, mentioning the far more controversial notion of a ‘concert of powers’ in his 2005 speech quoted earlier.
Not, of course, that those are the only mind-sets in Washington concerning the future of US power. There is much diversity. Even a sort of isolationism is back on the cards, with a few people arguing that it might have been better for the world if the United States had drawn away from international politics after the end of the Cold War in 1992, as it did after the end of the First World War in 1919. It would at least have meant no current Iraq War, which would have made the world a lot less distressing. Yet at the opposite end of the spectrum, even after Iraq, there are still a few unrepentant hegemonists who insist that the unipolar world can be maintained on the military plane, even if not on the economic or diplomatic planes.
The most spectacularly obvious signal of new US thinking on the future ‘balance of power’ was George W. Bush’s trip to India in 2006, and in particular the nuclear technology agreement he signed there. I call it spectacular because it more or less drove an M1 Abrams tank through his previous counterproliferation line, as used against Iran and North Korea, and also put a large dent in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to the embarrassment of various allies including Australia—in our case because of the question of selling uranium to a power which has not signed the Treaty.
Even if Bush’s Indian deal is not endorsed by Congress,[15] it will send about as clear a message to China as could well be imagined, especially as the Pentagon has also been authorised to sell advanced fighter aircraft, the F-16 Fighting Falcon or the F/A-18 Hornet, to India.[16] As mentioned earlier, China and India were at war as recently as 1962, and China still holds a large swathe of territory in the high Himalayas that India regards as Indian. But China is not willing to relinquish it, due to the territory’s importance to their military control of Tibet and Xianjiang. The Bush signal to China is the old traditional warning: ‘a balance of power can be constructed against your rising military capacity if you push your luck.’ The renewed emphasis on the strategic relationship with Japan is, of course, a reinforcement of that message. The Indian Government has its own reasons for assuming that a great-power ally, either the United States or Russia (or preferably both) might prove quite useful in its future context, since both China and Pakistan will be substantial nuclear powers, and Persian Gulf or Central Asian or Russian oil must remain vital to its development.
Yet Beijing has also to ponder the Zoellick signal of the potentialities of a much closer relationship with the advanced Western world (a high place in a global ‘concert of powers’), so one can say that there has been brought to the attention of its policymakers not only a very formidable stick (a possible ‘balance of power’ coalition against it), but also a very juicy carrot, one consonant with its long history of civilisation.
In some ways both those concepts are more difficult for Washington to adjust to than for Beijing. Both concepts have been regarded in the United States, ever since Woodrow Wilson’s time, as amoral and discredited European diplomatic devices. He saw the failure of the Concert of Powers in 1914 as proof that the idea did not work. But the more reasonable way of interpreting that patch of history is that, after all, the Concert did work for 99 years, from 1815 to 1914. No other diplomatic device has had an equal level of success in preventing hegemonial war, which is the sole essential function of such a system. Moreover, the Concert achieved that record despite two great-power wars (Crimean and Franco-Prussian) and the fact that tensions between the great powers were actually stronger in the nineteenth century than they are at present, because of the long-running imperial rivalries between the British, the French, and the Russians. The Germans, fatally, entered that imperial competition by the end of the century, and so the Concert failed, and the war in 1914 (originally seen as likely to be both short and limited) destroyed that entire society of states.
However, Wilson’s supposed improvement on the Concert, the League of Nations, lasted only 20 years, from 1919 until 1939, was ineffective even for that brief life, and ended in a particularly murderous hegemonial war. The United Nations has lasted better, some 60 years now, but has been similarly ineffective in the security field. Security issues have therefore been the domain of a traditional ‘balance of power’ coalition, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which has seen off its adversary (the Soviet Union) without direct hostilities: the ultimate success for any ‘balance of power’ coalition. So comparing the nineteenth and twentieth century periods as a whole, one would have to judge that the two Wilsonian systems, the League of Nations and the United Nations, have fared less well, as far as the most vital issue (prevention of hegemonial war) is concerned than the two traditional systems, ‘concert of powers’ and ‘balance of power’. Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman’s Secretary of State, was the principal architect of NATO, with substantial assistance from George Kennan and Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary of the time. They could not call their achievement by its rightful and traditional name, however, because that would have been politically tactless in view of the assumed necessity for a Wilsonian flavour in US rhetoric in the foreign policy field—a tradition all too readily audible today in the speeches of President George W. Bush.
