“…We need to pay attention to the fact that we have not yet reached the stage of a new state of affairs with a stable multilateral world order. We are in a transition marked by the end of the US hegemony and also the long Western hegemony that proceeded from the Dutch and the British and other European powers through the US. But this transition is likely to last for some years and to be difficult, challenging, if not even chaotic. And so we need to be careful with our imagination and not leap ahead and speak of a new cosmopolitan order or even simply a new multilateral order.
As we move from a single superpower to multiple nation powers the transition needs a great deal of attention and management, it could easily turn into a multipolar rather than a multilateral world. The list of nation-powers certainly includes Russia, India, China and Brazil. There are different lists for military, economic and other forms of power but we should not make distinctions between these different forms of power too sharply, because one of the features of the new period of the world, to which we are moving, is that these sorts of distinctions break down to some extent. The new media, the shifts in the world reduce some of the distinctions among the political, the economic, the cultural assets which we have often treated as though they were fixed and separate categories to be dealt with by different institutions. It’s also important to remember that there will be rich countries, which are not major powers, but that will need to be included in global trade and other relationships (global institutions). So, countries like Singapore or the United Arab Emirates are important and we also need to consider that if we have only alliances among nation powers, if no Arab country is a major power it would be a disaster. There need to be some mechanisms of inclusion. Global security depends equally on global institutions: most importantly the UN, even though it needs both our support and reform. And we need to see some of the challenges to this organization – for example, security organization, work in development, human rights, justice issues… The UN is heavily oriented to emergency response but also needs to renew its peace-building capacities. Nevertheless global security depends equally on regional institutions and it would be a mistake to imagine a shift to the global, to the United Nations alone or other global institutions.
Regional institutions and regions themselves are likely to grow more important in the coming years. But this will not develop overnight. For example, I think we would all agree that Europe can be on that list of world powers and yet we would immediately remind ourselves that despite the great progress of the European unification, Europe is not capable of a common foreign policy and only ambiguously of a common economic policy. Therefore, we shouldn’t exaggerate the extent to which a regional organization strives. At the same time, we need to recognize all definitions of regions and understand that old civilizational and geopolitical regions will be important but will not be alone. For example, integration is proceeding across Asia, not just in South Asia or South-East Asia or East Asia but across the whole Asia and even extending to Russia, to the Middle East and so forth. Direct investment and trade have united Asian countries into a common economic area and have entailed fast development over the last 15 years.
It is important to revisit our classical perception of what integration is about. For example, we need to look at the Islamic world as a kind of region for some purposes and not only as a geopolitical region. We also need cross cutting institutions, which could deal with issues of Diaspora. There are new kinds of regions that are created. In all of this, we need to pay attention to global inequality. And we need to be careful that the emergence of a structure of multilateral relations among nation powers does not leave to one side dramatic inequalities in the world. This is an important security consideration.
As it’s important to have a multilateral and more secure world, it is vital for all nation powers to see themselves as regional powers. Global organizations dedicated to security issues should include all countries which have an important regional influence. Russia, for instance, should be included among them. And it is important that we see a structure of cooperation among the major powers, that we recognize that this is problem solving cooperation not simply a measure of always having mutual interests in common. There will be a common interest, but there will be a need for productive and peaceful ways to deal with differences of interest which will be real and important. This is true also in regard to the various global challenges many of which are obviously already on the table. For example, about peacekeeping, we have still not decided fully what kinds of institutional transformations are needed for Europe, when civil and non-state wars rather than interstate wars are the central security threat. They also need to deal with humanitarian emergencies, environmental issues... Bu there are also other important issues like how to share resources of clean water, how to deal with pollution, health issues among which infection diseases, migration and diasporas complications…
Information technologies and their use are also a fundamental issue of international institutional management. IT information technology is not just technology. It’s a matter of international agreements, of regulatory frameworks. These international agreements cannot be reached without international institutions. As we move to the question of intellectual property rights, we have even more clashes between countries and need collective institutions to manage them. This cannot be an imposition of the US intellectual property rights regime on all of the other countries of the world; partly for the reason that the US intellectual property rights regime makes information too often a private rather than a public good. To build an advanced and acknowledged society, it is important that information and knowledge be treated as often as possible as public goods and not be always controlled as a matter of private pricing and property rights.
In adopting new policies, the attitudes of nations and states still matter. We should not come to the conclusion that globalization is simply a transcendence of nation states, it will for the most part work through and depend on the strength of individual nation-states and the extent to which they can incorporate domestic law and constitutions, the needed recognition of international obligations, responsibilities and treaties. Nations matter because solidarity is crucial to democracy and if we wish for a more democratic world, it will happen largely inside, not just across nations. The sense of belonging to a state is made more important by globalization and not in the least less important. Globalization makes people more sensitive to some of these questions. And the long-standing issues of what are the matters between cultural identity and social solidarity, on one hand, and nation-state boundaries, on the other hand, aren’t going to go away. So, we need to have institutions that can deal with these kinds of conflicts and challenges because they affect every country’s neighbors, they are never entirely domestic. States count though because they are the crucial units of integration and potential for democracy and much of the effectiveness on all of these issues depends on states and cannot be handled internationally alone.
Lastly, we need to pay attention to the question of the effectiveness of institutions. I think that for the coming years, this will be a basic challenge for most states of the world: not just whether they are democratic or not but whether the institutions are effective. Can they deliver services, can they deliver public goods or not? And that is at once a domestic and an international issue. The economic institutions are not adequate to global development. We need different regulatory regimes but also different enabling regimes such as a better approach to the issue of international currency, drawing rights, reserves and so forth. Knowledge is the most important public good but here again the trends are mixed, partly because of this issue of privatization of rights and knowledge even in higher education and the spread of privatization rather than public investment in research and university education. It’s a general issue for information. We need to build relevant institutions. That extends from institutions like universities to the media…”
