In talking about the Cold War , the term “bipolarity ” is frequently used, but without rigor, including in the very definition of the underlying notion of “polarity .” If we are to put things in perspective with a subject that is more complex than it seems, we must learn to distinguish between power polarity and group polarity , two major realities that are often confused. 1 The former describes competition among states that may claim power status, in other words that have the objective resources to do so and are perceived as such by others. What is the use of being objectively powerful if others fail to acknowledge that capacity?
Asking questions about power polarities thus consists in determining if one is dealing with a hegemonic system or an oligarchic one. There are few historical examples of hegemonic systems. I mentioned the Pax Britannica that reigned from 1815 up to the growing power of Germany . American hegemony during the Cold War naturally enters into this category, but was mainly shared with Moscow in a kind of American-Soviet “joint rule.” There was a very brief moment of American unipolarity after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it quickly disappeared. In other words, clear and simple moments of hegemony are in fact rather rare. The rule is oligarchy, which describes situations in which a plurality of powers emerges that are more or less in free competition with one another. As for group polarity , it corresponds to periods when the powers put an end to their dispersion and move toward “side-taking” situations, based on the grouping together of a certain number of states around a leader. These sides could be variable in quantity, even if international politics generally encourages duality, in accordance with the time-honored friend-enemy dichotomy.
Likewise one must dissociate polarity and polarization . Polarity describes a juxtaposition of powers without qualifying their relationships. Polarization implies a potential or real confrontation. Thus a whole range of scenarios is possible: there are dispersed powers in competition without necessarily entering into a direct conflict, situations in which that competition results in a confrontation, situations in which that confrontation is organized around well-structured sides; lastly, one could imagine contexts, extremely rare in fact, in which a hegemonic power dominates all the others.
The bipolarity that we experienced from 1947 to 1989 was not only polar but also polarized, leading to a confrontational stance between the poles. Moreover, a mindset of rallying together came with it: not only were there two antagonistic powers, but there were also a certain number of small or larger states that united around them. Finally, both sides were dominated by a “superpower,” as they were called at the time, driven by a claim of rivalry with the alter ego, or peer competitor, and by a secret wish to divide up the world in a joint rule.
It is worth noting that this was a totally unprecedented configuration, to the extent that bipolarity has existed only once in the history of international relations. This did not prevent at least two generations of political actors from convincing themselves that it was likely to last, to the point of being confused with the very idea of an international system. Furthermore, it generated a whole vocabulary, a whole series of techniques, institutions, political, diplomatic and military practices of which we are still to this day the direct and often unconscious heirs.
Nuclear Reality and Ideological Antagonism
Why has our consciousness and vision of the world been so profoundly affected by what is after all a rather fleeting “bipolar moment?” It is always easier with hindsight to find explanations through which to speculate about a phenomenon that was largely an accident of history, an exceptional alignment of the planets. That accident was based on the conjunction of three factors. The first came from the nuclear reality and its entirely original nature. In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it became evident that this totally unprecedented weapon, although it would not necessarily enable one to win, would lead to the destruction of the other if used. As long as only one power had a monopoly on it, it would have an absolute, terrifying advantage since it could annihilate everyone without any risk of being pulverized itself. But as soon as one’s adversary became equipped with the same weapon, a very particular logic was set in motion that is known as “capacity of mutual destruction.”
There was no longer any question here of victory or defeat, since it was simply the possibility of the two belligerents’ annihilation that prevailed. However, with the emergence of the nuclear duopole (US-USSR starting in 1949), all states deprived of the weapon had no chance of surviving unless they aligned themselves under the protection of one of the superpowers. For the first time in history, protection became the absolute rule in international politics. For the first time, it was impossible to envisage one’s place in the international system outside that logic of protection, which also implied sides and leaders of those sides.
Previously, the logic of protection between strong and less strong did not have that absolute quality because no one was at risk of total annihilation, even by one stronger than oneself. Alliances were quite flexible and each state could build its own autonomy at a lower cost. Henceforth, and it was an unprecedented and remarkable phenomenon in international relations, there was no longer any question of bridging the gap separating the two super-adversaries. With the nuclear era, protection became so vital that it became very risky and dangerous to stray too far from one’s side. Charles de Gaulle was highly aware of this when, in 1962 in the heat of the missile crisis, he aligned himself unhesitatingly with the US in the face of Khrushchev’s USSR .
