The Levelling

by Michael O'sullivan

  Instead, the evolution of a new world order—a fully multipolar world composed of three (perhaps four, depending on how India develops) large regions that are distinct in the workings of their economies, laws, cultures, and security networks—is manifestly underway. My sense is that until 2018, multipolarity was a more theoretical concept—more something to write about than to witness.4 This is changing quickly: trade tensions, advances in technologies (such as quantum computing), and the regulation of technology are just some of the fissures around which the world is splitting into distinct regions. Multipolarity is gaining traction and will have two broad axes. First, the poles in the multipolar world have to be large in terms of economic, financial, and geopolitical power. Second, the essence of multipolarity is not simply that the poles are large and powerful but also that they develop distinct, culturally consistent ways of doing things. Multipolarity, where regions do things distinctly and differently, is also very different from multilateralism, where they do them together.

  China, in particular, is interesting in the context of the switch from globalization to multipolarity, not least because at the 2017 World Economic Forum the Chinese president claimed the mantle of globalization for China. China benefited greatly from globalization and its accoutrements (e.g., WTO membership), and it played a vital role in the supply-chain dynamic that drove globalization.5 However, trade flows into China increasingly betray a move away from a globalized world and toward a more regionally focused one. For instance, IMF data show that in 2018, compared with 2011, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Malaysia traded more with China and relatively less with the United States. These countries, together with Bangladesh and Pakistan, have allowed themselves to be enticed by trade- and investment-based relationships with China and are now in its orbit.

  However, China is itself not globalized: it is increasingly hard for Western companies to do business there on equal terms with Chinese companies, and the flow of both money and ideas—out of and into China, respectively—is heavily curtailed. Flow of people is another indicator. Flows within China are dynamic and are perhaps more managed than before, but flows of foreigners into China are miniscule by comparison to other countries, and China has only recently established an agency (the State Immigration Administration created at the 2018 Party Congress) to cultivate inward flows. So as China has become a major pole, it has become less globalized and arguably is contributing to the trend toward deglobalization.

  On a broader scale, without picking on individual countries, we can measure the extent to which the world is becoming multipolar by examining aggregate trends in trade, GDP, foreign direct investment, government budget size, and population. All of these are much less concentrated, or more dispersed, than they used to be, and increasingly they are collecting around several poles. For example, in the five years from 2012 to 2017, total foreign direct investment into Australia from China increased at a rate of 21 percent per annum, compared to 6 percent from the United States to Australia, suggesting that Asian investment in Australia is picking up.6

  Several trends show that population flows are becoming more regional. Migration is becoming more region specific or region internal. For example, in 2015 there were 244 million migrants between countries, but at around the same time there were 763 million migrants within countries, according to the World Economic Forum. India is a case in point: from 1991 to 2011 the number of internal migrants more than doubled. In 60 percent of cases, global migration consists of people moving to neighboring countries. As an example, a large proportion of Indian migrants move to regional neighbors, such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.7

  An excellent resource here comes from the data scientist Max Galka, who graphically tracks the flow of immigrants across the world.8 He produces long-term charts showing the waves of immigration into the United States over the past two centuries. His data show that America is founded on a bedrock of German, Irish, Italian, and eastern European immigrants and that lately (since the late 1980s) the biggest flow of immigrants has come from Mexico. The most desired migration destinations worldwide are the United States, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and Saudi Arabia (according to the 2017 World Economic Forum Migration Impact on Cities report). However, data from the World Bank show that the growth in international migrants (excepting refugee flows) into the United States, the United Kingdom, and the eurozone is at its lowest in fifteen years. This may reflect political events—Brexit, for example—and a generally less welcoming climate toward migrants. Today, most of the significant migrant flows are driven by emergencies such as the conflict in Syria, which is driving immigrant flows to Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. Venezuela to Colombia is another new, major crisis-driven corridor, with over one million Venezuelan refugees now living in Colombia.9

  The one area where the world is still globalized, or unipolar, is finance, which we can see in a number of ways: the tenor of global equity and bond markets is still set by Wall Street; American investment banks beat Asian and European banks in trading and advisory leagues; and, most importantly, the usage of the dollar is nearly universal (about half of all transactions globally involve the dollar, with the euro and yen coming far behind and the renminbi accounting for only 2 percent of foreign exchange transactions) according to the Bank for International Settlements.10

  Even if multipolarity is based on the growing dispersion and regionalization of economic power, it is also expressed in other ways, notably military power, political and cyberfreedoms, technological sophistication, financial sector growth, and a greater sense of cultural prerogative and confidence. These are not as easily measured as economic multipolarity, but some clear strands are emerging. To try to synthesize what a pole entails, we can point toward several initial factors: size of a country’s GDP, size of its population, the existence of an imperial legacy, the extent of its regional economic role, its military size and sophistication (e.g., absolute spending, number of fighter jets and ships), its place on the UN Human Development Index relative to its region, and its participation (or not) in a regional grouping (such as NATO or the European Union).

