When the Water-level Falls...

All sorts of forgotten things come to the surface.

I’ve already suggested that the underlying patterns of economic, military and political power in the world have been changing quite radically recently, and that will continue to change for a while yet. These changes won’t simply amount to a cut-and-paste of the situation today with a few names changed: they will be changes that affect the world as it is in ways that we can’t easily imagine. The future won’t even be different in the ways we expect it to be different. But that said, what we may be seeing now is a partial return to pre-1945 patterns of international relations, after the distractions of the Cold War and the age of Messianic Liberalism that I discussed last week. Here are a few pointers.

As I’ve argued before, the reason much of the recent thinking and writing about the future is obsessed with trying to identify a new variant of the current situation, is because then, of course, we can at least partly understand what may happen next. So we read that the current “unipolar” world, which has succeeded the Cold War “bipolar” world, will increasingly be replaced by a “multipolar” world which, insofar as anyone can conceptualise it, seems to be a bipolar world on steroids. I think this is far too simple, and reminds us of the process by which Cold War nostalgia stopped the development of sensible security policies in Europe for quite a while after 1989.

Consider: the post-1945 world was extremely artificial in its geographical distribution of power and territory. Up to that point, the majority of the world had lived in Empires, or at least territorial possessions gained by conquest or alliance. Even the Second World War in Eastern Europe can be seen as the last gasp of this norm. For once, “Empire” is not an exaggeration or a rhetorical flourish when we think of the Nazis’ General Plan East, which would have created a genuine Empire up to the Ural Mountains, run from Berlin, and settled by Aryan soldier-farmers. Those Slavs who were not enslaved (curiously the two words have the same root) would be exterminated or just left to die of hunger: some 30-40 million, it was judged might perish in this way. And some practical steps were actually taken to establish this Empire.

The post-1945 world saw two developments. One was an explosion in the number of nation-states, and not just former colonies either. The other was a system of political influence, and in some cases direct control by two great powers, and several lesser ones, such as had never been seen in history before. This was very largely a consequence of happenstance, especially for the United States: no committee of Ivy league intellectuals set out in 1935 to plan the deployment of US forces a decade later. Likewise, only a very competent astrologer could have predicted a decade before that in 1945 British troops would be taking the surrender of the Japanese in Vietnam, while fighting Communist partisans in Greece.

All this could, and probably would, have begun to go into reverse, if not for the Cold War in general and the Korean War in particular. The significance of the latter has largely been forgotten today, but in fact it transformed what had been a generalised worry about Soviet power into stark terror of a new war. After all, the Korean War (which led to the permanent basing of US troops in Japan among the things) was expected at any minute to be followed by a similar strike to the West. Without labouring the point, the history of the world post-1945 could easily have been very different had it not been for the that War and the fears it provoked. The actual configuration of the world during the Cold War was highly artificial therefore, and not the result of any coherent strategy by anyone. So it’s hardly surprising that when it cracked up, the results were confusing and often violent: a point I return to.

The pattern of influence in the world, at least at a superficial glance, was thus entirely new. The United States partly expanded and was partly drawn into a political and military vacuum in many parts of the world. The Soviet Union, which under Stalin had been very inward-looking, occupied large parts of Eastern Europe and installed client regimes to construct a glacis against further attacks from the West. The Soviet Union also made much more use of its military and intelligence assets to help wars of “national liberation,” under the apparently genuine belief that it was assisting in a historically inevitable process. For its part, the West saw an ideological enemy that had to be stopped.

This was all very different from the past. The great Empires of history, from the Persians to the Romans to the Mughals to the Ottomans, had expanded into contiguous territories by military force. The shorter-lasting Empires of Britain and France had separate possessions in different parts of the world, often originally for trade, and often only tenuously controlled. The British Empire might, according to the small but noisy group that championed it, be one on which “the sun never set," but it was never remotely as worldwide as the US presence is now. Its naval bases, for example, were effectively limited to Britain and the Mediterranean: there was never enough money to finish building the base at Singapore, still less station any ships there.

So at least in theory, the whole world was now divided into zones of influence, and, for the first time in history, “neutrality” was a positive concept, employed by those who hoped to avoid being part of one. But the common model of a world divided into two-and-a-half blocs (with China the half) was always an oversimplification, and sometimes downright misleading. The reality on the ground was always more complex, and smaller countries not only manipulated the super-powers for their own ends, but also often adroitly manoeuvred between them. This was important, because it means that, for many countries, the Cold War was simply a superficial layer superposed on their historic security concerns, both internal and external. When the Cold War ended abruptly, traditional historical problems all over the world came roaring back again, often to the bewilderment of political and diplomatic elites brought up in the belief that all that mattered was the confrontation with the Soviet Union. (“What’s Kaliningrad?” people started asking.) The reunification of Germany released all sorts of historical tensions that had been repressed for decades: I remember crossing Whitehall in the summer of 1990, seeing an evening newspaper headline which said GERMAN-POLISH BORDER: NEW PLAN. 