The other new aspect arose from the world’s polarization between two ideologies. Here again, the phenomenon was totally unprecedented. Previously in the world, ideologies did not have the structuring virtue they acquired at the end of the Second World War . The two victors over Nazism indeed claimed allegiance to highly different political philosophies: centralized Marxist socialism that was state-run and authoritarian, and a liberal orientation advocating the virtues of individualism, a free market and democracy. For the first time, ideology interfered in a deep and systematic way with international politics. Nations and nationalism , which once structured those politics, saw themselves almost downgraded through this face-off between two messianisms that claimed to embody on their own the promised end of History. As a result, the instinct for protection previously discussed went far beyond mere pragmatism. Whichever side one aligned with had a philosophical identity that widened the differences. One did not align oneself merely to be protected, one swore allegiance willingly or not to one of the two poles in this dual system.
One might argue that there have been other moments in the history of international relations where ideologies played an important role. Thus one could say that the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries left their mark on international politics, but on a limited scale that ultimately only concerned a piece of the European continent, not the entire world. Moreover, while ideology was then a partial vector of identification and alignment, it did not structure all of international politics. Furthermore, Protestants and Catholics soon joined together in disparate coalitions. During the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697), it was a coalition of Protestant and Catholic states that fought Louis XIV. Likewise, in the nineteenth century, the split between legitimism and nationalism did not produce such clear and lasting alignments. On the other hand, during the Cold War , the two dimensions were mutually reinforcing. The two ideologies fueled a radical simplification of the international system which in turn, through its oversimplification, fueled ideological tension. Undoubtedly, the antagonism between Marxism and liberalism would not have been so strong if it had not been based on competition between the two politically, diplomatically and militarily structured blocs.
Lastly, beyond these two clashing ideological systems, two forms of socioeconomic and political organization were really pitted against one another, again in a totally unprecedented manner. The force of that antagonism was all the more exceptional given that each of the two systems had at its disposal a kind of outgrowth on the opposing side. This was of course the role played by the national communist parties in NATO countries, supported by a working class still not well integrated into society, particularly in the southern European countries. In France and Italy, the Communist Party brought in over a quarter of the vote, making it a major social power. On the Soviet side, dissidence was gradually built up that also expressed a lack of integration within the system. These two dissidences drew their ideal from the opposite model, the European working class, especially in southern Europe, perceived the USSR as a kind of “paradise,” while the dissenting social forces on the Soviet side increasingly identified with Western liberalism and individualism.
That dynamic gave meaning to the competition between the two systems and gave the social and political struggles taking shape on both sides an intensity and relevance at least as strong and decisive as that of military competition. Not surprisingly therefore, the progressive integration of the working class and the regression of communist parties at the end of the post-war economic boom contributed to the weakening of the Soviet bloc, which thereby gradually lost a part of its supporters in the West while, on the contrary, discontent and dissidence continued to grow stronger in the East. Bipolarity ran out of steam and the bipolar system ended up collapsing from the moment the rigidity of that ideological, political and socioeconomic duality was challenged on both sides by ongoing social transformations. Thus it was not only, or even mainly, through military competition that the West prevailed over the East. The delegitimization and decomposition of the economic and social system of the Eastern bloc countries led to the fall of the Wall, finally resulting in the muddled and ambiguous situation known as “post-bipolar.”
From Antagonism to Diarchy
It once seemed that bipolarity was based on the balance of forces, that the Soviet Bear and the American Eagle balanced each other in terms of power. In reality, the fading of bipolarity reflected the extreme precariousness of the factors upon which it was based, far more than on a logic of power that would have enabled one of the two sides to prevail. The decline of the Soviet bloc was not primarily linked to a lessening of its power as such, but to the erosion of its social model and the concomitant decline of its power of seduction to dissenters on the Western side.
With these considerations in mind, one should also understand that bipolarity was never a monolithic phenomenon and that is was constantly evolving over the course of its brief history. Between 1947 and 1967, bipolarity was marked by the extreme rigidity of radically intransigent behavior and a lack of willingness to communicate beyond the “iron curtain” separating the protagonists. It was the height of the Cold War , with climactic moments like the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The two powers hardly communicated, except to hurl abuse at one another during certain sessions of the Security Council, even though the Soviet Union left it at the start of the Korean War . However, from 1967 to 1989, bipolarity adapted. It was a time of “peaceful coexistence,” then of “détente,” strained somewhat by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This thaw in relations between the two powers was orchestrated by various major diplomatic initiatives, including the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin in 1971 and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe held in Helsinki in 1975. From then on it was a matter of bipolarity that was no longer radically antagonistic but in a sense diarchic. The parallel between the two main protagonists lay paradoxically in the perception of their weaknesses and in the stalemates in which they were involved in this and that region around the world: the American defeat in Vietnam, the USSR ’s setbacks on its own side, the wars in the Middle East, where the “two policemen” had trouble imposing their will. Forced to cooperate due to these weaknesses, they also discovered they could benefit from that collaboration, first of all on an economic level, thus the importance of the SALT agreements in the 1970s, which made it possible to contain the strategic arms race: the economic argument is always stronger in setting de-escalation in motion in this regard. These negotiations were a good deal for the economically weaker USSR , but also for the U.S., undergoing a period of recession that caused a great deal of strain.
