Will it Bend or Will it Break?

The international system, that is.

Service Announcement. I continue to be pleasantly surprised to receive a number of encouraging messages about a paid tier. I hadn’t originally thought of a paid tier, but what I’m going to do is to leave a period (let’s say a month) for people to make pledges or simply to write to me directly and indicate a potential interest. In the latter case, you can just reply to the welcome message, or, if you’ve deleted it, then to aurelien1952@orange.fr. I would not feel comfortable asking for money for essays that are currently free, and, before I put time aside to offer extra material for paid subscribers, I need to be sure the demand is there. If it’s not, I’ll drop the subject for the time being. In any event, I would set the subscriptions at the minimum Substack allows, since this isn’t a money-making exercise. And now back to the studio.

No system or institution lasts unchanged forever. Most understand the need for occasional adaptation, many actually try, and a number succeed. But others never even make the attempt because they cannot. We’re at a stage now where what’s usually referred to as the “international system,” is going to be subject to unprecedented stresses. Will parts of it, at least, survive, or will it fall apart as many systems in the past have done?

I’ve always found it helpful to use the analogy of a computer operating system when talking about the way the world works. The world has a particular “look”, it runs according to certain accepted rules, various activities are or are not possible and have to be done in particular ways, and so on. Access may be controlled at various levels, and some users have more privileges than others.

Just as the first computer I ever used was managed by a piece of garbage called CP/M, and my current one, forty years later, runs on an advanced version of MacOS, so the rules of the international system, both written and unwritten, have changed over time, and sometimes quite radically. The current operating system dates effectively from after the end of the Cold War (ironically, just about the time that Windows 3.1 was pushed out.) Before that, the world’s operating system was that of the Cold War itself.

The question for any institution or system is how it responds to change. And change is, in fact, unavoidable: eras like that of Tokugawa Japan, which aimed at unchanging stability, not only underwent important changes (in the development of technology, for example) but also suffered from rising internal tensions that made political change ultimately inevitable. What is different about the current international system, perhaps, is its sheer scope, and the fact that it contains far fewer checks and balances than previous systems did. On one hand this makes it strong, since mounting a challenge is very difficult, but on the other, it encourages a uniformity of thinking and behaviour which leads to atrophy and the inability to see the need for change.

Now then what is this “international system” of which I speak? The easiest way to understand it is through the computer analogy: it is the rules and procedures by which the world “works,”in terms of hierarchies and cooperation between nations, and the functioning and influence of international institutions. For things to stay as they are, powerful states must retain their power and coherence, and existing institutions must retain their effectiveness. In this essay I explore doubts about both. (Note that I talk of “hierarchy” rather than power: real economic power has become more and more distributed in recent years, but the international operating system has yet to catch up with this fact.)

To make the argument clearer, we’ll start by looking at how the international operating system functioned a century ago, when it was essentially a three-tier system. A small number of states had imperial possessions or League of Nations mandates in different parts of the world. (Many of these mandates were for territories that had themselves been part of the Ottoman Empire.) A much larger number of states, mainly in Europe and Latin America, did not have empires, but were politically independent. And then much of the world consisted of territories ruled or administered by other countries.

The Soviet Union, still a mystery to most western governments, was slowly emerging from civil war. The United States, which had benefited economically from the War, was only just edging clumsily onto the international stage. Britain and France, weakened by the War, were still major international powers, effectively unchallenged in Africa and the Middle East, and not yet threatened by Japan in Asia. The Royal Navy was still the mightiest in the world.  There was at that stage little that could be called an organised International System: the League of Nations was in its formative stages, and anyway fatally weakened by the American reluctance to participate. Inasmuch as there were any ideas for maintaining peace in Europe, they were of the traditional balance-of-power type. (The aspiration that 1914-18 would be the War to End All Wars was precisely that: an aspiration.) At that point, declaring wars, even “aggressive” wars, was still very much part of the international operating system. The world itself was a confusion of different systems of thought and behaviour, although parts of it were deeply culturally influenced by monotheistic religions.

