A New Beginning in International Affairs?

Keynote Address by Professor Amitav Acharya to the Symposium on "Looking Forward: International Affairs in the Next Decade", organized by the Journal of International Service, American University, January 30, 2009.

Thank you for inviting me to deliver the keynote address at the Journal of International Service's 2009 Symposium on "Looking Forward: International Affairs in the Next Decade". I will give you more than what you had asked me to do, by commenting on international affairs not just of the next decade, but the next three decades.

What I am going to do today is to address a simple question: what sort of world are you going to live and work in as you consider and embark on a professional career? As you know, SIS is a professional school, it’s supposed to prepare you for a career in international affairs, such as the foreign service, national security establishments, international organizations, and non-governmental groups, etc. But even as a professional school, we give you sufficient grounding in theories in international relations. This is not only because we want at least some of you to pursue academic careers, but also because theory can act as templates or lenses for analyzing real world policy challenges and conceiving pathways to address them.

But I should start with the important caveat that IR scholars have a notoriously bad record when it comes to making predictions. Sometimes, it’s a failure to anticipate what is coming, at other times, it’s the failure of predictions that were actually made in scholarly writings. In the most striking recent example of the former, i.e., failure to anticipate what’s coming, there is no better example than the end of the Cold War. Nobody, realists, liberals or constructivists, had predicted the end of the Cold War. But neo-realism was particularly implicated. Kenneth Waltz, the leading light of neo-realism, had argued famously that bipolar international systems are more stable than multipolar ones. At first, Waltz meant by stability the degree of conflict and cooperation in a given international system. Later he revised the meaning of stability to imply the durability of the system. He was wrong on both counts. The Cold War was not really that stable in the first sense, especially if you are counting the number of conflicts, and the dead and injured in the developing world. He was also wrong about the durability of bipolarity. The Cold War lasted a lot less longer than the multipolar order of European great powers in the 19th century.

What about predictions about what the future holds? To be sure, most IR scholars generally shy away from making outright predictions about the future events. What they more commonly do is to identify and label new ‘moments’ or turning points in history. Hence we have formulations like the late Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’, Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, and assorted claims about the ‘liberal moment’, the ‘unipolar moment’, and now the onset of Richard Haas’ ‘nonpolarity’, Nial Fergusson’s ‘apolarity’. The Economist Magazines ‘neo-polarity’ and Fareed Zakaria’s ‘post-American World’. But even here, IR theory has a poor record. Liberals and constructivists have been less precise in their predictions, but their analysis of the future world order has also gone awry. [by the way, when Obama was running for President, he was seen with a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s book, entitled “the Post-American World’, and there was a comment from a conservative source: Obama is reading a book by a Muslim who wants the US to be destroyed.)

Anyway, both realism and liberalism gave rather optimistic accounts of the world order to come after the end of the Cold War. The ‘liberal moment’, exemplified in the democratic peace theory, George Bush senior’s New World Order slogan, and in a more extreme fashion, by Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, has given way to liberal pessimism. Constructivism was associated with the Gorbachev’s ideational revolution, with the emergence of security communities in Western Europe and Southeast Asia where war becomes unthinkable, and the transformative impact of socialization and collective identity building. What we see instead is the resumption of the Russian-West rivalry, and the dark side of collective identity-building which fuels ethnic and religious conflicts.

Reviewing some of the popular and influential ideas about the future of world order since the end of the Cold War, I can only make the following conclusions:

1. The end of history versus clash of civilizations was a false debate. We now know, if any proof was really needed, only too well that civilizations cooperate as well clash. In the war on terror, there has been plenty of empathy and cooperation across civilizations, and plenty of divisions within them. Similarly the simplistic view that the end of the Cold War means a decisive and final triumph of market economics and liberal democracy over all other ideologies and approaches has been overtaken and discredited by a host of developments from the rise of China to the ongoing global financial crisis.

2. Neo-conservatism or the ideology of pursuing democracy promotion with a big stick, and disdaining multilateral cooperation in pursuing strategic goals, was overrated in terms of its durability and impact. The neo-cons are gone, hopefully for good, although not before causing much damage to global order and US credibility and leadership, which now needs to be repaired.

3. A more contentious question: is unipolarity ending and if so, will it have dangerous consequences for international stability? A recent article in National Interest Online (January 2009) by Chicago University Professor Robert Pape and entitled ‘Empire Falls’, argues that the United States is in unprecedented decline. Pape calculates that even before the economic downturn, the average rate of US growth has fallen from nearly 4% during the Clinton years to just over 2% during Bush. The US decline is of course relative, especially that to China. China’s share of world product had grown consistently by over 10%. Between 2000 and 2008, the US share of the World product measured in current US dollars fell by 32%, while that of China rose by 144%. A good deal, or nearly a quarter, of the decline is self-inflicted: spending on the Iraq War, tax cuts, current account deficits, etc. Other factors behind the US relative decline include the rise of China and the diffusion of technology around the world. Overall, Pape concludes, the US has experienced one of the most significant declines of any state since mid-19th century. This has the risk of causing dangerous international instability, as powers undergoing such decline tend to become targets of counterbalancing or even opportunistic aggression by rival powers and coalitions or face defeat from preventive wars initiated by themselves.

