A political awakening that recasts the global landscape

A political awakening that recasts the global landscape
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: July 13 2007 03:00 | Last updated: July 13 2007 03:00



One of the reasons, probably the most important, why today's world is a confusing and chaotic place is our natural instinct to look at it through the prism of yesterday. The assumptions and preconceptions that made sense of the past century do not fit the present.

The world of the 20th century was defined by the power of states. The dissolution of empires and the rise of nationalisms saw the number of states quadruple. For most of the time, war and peace measured the rivalries or otherwise between them. Even as it sought to regulate better their relationships after the carnage of two world wars, the United Nations charter paid homage to the primacy of states. As long as they did not threaten their neighbours, governments, democratic or authoritarian, could do as they pleased within their own borders.

That was yesterday. The world of the 21st century is one in which states have been fast losing their monopoly of power - in part to a new cast of global actors and in part to a tumultuous awakening of a once passive citizenry beyond the west. Some of these actors are benign: think of, say, the companies whose operations - and employees - now span several continents. As many are malign: think of Islamist terrorists and human traffickers. Either way, the new landscape comes into focus only through a different set of lenses.

Among the shifts in global power we are now witnessing, some are consonant with historical experience. The re-emergence of China and India after their two lost centuries fits the old paradigm of a world described by the rise and fall of nations. So too do the transfers of relative economic power from north to south and from west to east. But it is the seepage of power from states, rather than changes in the balance between them, that defines the global disorder.

Here too, there is a mixture of the old and the new. International treaties and conventions began to erode the inviolability of national borders almost before the ink had dried on the UN charter. The globalisation of business and finance began with international moves to liberalise trade during the 1950s. What has changed has been the sheer speed of change.

The really big - the new - story is about what has been called a global political awakening. Two recent encounters - one with a veteran of American foreign policy-making, the other with one of Europe's youngest foreign ministers - have reminded me of the profound and irreversible nature of the change.

At the weekend I listened to Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, deliver the annual Ditchley Foundation lecture.Mr Scowcroft, a general turned accomplished policy practitioner, was at the centre of events during the collapse of communism. The end of the cold war removed the existential threat of mutually assured destruction. But the disintegration of the Soviet empire was also a trigger for instability. Fracturing empires beget weak states. Most of the areas of greatest insecurity in today's world lie along an arc from the Balkans though the Middle East to central Asia. They also sit in what were once the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman and the Soviet empires.

Within these, often weak, states,Mr Scowcroft told his audience at Ditchley, we have newly empowered populations. Technology has transformed the most primitive societies. Ubiquitous and cheap telephony, the internet and satellite television have taken national and global controversy and conflict into the remotest villages - and out again.

Anger and grievances that were once contained within towns and regions now spill over state borders; so too do people. The politics of ethnic and religious identities threaten power structures that have endured for centuries.

My second encounter was with a politician who was barely out of university when Mr Scowcroft was navigating the geopolitical rapids in the White House.

David Miliband has become Britain's foreign secretary at the tender age of 41. A few days ago I joined my FT colleagues in cross-examining him about today's geopolitical challenges.

As befits one of his country's fastest-rising politicians, Mr Miliband has acquired quickly an easy grasp of the security issues of the day. The generational change, though, also matters. Politicians of Mr Miliband's age do not assume the permanent hegemony of the west. I was struck by his observation that it was impossible for politicians in the west to make sense of the world unless they also understood what it looked like through Indian eyes.

The point at which he became animated, though, was during a discussion of the threat from jihadi terrorists. For most of human history, he remarked, the power to control had been greater than the power to destroy. Now the power to destroy was greater than the power to control. That, Mr Miliband thought, was a "profound" point.

He did not claim the thought as his own, crediting it instead to another former US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Mr Brzezinski, who served President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, has one of the sharpest minds in Washington.

I mention Messrs Scowcroft and Brzezinski in the same column with slight hesitation because I suspect (without, it must be said, real evidence) that they are intellectual rivals. But, at the risk of libelling both, it seems to me they offer the same, important, insight.

In his latest book, Second Chance, Mr Brzezinski writes of the challenge to the existing global balance from the effective, if not the literal, enfranchisement of billions of people once locked out of any political process. This technology-driven awakening - most visible in the Middle East and Asia - is driving a global redistribution of power. In Mr Brzezinski's words: "The resentment, emotions and quest for status of billions are a qualitatively new factor of power." Add migration, porous borders and unconventional weapons to the mix and you describe the new collective vulnerability of the west.

To describe this great upheaval, of course, is not to answer the question as to how the west should respond. Those mentioned above have their own suggestions. If there is one that stands out for me it is that we need to understand that ideas and values are now as important a tool as economic, or indeed military, might, in the effort to guarantee our security. Mea culpa: the former US official referred to in last week's column as seeking to recast the US war on terror was Philip, not Robert, Zelikow