Yet what must have struck our predecessors most was how radically the operating system had changed in the previous decade, almost exclusively as a result of the War. In 1914, the affairs of a good part of the world were decided by hereditary rulers, with territories extending from Jamaica to Windhoek to Vladivostok, via Baghdad and Budapest. Most people, all around the world, lived in territories rather than nations, and owed formal allegiance to some distant ruler they had never seen. Four of these Empires, the Hapsburg, Romanov, Ottoman and Hohenzollern, collapsed at the end of the war, and were replaced by a bewildering number of new states, constructed on the innovative and disruptive principles of nationalism and ethnicity, complete with disputed borders and disgruntled minorities. (In part, the Second World War was a consequence of the international system as it then existed not being able to resolve the resulting tensions.) For the first time, the United States was an international actor (in the matter of German reparations, for example), and Japan was becoming more and more a factor to be reckoned with.

Because this isn’t an attempt at a history lesson, I’m simply going to stress the obvious point that the international system has mutated twice since then: into the Cold War system of (roughly) 1948 to 1990, and the subsequent post-Cold War system. Now that it looks as though the current system will be subject to extreme stress, it’s reasonable to ask how much of it will survive, and what would need to be done to make it survivable. Here, history may help us.

The approach I intend to take is, as usual, an engineering-inspired one. What are the forces that make it necessary for institutions and systems to realise they must adapt, and then attempt to do so? What are the forces that make such attempts more or less likely to succeed?

Let’s start with the Empires listed above. By 1914, the Hapsburg Empire was trying to deal with the twin demands of agitation by national groups and demands by the middle class to share political power. This produced a messy and untidy situation—some parts of the population had the vote in some parts of the Empire for example—and was a case of changes entered into reluctantly, in the hope that they would be enough to secure the position of the throne, at least for a while. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to concede the calling of democratic assemblies—the Dumas—after the disastrous war with Japan in 1904-5, but grimly held onto as much authoritarian power as he could. The end of the Hohenzollerns was really a shabby manoeuvre intended to make elected politicians responsible for the German surrender in 1918, whereas in the case of the Ottomans, the Sultanate survived the war, only to be overthrown in a domestic revolution, which would probably have occurred even without the War, an which incorporated deliberate western-style modernisation.

From this era, we can isolate perhaps one common tendency in unsuccessful political reforms: too little, too late. Both the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs gave ground only where they had to, and strove to conserve as much power as possible. But contrariwise, once an apparently invulnerable authoritarian system starts to make compromises, it shows weakness, and its ultimate fall is very likely. And further, at least formally, the Hapsburg Emperor and the Tsar owed their position to divine sponsorship, and it was not clear that God had ever contemplated any form of power-sharing.  Thus, these two examples show that fundamentally, certain things are incompatible with other things: you cannot have an authoritarian absolute monarch, appointed by God to reign over  territories and at the same time concessions to modern political ideas. The sudden and brutal (though not necessarily violent) end of each of the regimes was inevitable because of this inherent incompatibility.

This is a pattern we often see in history, and it’s not surprising that it generally ends badly. The absolutist state of Louis XIV, where all power and decisions were concentrated in the hands of the King, was literally un-reformable. This was because any attempt at accommodation with the rising middle class, for example, would attack and ultimately destroy the very foundations of the state itself. Thus, whilst moderates in 1789 dreamed of something like the English system of constitutional monarchy, where Louis XVI would have been “called to the throne” by the French people, the monarchy could not accept the solution without effectively destroying itself and its entire legitimacy, which came from God. It was therefore perfectly reasonable for Louis to flee abroad and try to come back with the help of foreign armies, because he saw himself as re-imposing divine order on a country that had inexplicably rebelled against him, and God. Compromise was effectively ruled out by the very mechanics of the system.

This was not so, of course, in England, because the mechanics were different. Power was anyway less centralised than in France, and Parliament was a mechanism which eventually allowed the rising middle classes and small landowners—frozen out of the French system—to have a voice.  The political transition towards the definitive model of constitutional government was not straightforward or free of violence, but the system itself was sufficiently flexible that it was able to bend, not break. French Liberals such as Montesquieu accordingly admired a system which dealt with tensions inside the ruling oligarchy by giving all of the players a share of power.

Examples can be multiplied, but one is especially interesting: the Weimar Republic is a good example of a system which was inherently unable to save itself. Of the major parties in Germany in the 1920s, only the Socialists were unyielding supporters of the new regime, but they could muster, at best, only a third of the seats in parliament. There could be no question of an alliance with the Communists, who usually gained about ten per cent of the seats, nor with the extreme nationalist Right like the Nazis, with their own small handful. Governments were therefore typically coalitions of convenience between the Socialists, and those forces of the Centre and Right who looked back nostalgically to other ways of doing things, but were prepared to tolerate the Republic for as long as it lasted, in order to be in power. As early as the 1928 elections, so before the economic crash in the United States, the system had demonstrated that it was essentially unworkable, and after 1930 it degenerated into rule by decree. In the end, there simply were not enough political forces ready to make an effort for its survival.