This cooperation was all the more beneficial for both sides by triggering a quite unprecedented dynamic: the two partners could bask in the glow of joint rule. Contrary to what is often imagined, the world was not divided up at Yalta, but rather starting in 1967 when the two powers not only learned to talk to each other, to mutually acknowledge one another as leaders, but also to act in connivance with each other, going as far as fully recognizing their geographical spheres of competence. The year 1967 was when the first meeting occurred between Johnson and Kosygin in Glassboro, followed by a whole string of summits between Nixon and Brezhnev that continued with their successors at the same pace. It was during these moments of dialogue that the two major powers strove to find pragmatic solutions to various international issues; and when they couldn’t, they agreed on how to put them on hold, such as in the Arab-Israeli conflict which, although not really taken care of, was contained by an unprecedented framework of constant communication between the two superpowers.
Lastly, the year 1967 was importantly followed by the signing a year later of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter was emblematic in that it perfectly reflected the new climate of diarchic cooperation: the two superpowers defined the system enabling them to lock the door of their little nuclear club. It also shows to what extent this connivance developed within a hierarchical framework still that of the dying Westphalian system , which was becoming untenable. In 1968, the NPT was accepted by the entire international community, with a few rare exceptions (India , Pakistan , Israel ). The submission of the small and medium-sized powers—in this case, the nuclear-free states—to the major ones was still a given. Barely anyone challenged the game of two sides or polarization . Nearly everyone, willingly or not, believed that the superpowers had good reason to act as they did. Once that diarchic bipolarity was gone, it became on the contrary very hard to practice. Keeping it on life support is totally out of step with the current reality of our world, where challenges to the hierarchical legitimacy of the most powerful is radical and constant. And yet, a presage of those challenges appeared from the beginning of the era of bipolarity . The system was in reality a “conundrum”: there were already too many actors disputing it even though people refused to listen to them.
Stirrings in the South: The Flaws of Bipolarity
It is symptomatic that the first signs of the erosion of the bipolar system came above all from the South. Nothing in the East–West relationship was really capable of shaking up the diarchic model. Naturally, one must take into account General de Gaulle’s wishful thinking about going it alone, his protests, starting with the 1958 memorandum, against an Atlantic Alliance that did not give him a full share in running it. There was of course the schism between Moscow and Beijing (but this was already in the South), and, on a far more modest and less virulent scale, the relative distancing of Ceausescu’s Romania, which followed in its way the Titoist schism in socialist Yugoslavia. But, in the end, none of these “divergences” fundamentally modified the order of things.
In the previous chapter I evoked the way in which the first Pan-Asian, Pan-African and Pan-Arabic movements had expressed their distrust with regard to the European powers. That distrust was expressed again, with far greater force and visibility, during the Bandung Conference in 1955, albeit weighted down by a formidable paradox. Professing its Afro-Asianism, the conference intended to highlight the existence of a third force, a bloc that was neither East nor West, and whose watchword was non-alignment , which had become the lasting designation of the movement that grew out of this first major Afro-Asian meeting. Nonetheless, the different protagonists at Bandung were the first to follow a highly developed logic of clientelization with respect to the two superpowers. This was the case for four of the conference’s sponsors—Indonesia, India , Pakistan and Ceylon (the future Sri Lanka). Two others, Pakistan and Ceylon, aligned very quickly with the Western side. John Kotelawala, the Sri Lankan Prime Minister at the time, did not attempt to conceal his “Westernophilia,” while Pakistan formed a close alliance with the United States , even if it meant simultaneously relying on China . On the other hand, Nehru in India and Sukarno in Indonesia had clearly turned toward Moscow.
