Global Governance and the International System

Hegemony and American Hyperpower
My first point will be on the concept of American “hyperpower.” Hyperpower, as you know, is a French word translated into English. The author of that word is Hubert Védrine, the current French Foreign Minister. I think he did not at all mean to be anti-American when he formulated this concept. What does it mean? It means that the concept of superpower is no longer relevant to describe the United States, because the United States is not only the only superpower, but the only power ever to have the capacity to act worldwide, either on the economic scene or on the military scene. Of course, you could use other words. You could speak, for instance, of mega-power or giga-power. But the fact is that we need a new word because it’s an entirely new situation. And this extraordinary achievement is due—at least in the recent past—to the admirable way the United States adjusted to the new technological revolution and its productivity achievements. It is also due to the very flexibility of its society. It looks as if the very fabric of the American society had been designed to fit with globalization, contrary to nations which are much more monolithic like Japan, for instance, which suffer a lot from adjusting to the new world. The European countries stand somewhere in between Japan and the United States.

It’s also important to stress the military side of this situation. The revolution in military affairs, which is now familiar to all of us, is the military version of the technological revolution. There is, it seems to me, deliberate will on the part of the United States to preserve its military superiority, not only vis-à-vis its potential adversaries, but also vis-à-vis its own allies, which also is quite an unprecedented situation. Can we therefore speak of the U.S. as a hegemonic power? In a sense yes. Yes in an obvious way. But I think we can qualify this yes and say, “Yes, but….”

There are two reasons. First, I think the U.S. is not driven today by an explicit ambition or by a global strategic vision comparable to that of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. So in a sense, it is a hyperpower without a vision or a goal. The U.S. has no clear vision about what to do, for instance, in Asia—this was mentioned several times here in the last few days—or even in Europe. But I think the most serious criticism we should address to the United States today is its reluctance to promote a vision of collective security, which is badly needed at the end of this century and the beginning of the next. And it’s all the more unfortunate because the United States invented the concept of collective security at the beginning of the twentieth century in the aftermath of World War I. (And by the way, it was after World War I that the very concept of the think-tank was created in the United States. The Council on Foreign Relations in the United States and Chatham House in the United Kingdom were created just after World War I. Today, there are many think-tanks represented in this room.) The very concept of collective security itself is an American concept.

But today, the U.S. fails to promote it, particularly within the UN system. But when I say collective security, I am not only referring to the security system in the classical political-military sense, but also in the economic sense. The discussions the last two days show how badly the United States performed recently in such areas as trade, for instance. As for the UN, of course, I could multiply the examples: the issue of payments and contributions to the United Nations; the way Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former Secretary-General, was literally kicked out of office; the dubious legality of the Kosovo intervention. We could spend hours just discussing Kosovo, but the very way the problem was approached was a fundamental mistake. We have intervened, but what is our aim now? How will we get out of it? What is the vision behind this action? We do not want Kosovo to be independent, but we have acted in such a way that independence ultimately is the only outcome unless we stay there for twenty or thirty years militarily. So Kosovo is certainly not a success. It is a failure of the collective security system in the sense that the legal approach to the problem is just not acceptable to all the members of the world community. The legitimacy of a collective security system rests on its acceptability by all.

But there is a second reason why I think the United States is not really a hegemonic power, and this is closely related to the first. It is related to the interaction between domestic politics and foreign affairs, a very old subject. Alexis de Tocqueville, who has already been referred to, the author of Democracy in America, wrote a lot on the difficulties faced by democracies in conducting foreign policy. Unfortunately, the American political system makes it extremely difficult to have a coherent foreign policy. This is closely linked, of course, with the issues of public opinion and weak governments. Sometimes, the United States government seems too weak. Weak governments are not in a position to act in an effective way when circumstances require it. Therefore, American foreign policy is clear only when the stakes are very obvious, when American interests are involved in a very visible way. When I say “American interests” I do not mean that American interests are always in conflict with others’ interests. Fortunately the degree of overlap between American interests and its allies’ interests is quite high. Nevertheless, it’s not always satisfactory. American foreign policy, therefore, is clear only in certain circumstances, such as nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, oil and gas resources, the Middle East, Israel, and to some extent Central Asia and East Asia. Globally, however, American foreign policy is structurally unpredictable and unilateral.

Globalization, Regionalization, and European Governance
Now I come to my second point which has to do with globalization and global governance. We have used the word globalization in the last few days without defining it. So let me give you my own definition. Globalization is the tendency for an increasing number of actors to consider the whole world as their relevant chessboard, or theater of operations to use the military term. This is clearly the case for many economic agents and for many non-governmental organizations. (And by the way, all the demonstrators in Seattle who are themselves against globalization are actors of globalization. It is one of the paradoxes of the situation.) Many issues are global by their very nature, such as environmental issues and transnational crime. And we all know that globalization goes along with the increasing importance of civil society, a Western concept.

