From the end of the cold war to a new global era

Introduction

The modern world system really begins with the cold war-a by-product in turn of the greatest
war ever known in history. Fought on two continents and across three great oceans, the Second
World War led to a major reordering of world politics, one that left Germany and Japan under
Allied control, most of Europe and Asia in tatters, former colonies in a state of political turmoil,
and two states-the USA and the USSR-in a position of enormous strength. Indeed, as early as
1944, analysts were beginning to talk of a new world order dominated by two superpowers,
whose capabilities and reach would inevitably shape the international system for many years to
come.

The causes of the cold war have been much debated. But several factors in the end can be
identified, including a deeper incompatibility between the social and economic systems of East
and West, mutual fears between the USSR and the USA concerning the other's intentions, and
insecurities generated by an on-going nuclear arms race. Beginning in Europe, the cold war soon
spread to what became known as the Third World. Here, the conflict assumed a far more deadly
form, with over 25 million people being killed as a result of real wars being fought from Korea
to Vietnam, Latin America to southern Africa. But in spite of this, the cold war still managed to
develop its own set of unspoken rules. Indeed, both the United States and the Soviet Union
tended to act with great caution towards one another.

This did not preclude them from competing for influence. Nor did it prevent the two nearly
going to war, as they did over Cuba in 1962. But overall there was an understanding that,
whatever their differences, they shared some important common goals, including a desire to
avoid nuclear war, to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to other powers, and to manage a
European continent that had been the site of two great wars in the past. This in turn influenced
the way certain scholars even theorized the cold war, notably those in the wider realist tradition.
Indeed, as Kenneth Waltz pointed out in a famous 1964 article, by reducing the number of major
international actors to only two, the cold war had created its own form of stability.

Several years on, the influential historian John Lewis Gaddis was saying much the same thing.
The cold war had deep roots, he agreed. But it also contained as much conflict as it generated
(what he termed a 'long peace') by organizing the world into two separate blocs, keeping
Germany divided and nationalism in Europe under tight control. This way of thinking about the
cold war may in part explain the failure of IR academics to seriously contemplate the possibility
of it ever coming to an end. Nor was there much reason to think it would given the then prevalent
view of the USSR. Once the cold war had come to an end, many assumed that it was bound to
happen given Soviet economic problems. But that is not how things looked before 1989. The
USSR, it was agreed, was economically uncompetitive. But its planned economic system was
still capable of muddling along while guaranteeing full employment for ordinary Soviet citizens.
The Soviet state also retained formidable powers. And there was little indication, either, that the
USSR was about to decamp from Eastern Europe. The cold war would go on.

Though most experts failed to see the end of the cold war coming, one group above all others
took the lion's share of the blame: those in the realist camp. Indeed, as one world gave way to
another, realism was to come under sustained attack from an emerging band of critics, who
accused it in turn of being too static in outlook, of failing to pay enough attention to what was
going on inside the Soviet Union itself, and of taking little or no account of the important role
played by ideas in bringing about the cold war's end. But both realists and their many critics
(many of whom went on to promote constructivism as a viable alternative to realist discourse)
together faced a perhaps even bigger theoretical conundrum: that the end of the cold war might
not have happened at all if it had not been for the actions of a single individual in the shape of
Mikhail Gorbachev in material capabilities, the cost of maintaining an expensive empire, an
unwinnable arms race with the United States, and an alteration in Soviet thinking may have
together created the conditions that made change likely in the 1980s. But it required the actions
of a single man to finally bring it about.

US and the Unipolar System

 The end of the cold war, followed by the collapse of the USSR, dramatically increased
the USA's weight in the international system.
 By 2000, the popular view was that the USA was more 'hyperpower' than 'superpower'.
 Under Clinton there was a great focus on economic issues and using America's economic
power to reinforce its position in the international system.
 The USA may have failed to intervene in Rwanda, but it continued to play an active role
in international affairs during the 1990s.

After the Soviet Union

 The problems facing post-communist Russia were enormous.

 Economic reforms in the 1990s created a new class of super-rich Russians but
exacerbated Russia's overall economic decline.
 Vladimir Putin has attempted to reverse what he saw as Russia's decline in the 1990s.
 It is misleading to talk of a 'new cold war' between the West and Russia.