On the other hand, there are also surprising cases where a system has survived in a much-modified form, against all the odds. Forty years ago, few would have given South Africa much hope for the future. Political exiles I knew at the time anticipated a bloody cataclysmic end to apartheid. And yet. On the face of it, the political engineering in the country seemed to rule out any prospect of change forever. The country was dominated by the Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch and French Huguenots who had arrived three hundred years before. Fierce Calvinists, they believed firmly that God had granted them the territory, as a place of refuge, and that they, rather than the much-later English-speaking immigrants and the African tribes from the North, were the only true natives. Scraping into power in 1948, the Afrikaner Nationalist party purged English-speakers from the government, established Afrikaans as the de facto state language, and set about constructing the apartheid system of complex racial separation. How then, could an isolated, deeply conservative and religious community that controlled political life and the state, obsessed with the belief that it was targeted for destruction by an international Communist conspiracy,  ever turn its back on three hundred years of history, and compromise, without blowing itself to pieces? The answer was simple enough: fear.

By the 1980s, in an environment of domestic chaos and increasing international isolation, it had become clear that the only options were some kind of reform or an apocalyptic collapse. Enough members of the National Party and the security establishment recognised this that cautious approaches to the ANC began. In the end, the Nationalists, who’d been hoping to make largely symbolic concessions, wound up by conceding on almost everything, just as the ANC negotiators angered many by leaving much of the existing structure untouched. But for both sides, it was that or something unthinkably worse. And for the Afrikaners there was literally nowhere else to go: most spoke poor English, few had ever left the country. I remember standing on a beach at Cape Town in 1994 with a white anti-apartheid activist friend, and we both had the same thought. After this, there’s nowhere to run but Antarctica. And helpfully, not only did the Cold War end, and the Communist menace disappear, but the Dutch Reformed Church actually went so far as to denounce apartheid as a sin in 1989.

So some systems contain inherent rigidities, or limitations, that mean they eventually break under pressure, whereas some have just enough flexibility to bend, but to survive. There are also systems where genuine attempts at reform are made, but where the difficulties were simply too great. France in the last years of the Third Republic is a good example. The regime was an ultra-parliamentary one, with typically short-lived governments. Any form of long, or even medium-term planning was impossible, and the system itself was widely despised. But under the Socialist Léon Blum the Centre-Left government of the Popular Front (1936-37) nevertheless carried out a host of reforms, and began rearmament, while modernising the system of government itself. But Blum resigned on a point of principle (like most Leftist politicians he was more comfortable in opposition) and the system eventually fell apart in 1940. And the story of the 1980s in Yugoslavia is of desperate attempts to keep the state together by more and more baroque expedients, with further and further devolution to the Republics, which of course had the perverse effect of strengthening the very forces that were trying to tear the country apart. It’s doubtful in fact, for all the furious activity, if anything could have saved the SFRY.

But I want to talk a little bit about systems, as well as countries. As already mentioned, until recently most of the world lived in Empires. Historically, Empires had fought each other, expanded and contracted and usually perished violently. The Ottoman Empire was beaten back militarily and dismembered, and, to a degree, British and French mandates took over the final territories, as Empires in the past had consumed each other. But that was pretty much the last occasion. By contrast, the British and French Empires in Africa disappeared, with one significant exception, almost overnight, without creating much fuss or opposition, and thereby creating dozens and dozens of new nation-states. These Empires had mostly been acquired in a rush at the end of the 19th century, during a period of Great Power competition. For all that they had been important to survival during the two World Wars, they were clearly anachronisms now, as well as being considerable financial burdens. In Britain, Empire had always been a minority enthusiasm, and the Colonial Office was a low-status Ministry, looked down on by much of the rest of Whitehall. The actual emergence from Empire (softened by the creation of the Commonwealth) was thus easy for the British system to accept, as part of a wider strategic turn towards a more European, Atlanticist and technological orientation. Much the same was true in France, where De Gaulle perceived that continuing to try to administer half of North Africa was not only a massive financial commitment, but an obstruction to his plans to modernise France. Again, there was no significant opposition to independence for the colonies, with the promise of continued close links with France.

