Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from today’s (25 Jan 07)
Globe and Mail, is an interesting take by Timothy Garton Ash (Oxford) - http://www.timothygartonash.com/biography.html :
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070125.wxcoash25/BNStory/International/home
Power isn't what it used to be
The unipolar moment of U.S. supremacy has passed
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
DAVOS — If you want to see the world as a whole, the best view is from the moon.
The second-best is from Davos. The annual meeting this week of the World Economic Forum offers a unique top-down snapshot of the world's problems and opportunities. One reason for this is simple. Globalization is, in the first place, an economic phenomenon. It is most advanced in the dealings of the big businesses who are the forum's main stakeholders. No one, with the possible exception of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has a more global perspective than they do. All other kinds of globalization -- cultural, legal, political, moral -- trail behind the economic. But it is the extraordinary ambition of the forum's founder, Klaus Schwab, to put them back in sync. "Committed to improving the state of the world," you read on illuminated signs around the Swiss resort.
Every year, the mountain-top camera is pointed in a slightly different direction. This year, its wide-angle lens focuses on "the shifting power equation." With perfect timing, the opening of the forum coincided with a State of the Union address in which the world's most powerful man, President George Bush, munched another great slice of humble pie.
Remember the hubris of six years ago? After the bipolar world of the Cold War, we were told that we now lived in a unipolar world. The United States was the only superpower -- no, the hyperpower, as an envious French foreign minister observed. It had the most powerful military in the history of humankind. It would create its own reality. It could afford to be unilateralist.
After Iraq, it's goodbye to all that. This is not just about the failure of one particular hubristic American foreign policy. It's about profound structural shifts, which the Davos camera is trying to map.
My own summary of the shifting power equation goes like this. Power is no longer what it was, nor where it was. (Concentrated in the West, that is, and especially in the West Wing of the White House). It is more diffused, both vertically and horizontally. Vertically, in the sense that relatively less power resides with the governments of states; horizontally, in the sense that power is more widely distributed among a number of powerful states. Increasingly, the power map is both multilevel and multipolar.
The horizontal shift, toward a new multipolarity, is the more obvious one. Of course, for most of human history the world has been multipolar.
But the global poles -- say, the Mughal, Ming and Ottoman empires in the 16th century -- only interacted at the edges. Now, every great power interacts with every other great power, in a multilateral, globalized geopolitics. This globalized world is a product of the 500-year-long supremacy of the West, and what historian Theodor von Laue called "the world revolution of Westernization."
Now, that supremacy is coming to an end. What we are witnessing, after half a millennium, is the renaissance of Asia. China and India are playing the economic game on terms largely invented by the West, but they are beating the West at its own game. Already, their growing economic power is beginning to translate into political and military power.
At the same time, Asia's emerging economic giants are competing with the profligate consumer economies of North America and Europe for finite hydrocarbon energy sources and raw materials. This strengthens another category of powers, which one might call the exploitative powers. The classic example is Russia. Eighty years ago, Soviet Russia was strong because of the revolutionary dynamism of communism, including the global appeal of its ideology. (Russia, too, once had soft power.) Forty years ago, Soviet Russia was strong because of the power of the Red Army. Today, Vladimir Putin's Russia is strong because of gas and oil. So are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other exploitative powers, whose resources are now being competed for. Unless and until the major developed economies of the world drastically reduce their dependence on these energy sources -- and in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, Mr. Bush promised the desperately belated beginning of a beginning in that direction -- those states will continue to have significant, if one-dimensional power.
The interaction of these two major trends -- Asian renaissance and energy race -- shapes the new multipolarity.
As important is the vertical shift, from states to non-state actors, often empowered by new technologies. International terrorist networks are one obvious example, using new technologies both of destruction and communication (as in Web jihadism). But there are many others.
International NGOs such as Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Transparency International and George Soros's Open Society network have the power to change agendas. The big corporations heavily represented here in Davos are more powerful than most smaller states. (Would you rather be president of Citigroup or Mali?) International organizations, communities and networks, from the UN and the EU to the World Bank and the International Criminal Court, all take their slice of the power cake.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is the individual blogger or citizen-journalist who makes history by posting a blurred video sequence from his or her mobile phone on YouTube. This famously happened to Virginia Republican and sometime presidential hopeful George Allen, with his dreadful "Macaca" moment and Confederate hijinks. In the meantime, the leading Democrat candidates for president, including Hillary Clinton, have launched their presidential campaigns on the Web.
One experienced observer of U.S. presidential campaigns observes "it is a safe bet that one of these candidates will be derailed by some obscure video recording on a cellphone that will be posted on the Web." Andy Warhol said that everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame. The Web means that anyone can have their 15 minutes of power. Anyone with a mobile phone, that is.
So the new power equation is a complex, differential one. This also means that the world is more difficult than ever to "manage" in the way envisaged by the architects of the post-1945 international order.
(States themselves are also becoming more difficult for governments to manage internally, and for some of the same reasons.) The existing international institutions no longer reflect today's complex realities.
This world cries out for new structures of global governance, but the very multilevel, multipolar diffusion of power makes that harder to achieve. According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, a couple of years ago the National Intelligence Council of the United States played through a number of scenarios for the world in 2020. The only reasonably attractive option was one in which multiple powers addressed global challenges jointly with non-state actors. They called it "Davos world."
The real question is not whether such a world is desirable, but how it might be achieved. In economics, there is a mechanism for coping with worldwide complexity: regulated markets. They do the job inadequately, of course, and often unfairly; but for now, they still do the job. There is no equivalent mechanism to address the new worldwide complexity of politics. Simply saying "reform the UN" or "reform the WTO" won't get us far. Here is the next great challenge, revealed by the mountain-top camera of Davos.