Europe; Rise and decline

 In spite of the break-up of former Yugoslavia, Europe benefited as much from the end of
the cold war as the USA.
 Europeans after the cold war were divided over a series of key issues, most notably the
degree of European integration, economic strategy, and the foreign policy aspirations of
the European Union.
  Europe may not possess much collective military power, but it does retain important soft
power, while remaining a major economic actor in the world.
 The costs of the economic crisis have been significant but the consensus remains that a
functioning EU is more likely to deliver peace and prosperity than any alternative
arrangement.

A new Asian Century

'It has become the new truth of our age that the Western world we have known is fast losing its
pre-eminence to be replaced by a new international system shaped by China and increasingly
determined by the economic rise of Asia ... However we need to question the idea that there is a
power shift in the making and that the West and the United States are in steep decline. The world
has a long way to go before we can talk of a post-Western world.'

(M. Cox (2011 ), 'Power Shift and the Death of the West? Not Yet!'. European Political Science,
10(3): 416

 Compared to Europe after 1945, the international relations of East Asia during the cold
war were highly volatile, marked by revolutions, wars, and insurgencies.
 The end of the cold war was experienced very differently in Asia.
 Economic growth, the USA's presence, and the role played by ASEAN continue to make
the region more stable than some predicted.
 China's economic rise has brought prosperity to the region but increased tensions too,
confirming-at least according to some realists-that when the balance of power changes
instability follows.

A new Global South

'We must not forget that the overwhelming majority of poor people live in the Third World
states. They did yesterday, they do today, and in the absence of remedial action, they will
tomorrow.' (C. Thomas (1999), 'Where is the Third World Now?'. in

M. Cox, K. Booth, and T. Dunne (eds), The Interregnum: Controversies in World Politics, 1989-
1999: 244)

 The end of the Third World was marked by major economic reform in many countries,
accompanied by their rejoining the world market.
 The less-developed countries continue to be burdened by debt and debt repayments to the
more advanced economies of the world.
 Though socialist anti-imperialism is no longer a powerful political ideology in the South,
resentments against the more powerful West remain.

From 9/11 to Arab Spring

  9/11 effectively brought the post-cold war era to an end, and in the process transformed
US foreign policy.
 The reasons for going to war in Iraq have been much disputed, although most people now
believe it was a strategic error.
 The Arab Spring since 2011 has seen the emergence of powerful political parties and
organizations favoring constitutions inspired by Islam.

Obama and the World

 Barack Obama was elected in 2008 in the midst of the deepest financial crisis since the
1930s.
 His foreign policy aimed among other things to restore US standing in the world while
finally bringing US troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
 Obama's re-election in 2012 was in part due to his economic policies at home and in part
due to his perceived success in foreign policy.
 Obama rejects the idea that the United States is in decline, but accepts that the US has to
adjust its policies to take account of new economic realities-most notably in Asia.

Rising Powers and the emerging world order

The Post-Cold war Order During the 1990s there was near universal agreement that the global
system was dominated by the power of the United States and its allies and by the institutions that
the US dominated.

From the perspective of the dominant norms of the system, the United States has rarely been a
status quo power but has often sought to mould the system in its own image. Since the end of the
cold war it has been a strongly revisionist power: in the 1990s, in terms of pressing for new
norms on intervention, the opening of markets, and the embedding of particular sets of what it
saw as liberal values in international institutions; in the early years of this century, in terms of its
attempt to recast norms on regime change and on the use of force .

The states of the global South did not face the United States within a stable notion of a
'Westphalian order'. From their perspective, the dominant Western states were insisting that
many of the most important norms of the system ought to change, above all in ways that
threatened greater interventionism. But there was a widespread sense that there was little
alternative but to accommodate Western power.

There was widespread consensus that challenges to the US-led order would result from
'blowback' or 'backlashes' against US and Western power, and would be focused around anti-
hegemonic social movements or radical states.
The US order under challenge

Over the last decade, countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, the ASEAN
states, and Mexico have experienced significant economic development. For many, the
continuation of this trend is likely to result in an alteration in the economic balance in favour of
the dynamic emerging markets.

With this greater economic share of the world market, they feel that they deserve a greater
political say in the international community as well. In fact, the 2008 financial crisis-
underscoring the shift in relative economic weight-only made this call for a seat at the top
negotiating tables stronger and more urgent.