The second paradox was that, while these countries in the South were demanding full acknowledgement of their sovereignty from their former colonial masters, they were appealing to the North to support them in their efforts at development. In order to survive at the time, one needed help, and to be helped one had at least to be clientelized if not aligned. The strength of bipolarity had temporarily won out over the Southern people’s emancipation narrative. At the same time, this new world, not well integrated into the international game, gradually became the main focus of international conflicts . And yet, while it may be relatively easy to clientelize states, it is far more difficult to control the conflicts underpinning them. While negotiated bipolarity may have protected Europe from war , the Old Continent was no longer the world’s battlefield. The latter had moved to the South where wars developed over which bipolarity had no hold. Things were really starting to change.
One could already begin to see the main features of the “great misunderstanding” that struck the world after 1945. The Northern powers, intoxicated by the apparent success of the American-Soviet joint rule that seemed to be working better and better, were convinced that they could retain control over all international events, and in particular conflicts known disdainfully at the time as “peripheral.” This was the main purpose of the whole economic and military arsenal of vassalization and clientelization. But, in reality, the more such conflicts developed, the more the Northern countries’ capacity to control them declined. In other words, we were no longer alone in the world.
Bipolarity Undermined by “Peripheral” Conflicts
The first of those conflicts was undoubtedly the Korean War , which revealed the difficulties already experienced by powers such as the Soviet Union and China in controlling their North Korean ally. The U.S. took advantage of this to consolidate a military dictatorship in South Korea that was totally subservient to its interests. But the Korean conflict “did not spread too far” and the turmoil was kept under control.
Things went differently in the Vietnamese conflict, for three reasons. First, contrary to the Korean War , the Vietnam War developed in a context of competition between the USSR and China . This double patronage, which North Vietnam made terrific use of, already introduced a dysfunction into the system. Secondly, the U.S. experienced in South Vietnam what it had been spared in Korea , a truly partisan war . It then began to discover that fighting a society is far more difficult than fighting a state. To be sure, one cannot deny the presence of North Vietnam in the background, but the Viet Cong’s infiltration and activity in South Vietnam was something quite different from frontal combat between two states. This was the same type of conflict the other Western powers had just experienced in the wars of decolonization in Madagascar, Indochina, Cameroon and Algeria of course, with regard to France ; as well as all the bloody episodes in the British Empire’s withdrawal from its overseas territories: in Malaysia, where it didn’t do so badly and finally succeeded in subduing the communist guerillas, and in Kenya, where the conflict with the Mau-Mau nationalist rebels was much harder to handle.
These emerging conflicts in the South brought to the fore new military practices which turned out to have nothing to do with the theory of war as it had been developed by the major Western strategists. Initially, the Soviets thought they could congratulate themselves on the situation. Decolonization was a Western problem, and not only was Moscow shielded from any accusation of colonialism, but it could also use those conflicts to weaken the West. It was somewhat like the atmosphere at the Baku Congress that resurfaced in the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR defending everywhere the cause of oppressed and colonized peoples, and in particular within the forum of the United Nations . But the schism between Moscow and Beijing undermined the Soviets’ self-confidence and showed that there were other candidates perhaps in a better position than the Soviets to defend the Afro-Asian cause. Lastly, the Soviet Union was caught in its own trap when it discovered that it too had a “southern flank” which it dominated in an imperial and neocolonial fashion. The Afghan episode was the defining moment in that evolution, the Soviet Union’s “little Vietnam” from which it never recovered. It should be noted that this geopolitical reversal of fortune in the Third World took place during a very short lapse of time between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the fatal decision to intervene in Afghanistan in December 1979, triggering the disintegration in the 1980s and the final destruction of the Soviet model.
But even before that debacle, the Soviet Union found itself a prisoner of the clientelization game. In conclusion, it was easy to stigmatize the Western powers contending with their colonies or former colonies, but it learned subsequently at its own expense how difficult it was to enforce its tutelage over those same countries. The USSR experienced some good fortune with India , which prevailed over its Pakistani rival, as resoundingly attested among other things by the war of independence in Bangladesh in 1971. Thus the alliance between Moscow and Delhi never constituted a major diplomatic disadvantage for the Soviets. However, other regional conflicts produced less fortunate consequences, notably in the Middle East. Not only did the Soviet Union not succeed in clientelizing the whole of the Arab world, but it had to undergo the painful consequences of certain shifting alliances. Its clients—initially Egypt, Syria and Iraq —had to coexist in a complex relationship with other states that were also hostile to Israel but adversaries of the Soviet side, such as the traditional monarchies of the Arabian peninsula and Jordan. Syro-Jordanian tensions in the fall of 1970 thus followed the famous black September episode during which King Hussein of Jordan tried to eliminate the PLO’s presence on his soil, leading Hafez al-Assad to send tanks to the border of the Hashemite kingdom. This initiative seemed an ill-timed decision that thwarted the Kremlin’s plans in the region, and it had to adapt to a pace of conflicts it was not at all in control of.
