World Anarchy and World Order: Past Trends and Future Prospects
Before drafting a plan for a conference on world security initiatives, we need to consider where we've come from, where we are, and where we're going. Twentieth century trends in world governance fan out across a spectrum ranging from increasing anarchy to increasing order. An examination of this range will provide a common background for our efforts. It should help define how and why current trends are unlikely to achieve global security in the near future. In this way, we may be better able to understand the contribution that our conference might make to affecting the trend lines of the future.
From Empire to Nation State
For thousands of years, most human beings lived in imperial states that in their best periods preserved internal peace among their many ethnic components. Relative to the communication and transportation technologies of their day, these states faced much more daunting administrative tasks than a world state would face today with current technologies. The imperial states, like all states before and since, were established through conquest; they were maintained internally and externally through unquestionably superior force. In spite of the distances involved, at their most effective they were centralized states with only limited federal or feudal aspects.
The last incarnations of the classic imperial states were the colonial empires that arose after the discovery of America and the opening of the East. By the 1960s, the most important survivors of these imperiums were the British Commonwealth, the French Community and the USSR and its satellites. By the 1990s, the age of empire was over.
The rise of the nation state destroyed the basis for empire. At first, in an age when governments were willing to use massive compulsion to force people into a common mold, the nation state reduced ethnic differences and undercut political anarchy in countries such as Germany or France. The state created a nationality and then became a nation state. But at least since the Versailles Treaty, the primary effect of the nation-state concept has been to fracture political systems. Recent events in the former Soviet sphere, Yugoslavia, and in many third world countries suggest that the subdividing of political power into ever smaller units to satisfy national aspirations is on a trend-line that is yet to turn down.
Morgenthau's Requirements for a Stable World Community
Why, then, are we not satisfied with the current international regime based on the nation state? Morgenthau defines the problem in simple terms as the inability of this regime to guarantee the peace. He believes the only reliable solution would be the creation of a "world state" that would transform the external relations of today into the internal relations of tomorrow. To avoid the implications of the term "world state", we will translate his term into "stable world community", and refer to it subsequently in this paper as a world Community. Whatever the actual form and designation of this end point, it will have many of the characteristics Morgenthau regards as essential.
To create a world Community, Morgenthau cites three requirements: (1) the development of popular loyalties to the Community that supersede those to its subdivisions, (2) the development of mechanisms for dispute resolution that promise all groups within the Community "at least some satisfaction for their conflicting claims", and (3) enforcement agencies able and willing to meet threats to the peace that come from within or without the Community (at such times as it is not universal). 1 Meeting these requirements would require the world's peoples to be willing to surrender much of the sovereignty identified with subsidiary political forms, and to be willing to be substantially taxed to achieve Community objectives. Today, environmentalists might argue that global problems other than securing the peace require the development of an organized world Community, an argument that would serve to expand Morgenthau's second requirement.
Three Trends Against Anarchy
Three trends have countered the anarchical growth of the nation state in the twentieth century, and thereby gone part of the way toward fulfilling Morgenthau's requirements: the trend toward a universal world civilization and the rapid increase in world trade that has accompanied this development, the trend toward increasing reliance on international organizations and international law, and the trend toward the multiplication and strengthening of regional and special purpose organizations. We must examine these trends to discover the extent to which they are overcoming the anarchy of the nation-state system so that a stable and effective world order can emerge.
The trend toward a universal world civilization is a product of the voyages of discovery and the economic and missionary activity that followed them, the spread of literacy, the colonial structures that dominated the non-Western world for centuries, and the new communication, transportation, and trade regimes that erase both distance and differences. At first, changes brought about by these influences had shallow roots, but over time they deepened. They have transformed the thinking and interests of elites and, for better or for worse, given ordinary people modern needs and attitudes that make past systems and standards increasingly unacceptable. Most important to our concern is the change that has taken place in the understanding and acceptance of the originally Western ideas of human rights, political freedom, and civil liberty.
