A world of unequal nations after the American Century

A world of unequal nations is forming after the American Century. But to understand this new world we need to shed mental models of nation, empire and American Primacy.

The polycrisis is stirred by confusion over the basic metaphors of the international system. It is not only a reframing of mental models of the broad alliances or dominion within the international system - the unipolar, bipolar or multipolar world. It also demands a reframing of how we conceive the idea of “world order,” and who we admit as a participant or even partner in that international order.

Do we admit empires, or only nations? What is the role of the United Nations? International organisations and multilateral organisations, like WHO, the G7 or even private clubs, such as the World Economic Forum? How do we treat sovereign equality of states, when the sway of nations is demonstrably skewed by UN Security Council vetoes, military bases, and financial clout?

Since 1945 the West has viewed order as its cherished principles imposing a hierarchy of value in a “world of equal nations”. Under the legal fiction of the United Nations Charter, all states are equal, and no state can claim imperial dominion over another. But the reality of the distribution of power defies that fiction. The rhetoric of the West since 1945 has monstered the legal principles of a democratic assembly of equal nations. Freedom vs Tyranny. Democracy vs Autocracy. The West vs the Rest. The G7 vs the Global South? The coalition of the willing vs the Axis of Evil. Empires did not end in 1945 or 1991. They went into the shadow of the Western Mind to be cloaked with Orwellian deceptions like American Primacy or the Liberal Rules Based Order.

In the world crisis, we are experiencing a new shift of power and resources that expose the unreality of our mental models of ‘world order,’ its participants, and the rules of the great game. The entrenched legalities of the post-1945 ‘world of nations’ are absurdly mismatched to today’s realities. Britain and France are on the UN Security Council. But not India or any state from Africa. The rhetoric of Western led “Liberal Rules Based Order” similarly is exposed. How can the political leaders of four per cent of the world’s population democratically claim both to “run the world” (Joe Biden) and not be an empire?

In the Animal Farm of the post-1945 world some states were always more equal than others. This is the reality of world history and will never change. The post-1945 world of equal nations and the post-1989 scheme of the ‘end of history’ could never be realised. It is time we abandoned the over-simplified models of nations and empires.

What is a state that is more equal than others?

However much we might fulminate about some states having more sway than others, we cannot change the reality. But many of the terms we use - like nations and empires - lock us into a bifurcated debate.

The Chinese idea of the Great State offers an alternative concept that overlaps with empire, but also describes distinct patterns of political and international order. It also has the benefit of stepping outside inherited conceptual models of Euro-Atlantic experience, overworn with the emotions people feel about the word, ‘empire’. The concept is explained by historian, Timothy Brook, in his book Great State: China and the World, and in this 2016 article.

Brook draws attention to this term, formed by an adjective of ‘Great’ or ‘Big’ and ‘State’, that is common in many Asian languages. For example, in Chinese it is daguo, in Japanese, daikoku, and in Mongolian yeke ulus. The concept allows for inclusion of powerful states that exercise influence across boundaries, but do not openly control states and territories of other nations, as in the Western concept of empire. It also allows a frank assessment of the way ‘victims of empire’ have themselves exerted influence or sought dominion outside their core. China too has had its conquests. If we shift our terms from empire to Great State, we might just provide us a little flexibility to rejig our mental models of the world crisis today.

By focussing on Great States we can set aside fixed mental models about hegemons, the decline of empires, the denial of empire by republics, and the rise and fall of great powers. But the concept, Great States, does not necessarily clarify the nature of the system of world order or international relations or the institutions of ‘interpolity’, as practised between each of these individual states.

I think a conceptual shift from empires, or hegemons or blocs, to great states allows us to discern more clearly what is happening in today’s international system in crisis. We need to build mental models of the international system that have many agents (not just hegemon and challenger) and multiple objectives (not just survival or power).

A Classification of Nations

Despite all the rhetoric, some nations are more equal than others in the international system. It is helpful to identify three groups of states in this twenty-first century Kaleidoscopic World:

• Great States (Major Powers)

• Middle Powers

• Minor Powers.

Great States or Major Powers

There are five Great States of the Kaleidoscopic World:

• USA

• European Union

• Russia

• China, and

• India.