As a consequence, the way human societies conduct their collective actions is going to be deeply modified. And again, I will refer to my master in Realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, who reminded us the other day that the invention of printing in the fifteenth century provoked a number of consequences that ultimately led to the creation of the nation-state. The invention of writing some 3,000 years ago had exactly the same effect. In my judgment, the three most important revolutions in human history are the writing revolution, the printing revolution, and the computer revolution. The whole system of nation-states will gradually, I would not say disappear, but transform into something new that we cannot forecast in detail. Our grandchildren will know it, not us. But we can observe the beginning of such transformations through regional integration. And here, I am referring not only to the European Union, but also to other such groupings as NAFTA on the North American continent, Mercosur on the South American cone, which has been quite successful, and the embryonic Asian integration that we have been discussing in the last few days. But it seems obvious to me that of all these groupings, the most advanced political laboratory for integration is clearly the European Union, because we started before the others—and we started for other reasons. When we started we were not thinking at all about the computer age and this revolution.

Let me highlight some important features of the European Union very quickly. We have already achieved major sovereignty transfers, which are really astonishing, especially for a country like France. The French are said to be jingoists, but we have transferred massive powers to new entities. Practically all of our major economic powers have been transferred—trade, money, now currency, let alone the legal environment. The production of laws is more and more at the European level. And although ESDI—the European Security and Defense Identity—does not yet fully exist, there is no doubt that we are moving in that direction. We should not ridicule the goal of being able to project 60,000 troops. If we are able in the next ten years, for instance, to project 60,000 well-equipped and well-trained forces anywhere in Europe or in our near-abroad (to use the Russian expression), that would not be so bad. We have achieved in the last few years significant progress in the area of defense industry consolidation. Still, we are not spending enough. Robert Cooper yesterday mentioned that collectively, Europe’s defense budget is 60 percent of the U.S. defense budget, but has only 20 percent of its efficiency. We could debate these numbers, but be that as it may, we have an expenditure gap much more than a technological gap. These things hopefully can be overcome in the next few years.

As a laboratory the governance system of Europe is proceeding by trial and error. And here the terminology, namely, governance rather than government, is fully justified because what we are trying to achieve is something entirely new. It is a much more decentralized way of governing human societies. It looks very much like the issues we have discussed about the management of firms. We need strong strategic centers with very high decentralization. In Europe, we use the word “subsidiarity” and the subsidiarity principle just to explain this design. It is a particularly painful process for our own nation-states which are so heavily centralized. Let me give you this nice definition of centralization: congestion at the center and paralysis at the extremities. So the problem is to overcome this congestion and paralysis.

Currently, there are a number of issues confronting European governance. Daniel Janssen yesterday discussed the decision-making system, but I am slightly less optimistic than he is on the outcome of the Inter-Governmental Conference this year. At stake is not only the voting system, but also the number of commissioners. Another issue related to the massive process of enlargement is the issue of European identity. Now we stand at fifteen plus twelve plus one: fifteen current members, twelve countries with whom we are discussing membership, plus Turkey. Turkey was never considered a European country by any geographer in the last 2,000 years. I know that there are good reasons for Turkey to be a member, and like some in this room I sympathize with Turkey for a number of reasons. But once Turkey is in, why not Armenia? Why not Georgia? Why not the Caucasus? Why not Chechnya? Not to mention Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia itself, ultimately. At some point, we have to address the issue of the boundaries of Europe. So we have an identity problem, not only a geographical problem. It’s also a cultural problem.

Let me say one brief word here on Haider and the Austrian situation. The Germans are now promoting the idea of a constitution for Europe and they are right to do so. If we had had a constitution for Europe, Mr. Thomas Klestil, the Austrian President, would not have had to write a declaration of his own mentioning the democratic values of the European Union and ask Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, and Mr. Jörg Haider to sign it. We have an identity problem and if we do not find answers to the questions it poses we will be in trouble in the future.

If we are successful—and I think we will be—then, sooner or later, maybe in the next ten to twenty years, the European Union should be able to deal with most European security issues essentially by itself. What will NATO become then? I would argue in favor of the transformation of NATO into an alliance between the United States and the European Union, as such, including, of course, other partners like Canada. But we cannot escape the key issue of what that new NATO would be for if it is not directed against a potential adversary? Cooper said yesterday that NATO is now based on values. But I feel very uneasy with that concept because the idea of an alliance projecting its own values is by definition neo-imperialism. Do you know any other definition? And what about the geographic scope of NATO? Some people—including many prominent American thinkers—would like to transform NATO into a worldwide alliance dealing with non-European issues. But then, how would that be perceived by other actors? How would China react to what it might consider as a potentially anti-Chinese alliance?