The diffusion of modern ideas in these and other respects provide a basis for fulfilling Morgenthau's first requirement, the development of loyalties to the whole that go beyond loyalties to the part. Admittedly, the degree to which modernization has led to such a transfer of loyalties, even in advanced countries, remains modest.
The development of international organization has at least three intellectual sources. The first is the realization that only a universal political form will guarantee the peace, a line of thought running from Grotius through Kant to Morgenthau, although the latter viewed the attainment of such a form to be impossible in the real world of the twentieth century. The second is the primordial realization that separate countries can increase their power and effectiveness by banding together to achieve common objectives, particularly in the context of war or the threat of war. The third is the realization that a particular international problem requires a specialized international organization to resolve disputes or set standards. The international postal union is only one of the countless international organizations that spring from this source.
The growth of international organization in our century has drawn from all three sources. The League of Nations and the United Nations were initially based on alliances in wartime situations; many of their founders saw the new organizations as means to perpetuate the gains that victors had achieved in war. But they also reflected the realization that only a permanent international political system would guarantee the peace. As time passed, the wartime objectives of founders slipped into the background. This is true particularly for the United Nations, although the fact Germany and Japan lack permanent Security Council membership and veto power recalls the UN's wartime origins.
Comparing the records of the League of Nations and the United Nations suggests a strong positive trend. The formal organization of the United Nations was little more than an updating and expansion of the League. 2 However, the participation of the United States in the UN, the ending of colonialism and consequent UN expansion, and the increasingly positive roles played by its defeated former foes - Germany, Italy, and Japan - have given the UN a much more universalist character. Over the years, the United Nations has addressed more issues, and a wider variety of issues, than the League. Many have been addressed with success. While the League lasted only twenty years, the membership and activities of the United Nations continue to grow as we approach its fiftieth anniversary.
Richard Gardner tells us that "All together, the UN has launched more peacekeeping operations in the last four years than it did in the first forty-three, and the scope of those operations has broadened from mere border patrolling and truce supervision to organizing and monitoring free elections, disarming hostile forces, assuring the protection of human rights [and] resettling refugees . . . " 3 . In its peacekeeping or security activities, two types of United Nations responses should be distinguished. The first is the truly multilateral use of armed forces (if not force) to keep belligerents apart. The observer or peacekeeping forces long stationed in Kashmir and Cyprus are examples. The second has been the use of the United Nations to legitimize the efforts of one or a few large countries to resist aggression through large-scale military intervention. The Korean War and the recent defense of Kuwait are examples. However, Kuwait's defense (and the subsequent protection of the Kurdish people in northern Iraq) represented significant improvement over Korea in the scope of international cooperation, both as a consequence of the end of the Cold War and of the participation of wealthy and powerful collaborators that were unavailable to the U.S. in the early 1950s. Kuwait can be seen as a melding of the two types of peacekeeping responses.
In many areas, the United Nations has played an important role in setting international standards. For example, although for many years the Cold War prevented the international community's concern with human rights from being effectively expressed in action, the UN became a keystone of the new cause through the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the approval of the Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The activities of the United Nations, particularly through the General Assembly and the International Court of Justice have served to extend the range of international law. In particular, UN decisions have constrained anarchy in the appropriation of Antarctica, the oceans, and outer space.
Still, the United Nations failed to fulfill many of its founders' hopes. Like the League, the major powers were often able to ignore its existence. Until recently, the combination of the veto power in the Security Council, the exigencies of the Cold War, and the disproportionate representation of small and often poor countries in the General Assembly deprived the organization of the legitimacy that it required if it were to become an effective and decisive actor in world affairs. Thus, although the UN played a significant role in moving toward achieving Morgenthau's first requirement, it failed to come close to meeting either his second or third requirements. The major powers did not consider the General Assembly to be a just or effective forum for resolving their disputes or defending their interests, while exclusion from the Security Council made smaller states also doubt they could use the UN to obtain their objectives. The United Nations failed to develop the envisaged independent military capability that could guarantee peace. As a result, the United Nations remained largely a bystander during many violent conflicts of the last forty-five years. American independent actions in Vietnam, Grenada, and Panama; Soviet independent actions in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan; major wars between Iran and Iraq or India and Pakistan without consideration of the international community - such events made the United Nations seem all but irrelevant.