Can we accept this thesis, not just of the fact of the US decline, but its strategic consequences? First, even Pape concedes the US decline is stoppable and even reversible, with the right grand strategy. Can Obama administration pursue such a strategy? Here is a clue:

In Barrack Obama’s Dreams for my Father, on page 41, he recounts an incident where his young Barry Obama, after being attacked with a stone, by a class-mate, is taught self-defence by his Indonesian step father, Lolo. While the training goes on in the courtyard, with his mother watching from inside the house, Lolo says to little Barry Obama:

‘Better to be strong. If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who is strong. But always be strong yourself.’

I am not sure how much President Barrack Obama’s worldview and foreign policy derives from young Barry Obama’s experience growing up in Indonesia. But what the above tells me is that the US under the Obama administration is not going to sit back and be overtaken by another power or bandwagon with another rising power.
Moreover, as Stephen Walt points out in his blog in the Foreign Policy Magazine, while the US relative power has declined, so have that of most other powers during this period, with the notable and significant exception of China.

And even if one accepts that the US is a declining superpower and that this is a long-term and irreversible phenomenon, what about its strategic consequences? This brings me to the subject of China’s rise, since China is the closest that any nation comes to being the peer-competitor to the United States.

Unlike Germany of the late 19th century, China is a status quo power. China does not seek to alter the existing international order by force. It’s a mistake to use European analogy, as Pape, like many other Western scholars before him have done, to anticipate how the rise of China might affect future international order. Just as Paper and others point to the diffusion of technology as a new factor undermining the relative US dominance, so we can also say that new instruments of regional and international governance, not available during the era of European global dominance, will come into play and some of them may prevent history from repeating itself.

These include the growing density of multilateral institutions. As Iain Johnston points out in his new book, Social States, China is today deeply engaged in the global regional multilateral structures. China is probably the first truly global power to emerge in an era of extensive and cross-cutting multilateral linkages. The entire history of European state-system could claim to have had only one, the European concert system of the early 19th century.

Contrary to the scenario sketched by Pape about the possible strategic consequences of the US decline and the end of unipolarity, let me discuss four key trends about what we might expect in the future:

1. The end of unipolarity will not usher in an era of great power wars, whether caused by opportunistic aggression against decline powers, or through the logic of power transition where a rising power squares off against a declining or status quo power. In fact there is a far greater likelihood of relative peace among the major global powers, including the West, Russia and China.

2. The main security challenges facing the world will be human insecurity challenges, including death and injury from internal conflicts, from hunger and disease, and from social and political consequences of rapid environmental degradation. Many of these dangers will be transnational dangers: they will arrive suddenly and unexpectedly, spread through linkages forged by globalization.

3. There will be no ‘back to the future in Europe’, under conditions of multipolarity, as John Mearsheimer had argued in his 1990 article in International Security in under the same title.

4. In Asia, the rise of China and Japan and India will pose major policy challenges and dilemmas for the US. But Asia will not be ‘Ripe for rivalry’, contrary to the thesis advanced by Aaron Friedberg, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser and professor at Princeton. Nor will Asia be the arena for vindicating Mearsheimer’s ‘Tragedy of Great Power Politics’.

Finally, instead of assessing the prospects for world order mainly in terms of material power, economic and military, we should accept that other factors, such as legitimacy, socialization and identity can also make a big difference. In this respect, something truly extraordinary has happened in this world and it has happened in the United States. The president of the world’s most powerful nation today has a resume and life history that includes a substantial period of his formative years growing up outside the United States. This was in far away Indonesia, where the ‘children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats’ became his ‘best friends,’ and whose Indonesian step father taught him how to eat dog meat (which he found tough) , snake meat (which he thought was tougher), and roasted grass hoppers (which are described as merely crunchy). I must confess that despite having grown up in a very remote rural corner of India, and having been to Indonesia numerous times, I have never eaten dog meat, snake meat or grasshoppers. In Indonesia, young Barry Obama also experienced first-hand the synthesis between religions and civilizations when introduced to a brand of Islam that made ‘room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths’. And in Indonesia, the future president of the United States had to face on a daily basis the burden of having to make a decision how to choose for giving money between various types of beggars that included ‘men, women, children, in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of scurvy, or polio or leprosy’. Since there would not be enough rupiah to go around, his mother had learned to be selective and devised a formula to ‘calibrate the levels of misery.’ His step father was less sentimental, he advised young Obama to save the money for himself so that he did not ‘end up on the street’ himself’.

I wonder how many Senators, and Congressmen/women, or even leaders of even developing countries can claim such childhood learning? What greater symbolism is there for the United States and its citizens to banish elitism and exceptionalism that sometimes comes with being the leading nation, or bury the clash of civilization thesis. What better time to embrace, multiculturalism, multiracialism, and multilateralism, human security and global governance?

So I end in an optimistic note, cautiously so, but nonetheless disagreeing with an overtly geopolitical zero-sum view of the world. Thank you for your attention.