A complex diplomatic game thus confused diplomatic matters for Moscow. The case of the Horn of Africa is particularly eloquent. Initially, pro-Soviet Somalia clashed with the Ethiopia of the Negus, allied with the West. But a Marxist-leaning revolution backed by Moscow had barely overthrown the latter when the Somalian leader Siad Barre changed sides. It was therefore a draw at best. Elsewhere this revolutionary Third-Worldism practiced by the Soviets became mired in wars of position with equivocal results, such as in southern Africa, where the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique did not lead to the easy victories to which those wanting to reap the fruits of a painful decolonization process felt entitled. Admittedly, actors from the South proved themselves to be reluctant players of full alignment. Nasser moved closer to Moscow while remaining viscerally anti-communist and fundamentally hostile to the Egyptian Communist Party. Saddam Hussein turned to the West to raise the stakes, notably during his eight-year war with Iran , but even before that, when he began a “civilian” nuclear program. Jacques Chirac went to Baghdad in the fall of 1974. The Iraqi “rais” came to France the following year to visit Cadarache, the site of the Atomic Energy Commission, to meet with the new French prime minister, to go to the Élysée Palace and provide substance for the “Osirak” project which included among others the French companies Bouygues and Saint-Gobain.
The Limits of Joint Rule
For all these reasons, the bipolar system quickly lost credibility among countries in the South . First, the actors realized that they had their own resources at their disposal and did not need to “stick with” a Western or Soviet sponsor in order to survive. In becoming the actors closest to the new conflicts they acquired a strong capacity to influence the international agenda, and they knew how to cash in on it. They also noticed that their Soviet patron was too compromised in preserving the advantages of joint rule with the United States to be a completely reliable protector. If Moscow was only lukewarm in backing its Arab protégés in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , it was due to the strategic priority of the peaceful coexistence negotiated with the US. At some point the benefits of effective patronage ran the risk of being destroyed by the cost of the falling-out it could trigger with Washington. Joint rule thus contained a potential contradiction that was fatal to it.
There was more proof of the uncertainties of power: the turbulent new conflicts that lacked any discipline and that the two major powers could no longer control. Furthermore, in this strategic game, the weak could now exert pressure that was more effective than the missiles the powerful were likely to deploy as dissuasion. The reason for this was simple. When a power was well established it risked losing a great deal, whereas the weak, with not many resources, ran no great risk of showing their resolve and going it alone. In a military adventure, Saddam Hussein ’s Iraq or Hafez al-Assad’s Syria had a great deal less to lose than Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, trapped by a series of international constraints. Weakness creates a realm of perilous freedom that is still underestimated to this day: too great a gap in power kills power.
That growing margin of autonomy on the part of clients and vassals was all the more explainable given that yesterday’s nuclear constraints were of far less consequence in the South, and in a different way in any case. First, in the background, it had evolved, several middle-sized powers both in the North and South having succeeded in getting through the barbed wire of nonproliferation. Either in the British way, by acquiring the weapons under American protection. Or in the Gaullist way, striving to show that one could acquire them alone, as proof of national independence. Once China had entered the game, the five-member club was formed, to which must be added the nations that refused to sign the NPT , including India , Pakistan and Israel . Exiting the nuclear duopoly did not fundamentally change things per se, since the new nuclear powers could not compete with the two superpowers. But from the moment the international stakes were less and less defined by East–West relations and more and more by the North–South relationship, they were abruptly aware of an unknown: of what value was this “weapon from the North” in dealing with conflicts increasingly occurring in the South? Strategic reflection changed little. Some, notably Kenneth Waltz in the U.S., believed that the possible multiplication of nuclear actors in the South would be a way of rebalancing international relations . 2 Others worried about the eventuality of non-governmental proliferation of nuclear weapons : terrorists could get hold of miniaturized nuclear arms and use them on cities.
This was pure speculation, without progressing on the essential point. Nuclear weapons had to be the last resort within the framework of traditional warfare, but what could it do nowadays faced with new kinds of conflicts? As a result, the tutelary capacity of the most powerful, who had invested so much in that distinction, was once again discredited. The “club of five” was no longer alone in the world.