The third trend against world anarchy is represented by the rise of regional or special purpose organizations. Between 1815 and 1964 the number of international governmental organizations grew from one to one hundred sixty-five while the number of memberships grew from six to nearly forty-five hundred. It appears that the numbers have continued to grow. 4 The organizations weave into one another, overlap, and interlap. Here we can only note a few major examples. The continents and subcontinents have organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS) or the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Such organizations have played an important part in defining regional interests for the world community and in addressing common problems. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank play an increasing role in managing world economic affairs and development assistance. The Council of Europe defends democracy and establishes a rule of law throughout the European area with the aid of its European Commission of Human Rights and European Court of Human Rights. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) establishes for both Europe and the successor states to the Soviet empire a common forum for the consideration of security and arms control issues.
However, most regional and special purpose organizations have few teeth beyond those of political, and in some cases, economic pressure. Few, if any, require a significant reduction in sovereignty (although some poor countries may feel that to preserve the flow of foreign aid they have had to relinquish important national interests). As a result, these organizations are best described as common interest groupings or leagues rather than order-creating Communities - although the distinction should not be overly reified.
Two apparent exceptions have been the European Community (EC) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In both cases, it would appear as though member states have sacrificed significant aspects of national sovereignty for the common good. However, the ability of France to opt out of NATO planning in many respects and the fact the Maastricht Treaty on European Union requires unanimous acceptance by EC member states before it comes into effect suggests that the surrender of sovereignty has not gone far beyond the stage the United States had reached at the time of the Articles of Confederation. It should also be noted that as they stand, both NATO and EC remain partial regimes. To date, the EC does not even envisage that monopoly of coercive power internally or externally that Morgenthau believes necessary for an effective political Community. In spite of its broad charter, NATO continues to be seen as primarily a defensive alliance of like-minded states, at least two of which (United States and Canada) are unlikely to be asked to help solve European problems in nondefense areas. Nevertheless, in spite of these caveats, NATO, and EC offer the best evidence in the regional area for movement toward that world Community Morgenthau regards as essential for a stable peace. (Obviously, since this paper was written, we have gone several steps beyond the situation outlined here.)
The Future of Trends Against and Toward Order
How, then, might we extrapolate the trends that we have identified into the future?
First, the trend toward increase in the number of independent political units in the world can be expected to continue for some time. Although there remains no major colonial empire to provide the world with a new crop of independent states, the last of the fissions following the demise of the Soviet Union is yet to occur. As democracy and the associated concepts of free expression and self-determination continue to diffuse and strengthen, many post-colonial states are likely to fission in the third world. Fission is a probable accompaniment of both economic development and economic disaster in Africa, but centrifugal pressures are by no means limited to Africa. The continuation of this separatist trend will both raise new security and development problems for the more stabilized world and bring into being "new peoples" unlikely to want to surrender their sovereignty to regional or international organizations.
On the other hand, positive trends toward world community should also grow stronger. The 1990s offer the United Nations a good opportunity to repair much of the loss of credibility occasioned by past ineffectiveness and mindless third-worldism. Except on specialized issues, a world organization is likely to be effective only to the extent that its membership accepts common political and economic values and standards. Acceptance of such values is at a high point in 1992. For the first time in UN history, the majority of member governments and the elites that support them accept the general principles of democracy as the future, if not the present, of their countries and accept the relative superiority of free or market economies as engines of economic growth. China, the most important exception in the democratic area, has moved dramatically to free its economy. It remains to be seen whether the United Nations and its supporters can effectively exploit this changed atmosphere, given the negative traditions of the organization's past, particularly in the operation of some of its specialized agencies.