  Under this schema the European Union, the United States, China, and potentially India are poles, but Japan and Russia would not qualify as distinct poles. Russia, for instance, scores well on certain aspects of multipolarity (e.g., militarily), but in its current state it may never become a true pole in the sense employed here. It has spent heavily on its military, now actively exports military technology, and has demonstrated its ability to launch large-scale interventions at speed. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is also becoming a role model for some politicians in other countries who are attracted to the notion of a more medieval and muscular form of leadership, and his notion of managed democracy also has followers around the world.11 However, for a country to be truly multipolar, its characteristics need to be institutionalized rather than simply reflected in the abilities of a single leader. Russia, with a structurally weak economy and financial sector and low human development scores, may not be as powerful in a post-Putin era, whenever that is.

  Hard and Soft Power

  Still, Russia is a good example of how a country leverages hard power (measured in terms of fighting readiness and tactical ability, as set out in military analyses by Jane’s Information Group and think-tank assessments).12 It and a select number of other countries have reserves of hard power, such as nuclear, space, and cyberwar capabilities.13 From a diplomatic point of view, Russia is also an example of the way certain countries can look at the same set of facts and, disturbingly from the point of view of international peace, reach different conclusions. The Western narrative on Russian diplomacy is that it is a reckless and aggressive provocateur. Russia sees things differently. It sees the incorporation of eastern European states into the European Union, NATO-led military adventures into Iraq and Libya, the encroachment of Western missile systems onto Russia’s borders, and Western support for revolutions in Serbia and Ukraine a
s provocations. Given this worldview, it has bolstered all aspects of its military and has struck out to push threats away from its borders and gain international diplomatic leverage.

  A complement to the employment of hard power is to use cultural institutions to build what Harvard professor Joseph Nye (former dean of the Kennedy School of Government and former chair of the National Intelligence Council) calls “soft power.” In very simple terms, Nye defines soft power as the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (hard power).14 Europe is perhaps the leader here. One simple illustration of this is a survey of attitudes to “made in” labels. According to the study, products with German, Swiss, EU, or UK “made in” labels are most admired, and those with Chinese, Bangladeshi, or Vietnamese labels are the least admired.15 From a cultural point of view, the British Council, BBC World Service, Alliance Française, and Goethe Institute are some specific examples of how old Western countries sustain and grow soft power. (China has the Confucius Institute.) The BBC, for example, is seen by many as the benchmark in news broadcasting, and from a soft-power point of view it devotes considerable resources to broadcasting news and radio programs in forty languages (World Service). In general, there is now recognition that a country that takes itself seriously as a geo-economic pole must have a network of neighbor states with which it has cultural ties.

  Most countries don’t have the military, cultural, or economic power to match the large poles, and many countries are caught between poles. Australia, for instance, is a close political and military ally of the West but falls within the economic orbit of Chinacentric Asia. Equally, we might quibble that India has the ingredients to be a distinct and powerful pole but does not have an overall sense of its capabilities and how to marshal them. In this regard it is a geopolitical adolescent.

  India is interesting in this regard. It has an economy that is gaining velocity, a potentially enormous consumer sector should its wealth base grow and become better distributed, and a substantial agricultural sector. It is a democracy, with diverse regions and cultural cross-currents, and is also a nuclear and space power. India’s army is not as skilled and experienced as that of, say, Russia. Unusually, for a large country, India has a relatively large amount of soft power. Large countries tend to have had empires, to have been involved in wars, or generally to have pushed their weight around in world affairs. India, by comparison, has been relatively gentle and enjoys some goodwill as a result. India has trade and cultural ties to London, Dubai, and Hong Kong and is one of the few countries whose internal and external people flows are fluid and representative of an interconnected world. What India has not yet done is to harness and use its power and assert itself as a distinctive pole.

  Looking elsewhere around the world, Latin America should, given its population and geographic size, constitute some form of pole. But in the areas of foreign policy, military power, financial sector mass, and ability to innovate, it falls behind other regions. Furthermore, to a large extent, with the rise in the Hispanic demographic in the United States, the détente between the United States and Cuba, and the primacy of the dollar, Latin America remains part of the satellite region of the US pole. Sadly, it has been overlooked by Washington. The prime example of this neglect is Venezuela. The country is failing and in the grip of an underreported humanitarian crisis. Economically, this crisis may lead China to take a deeper role in Venezuela and in its oil production. Diplomatically, the lack of a comprehensive reaction from Washington brings to mind an article entitled “The Forgotten Relationship” that Jorge Castaneda published some years ago in Foreign Affairs in which he bemoaned the deteriorating relationship between Latin America and the United States.16

  Latin America can be criticized in the multipolar context in many respects. One of these is that it lacks a sense of command and control across the region, an ability to act cohesively and coherently. A modus operandi and an ability to speedily execute decisions and transmit their effects is, however, evident in other regions. The US president, White House, Pentagon, and other institutional trappings of the United States provide a single foreign-policy voice, as do the day-to-day workings of the French and British systems.