In other words, what the security arrangements of the Cold War did was not to resolve historical problems, but, appropriately  enough, put them on ice. As we’ll see in a moment, the alleged US “hegemony” since 1990  has continued this freezing process, which means that there’s an awful lot of stored tension waiting to be thawed out. The process is all the more complicated, because many countries were able to turn the “bipolar” and later the ”unipolar” world to their advantage, and so modify the underlying strategic situation, although these manoeuvres were often not obvious to superficial readers of the western media.

Historical narrative these days tends to go pretty much directly from WW2 to the Cold War. But this is to overlook the confusion and despair of Europe in the immediate aftermath of 1945. In many ways, the situation uncomfortably resembled 1919. Germany was defeated, totally this time, but could not be kept down forever, even if nobody seriously expected the country to be rearmed any time soon. The Soviet Union was still there, massively more powerful than in 1919. There was unrest and political violence all over Europe, with massive population movements, large-scale killing and wholesale adjustments of frontiers. More for lack of an alternative than anything else, the Brussels Treaty was signed in 1948, in the hopes of building a military alliance against a possibly resurgent Germany.

In that sense, the Cold War and NATO addressed a lot of problems, at least in the short-term. The moves towards European integration addressed quite a few more. The creation of a NATO integrated military structure enabled German re-armament, which everyone realised was inevitable one day, to be conducted effectively under international supervision. The fact that the Bundeswehr had  no HQ of its own, and its troops were under international control, brought at least some comfort to the victims of the recent War. Many small European states found the US presence in Europe a useful guarantee against a revanchist Germany. After the1962 Elysée Treaty, when it was clear that the Europe being constructed would be dominated by the Franco-German Entente, the US was perceived by other countries as a useful counterweight. The same was true in the Pacific, where the US presence in Japan helped to reassure that nation’s recent victims that there would be no more adventures in the foreseeable future. There were even hopes that the Soviet Union might find the deployment of foreign troops in Germany comforting, but Soviet documents published later suggest that this was not in fact the case.

The difficulty, of course, is that none of these problems were ever actually resolved. At best, as with the case of Germany, they were alleviated somewhat, to the point that most European states no longer fear German military expansion (and indeed the Germans have no military forces worth mentioning anyway). But the basic political and economic imbalances in Europe have not gone away. Irrespective of precisely what the boomerang effects of the current anti-Russian sanctions may be on different countries, it is clear that Europe’s economic centre of gravity will move even further to the West than is now the case, and that some of the EU’s eastern fringe states may become unviable, with political and security effects that can’t yet be foreseen. But if NATO and the EU were to be massively weakened as a result of Ukraine, which seems the minimum likely outcome, this will make the resulting problems more, and not less difficult to handle. Some of these problems, such as the mismatch between populations, cultures and borders in the East of the continent, have no satisfactory solution. The Warsaw Pact, and more recently the EU, succeeded if not in appeasing, then at least in suppressing, the resulting tensions. But the Warsaw Pact is long gone, and the EU may well be struggling to manage its own internal problems quite soon. The same is true in Asia, where the US presence has frozen certain problems without resolution. We have already begun to see the re-assertion of Chinese influence, and steps towards expanding Japan’s defence capabilities. As US influence declines, old tensions and new problems will combine to create a series of crises, without any obvious international forum to try to resolve them.

Which brings us to the next issue. The caricature of bipolarity in the Cold War followed by uni-polarity over the last generation was always that: a caricature, not a serious way of understanding the world. The reality was much more complicated. Countries like India kept their distance from the major players ,and distributed their favours all around. Next door, Pakistan managed to be close to both China and the United States.  Countries like Egypt and Ethiopia adroitly changed camps when it suited them. Even during the period of alleged post-Cold War hegemony, small countries could manipulate the United States, getting what they actually wanted in return for pro forma signature of agreements and public displays of loyalty. More generally, western presence and investment in different parts of the world was largely seen as an opportunity for locals to seek political and financial benefits. To the extent that western powers reduce their presence in certain parts of the world in the future, those opportunities will disappear, and it’s not certain that the Chinese will be an adequate source of substitute income.

