Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
What Happens in a Multipolar World?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_14-2009_06_20.shtml#1245355797
The Chicago Journal of International Law has a new symposium issue
coming online soon on the topic of a multipolar world. I have a piece
in it, so does my co-blogger Chris Borgen of Opinio Juris, John Yoo,
and some others - I'll post a link to the issue when it appears. My
own piece is titled, [1]United Nations Collective Security and the
United States Security Guarantee in a Multipolar World: The Security
Council as the Talking Shop of the Nations.
It's a pretty self-explanatory title. The one thing I'd add to the
abstract is that there is a discussion of NATO and a Hymn to one of my
Intellectual Heroes, Raymond Aron, in the middle of the essay that
begins (the editors were slightly taken aback): "Be wary, O Europe,
and consider carefully what Aron would say of an America that does not
assert, rudely and brusquely and vulgarly, its own interests first
..." Mighty pretty speechifying, no?
In shameless self-promotion mode, you can get it from SSRN at the
link; here is the abstract:
([2]show)
This essay considers the respective roles of the United Nations and
the United States in a world of rising multipolarity and rising new
(or old) Great Powers. It asks why UN collective security as a
concept persists, despite the well-known failures, both practical
and theoretical, and why it remains anchored to the UN Security
Council. The persistence is owed, according to the essay, to the
fact of a parallel US security guarantee that offers much of the
world (in descending degrees starting with NATO and close US allies
such as Japan, but even extending to non-allies and even enemies
who benefit from a loose US hegemony in the global commons such as
freedom of the seas (leaving aside pirates)) important security
benefits not otherwise easily obtained.
Much of the world can afford to pay lip service to UN collective
security as an ideal, and to nourish it as a Platonic form,
precisely because they do not have to depend upon it in fact. Not
all the world falls within even the broadest conception of the US
security umbrella, however, and these places include such locales
as Darfur and other conflict zones in Africa. In those places,
according to the paper, the US should engage with UN collective
security to offer what the US will not, or cannot, offer directly.
The paper also argues that the Security Council should be
understood, in a world of rising multipolarity especially, not as
the "management committee of our fledgling collective security
system," as Kofi Annan put it, or even as a concert of the Great
Powers, but as simply the security talking shop of the Great
Powers. Sometimes the Security Council can act as a collective
security device, and sometimes as a concert of the Great Powers
(e.g., the first Gulf War), but the condition of multipolarity
argues that Great Powers are competitive and that the Security
Council will find its limits, but also its role, mostly as the
place for debate and argument, diplomacy successful or not - but
not management of global security.
The essay also argues that those who want to see an end to loose US
hegemony in favor of the supposed freedoms and sovereign equality
of a multipolar world should think carefully about what they wish
for. The dreams of global governance by international institutions
turn out to have their greatest possibilities precisely in a world
that, to a large extent, relies upon a parallel hegemon rather than
collective institutions for its underlying order. In a multipolar,
more competitive world, the winner is unlikely to be liberal
internationalist global governance or UN Platonism or collective
security, but instead the narrow, often directly commercial,
interests of rising new powers such as China. The paper closes with
policy advice to the United States on what it means and how it
should - and should not - engage with the UN on security and the
Security Council.
(The paper runs some 15,000 words and is part of a special
symposium issue on a multipolar world.)
([3]hide)
References
1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421999
2. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1245355797.html
3. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1245355797.html
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