The great exception, of course, was Algeria, where at one point half-a-million French troops were deployed in a vicious conflict with the FLN. In the end, the tensions produced by the war were such that they actually destroyed the Fourth Republic, threatened a military coup, and brought De Gaulle and the Fifth Republic to power. So why the difference? It had, in fact, little to do with Empire as such. Algeria was legally part of France (and had been since 1848, before Kansas was part of the United States). During the War it had not been occupied by the Germans, and what remained of the French Army was hidden there. It was De Gaulle’s first proper capital after 1942. Around ten per cent of the population of Algeria was European: most had been born there. To have part of the nation torn away again, as had happened in 1940, was simply an unacceptable national humiliation for very large numbers of French people, including many (like Georges Bidault) who had been active in the Resistance. In the end, the weak, parliamentary, Fourth Republic could not contain the tensions evoked over Algeria and blew apart. Something similar happened with the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, where it took a military coup and a revolution in 1974 before the two countries became independent.

The same logic can apply in reverse. The construction of the “post-war” world in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a particular historical moment, when an exhausted, fearful and largely demilitarised Europe was ready to accept political commitments and limitations on national sovereignty that would have been unthinkable before. Stark terror at the possibility of another war, this time with the Soviet Union, moved European states to press for political linkages with the US, and for economic linkages between themselves to prevent another internecine conflict. It was precisely because the United States did not feel threatened in the same way that its reluctance to enter into new commitments had to be massaged away, with the “security guarantee” in Art 5 of the Washington Treaty which, if read carefully, is no commitment at all. By contrast, the “post-war” world was one where the United States simply expanded into a vacuum, or kept its troops where they had been in 1945, rather than following some pre-conceived plan.

So without labouring the point and multiplying examples any further, we can essentially distinguish three cases. Sometimes, systems are sufficiently flexible that they can bend and adapt. At other times, the internal rigidities of the system are such that it cannot adapt, and breaks under pressure. The third case is where the need for flexibility is recognised, and the answer is obvious, but still unreachable in practice. Now note that this is, once again, politics conceived as engineering. Such things as the abstract merits of arguments, economic costs and benefits, moral and ethical arguments and even public opinion, are only relevant insofar as they actually exert measurable force upon structures and persons, and their final effect may actually be to make the situation worse, and a solution more difficult to find. In the case of Algeria, for example, the economic argument for ending the war (including the massive waste of manpower and resources) was unanswerable, and there was immense moral and political pressure to do so. Unfortunately, the structure of the political system was such that none of those factors could really be taken account of. In South Africa, by contrast, political opinion among ordinary Whites actually hardened against reform during the 1980s.

To conclude, it may be worth putting down a few thoughts about how these elements may play out in the future. In real life, of course, politics is not identical to engineering or physics, because it is not entirely deterministic: nonetheless, we can identify things that seem highly probable, according to the way politics actually works, and also things that are pragmatically impossible. I’ll take two influential countries and two powerful institutions, as examples.

First, France. The basic structural problem in French politics (and culture) is that of ingrained duality: the country oscillates between extreme solutions, never settling on a compromise. So the oligarchic Empire of Napoleon III was followed by the unstable ultra-parliamentary Third Republic, which was followed by the dictatorship of Vichy, which was followed by the unstable ultra-parliamentary Fourth Republic, which was followed by the strongly-presidential Fifth Republic. And for the last couple of decades, voices have been calling for a Sixth Republic, which would be similar to the Third and Fourth. The structural problem has greatly worsened with the effective disappearance of the Socialist Party and the possibly-terminal  weakening of the traditional Right. The resulting void has been occupied by the Empty Suit party of Emanuel Macron, and the Unmentionable Party of Marine Le Pen. But Macron’s party is largely an extension of his own ego, with little presence in the country, and probably cannot survive his forced departure in 2027. What will happen then, is anyone’s guess. It’s often said that De Gaulle designed the Fifth Republic for himself. This is an exaggeration: rather, he saw clearly that only a directly-elected figure above politics could ever hope to unite the country. But the supply of such figures has now dried up, and Macron has twice been elected, with great reluctance, not for any virtue he may possess, but just because he is not Le Pen. The likelihood in 2027 is that French politics will simply collapse, with a weak and disliked President of some kind, and a parliament too fragmented to agree anything. At that point, it’s reasonable to fear that the system itself will break, with consequences not only for France but for Europe and international institutions.

