Chapter Six Gazing Through the Crystal Ball: The Stability of Today’s Architecture.
Global architectural construction is a precarious undertaking. It requires a delicate balance between the exercise of state strength and multilateral cooperation. In the absence of sufficient state strength, international organizations such as the League of Nations will not have the necessary capability to be effective. Too much unchecked state strength may result in the inability to stabilize security structures, as was the case with the balance of power system, the rise of Bismarck Germany and the fall of the Concert of Europe. Multilateral cooperation involves integration or power sharing and co-governance. It may not be enough to partially integrate dissatisfied nations into multilateral institutions and regimes, without jeopardizing the stability of the entire architectural scheme.
For now, group hegemony and creeping incrementalism appear to have achieved a precarious balance between state strength and multilateral cooperation as evidenced by the multilateral coalition against international terrorism, but will it last? Structurally, the international system today exhibits at least four characteristics that may threaten the stability of existing architectural arrangements. First, today’s global norms, rules, and institutions are inherited in large part from the Cold War era. We have argued that the old bipolar system has been remodeled rather than razed and replaced. The success of the remodeling depends on the new order being built on a foundation that transcends the conditions that created it in the past; otherwise it will be inadequate for the problems in the post-Cold War order. Second, threats to international stability are also reflected in significant imbalances in different facets of state strength. These imbalances are manifested in economic versus military strength, in the structural strength of individual states, and in the inability/unwillingness of countries to convert domestic strength into relational or structural strength. The third potentially destabilizing problem concerns partial integration. Major powers may not be satisfied with simply being allowed to participate in international regimes and institutions. They may insist on a greater role in global governance. However, too much heterogeneity in global leadership may render co-governance impossible. The fourth threat is the need for new mechanisms. One of the problems of using creeping incrementalism to construct global architecture is that it does not provide new mechanisms to address new conditions.
This chapter examines the stability of today’s architecture in light of the fact that it appears to be based on the Cold War arrangement. It then explores other potentially destabilizing threats including disproportionate state strength, partial integration and the need for new mechanisms.
Beyond Bipolarity
Although the bipolar dimension has disappeared in the post-Cold War international system, we nevertheless argued that many of the salient architectural features of the pre-1989 world have remained and have been adapted incrementally to the circumstances of the new world order. Yet, this can be the case only if the underlying structural dynamics of the previous era were based on characteristics that derived not primarily from the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union—a confrontation now missing—but on dynamics persisting beyond Cold War antagonisms and the capabilities that states assigned to Cold War related interests. Otherwise, virtually all of the Cold War architecture would have become irrelevant in the new era.
It would be foolish to argue that there was no Cold War or no great, ongoing political/ideological/economic confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. No attempt at revisionist history of the era that lasted from 1945 to 1989 could deny the bipolar antagonisms reflected in the actual confrontations that transpired between East and West. The mileposts of that time—the Berlin crises, the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin War, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Vietnam War, Star Wars, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the reconceptualization of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” by the Reagan administration—are but a few of the undeniable twists and turns of an era dominated by conflict between East and West.
Clearly, the previous era was in many ways characterized by conflict between two major alliance formations armed with thermonuclear weapons, a hostile system history, and radically opposed ideological orientations. Nevertheless, the architecture that was developed, in our view, should not be construed as one which created norms, rules and institutions based solely or primarily on the conflict between the two superpowers. Instead, and by looking at the structural and relational distribution of state strength, we can see a somewhat different picture emerging. That picture is one of preponderant structural and relational strength on the part of the United States at the start of the era. Although the perceived Soviet threat was tremendously influential, the U.S. applied its structural strength to create architecture consistent with promoting its long term interests in international affairs, a leadership consistent with the type of activities theorized by both the long cyclist (e.g., Modelski, 1988; Modelski and Thompson, 1988) and hegemonic stability (e.g., see Keohane, 1984) schools of scholarship.