These are very difficult issues. I do not know, of course, what the answers are. The very survival of NATO in the long term is at stake, and the fact that NATO is today the only institutional link between Europe and the U.S. is not sufficient rationale for its survival. It would be a perversion of the very concept of alliance to say that NATO should survive just because of that reason.

The United States and the Legitimacy and Effectiveness of UN Institutions
My third point is that the development of the fabric of a new governance system beyond the nation-state means that regional institutions will become more and more important. As Fred Bergsten and others pointed out, these regional institutions should evolve in such a way that we do not see the emergence of new trade blocs and military blocs. That would be a great failure. So how do we prevent such an outcome? The only way to do that is to develop interlocking mechanisms among the various regional institutions and put them into a broader legitimacy framework.

And here, we are back to the United Nations. I think the points made by Sergio Vieira de Mello about the United Nations have to be made much more forcefully. The United Nations is the legitimacy system. We have actually two dimensions in the United Nations system—legitimacy and effectiveness. To be legitimate, we certainly have to drastically reform the permanent membership of the Security Council, probably by enlarging it to include Japan and maybe others like India, or canceling the veto system. If we maintain the current veto system, paralysis will be the only possible outcome when serious problems arise, especially if the troublemaker is a permanent member of the Security Council. So we have to think along these lines. But nothing will happen if the United States continues to deal contemptuously with the United Nations system. On the issue of effectiveness, the problem here is allowing the Secretary-General to deal more quickly with issues that are not perceived as major national interest issues by the major UN members.

But again, this can be achieved only if the United States takes collective security seriously. It is really a major issue and related to it are the other problems which were more or less briefly mentioned, such as the International Criminal Court of Justice. The United States, Russia, and China have not yet even signed the treaty, which is not ratified. Even though there are some problems related to sovereignty, in this new world there is no doubt, whether we like it or not, that the sovereignty principle is gradually becoming more and more obsolete. So we have to think along these lines.

Culture, States, and Continuity in the International System
And now, I come to my conclusions. First, the concept of cultural identity is very close to the concept of the nation-state, but if we are not clear-minded about this concept of cultural identity, the degree of fuzziness will increase as the international system evolves. And here I was a little bit dissatisfied with what Yoriko Kawaguchi called “the market theory of culture,” brilliantly presented to us by Mario Vargas Llosa. The point is not, in my judgment, Asian values versus Western individualism. Culture is the particular way each of us approaches universality. I would use St. Thomas Aquinas’ concept of habitus in the Summa Theologica, rejuvenated by the well-known French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, to describe this approach. The way we act and move in this world is largely determined by our basic culture. A few sophisticated individuals can pick up a menu of cultures, but even Mr. Vargas Llosa has a main course. We are very much dependent on our basic initial culture. The view that this culture should not become an excuse for developing nationalism is absolutely correct. But I think we should further deepen this concept. We are not at ease with the debate on cultural identity, but it’s really a key issue for the future.

Second, in spite of globalization, states remain the main actors of international relations. (I belong clearly to the neo-realist school of International Relations in the line of another of my masters, Raymond Aron.) But clearly the format of nation-states is also changing rapidly and relates to Gordon Smith’s concept of “altered states”. States have to reshape themselves, both internally and externally. Internally, some do it through the Third Way; externally, it supposes the development of cooperation in many new ways, which means it’s something entirely new for conducting international affairs.

Last, I would like to stress that globalization is not a uniform process. We are still very far from Marshall McLuhan’s global village, which is nonsense in many ways. The geographic distance is not equal to the psychological distance. For instance, the former Yugoslavia may be very close to Europe in geographical terms, but it’s very far away in psychological terms, as is Russia and many others. So we have to be very careful not to project our way of looking at the world and think that it holds true worldwide. It may be so in 100 or 200 years. But certainly not today.

And finally, I think we should beware of the simplistic Fukuyama kind of equation: Free markets plus democracy leads to peace and prosperity. The problem with this platitude is that each of the four concepts mentioned, namely, free markets, democracy, peace, and prosperity, raise a number of big difficulties. For free markets, the problem is how to get from here to there. That’s the Russian problem. For democracy, there are many different forms of democracy and ways of achieving it. A problem that no democracy to my knowledge has ever solved is how to deal with real minorities. Even the French are not able to solve the Corsican issue. How can we pretend to give lessons to the Russians on how to deal with Chechnya? How can we pretend to bring solutions to the Bosnia problem or to the Kosovo problem? As far as peace is concerned, who on earth is able to give a satisfactory definition of that concept? As for prosperity, it never goes without inequalities and therefore new problems of security. So this equation, unfortunately, doesn’t provide solutions.

My general conclusion is that, after all, the world has not yet entirely changed.