They all exert enough military, economic, diplomatic and cultural power to count as Great States. I explore the details of these five major powers in my guide to geopolitics and history (which paid subscribers can access here)

I add the European Union, although technically it is an international association of other states. However, it functions with growing economic integration and close overlap with NATO strategy. Through France, it is a nuclear power and represented on the UN Security Council. It seeks to strengthen its role and comprises over 740 million people.

India may also be considered a controversial choice. It is the poorest of these five Great States, but is growing faster than any other nation on earth. It is also the world’s most populous nation, its largest democracy, the source of profound civilizational influence, and also a nuclear power. It is the only Great State not represented on the UN Security Council, but that may change within the decade.

I will be exploring the history, culture, social trends and politics of these five major powers through the whole of next year on the Burning Archive, as discussed in this post.

Middle and Minor Powers

There are many more Middle Powers. The key attribute of these states is that they control critical assets of resources, culture, position, people or influence that allows them to win at least some influence games in the world.

A preliminary list can be taken from the G20 nations, excluding the Great States and the EU nations: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Türkiye, and Britain.

Although Britain hankers for Great State status, and once could claim it, I classify it as a declining middle power. The individual EU states could also be included in this group, and clearly operate a mixed foreign policy, partly through their own states, partly through NATO, and partly through the EU. Iran, the Gulf States, other Latin American, African, and Asian states can also be included.

Shifting requirements for resources around the world allow some states with control of critical resource (e.g. oil, metals, minerals, food, energy, finance, transport nodes, trade hubs) to become Great City Resource States. In some respects, Taiwan, though not a state, acts like a pretender middle power through its superconductor industry and strategic position. Some Latin American States, which control most of the world’s lithium, may join the club, and learn they no longer need to be vassals to the USA.

Groupings like ASEAN, African Union, Islamic States, and the Latin American States provide institutional and diplomatic heft to many middle powers. They all are building step-by-step new forms of imperial cooperation and processes for peace. The West no longer commands the cultures and institutions of all the world’s middle powers, or at least not without negotiation.

The Minor Powers are states like Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the many micro-states of the world. Many of these states are victims of war, poverty, small populations or lack of resources. They barely hold themselves together. They are often racked by internal conflicts, worsened by the games of Great States. They cannot project influence outside their borders, except by enslaving themselves to the geostrategies of a major power. Many geopolitical commentators throw around terms like “vassal” to describe allies of the major powers. I would limit this colourful term to the minor powers, like Ukraine, who enslave themselves in “proxy wars”.

I do not propose to attempt an exact classification of all 189 minor and middle powers of the world. Most minor powers seek to trade up to become middle powers, and are forced into one or other dependent relationship with Great States. They are not fixed groups, but relative positions.

If we use the idea of Great States, we can shed preconceptions of empires, hegemons, and new cold wars between democracy and autocracy. If we focus on actors, institutions and processes, we can dispense with oversimplifications of geopolitical theory. We can conceive a more complex and dynamic mental model of how the polycrisis is unfolding. We can shed the outdated mental models of the new world order or the old style geopolitics. We see the map of the world, not in coloured blocs, but as an intricate situation in which many actors trade influence, rebalance status, and exchange resources. And in today’s world crisis, in particular, control and trade of real resources, not virtual assets, is increasingly important. The world economy is no longer dominated by one super-state that can pay for whatever it wants. There is a pentarchy that is only partly in charge.

The World Crisis and the Fall of American Primacy

When Adam Tooze refers to the polycrisis, he does not mean only that many things are going wrong. He means the crisis reveals a discrepancy between mental models and social reality in many fields. The concepts used by decision makers no longer fit reality, and disappoint them in their attempts to control events.

As Adam Tooze also demonstrates in The Deluge, American leaders have pursued a strategy of hegemony since 1916. They have sought to be the Leader of the Free World, while denying they are an empire. Since 1991, they have pursued “full spectrum dominance” out of the goodness of their intelligence agencies’ hearts.

But American ambitions have failed the reality test of the changing world. For periods between 1945 and 2008, the USA has reason to think it was number one. But if it had been more prudent it would have also noticed all the reasons to think one nation of four per cent of the world’s population claiming “hegemony” over 200 states was bound to fail. On most metrics of power, the USA is no longer number one. American Primacy is now a zombie idea inherited from a misunderstanding of the post-1945 world.