Now, it is important not to jump from that conclusion to a belief in some kind of Apocalypse Now, or in the near future. There will certainly be cases where historical tensions will return, and even be exacerbated. There are plenty of causes for violence in the world today already, and the relative retreat of western power may unleash more of that violence, at least in the short term. But there is another way of looking at the problems. Both the Cold War ideological mindset, and the Messianic Liberalism that I discussed last week, represent the imposition, through economic and political power, of abstract theoretical models onto a messy reality, often with ultimately terrible consequences. The second of these two, dominant today, demands a search for a “political solution” that will be complete, inclusive,  and permanent, address the famous “root causes” of conflict, and incorporate the full wish list of western Liberals for a society which, having failed to construct at home, they still dream of constructing abroad. It’s uncontroversial to say that these elaborate and complex  plans generally haven’t worked. The problem is that the vulgar Kantianism, which serves as the nearest thing that western Liberalism has to an ethical framework, insists that it is our duty to bring peace to this or that country, according to our concepts of a desirable outcome, and that if peace requires killing people first, then so be it. But sometimes there actually is no “political solution” that does not lead to further violence, and a war fought out to its conclusion may in the end save lives, no matter how distasteful such a conclusion may be.

But it is questionable not only whether this kind of high-level normative approach to creating stability has ever worked, but if it ever could, even in principle. The Liberal mind sees peace and conflict as polar opposites, and conflict as a systemic failure that needs to be corrected. Most political actors, throughout history and just as much today, don’t see things like that at all. They seek to preserve their interests and those of their group or country, and enhance them if possible, by whatever means are available and suitable. Sometimes this means giving way to a larger neighbour or outside power, even while perhaps trying to manipulate them. Sometimes it means signing a peace-treaty negotiated by outsiders. Sometimes it means making an alliance of convenience with a “traditional” enemy against a “traditional” friend. Sometimes it means intervening in your neighbour’s civil war, supporting the side that you want to win, or both sides if you just want to weaken your neighbour. You may cooperate economically with your neighbour, while also seeking to undermine them politically. You may cooperate in the resolution of one problem, while each supporting different factions in a war somewhere else. You may have commercial relations with each other while fighting at the same time. (The Bosnian war lasted as long as it did partly because the different factions were making money from it, including selling each other weapons.) There is nothing inherently improbable in stories of Ukrainian troops selling western-delivered weapons to the Russians: only we in the West would be surprised.

Only western Liberals and readers of Kant’s Universal Peace (where they can be distinguished) find this ad hoc approach to peace and conflict surprising. Yet if we look around a little, we find it is the norm. So wars tend to end when the sides are exhausted and recognise that peace is more likely to get them what they want (Bosnia in 1995 is a good example). Peace based on mutual self-interest tends to last longer than peace based on agreements forced from outside, even if that peace is not absolute . Russians and Turks, for example, are cooperating over Ukraine (though the Turks also seem to have links with Kiev) while coming almost to open conflict in Syria. And indeed, until the 2014 “change of government," relations between Russia and Ukraine were, if not devoid of tension, sufficiently relaxed that they used military equipment manufactured in each others’ countries, and cooperated economically. Many situations of “peace” like that emerge from the pragmatic self-interest of nations, or at least of their rulers, rather than from any overarching negotiated framework.

This kind of retail-level security  policy works much better on average than the wholesale version favoured by the West, which wants everything to be just so. The reality is that states have a variety of relationships with other states, and very often the different interests point in different directions. Western thinking tries to harmonise all these relationships, which inevitably produces internal conflicts and contradictions. In the post-Ukraine world, we are likely to see a return to a more pragmatic, traditional, case-by-case approach to relations with other countries.

Finally, another word on this polarity business. As I have pointed out, models of polarity in the past were never very realistic. Hegemony was never complete, and often a matter of surface appearances only. So there is no reason to suppose that in the future we are going to see “mini-hegemonies” around the world. This is just a lazy way of continuing current patterns of thinking. All power, as I have said many times, is contextual and relative. Nigeria may not seem a superpower from a seat in Washington DC, but it does from a seat in Lomé. In other parts of the continent, South Africa and (until recently) Ethiopia dominated their neighbours. Brazil is the most important state in South America. China, of course, has interests everywhere. Behind the myth of polarity, what we have always had is shifting patterns of power and influence, changing according to context, and producing political and economic relationships which are far from tidy Realist assumptions.

What this suggests is that there will be increasing interest in subtle and flexible forms of regional cooperation based on objective economic and strategic interests. (The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is a case in point.) Nations will join such blocs because they see advantage in doing so, not in defence or furtherance of norms and values, or for ideological reasons, or under outside pressure from a “hegemon.” They may join several blocs. They may compete with their partners in one bloc by also being members of another. Nobody will think this is strange, except a few unreformable Liberals,

It’s often said that when the tide goes out, it reveals many things believed hidden. We could extend the metaphor to the lakes and rivers that have been drying out this summer. It’s particularly fitting, for example, that ships from Germany’s Black Sea Fleet, scuttled in 1944, have recently become visible again as the level of the Danube falls. It’s a little metaphor for what’s happening now. The seas, the lakes, the rivers, are retreating, and the ghosts of things we thought disappeared have returned to haunt us. The navigation systems along the rivers no longer work. How are we going to find our way in the future?