Are we heading towards the age of non-polarity?

This is no anti-American diatribe but simply the question that is being posed in the US right now by various eminent personalities. They range from Richard N. Haass, a former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, and president of the Council for Foreign Relations, to Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and a specialist in international relations.

While Mr Haass has recently spoken of the so-called "age of non-polarity", as he posed the question as to what will follow US dominance, Mr Zakaria has just written an interesting bestseller called The Post-American World. The opening statement of his book explains it all. "This is not a book about the decline of America but, rather, about the rise of everyone else." Or, as it is described, "the rise of the rest".

Basically, both analysts and commentators are talking about the new era we are now entering.

The world that both these personalities envisage is one in which the US will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics or overwhelm cultures.

Even were one to hold back from analysing these two interesting studies it has now become common knowledge that the great story of our time is the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia and many others that are being perceived as having the potential of reshaping the world.

Globalisation might have been on the agenda for a number of years but I think that now is the time to ask ourselves what does it mean to effectively live in a truly global era.

The question that follows is how will or should the US itself react, understand and thrive in this rapidly-changing international climate.

Unless we first understand and realise how much the world has changed over the past 25 years it will be somewhat difficult to grasp the magnitude of this new geo-political tidal wave.

The most worrying statement that Mr Zakaria made is that, although for the past 60 years the US has extolled the virtues of free markets, immigration, technological change, competition and democracy, now that the rest of the world has finally decided to take their advice, "we" are becoming more suspicious of the very things "we" have long celebrated.

What we also have to ask ourselves is, given that the world is changing, whether the change is largely for the better and whether it has been caused by the benign development of other power centres rather than by the collapse or decline of the United States.

As for Mr Haass, he argues that we are experiencing a tectonic shift from the past in the sense that the principal characteristic of 21st century international relations is turning out to be non-polarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power.

To understand this shift we must first recall how the 20th century started out distinctly multi-polar but then, after almost 50 years, two world wars and many smaller conflicts, a bi-polar system emerged only for a new development to see the light of day the moment the Cold War ended and the demise of the Soviet Union took place. Bi-polarity gave way to uni-polarity; basically an international system dominated by one power.

According to him, at first glance, the world today may appear to be multi-polar, the reason being that the major powers - China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia and the US - contain just over half the world's people and account for 75 per cent of global GDP and 80 per cent of global defence spending.

But this is where Mr Haass disagrees. In his opinion, appearances can be deceiving. He argues that today's world differs in a fundamental way from one of classic multi-polarity because there are many more power centres and quite a few of these poles are not nation-states.

The summary conclusion is that beyond sovereign states, in addition to the six major world powers there are numerous regional powers among which: major organisations, large global companies, global media outlets, well-organised militias like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban, political parties, religious institutions and movements, terrorist organisations, drug cartels and NGOs of a more benign sort. In addition to which we must also add the rise of sovereign wealth funds - a buzzword for government-controlled pools of wealth, mostly the result of oil and gas exports.

The bottom line leads us to conclude that today's world is increasingly one of distributed rather than concentrated power.

Where I beg to differ with these two studies is that in my opinion for many years to come the US will long remain the largest single aggregation of power, but not solely that. It is and will remain a major source of culture, information and innovation.

At the same time it is a dawning reality that US primacy is meanwhile being challenged in other realms, such as military effectiveness and diplomacy. We should look at this emerging scenario with some optimism, in the sense that, although non-polarity might prove to be difficult and dangerous, encouraging a greater degree of global integration will help promote stability.

Mr Brincat is shadow minister for foreign affairs & IT.

leo.brincat@gov.mt