The Contentious Legacy of Non-alignment
While the strategy of non-alignment never really took off, the specter of it never really went away either. The real heirs of Bandung and of the non-aligned movement today are all the examples of “dissenting diplomacy ” expressed in various forms in the international arena. The so-called non-aligned countries quickly saw not only that they could not lay down the law—beyond trying to have an influence on the fringes in certain international negotiations—, but also that the notion of non-alignment no longer mattered after bipolarity had weakened then vanished. The movement’s main actors were well aware that they would never be a force of organization, or of co-governance of the world. However, they soon realized that they could be a sort of “plebs” of the international system. And also that through the intermediary of a few good public speakers, they could participate as full partners in international political debates. Algerian diplomacy set an early example in this unprecedented role, which it handled with a certain skillfulness. Beginning with the Algiers conference held in 1967, 77 countries from the South signed a charter which today includes over 130 countries but has kept the name “Group of 77.” It suggested that the “nobodies” in the international system could play a role in a renewed and democratized system. Although it did not take shape, this eagerly awaited role became the basis of a dissenting discourse that ushered in a new kind of diplomacy. By excelling in that unprecedented game, one could raise the stakes and possibly become an effective “deviant” or “delinquent,” learning how to properly use its potential to harm in order to have an influence on the world’s fate, including in dramatic ways.
The most extreme, although not the most frequent, examples of this behavior could lead to the use of oppositional violence in the form of terrorist acts used for national diplomacy, clearly thwarting the Clausewitzian tradition of frontal warfare. Certain countries have promoted this strategy, either continuously or at times: Iran in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein ’s Iraq , Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, Libya under Gadhafi.
A conclusion may be drawn here in the form of a paradox. Admittedly, the non-aligned movement never led to an institutionalized political order, but its heirs had a great deal of influence in the world by participating more and more in defining the international agenda. It is in their territories that the main conflicts are developing in the world today, involving their key issues and the social deficits burdening them. One has only to listen to Iranian President Rohani, a seemingly moderate leader, explaining that his country has a capacity to control an extremely heavy regional agenda, if not the international one, that is quite probably superior to that of the United States or Russia. The real shift in the world dates from the moment when conflicts moved South. The fleeting illusion of unipolarity or of oligarchic governance could not withstand these deep dynamics.
The Fleeting Illusion of Unipolarity
In the aftermath of the Cold War , Western countries made the mistake of thinking that the “victor” would initiate a time of unilateral domination of the international system. Following the rules of arithmetic, they posited that a player’s failure in the diarchic system automatically led to a unipolar world. Arithmetic is an infinitely respectable subject, but does not apply to international relations.
The bipolarity initiated in 1947 was based on the idea of protection: one had to be subordinate to one of the two alliances to protect oneself from the threat posed by its opponent. But, once the threat was gone, that narrative of alignment no longer made much sense. Under such circumstances, what arguments could justify this perpetuation of American hegemony ? Added to this “arithmetical” mistake was a misjudgment about the context. The world of 1989 was totally different from that of 1947. Decolonization had been completed, the battlefield had shifted from the North to the South, and the different constituent units of that South, whether of states, peoples, social groups or religious and cultural communities, had achieved tremendous autonomy. The fall of the Wall supplied them with additional arguments strengthening their claims for emancipation, dissent, and even deviation. Furthermore, globalization had totally changed the equation. Societies were now establishing contact among themselves with an intensity that defied the traditional vision regarding the capacity of governments. “Intersocial” communication was often faster and more effective than communication between states. That “intersociability” naturally included economic exchanges, but also immigration, relations between religions, and ethnic and tribal support systems, the latter becoming all the stronger due to the incipient collapse of prefabricated and imported states, particularly those growing out of decolonization , as well as from the dislocation of the Soviet bloc. The colossal mistake had been to believe that this new world could be managed like the old one, resorting to the same hegemonic postures, with triumphalism reinforced due to the apparent void created by the demise of the Soviet Union. The Clinton administration gradually emerged as the very symbol of this “continuism.” In January 1997, the first “post-bipolar” American president did not hesitate to appoint as head of the State Department Madeleine Albright, personifying the spirit of the Cold War through her origins and family history. The daughter of a Czech diplomat who had left her country just after the Prague coup, she had established a name for herself at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as one of the foremost specialists of the USSR .