One obvious objection to my optimism about a possible global ‘concert of powers’ is to argue that its predecessor was successful only because all its decisionmakers were children of one civilisation, and shared many assumptions and norms. That last point is true, but is offset to my mind by four factors which more than compensate for the current diversity of cultural origins. First, the problems which confront the current decisionmakers are vastly more global than those of the nineteenth century. No one then was worried about global warming, which is now likely to damage every society in differing degrees. Second, though there were transnational terrorists back then (the anarchists), they were infinitely less formidable than the current jihadists, so had far less capacity to promote solidarity in the society of states against their common adversary, a ‘non-state actor’. Third, international communication for most of that period was slow and difficult, whereas it is now universal and instantaneous. Fourth, the penalties associated with war were vastly less in the nineteenth century than they are now. Then it was fought by professional armies, on distant battlefields, not (as now) by the destruction of great cities and their peoples.
Above all, however, my optimism on the issue of the prospective dominant powers finding consensus is that it is already being done, with few difficulties and not much fanfare. The grouping which began more than 30 years ago as the G7, is now the G8 with the addition of Russia, and appears likely to become the G10 with the admittance of China and India (which were invited to the 2006 summit). The group could in fact become the G12, which would be a fair approximation of a contemporary ‘concert of powers’. Its preoccupations are now no longer economic, or directed to the problems of its own members, but are rather global in nature. The Gleneagles meeting of 2005 was mostly concerned with the problems of Africa and world poverty, and the 2006 meeting in St. Petersburg with the troubles of the Middle East.
I am not arguing that it will or should replace the UN Security Council, but formal structures like the United Nations are far less flexible about membership and agendas than informal ones like the old Concert of Powers or its contemporary parallel. Over time, power does recognise countervailing power, however reluctantly, and makes the necessary adjustments. However, change may need to be informally established for some time before it is incorporated into the formal structures of the society of states. In time, the UN Security Council will probably expand to reflect twenty-first century realities, but for the moment the G8+ might serve as its ‘stand-in’ for some purposes.
There is a strong flavour of ‘forward to the past’ about contemporary history. According to economic historians, China and India were probably the largest economies in the world until about 1820.[17] Afterwards, the industrialisation of the West ensured its economic dominance. But by 2020 the wheel may have come full circle, and China and India may again be the largest economies in the world. In fact, one of our most eminent experts, The Australian National University’s (ANU) Professor Ross Garnaut, has said that China may make it to top place by 2010,[18] though others put it about 2040.
After the Enlightenment (in Europe at least), the idea that people would massacre each other over minor differences of religious doctrine seemed ridiculous. Yet in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sunni have been killing Shia (and vice versa) as earnestly as Protestants killed Catholics (and vice versa) in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. The national state, in its present form, was invented by the Europeans only four centuries ago, but they seem now to be circling back in some respects to its pre-Westphalian origins, with its peoples defining themselves not only in the larger context as Europeans, but in the smaller context as English, Scottish, Welsh, Breton, Catalan, Czech, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian or Montenegrin, among many others. By century’s end, the European Union might be less a confederation of 35 national states than a federation of 300 or so provinces, like the mini-states that nourished the composers Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in their time. The great city which for a time was called Leningrad is now again St. Petersburg, and the present decisionmaker for all the Russians has again been welcoming the dignitaries of the rest of the world to its restored Tsarist splendours. The political structures of Europe were once exported to other continents, like Africa, to which they were not well suited. Perhaps the new changes in Europe, which reflect recognition of the identities of long-submerged tribes, might do better.
If some of the iniquities of the past have returned to haunt the twenty-first century world, there seems a kind of historic logic in hoping that one of the diplomatic institutions of the past may be able to take on the most important of the jobs dealt with quite successfully then. The task the Concert of Powers managed better and longer than its successors—the prevention of hegemonial war—is going to be the most vital problem of all in this new century, and the emerging distribution of power seems more like that of the nineteenth than the twentieth century. Then there were five dominant powers—Britain, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria—but eight other near-great powers—Spain, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the United States and Japan towards the end of the period, and the substantial empires of Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands. There existed therefore 13 or (adding Serbia, which proved so crucial) 14 governments whose preoccupations and ambitions needed to be considered, though not all received adequate attention. Now there are emerging 12 dominant powers or more, but by mid-century (as mentioned earlier), according to UN demographic forecasts, there will be 18 sovereignties of more than a hundred million people, and still other aspirants may be waiting in the wings.
The society of states needs to construct diplomatic arrangements between these established and emerging powers that can maintain a reasonable consensus; otherwise the risk of hegemonial war seems likely to be very great. If a flexible global ‘concert of powers’ can manage the heavy task of averting that disaster for anything like the same span of years as its European predecessor, the international community might have sufficient time to devise solutions for the many other problems threatening the future of humanity, such as global warming, world poverty, and terrorism.