  By comparison, the European Union lacks a central, European foreign-policy persona (it has an official foreign minister, the high representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy, but the individual in the position is rarely as powerful and influential as, say, Mario Draghi), who must always compete with the foreign ministers of other states. Imagine, during a crisis, twenty-seven foreign ministers huddled around a speakerphone, with the official EU foreign minister trying to get a word in sideways. In areas like trade and competition policy, the European Union has a much clearer and more unified stance, but for it to fully develop as a pole it needs to have a more singular voice in foreign policy.

  Size—be it economic or strategic—is one of the two determinants of what constitutes a pole; the other is the distinctiveness of that pole’s approach to economic, cultural, and political life. This distinctiveness is colored by the aims of each region or pole and by the extent to which what might be called “hinterland states” would agree and acquiesce.

  Primus inter pares

  In considering the strategic aims of each pole, let us start with the United States. One might suspect that its goal is the preservation of its role as primus inter pares financially and militarily and also in terms of its grip on trade and international institutions. Europe aims for stability, both of the European Union politically and of the eurozone financially, and from there, a deepening of the European project in terms of its institutions and framework. China’s view of itself in the future, or the Chinese Dream, is colored by past generations of economic and cultural greatness.17 It wants to elevate itself to a position of economic power (perhaps regional dominance) and of policy power in Asia with its own regionally relevant rule-based order so that it is, at the very least, not subject to the domination of Western countries and institutions.

  Assessing the “ethos,” or distinctiveness, of each pole is more difficult. For example, if one were to try to get a sense of the nature and quality of institutions and democracy in China, the best publicly available metrics come from sources like the World Bank’s worldwide governance indicators.18 China does not rank well here, but that does not exclude the possibility that China’s institutions and policy apparatus serve its aims very well. Judging China or Russia through Western eyes goes against the very idea of growing distinctiveness.

  Bearing this in mind, we could select five factors through which a view of the distinctiveness of each pole might emerge: governance, democracy, civic control, economy, and power and its deployment. Europe is perhaps most distinctive in the area of democracy, in its low level of civic control (e.g., on freedom of expression), and in culture (the flow of tourists to Europe is perhaps proof of this). The European Union is notably distinctive in that it has its own currency, even though the euro system is not yet complete from an institutional point of view. One might also say that individually many European countries have strong institutions and that at least the European Union has a distinctive though perhaps inefficient approach to governance and policy making.

  In terms of power and its deployment, Europe is culturally very distinct, but it is not at all effective in the way it deploys either its diplomatic power or its military power, though one might argue that the European Union’s rather passive approach is a form of distinction.

  The United States, having led the contemporary wave of globalization, is distinctive in its own right. Its way of doing things has pervaded international institutions and policy mind-sets (the Washington Consensus). In each of the five factors it has a distinctive position, and in many of them a dominant one, with Europe edging the United States out in terms of the quality of its democratic processes. One challenge to the United States now comes in the deployment of its soft power, which was much more easily done in the context of postcommunist Europe and the early phase of rising emer
ging economies. With other countries and regions now adopting more authentic and assertive identities, the smooth flow of American soft power becomes more difficult.

  China, by comparison to the United States and Europe, has a political system that few in the West would recognize as a democracy, but its distinctive approach to curbing personal freedoms and its top-down political control serve the aim of advancing China as an entity. To this end, a positive interpretation of China’s model is that it is following a “prince-like” republican approach as described by Machiavelli, where policy is directed toward the common good, which in this context is interpreted as the furthering of China’s (and the Communist Party’s) prestige. A less kind view would point out that China’s citizens are subject to tyranny from above.

  In terms of other variables: China’s use of military power is yet untested, its soft power is not well developed, and many non-Chinese see China’s economy-led expansion as a reflection of China’s sense of its own greatness. One area where China does forcefully express its power is in trade relations, where it uses its size and influence in a manifest way on its Asian neighbors (stretching to Australia). The challenge for China is to use soft power to win over neighbors and to stealthily create regional integration so that it oversees the South China Sea while confounding those who believe in what Harvard professor Graham Allison has named the “Thucydides’s Trap.”19 Thucydides was an Athenian general who turned historian after an unsuccessful battle. In his famous History of the Peloponnesian War, he recounts the fifth-century-BC wars between Athens and Sparta. More recently, appreciation of Thucydides has grown following publication of a book by Allison in which he coined the phrase “Thucydides Trap” to refer to the inevitability of a war between an established power (the United States) and a rising one (China).