And yet, at the dawn of this new age, Clinton’s predecessor George H. W. Bush had begun to advocate for a “new international order ,” showing a certain restraint in the use of American force in refusing to go all the way to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the liberation of Kuwait : an intuition about the South’s complexity, or a discreet deal with Mikhail Gorbachev who already feared US expansion in all directions? Similarly, rather than consolidating Israel ’s total domination of its considerably weakened neighbors and adversaries, he deliberately chose to use his victory in the Gulf War to try to revive negotiations in the Near East by convening the Madrid Conference which, although a dead end, nevertheless succeeded in bringing together all the parties. It was all the more commendable given that he had achieved remarkable success with Operation “Desert Storm,” leading a true coalition supported by all, including Moscow, Hafez al-Assad in Syria, and China which made the operation possible through its abstention on the Security Council. Yet it was the very same George H. W. Bush who made the fatal choice of maintaining the existence of NATO , a way of entering the promised new world that was reluctant and highly overcautious.
This hegemonic conservatism was furthered by Clinton, who hardly possessed his predecessor’s international experience, and several of his failures soon showed that unipolarity was an illusion. The first was the fiasco of the “Restore Hope” intervention in Somalia, which led to the humiliating retreat of American marines from the Horn of Africa, revealing the nature of these new “asymmetric conflicts” opposing guerillas “weak” on paper to a power mired in its own gigantism. Then it was Washington’s incapacity to define itself regarding the Yugoslav conflict, taking the total opposite stance from its diplomatic position of striving henceforth to rid itself of its European burden. Bill Clinton was unable to interpret this new symptom of the imperial Russian breakdown, or to give it the attention it deserved. Likewise the absence of follow-up to the Oslo Accords regarding the Israel /Palestine issue, treated by Washington with an inexcusable naiveté and thoughtlessness, led to a series of setbacks all the way to the famous Camp David II conference held in July 2000. There, the President of the United States demonstrated that despite his total commitment to the negotiations between belligerents, he was incapable of either establishing his role as mediator or influencing his Israeli protégé. Lastly, I would point to the diplomatic fiasco represented by the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, its hundreds of thousands of dead, the passivity of the international community and, even more staggering, of the sole superpower, whose representative on the Security Council was compelled to recall that there was no question of intervening in Rwanda because it was a “sovereign state.”
All these “tests” confirmed that there was nothing unipolar about the new international system. In fact, there was little more than five years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and NATO ’s bombing of Serbia that marked the gradual return of the Russian-Western antagonism. With the intensification of what Moscow perceived as aggressions against its Serbian ally, Russia reemerged on the international stage. That dynamic reached its climax with the Kosovo episode in 1999, during the final phase of the Clinton presidency. In response to the NATO operation against Serbia, Russia suspended its cooperation with NATO as of March 24, 1999, while on June 12th, Moscow sent troops to take position at Pristina Airport: a true Cold War operation … but after the Cold War ! It was a way of showing that there was not just one master, that the West’s unilateral actions were no longer acceptable and that whenever Russia’s fundamental interests were at stake, Moscow would have to be dealt with.
The Pristina Airport episode was just the first example of behavior that could be seen throughout the Ukraine crisis initiated in November 2013 and that is still manifested today in the Syrian crisis. It is always the same mindset, and the same implicit message from the Russian government designed to fight its marginalization. And always the same pathogenic effect of a form of hegemony created through exclusion. From this standpoint, maintaining and expanding NATO to countries from the former Soviet bloc constituted a major risk. When the question was put on the agenda of a summit for the organization in 1991, it was reported that George H. W. Bush asserted there would be no question of breaking up the Atlantic Alliance even though the Warsaw Pact was already defunct. François Mitterrand is said to have replied: “You are announcing the rebirth of the Holy Alliance.” 3 From the moment an alliance is no longer justified by the concrete threat of an opposing group, it is nothing more than a hegemonic message without limit. This is exactly what Tsar Alexander I of Russia had tried to do with the Holy Alliance. To establish itself, hegemony must have the support of the majority of its partners, or at least their resignation. When it operates through opposition to others, or certain others, it fuels constant confrontation that threatens it at every moment. A real hegemon must be capable of doing without alliances.
An “Apolar” World
The other defeat came from countries in the South , now capable of breaking with the narrative of protection imposed by the Cold War and of successfully playing the autonomy card. The most active protagonists in the developing world began to define themselves against the North, no longer needing to take a position with respect to East or West. Yet, showing one’s opposition to the North now meant pitting oneself against the United States . This was reflected in the rise of powerful anti-Americanism, one of whose first major echo chambers was South America and its leftist nationalist regimes that were emerging in the 2000s in the US’s backyard.