We are by no means the first to suggest that bipolarity can exist side by side with global architectural construction by a very powerful global leader. Thompson’s (1986) work along with Rasler’s (Rasler and Thompson, 1994) illustrate that historically, and coming out of major global warfare such as World War II, new global leadership, having developed a primary global reach, often encounters rapid challenges to its leadership and such long-term leadership cycles can and do co-exist with challenges that have often been interpreted as bipolar or multipolar in character, even while the global leader continues to have the structural strength to mold global architectural arrangements.
Obviously, a global leader’s preponderance in strength cannot co-exist with bipolarity if the latter is defined in terms of equal relational strength between two major powers. Our data indicate that clearly such relational strength was not the case through the Cold War. To the extent that bipolarity existed in terms of a rough equivalence, it existed at times only in a minimal sense and only regarding military capabilities and strategic nuclear forces (of a second strike nature). Even in the context of relational strength needed by a global leader to maintain existing architecture, the United States enjoyed a highly imbalanced relationship in its favor with the Soviet Union, first alone, and then after 1975, in combination with those allied great powers that made up what we have labeled the institutionalized group hegemony of the G-7.
Is there evidence that American relational strength was more important than military/ideological bipolarity during the Cold War era? In order to provide at least a preliminary answer, we constructed an empirical test.[1] The nature of the test revolves around activities in the international system that we believe are reflective of stability and challenges to the status quo in the system. Three types of behaviors were identified that may reflect on efforts to disturb the stability of the system: interstate wars, interstate crises, and levels of participation in the system through foreign policy activities of states. Particularly wars and crises constitute important disturbances in international politics. Crises reflect an especially important form of conflict between states and the history of the Cold War is peppered with them. Interstate wars are less frequent, but tremendously destabilizing of the status quo and have been at the forefront of international politics scholarship. Although some have called the Cold War the “long postwar peace” (Kegley, 1991), it is also clear that interstate hostilities continued throughout the period (Brogan, 1990).
Changes to the volume of foreign policy activity are much less clearly linked to either system stability or to bipolarity. Yet, from a bipolar perspective, it makes some sense to argue that as bipolarity declines, states are more inclined to take independent action, and increase their activities in international politics. Conversely, when bipolarity is strong, independent state activity is likely to be less frequent. Likewise, we can see a relationship between the volume of foreign policy activity by states in the system and fluctuations in global leadership. When the global leader is strong and can compel others to accept its leadership, the volume of activity by states is likely to be less than when the global leader’s strength diminishes and its ability to compel conformity to its leadership is reduced. Hypothetically then, changes in foreign policy activity can be attributed to either changes in bipolarity or to changes in global leadership.
Thus, using crises, wars, and foreign policy activity as our dependent variables, we created a test of the relative salience of hegemonic versus bipolar perspectives on the Cold War. In order to measure changes in bipolarity, we created a measure of military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, with the use of events data, we created a measure of bipolarization, showing fluctuations in conflictual versus cooperative relations between the two superpowers.[2] We created as well, two hegemonic measures. One is the relational strength measure[3] for the United States that is described in Chapters Three and Four. The second is a measure of global acceptance of hegemonic leadership, which is operationalized as the percentage of states voting with the United States on contested roll call votes in the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Table 6.1 demonstrates the results of our test.[4] Once we control for the two global leadership measures, neither the degree of hostile interactions nor the relative military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union are significant in predicting fluctuations in crises, wars, or foreign policy activity during the Cold War era. However, controlling for the
Table 6.1. GEC Regressions of Wars, Crises, and Events During the Cold War.
Variable Wars Crises Events
Constant 7.049** 4.678** 13.523**
(1.041) (1.333) (0.429)
(Bipolar Variables)
Bipolarization -0.006 -0.029 0.020 (0.021) (0.022) (0.096)
Bipolar Military
Balance -0.016 -0.016 -0.029
(0.019) (0.023) (0.099)
(Global Leadership Variables)
U.S. Relational
Strength -11.833** -6.038* -7.223**
(2.730) (2.888) (0.219)
Concurrence with
Leadership -1.026 -0.146 -1.140**
(0.653) (2.888) (0.219)
------
Dispersion Parameter -0.369 0.184 6.797**
(0.204) (0.302) (0.058)
GEC log-likelihood = 85.99 149.98 2729116.1
Number of cases = 35 28 27
Likelihood Ratio Testa 42.48** 5.69b 31.99**
______
Note: Entries are parameter estimates with standard errors in parentheses.