British political writer Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford.
When considering the (resource)
exploitative powers he forgot to mention Canada which, according to some sources – e.g. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0872964.html - has the world’s second largest oil reserves.
Table 1
Rank Country - Proved reserves (
billions of barrels)
1. Saudi Arabia - 264.3
2. Canada - 178.8
3. Iran - 132.5
4. Iraq - 115.0
5. Kuwait - 101.5
6. United Arab Emirates - 97.8
7. Venezuela - 79.7
8. Russia - 60.0
9. Libya - 39.1
10. Nigeria - 35.9
11. United States - 21.4
12. China - 18.3
13. Qatar - 15.2
14. Mexico - 12.9
15. Algeria - 11.4
16. Brazil - 11.2
17. Kazakhstan - 9.0
18. Norway - 7.7
19. Azerbaijan - 7.0
20. India - 5.8
Top 20 countries 1,224.5
Rest of world 68.1
World total 1,292.6
NOTES: Proved reserves are estimated with reasonable certainty to be recoverable with present technology and prices.
Source: Oil & Gas Journal, Vol. 103, No. 47 (Dec. 19, 2005). From: U.S. Energy Information Administration. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/petroleu.html .
(The same source puts Canada in the top 20 in natural gas reserves, too. But in that category Russia leads with about ¼ of the world’s proven reserves while the US is in 6th place with 3% and Canada is 19th out of the top 20 with only 1%.)
Consider, also, energy consumption (same source, again, for consistency) (in millions of barrels/day);
Table 2
Rank Country – Consumption in millions of barrels/day)
1. USA - 20.5
2. China - 6.5
3. Japan - 5.4
4. Germany - 2.6
5. Russia - 2.6
6. India - 2.3
7. Canada - 2.3
8. Brazil - 2.2
9. South Korea - 2.1
10. France - 2
(That means than in the event of, for example, a major Middle Eastern conflagration which, effectively, shut down that region’s oil exports, the USA would have enough reserves to sustain nearly three years of consumption at its current rate – without importing a drop from Canada or Mexico. North American reserves, shared our evenly, could support North American consumption for about 25 years. Russia’s reserves would sustain its current consumption for 60 years and (combined with Norwegian and Chinese reserves) could sustain all of Europe plus China for about 12 years,
at current rates of consumption – but China’s consumption is growing exponentially.)
I think this data matters because the prospect of major war
s throughout the Middle East is very high, with consequential, major disruptions in energy supply.
Additionally,
I think, China’s energy demands will mean that Russian reserves will be split between China, Japan and Europe. China is, already,
I have read/heard, negotiating oil exploration and pipeline deals with Russia and the
Stans – see: e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4530426.stm and
http://www.china.org.cn/english/international/76100.htm . Some time ago I suggested that China covets Eastern Siberia and its resources and suggested that a Russo-Chinese war, for resources, is a possibility. It remains a possibility but military action is
not a probability because China is, as it would prefer, using its burgeoning economic power to buy up Russia’s resources. Russia and Europe combined have neither the power (hard or soft) nor the will to withstand China’s
incursions, despite Russia’s repeated and ongoing attempts to frustrate China’s many and varied oil importing schemes.
For the immediate and mid terms we are dealing with an oil fed global economy. The key factor in maintaining the health and vitality of the global economy (which is the
only hope for the
wretched of the earth) involves getting oil from producers (Saudi Arabia - 10.4 million barrels/day, Russia - 8.3 mbbls/day, USA - 8.7, Iran - 4.1, Mexico - 3.8, China - 3.6, Norway - 3.2,
Canada - 3.1 million barrels/day, Venezuela - 2.9, UAE - 2.8, Kuwait - 2.5, Nigeria - 2.5, UK – 2 and Iraq – 2) to consumers (Table 2, above). This requires a mix of pipelines and tankers – each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Pipelines have significant political problems; consider, for example, the routes which Kazak/Caspian Sea oil pipelines must follow to get to market – through one or more of: Iran, Russia, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. China has used its
Shanghai Cooperation Council to ensure its primacy in Central Asia thus, pretty much, guaranteeing a secure pipeline route from Atasu (in central Kazakhstan) through the Alashankou China/Kazak border crossing to refineries in Xinjiang. Getting Kazak oil anywhere else, except to Russia, is fraught with political and security problems.
Tankers are reliable and secure carriers once they are clear of ‘home waters’ and, in many cases, the
narrow seas (straits like the Straits of Hormuz or Malaca Straits) in which they are especially vulnerable.
So what?
I am thinking about this because a colleague suggested, elsewhere, that the strategic alliance which e.g. Ruxted recommends - http://ruxted.ca/index.php?/archives/33-About-Turn!-Time-to-Revise-Canadas-Foreign-Policy-Part-2.html - for Canada ought to be based upon a return to a
maritime strategy. This would involve a loose alliance of countries which are firmly established, secular democracies with some of the “world’s most capable militaries” - http://ruxted.ca/index.php?/archives/37-Changing-the-Guard.html . The attractions of a
maritime strategy include:
1. It is, or can be global – so it is suited to nations and groups with global interests;
2. It is, essentially, economically based – it promotes and protects trade rather than
tribute so it suits trading nations; and
3. It is broadly and generally
beneficial (rather than being
selfish – in the interests of only a few) because it promotes and protects free trade and globalization – so it appeals to and supports the ideas and
ideals of multilateralism, non-intervention and ‘Responsibility to Protect.’
