Global Policy Forum

By Alain Gresh

Some revealing news items appeared this year even before the financial hurricane. There are now more internet users in China than in the US, and the US accounts for only 25% of global traffic on the web, compared with more than 50% a decade ago; attempts to revive the Doha round of international trade talks failed, mostly because India and China refused to sacrifice their impoverished farmers to free trade; in the war with Georgia, Russia defied the US's half-hearted protestations and defended its national interests in the Caucasus.

These diverse facts indicate dramatic changes in international relations — chiefly the end of the absolute domination that the West has enjoyed since the first half of the 19th century. The current collapse of the financial system can only weaken it further. "The end of arrogance" was the headline in the German weekly Der Spiegel on 30 September, with the subtitle: "America is losing its dominant economic role." It is one of the ironies of history that this follows less than 20 years after the collapse of the camp led by the Soviet Union, and the apparent triumph of liberal economic policies.

It is always dangerous to make prophecies. In 1983, two years before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin, the French intellectual Jean-Franí§ois Revel predicted that democracies would crumble in the face of "the most dangerous of its external enemies, communism, the current and complete model of totalitarianism". A few years later, Francis Fukuyama announced the "end of history" with the supreme triumph of the Western model. After the first Gulf War (1990-91) many observers thought they saw the dawning of the American 21st century. Fifteen years later, another consensus is emerging, closer to reality: we are entering a "post American world". As the White Paper on defence and national security adopted by the French government in June 2008 acknowledges: "Economic and strategic initiatives are no longer the sole preserve of the western world (essentially, Europe and America) in the way they were as recently as 1994".

Will the world become multipolar? Without doubt the US will remain the dominant power for many years, and not just militarily. But it will have to take account of emerging centres of power in Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia and Moscow. The lack of progress in the WTO talks, the impasse in the Iranian nuclear crisis, and the complex negotiations with North Korea, all underline how the US, even allied to the European Union, is no longer able to impose its point of view, and needs other partners to resolve crises. Richard Haas, a former senior official in the administration of President George Bush senior, and then in the State Department, and now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, lists other powerful players in his description of a "non-polar world": the International Energy Agency, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the World Health Organisation and its regional bodies, Shanghai and Sao Paolo, Al-Jazeera and CNN, militias from Hizbullah to the Taliban, drug cartels, and NGOs. "Today's world is increasingly one of distributed, rather than concentrated power," he concludes.

States, which have, despite predictions, survived the onslaught of globalisation, all want their place in the sun. China, India, Russia and Brazil assert their global ambitions and reject an international order that marginalises them. Other countries, from Iran to South Africa, Israel, Mexico and Indonesia, have more limited ambitions, but still defend their interests. None of these is driven by a global ideology, as the Soviet Union was, and none is setting itself up as an alternative model. They have all, more or less, accepted the market economy. But none would consider compromising its national interests. Their main struggle is to control their rare and expensive resources, primarily oil and gas; and their agricultural products to be able to feed their populations when agricultural production, already falling, is threatened by global warming. Their second priority is to protect their strategic interests, based on their political vision and history: Taiwan and Tibet for China, Kashmir for India and Pakistan, Kosovo for Serbia, and Kurdistan for Turkey. These conflicts have not dissolved in the harmonious global village, but involve more people than before, and are no closer to being resolved.

A brief glance at a map of the world shows that the majority of these tensions are based around an "arc of crisis", which, according to the White Paper, stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Its writers warn that "a new risk is emerging of the conflicts within the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan connecting up. The existence of (usually clandestine) nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes increases the danger. The countries of these regions are acquiring, whether openly or not, large military capacities based on missiles and missile carriers. The destabilisation of Iraq, divided into rival communities, risks spreading throughout the Middle East. Instability in this geographical arc could directly or indirectly affect our interests. European countries have a military presence in Chad, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Europe and France will probably be called upon to intervene in this region even more in the future, to help prevent and manage crises". This analysis is closely akin to that of most US strategists, and the senior US State Department official William Burns summed it up: "Ten years ago Europe was the epicentre of American foreign policy... But now everything has changed... The Middle East in particular is now... the place that Europe once was for the administrations of the 20th century". That this region holds most of the world's oil reserves, at a time when the price per barrel remains high, adds to the strategic importance of the "Greater Middle East".

That explains why the largest number of western troops since the end of the second world war is in this region, from Iraq to Chad, Afghanistan to Lebanon. By incorporating all these conflicts into its war on terror, the US has helped create an international resistance united only in its opposition to US hegemony. This resistance can also be seen in the crucial realm of the economy. Unlike past crises (Asian, Russian), the current financial storm has confirmed the marginalisation of international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Soon after 2000, Russia, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Serbia and Indonesia decided to pay back their IMF debts early, to be free of the rules imposed by these international bodies.

Will the "Washington Consensus" be replaced by the "Beijing Consensus"? The man who came up with this phrase, the economist Joshua Cooper Ramo, believes a country from the South can take its place on the global chessboard through a willingness to innovate; or by taking account of quality of life as well as economic growth, and providing enough equality to avoid unrest; and by valuing independence and self-determination and refusing to let other (western) powers impose their will.

This viewpoint has aroused much debate – does China really offer a new model, when inequality there is growing, and it has willingly subscribed to the globalised economy? The analysis does explain how, for the first time since decolonisation, the countries of the South are able to follow their own political direction, and find partners, states as well as businesses, not aligned with the US vision. New relationships are being forged, as demonstrated by the China-Africa summit, or the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) foreign ministers' meeting in New York on 26 September. Countries can plan their own development without having to accept the unfavourable terms of the old "Washington Consensus".

There is another major change affecting the geopolitical architecture. On 17 April 2007 the UN Security Council held, for the first time, a meeting dedicated to the political and security implications of global warming. This is now being taken into account in strategic planning, by the US, France and Australia. Extreme climate conditions will affect food crops and contribute to epidemics. The rise in sea level will not only create millions of environmental refugees – 150 million by 2050, according to estimates – but will also revive disputes over territorial boundaries, as the disappearance of atolls and islands affects exclusive economic zones. The soaring price of food already threatens stability in many parts of the world.

With multipolarity and so many different development models, it is no longer just the West's economic domination that is being challenged, but also its right to define right and wrong, to lay down international law, and to interfere in other countries' affairs on moral or humanitarian grounds. The former French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, said the West has lost its monopoly on history, on "the big story". World history, as invented two centuries ago, is the story of the rise and dominance of Europe. The movement towards a multipolar world may be seen as an opportunity to progress towards a genuine universalism. But it can also bring out deep fears in the West – that the world is becoming more threatening, that values are under attack from China, Russia, Islam – and that the West must embark on a Nato-led crusade against the barbarians who want to destroy it. If we are not careful, this vision could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.