**p<.01; *p<.05, two tailed test
aTest is Chi-square with 4 degrees of freedom.
bLikelihood ratio test between full and null model is not significant at p<.05 but the inclusion of the relational strength variable in the model is a significant improvement over the model estimated without it (LR =3.90 with 1 degree of freedom, p<.05).
effects of these bipolar measures, U.S. relative strength is a consistently significant predictor of all three dependent variables, and concurrence with U.S. leadership is also significant for foreign policy activity.
The test offered here is by no means a definitive one in showing that the Cold War system reflected architecture for world order that was far more comprehensive than just the bipolar conflict that ebbed and flowed through it. In fact, we doubt very much that without anticipating the long-term conflict between East and West it would have been possible for the United States to marshal the strength needed to create the architecture that stabilized international politics across the decades of the Cold War. However, we do believe that it does provide some evidence for the assertion that the global architecture of the era was by no means one tailored exclusively for that conflict, nor that the fluctuations in the intensity of the bipolar conflict of the Cold War reflected architecture relevant only for it.
Layne and Schwarz (1993), in observing the emerging new world order have made the same argument by looking backwards to the previous one. For example, they point to the 1950 U.S. National Security Council (NSC 68) document indicating an American strategy “as one designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish”—regardless of the presence of a Soviet menace—since this strategy is a “policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community…a policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat”(Layne and Schwarz, 1993:5). That such an approach continued through the era is noted by the quote attributed to then secretary of state Dean Rusk nearly 30 years later who indicated that the United States “is safe only to the extent that its total environment is safe” (Layne and Schwarz, 1993:15).
Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO and GATT, the multifaceted character of the United Nations, the containment approach to the Soviet Union (including the development of strategic nuclear weapons along with a deterrence policy) all illustrate architectural properties that combine concerns about a strong challenger with elements that go far beyond the military/ideological challenge posed in the fifties and early sixties by the USSR. Even such architectural elements as NATO, designed primarily with the bipolar challenge in mind, have been found adaptable to the post-Cold War environment without a bipolar challenge.
At the same time, and to the extent that the architectural arrangements of the new world order have their foundations buried in the previous one, the experience of the last few decades should not be ignored in the evaluation of how the new world order will likely function. In that sense, the recent past can help provide data and understanding of the durability and weaknesses of today’s global architectural arrangements.
The Imbalanced Strength Problem
The distribution of state strength in the present world order creates several versions of what we call the imbalanced strength problem. There are especially three types of imbalances in the system capable of creating threats to architectural stability. One type of imbalance—the relational imbalance issue—exists between the economic versus the military strength of the great powers. The imbalance itself, we believe, gives rise—in part—to the phenomenon of institutionalized group hegemony, and as we noted earlier, the G-7 was created partially to supplement declining U.S. economic capabilities. Yet, the institutionalized group hegemony outcome is an awkward one as it rests on a minimalist definition of relative equality in the economic sphere while the United States exhibits predominance in the military sphere. The strength of the US in the economic realm is substantially greater than any of the other great powers, but it is not great enough to prevent a rough semblance of equality within the group when it comes to economic issues, allowing the group to act in concert. This, however, is not the case with respect to security issues, where the United States enjoys substantial predominance. While the Americans had, during a decade between 1991 and 2001, generally sought broad group support for governance in areas other than the economic realm, the imbalance created by the preponderance of U.S. military strength has been accompanied by significant grumbling within and outside of the group regarding American dominance. It is far from clear that countries—sharing governance in the economic realm—would be willing for long to stay on the back benches on security issues.