America froze its concepts of the international order in the periods when the USA could believe it was the indispensable nation, the arsenal of democracy, the victor of the Cold War, and the culture of blue jeans and rock and roll that the whole world wanted to emulate. But the kaleidoscope of world history has twisted many times since then. America and the world need to look again at the reality of the states of the world.

Empires institutionalise their success at its high point, and then get stuck in those patterns when world history changes. So it is with America. Its mental models of the world are stuck:

• in its ‘genius’ founding when it threw off the British Empire in 1776;

• in 1919 when progressive liberal American ideology tried to liberate self-determined nations from all the empires of the world, only to see revanchist communist and fascist empires strike back;

• in 1945, when ‘America saved the world for democracy’, but lost China, and enjoyed the apogee of the American century; and

• in 1991, when finally American progressive ideals and émigré elites eliminated the last empire, the Soviet Union, to establish America as the unipolar hegemon of a new world order, who may never again be challenged.

These accounts of history are ultimately dangerous. They reduce trust of the other parts of the world and undermine processes and institutions that secure peaceful competition and collaboration between other near equal Great States, and dignified debate with middle powers. Misperceptions in international relations are dangerous. The risk of such misperceptions for international orders is powerfully presented in Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. The risks for domestic political order within Great States is dramatically presented in Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union.

Of course, there are illusions of other great states. Arguably Russia has woken from the illusion that the West will ever be its friend, rather than its abusive partner. Some Chinese elites might dream that they can seek revenge for their century of humiliation. But America’s fanatical, belligerent clinging to its grand illusions in this polycrisis is endangering the world.

The polycrisis is revealing the gap between reality and these grand narratives. The story of America winning the Cold War and bringing freedom and prosperity to the globe is breaking down. The story of the Thucydides Trap is breaking down because it was always built on an extremely narrow version of world history. The story of the decline of the American Empire is also breaking down. American Empire and power projection, in force and on the air waves, keeps hanging around. It will remain a Great State. If Russia can endure through the 1990s, and yet still spring back to be recognised as a superpower 23 years after Vladimir Putin began the self-strengthening of the Russian Federation, then surely some form of America will still be a Great State for the next century. It survived Trump. It will presumably outlast Biden. But beyond America, all simplified models of the world crisis, all us vs them tropes, are breaking down.

Models of a World of Nations After American Primacy

Part of the world crisis is a struggle over that system or institutions or processes themselves. Some Great States are challenging USA hegemony. Some states are challenging the “international liberal rules-based order”. Some Great States are asserting the birth of a multipolar world or initiatives to celebrate the diversity and equality between many civilizations. Some people claim elites are trying to engineer a Great Reset to entrench World Government, controlled by those elites at the expense of nationally loyal peoples. I don’t agree with this, but there is clearly some kind of contest in an international arena that is not controlled by any one Great State.

The Oxford History of Empires makes clear that the role of great powers in relation to each other does not stay the same and there is an evolution of the international institutions or interpolity for managing conflict and cooperation between great states. They even talk about the evolution of the ‘global state’. Arguably, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and the Concert of Europe from 1815 were early forms of this ‘world government’. The League of Nations was an imperfect but more comprehensive form, led by the American Wilsonian super-state. The United Nations was an improvement again, but still imperfect.

The polycrisis is very much about the form of global governance in this interpolity. The institutions of world politics between states need to adapt. World government does not need to be a single executive state, nor a set of imperial administrations. It can take different forms, uniquely suited to what the world crisis reveals about what the world is today.

But first we might look again at who is who in the new world of many Great States. To reconceive our mental models of this world crisis we need more sophisticated histories of nations, empires, and civilizations. We need to tell the stories of how the processes of interaction between peoples and states are changing. We need to look at protean cultures and institutions. The polycrisis is revealing a new understanding of the history of the states, civilizations, and cultures of the world.

Fortunately, historians from many traditions are imagining ways to govern world politics beyond the nations and empires of a world shackled by American Primacy. I will discuss them in next week’s post.