The first aspect is the general context of global politics. We are living in an environment which is new in many ways. We are living in a post-Westphalian, but also in a post-cold war world. In a sense, the post-9/11 landscape reinforces, rather than produces, these new features.
Westphalian and cold war language still dominates most private and public discourses on global and world politics. But it is no longer linked to a context that can be sufficiently described in these terms - because the macro structure has undergone significant changes. The Westphalian political system is no longer in place, even though its formal relics - nation states - are still around and active. The binary cold war system has crumbled - or has been overcome.
States and governments do not control many processes of global politics any more. The basic activities are represented and may be described as flows (of capital, communication, entertainment, images, goods and services, people) rather than as organized exchanges. The container state is still around, but the containers have lost many or most of their black-box attributes. There are multiple processes going on inside the domestic sphere, increasingly blurring the boundaries to the external world. There are many linkages between ‘internal’ activities and the outside, often bypassing national governments.
Moreover, the currency of politics has changed. Military power still matters - sometimes - as has been demonstrated most recently by the US-led campaign against Iraq in 2003 and by the measures imposed on Yugoslavia by the West in the 1990s. Nevertheless, this is hardly an appropriate, and certainly not the only tool to achieve the main players’ goals in global times. The armed forces of the only remaining classical world power, the US, can still - alone or with allies - inflict considerable harm on one or two state adversaries and thereby deny them certain options: Saddam Hussein was forced out of Kuwait and, in the second round, out of power, similar to Milosevic who was forced out of Kosovo and subsequently out of power. But this is no guarantee for positive solutions, i. e. for effective and sustainable reconstruction, as both cases aptly demonstrate. In the Middle East, the US has not been and is not able to enforce an acceptable and durable solution. The currency of military power, when applied to a very complex world, cannot produce adequate outcomes.
In this new context, transnational capital flows are more relevant than national budgets; transnational cultural images and discourses are challenging national identities; strategies of access and denial, of inclusion and exclusion are more decisive than guarding national borders. In such an environment, a new cartography of power and access is urgently required in order to overcome the old standards of mapping. New tools for spreading influence and for dominating the nodes of webs and networks are emerging. The nodes and hubs of flows, cascades of power tools, new centralities in patchworks are at least as important as conquering the capitals of states. Stalin’s well-known question about the number of the Pope’s divisions looks outdated. What matters today is the influence in, and over, rating agencies, content producers and images.
Shown below is a list of six attributes of global politics which are characteristic of the new inter - and transnational context after the Westphalian and the cold war systems:
1. The game of global politics is a multilevel game. Relevant actions, interactions, and flows take place and have effects on different levels at the same time: the global, the international, the transnational, the national, the regional, the societal and the individual. This complicates the problem of intentionality. The likelihood of unintended consequences of an action on one level is multiplied by the linkages between many levels. In addition, the levels cannot be isolated from one another.
2. Many more relevant actors are involved in global politics than in international politics at any time before in the last hundred, fifty or even fifteen years. These actors are related to the spheres of the state, the market and the social and societal context. Important cleavages are public v. private, and state v. non-state. Who are the relevant players? States still play an important role as regulators, and especially as the target for public expectations. But this role is diminishing and changing. State actors have to locate themselves in a colourful picture containing many other players. Additionally, there are international organizations, international regimes, transnational corporations, NGOs, regional players (supra - and sub-state), the media, domestic structures and interests, and individuals - from George W. Bush and Bill Gates to Jorg Haider and Mohammed Atta. Or Mother Theresa.
3. While the playground of world politics is becoming much more colourful, the relative strength of different groups of players is shifting - depending on the game and on the availability of hard and soft resources. The decisive power currencies of all kinds of players are much more diverse than merely seeing the military as the core element of hard power. Asymmetries between the diverse players can be extreme - the relations between Al Qaeda und the US or between Falun Gong and the Chinese authorities are just two examples.
4. There are no clearly delineated boundaries between the domestic and the external spheres of politics any more. The global environment can have a decisive impact on domestic constellations. Domestic structures and coalitions produce significant changes in the transnational landscape. Even rather sophisticated concepts like second image reversed, two-level games and the internationalization of domestic politics look slightly outdated today. To put it bluntly: the problem is not so much one of linkages between the domestic and the international spheres, but rather the vanishing of the markers between those realms.
5. The nature of interactions is increasingly difficult to monitor, to control and to govern. Diplomats may talk about many things, but their impact on capital markets is limited - to say the least. The impact of satellites transmitting content into different cultural settings can rarely be predicted and is difficult to regulate. Many capital and content flows are difficult to organize and cannot be regulated effectively - at least not by the traditional instruments and strategies inherited from the Westphalian and cold war settings.
6. The very concept of regulating and controlling processes and developments is in crisis. Regulation requires a clear conception of the relevant players’ interests and resources, viable mechanisms for monitoring, sufficient funding, tools for impacting on the players involved, and incentives for relevant players to accept governance mechanisms. First and foremost, however, it requires a clear stipulation of what should be regulated and how it should be regulated. There is much talk about global governance but very limited clarity about how this should be done.
In reality, we have a patchwork of parallel, co-existing and competing norms, tools and systems of governance. The very term ‘governance’ is in crisis. What is needed is fresh thinking about new concepts which are more appropriate for the early twenty-first century - concepts of moderating and of navigating. To moderate processes does not mean to change their direction, but to influence the intensity and the pace of their development. To navigate trends and currents is even less of an ‘engineering’ concept: here one just tries to move in - or among - the currents of processes, the sources and driving forces of which are beyond anyone’s control.
One could add that the very style of doing politics is itself changing. The increasing mediatization of political agendas, in the form of info - and poli-tainment, and permanent election campaigns under intense media scrutiny, is producing a growing legitimacy gap between citizens’/voters’ expectations and the ability of politicians to produce acceptable outcomes. Additionally, ad-hocism is becoming the dominant mode of politics, i. e. the consistency of politics is decreasing.
This list gives a brief impression of what is new in global politics, compared to both the Westphalian and the cold war systems. The new qualities of these attributes have not been designed and did not come to bear in 1989 or 1991, or in 2001. But those years and the events related to them symbolize the changing currents at a deeper level.
My basic prediction is that these new attributes will be present for quite some time - certainly beyond 2010. We should not expect any player or institution to restore some sort of higher order in the game of global politics. The world is not unilateral or neo-imperial - whatever degree of military powers the US may reach. It is also obviously not a UN-regulated world either. We have to live in, and cope with, this kind of an insecure environment, at least for the coming decades.
World History