Building on the idea that 'a shared voice is stronger than a single voice', the emerging powers
realize that they have to cooperate in order to push forward their own agendas. On this view, the
new forms of Southern multilateralism led by today's emerging and regional powers have put the
idea of the global South firmly back on the political and intellectual map.

Three Questions about the rising Powers

For mainstream realist and neo-realist writers, rising powers matter because their growing
material power disrupts the balance of power. There is great debate about exactly how changes in
material power cause conflict, but widespread agreement that power shifts are associated with
conflict and that this will continue: hence the prediction of many neo-realists that conflict
between the US and China is inevitable.

These materially-based approaches to rising powers and global order remain highly influential.
But they do not tell us enough about the potential pathways that might lead to the emergence of
major power competition. What we want to know is precisely how an international system might
move across a spectrum from the general diffusion of power, to a situation of multi polarity, to a
system in which the foreign policies of the major states are driven by balance of power politics
and logics. Such systems do not suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Material understandings of power provide an insufficient basis for understanding the reasons for
challenge and the crucial importance of status and recognition as factors in the foreign policy
behaviour of emerging powers. Even if one accepts the idea of rising states as revisionist, it is
difficult to understand the sources of their dissatisfaction purely within a world of material power
and systemically given incentives.

For international society theorists, power hierarchies ;,i.re not simply about material power.
Great powers constitute a particular social category. Being a great power depends on recognition
by others and on the cultivation of legitimacy. The stability of power transitions will be crucially
affected by the accommodation of rising powers and the reallocation of the seats around the top
table of international politics.
For many theorists, the 'power' of today's rising powers is not just a matter of the power
resources that they possess. It derives from the role that they are playing in functional institutions
created to deal with ever more pressing sets of challenges (such as the management of the global
economy, climate change, nuclear proliferation). And it derives from their equally necessary role
in the creation of legitimate institutions and representative structures of global governance.

Conclusion

There are broadly two ways in which a global order might come into being. One is via the
coming together on more or less equal terms of a series of regionally based systems, whether
made up of states, empires, or other political groupings. The other is by the global dominance of
what was originally a regional system. And it is this model that stands behind global order in the
twentieth century, with expansion of an originally European international society onto a global
scalefirst, through the globalizing force of capitalism, the economic rise of the West, and the
immense transformative impact that it has on the regions and societies which get drawn into a
deepening system of exchange and production relations; second, through the emergence of an
often highly conflictual international political system which, as the English geopolitical writer
Halford Mackinder argued, came to see the entire earth as the single stage for promotion of the
interests of the core powers of the system and third, through the development of a global
international society whose institutional forms (the nation-state, great powers, international law,
spheres of influence) were globalized from their originally European context in the course of
European expansion and the subsequent process of decolonization.

A central part of the problem of global order in the twentieth century was the struggle of the
Third World, or later the global South, against what was widely understood as the Western
dominance of the international system. And a central question about the idea of 'emergence' has
to do with the ways in which the rise of today's emerging developing countries may be said to
constitute a challenge to this historically constructed Western order.

On one side, it has become common to suggest that the rise of new powers, the developmental
gap that has opened up between them and other developing countries, and their very different
power; political, military, and geopolitical opportunities and options simply underscore the out
datedness and irrelevance of old-fashioned notions of the Third World or the global South. The
very substantial expansion of the role of China in Africa, and the emergence of both India and
China as significant aid donors, highlight the gap between them and African countries. Although
South-South trade has expanded, just fourteen countries account for 75 per cent of that trade.
Their success therefore places them in an objectively different analytical category from other
developing countries.

If poverty, weakness, and political marginalization defined the Third World, something
important seems to have changed. 'The salient feature of the Third World was that it wanted
economic and political clout. It is getting both'. On the back of such a view come calls for major
emerging powers to jettison claims for special treatment or special status-in terms of the trading
system they should 'graduate' from the developing country category; in terms of climate change
they should not hide behind the Kyoto Protocol's principle of 'common but differentiated
responsibility'; and in terms of human rights they should no longer invoke outdated Third-
Wordlist conceptions of hard sovereignty as a reason for inaction. In other words, they should no
longer use underdevelopment, poverty, and a prior history of colonialism or historical
marginality as 'excuses' to evade assuming their 'responsibilities' as emerging major powers