It was also in this context that the attacks occurred on September 11 , 2001, which some thought would instigate an era of “asymmetric conflicts,” whereas it was only an expression among many others of a dynamic in progress for far longer. More than a breakdown, 9/11 was an indicator highlighting the effectiveness of a new form of violence capable of striking at the very heart of a power thought to be invulnerable. The American reaction gave free rein to a messianic exacerbation of the desire for unipolar hegemony manifested in the form of neoconservative ideology. Clinton already adhered loosely to certain aspects of that intellectual construct. George W. Bush and those spurring him in that direction (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, among others) pushed it to the extreme through the project of regime change, first applied to the Middle East, then virtually anywhere their hubris was liable to ordain them to do so. The negation of the other became as absolute as it was warmongering, because deep down this project only tolerated partners in its own image.
We know the outcome, and its startling contradiction. That unipolar hyper-determination only concealed the real configuration of the post-bipolar world, in fact far more concerned with apolarity and the devaluing of a power that had become powerless. 4 The United States suffered one failure after another, incapable of winning a war , while the medium-sized Western powers experienced the same setbacks at their own level. A world then began to emerge of “every man for himself,” where increasingly autonomous actors played their own cards, with local successes which encouraged them in that direction.
We may recall that “clustering polarities” only respond to the need to deal with a threat. But the latter was now so multifaceted and indecipherable that aligning with a major sponsor not only came with a high entry cost, but was often counter-productive. The former hegemonic stability 5 turned into “hegemonic instability,” its protection obliging and exposing more than it assured tranquility. Thus the highly ambiguous, but increasingly widespread strategies that could be seen in particular in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan . Former “clients” of the United States, these states found ways to outwit and get around the patronage of the major powers at a lower cost. How not to be disoriented by the position of Pakistan , officially a pro-Western country but whose secret services discreetly support the Taliban , or by that of Saudi Arabia, an old networks to Al-Qaeda , and even in an indirect way to the Islamic State? And yet there is a rationality in their attitude that cannot be ignored in the new post-bipolar context.
The Return of the Oligarchic Club
At the same time, with the growing uncertainties about the nature of this new international order , one could see the oligarchic rationale taking back the upper hand. The United States, like any power with a hegemonic purpose, was never a big supporter of oligarchies and clubs. It was with little enthusiasm that it reluctantly joined the G6 formed in 1975 at the initiative of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing , becoming the G7 the following year. One should not forget that the very idea for these groupings arose at a time when American hegemony was considerably weakened by the dollar crisis (it was abandoned as the reference currency in 1971 and devalued twice in quick succession in 1971 and 1973), the Vietnamese debacle, and the Watergate scandal. Faced with this triple weakness of their transatlantic partner, personified by the insipid figure of President Gerald Ford , the Europeans thought they could renew their “concert” mindset. From then on, there were alternating periods of oligarchy and comebacks by the United States, such as during Reagan’s presidency, automatically leading to the weakening of the “Gs” (7, 8, etc.).
However, the context of relative confusion that characterized Bill Clinton ’s presidency allowed them to regenerate, and in the 1990s the oligarchic club became so sure of itself that it ended up co-opting Russia, despite its having long waited at the door of the G7. With the rise of the emerging powers, this G7 + 1, soon defined as the G8 (before Russia was again excluded in 2014), rapidly appeared insufficient. The Asian crisis in 1997 thus led to the constitution of a G20 of Finance Ministers, but it took until 2008 before this grouping became the G20 of heads of state.
Year 2008 is a symptomatic date because it coincided with a double weakening of American power under the effect of, on the one hand, the Iraqi defeat and the clear failure of neoconservatism , and on the other hand, the election of a new president of the United States who was to adopt a totally different perspective with regard to international affairs. The G20 grew out of this “transitional void” in November 2008, when the recently elected Barack Obama had not yet taken office. But this new organization was soon left to vegetate due to the reticence of the old powers to overextend the foundations of world governance.
It is easy to understand how the emerging countries , snubbed and marginalized, strove to circumvent and contest oligarchic governance , looking for new forms of support and associations that deconstructed any narrative of polarity , which I will examine more closely in the following chapters.
Notes
- 1.
Owen Worth, Rethinking Hegemony (New York: Palgrave, 2015).
- 2.
Kenneth Waltz , “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons : More May Be Better,” Adelphi Papers, 171, International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, 1981.
- 3.
Roland Dumas, et al., La Diplomatie sur le vif (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2013).
- 4.
Bertrand Badie, L’Impuissance de la puissance. Essai sur les nouvelles relations internationales (Paris: Fayard, 2004).
- 5.
Charles P. Kindleberger , The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Los Angeles, London, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).