The second country is the United States. I’m not equipped to talk in much detail about its domestic political woes, but I just want to explore very briefly the difficulties its establishment is having in understanding what is happening in the world now and what the consequences may be. The problem with the American political system is that it is enormous, fragmented, conflictual, overlapping, and that in the end nobody is really completely in charge of anything. It’s a good rule that getting something done in Washington is extremely difficult, but stopping something is very easy. So numerous are the players in any security issue, so laborious and exhausting are the struggles and compromises, so easy is it to obstruct a decision or its implementation, that it’s amazing anything ever gets done. The system is rigid and inflexible, and it deals with defeats and disappointments by ignoring them. Struggles in Washington tend not to be narrowly ideological, but reflect institutional interests and the ambitions of highly-placed appointees. The US system is very bad at absorbing, and responding sensibly to, genuinely new developments: it took a long time for Washington to come to terms with the end of the Cold War, and arguably Cold War nostalgia (or at least emulation) has played a considerable part in the evolution of the crisis in Ukraine. It does seem likely that Russian military dominance of Europe after Ukraine and an effective Chinese veto on military action in Asia are going to be impossible concepts for the massive and narcissistic strategic community in Washington to grasp. The inherited mindset of absolute autonomy and almost limitless power and influence (however ill-founded in practice) is about to crash into reality, and denial will only get you so far.

Institutions are by their very nature more complex than states, and they seldom formally close down. Rather, they wither away, or their functions are transferred elsewhere. For example, the Western European Union (founded in 1948) had its functions rapidly taken over by NATO, but was revived at the end of the Cold War where it served for more than a dozen years as a European defence forum with its own Parliamentary Assembly. Only after twenty years were its functions finally taken over by the EU as a consequence of the Lisbon Treaty, and it was formally closed down.

NATO is a good example of how an institution can survive by bending and adapting. As I’ve pointed out before, European states have found NATO useful for all kinds of pragmatic reasons (mostly unacknowledged) and there was a general feeling after 1989 that it was useful enough to keep going. In any event, putting an end to NATO would be massively complicated and controversial, and there has never been the remotest consensus about what should replace it, if anything. (Inertia is an under-appreciated feature of international politics). If most European nations still find NATO, and the US presence politically useful, on balance, the military side of NATO has decayed to the point where its strategic utility is at best questionable. To the surprise of no-one who was paying attention, the conventional forces of NATO have been revealed as small and fragile, and the US is clearly no longer a serious military player in Europe. When the Ukraine crisis is over, many European governments will be asking themselves whether the US link can still be justified. Of course, institutions like NATO don’t and can’t just fade away. The likelihood is that it will enter a state of decline which will never quite become terminal. It will still have meetings, issue communiqués and policy statements, and call for new armaments programmes which may occasionally be implemented. But nobody will much be deceived.

Finally, what of the EU? As I have suggested, the war in Ukraine is an existential struggle for the Union, whose ideas, influence and political and economic weight have moved steadily eastwards now for thirty years. It’s hard to say how it will respond to failure, and to a gigantic STOP sign erected in its path, but perhaps the likeliest result is that the organisation will find it impossible to have a common reaction at all. The most likely foreign policy result will be paralysis, and the rise of contending de facto political and geographical blocs. If that happens, the basic structural problem of the EU—too big, too fast, too heterogeneous—will be on display for all to see. Again, so-one seriously sees the Union collapsing (it’s hard to see how that could happen, anyway), but there is every chance that it will become a chastened, divided organisation, obliged to reduce its expectations and ambitions sharply. The consequences for the international system will be profound.

For the US, and for NATO and the EU as well as their largest and most important members, the challenge is to accommodate to a world where the operating system has changed, not only economically (that is not new) but politically as well. Some nations, like Britain and to a lesser extent France, have been able to handle decline relatively well in the past. Some international organisations just faded away (does anybody remember the Baghdad Pact?) The nations that largely determine the rules of the international system have a theoretical choice: to bend or to break. But as we have seen in some cases bending is ruled out for practical reasons. So the chances of the “international system” coming explosively apart are not negligible.