Let us consider a few possibilities. At the beginning of the 1990s, the trend toward drawing together the two types of United Nations military interventions that began in the Gulf War may be further extended. In Cambodia, the UN intends through the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) to impose substantial outside force and to carry out many quasi-governmental functions. 5 If it is carried forth as planned, the United Nations effort could demonstrate an expanded UN ability to marshal the strength of many countries to ensure peace and development in a threatened state. With the end of the Cold War and the broader acceptance of democratic principles, the United Nations can be expected to play a more activist role in the promotion and protection of human rights than it has in the past. The 1992 environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro dramatically extended the organization's role in this new area of world concern.
The strengthening of regional organizations should continue incrementally. The major issue is the extent to which the European Community will be able to achieve the goals it has set itself without diffusing its energies through ever-greater involvement with the newly independent countries to the east. Particularly important will be the extent to which the organizational functions and membership in the security area are sorted out. For example, will the CSCE become the security organization for the entire European and CIS area, and if so, will this be more than an arms control and disarmament mechanism? If it is not more, will NATO expand its membership or responsibilities to include the defense of this large area? If so, what role will the United States take in such an expansion? At present, European and CIS leaders appear divided on whether they want the Americans to play a central or marginal role, on whether NATO or the Western European Union (WEU) should be the key to the area's security future. Hovering over this issue is the broader and contentious issue of the extent to which EC member states and other European countries are convinced of the desirability of community movement beyond economic, arms control, and human rights issues.
Since growth in regional organization can no longer be achieved through conquest or compulsion, it is unlikely that regional associations outside the European area will take on important military roles. Europe has been fortunate in that it includes several more or less equally sized major states and its peoples have comparable historical and cultural backgrounds. If Europe expands to the east, balance may be further improved by the addition of Poland, Ukraine, or even Russia. Other regions lack similar balance or homogeneity. The United States has too much power to be excluded from the OAS, but is too powerful and culturally too different for other American states to transfer sovereignty to the regional organization. In South Asia, India is too overwhelming for its neighbors. In East Asia, China is a region in itself, and beyond China, Japan outbalances all the rest. In sub-Saharan Africa, aside from South Africa no country comes near to matching Nigeria. If South Africa finally succeeds in establishing a viable, black-dominated social and political system; an effective regional organization might someday emerge. The Middle East has balance, but its countries have repeatedly tried and failed to build an effective regional organization. Even if we leave Israel aside, the wide discrepancy in worldviews between the elites of constituent states will continue to inhibit progress.
Evaluating Future Trends in terms of Community Requirements
The trends we have discussed suggest that the international mechanisms and public support necessary for the evolution of a more ordered world continue to grow at the same time as anarchy at the nation state level continues or increases. Unfortunately, the positive trends we have identified do not suggest that the evolving transnational institutions of order will be able to compel acquiescence by major powers, or dangerously armed lesser powers, if such powers threaten the peace or otherwise refuse to join an international consensus on an issue of vital world importance.
Let us use nuclear weapon control and proliferation as an example of this deficiency. Neither the United Nations we have projected, the European institutions we have discussed, nor other international institutions will be able to compel the renunciation of nuclear weapons by committed states. It is generally accepted that the United States and the CIS (or Russia) will reduce nuclear weapons only to a level at which they will individually be able to maintain decisive superiority over China's nuclear forces. As long as these major states retain large stocks of nuclear weapons, France will probably keep its arsenal. In a world based on national self-determination and the equality of states, the preservation of substantial nuclear forces in the older nuclear powers will continue to undercut the moral argument that states such as India or Israel should not have the weapons: And if India and Israel do, then Pakistan, then Iran, then Iraq. In the near future, no international force is going to compel the abandonment of nuclear weapons by new nuclear countries, nor is any international organization going to raise the funds to adequately develop offensive and defensive forces to make credible the interventions that compulsion would imply. If these new threats are to be eliminated, then decisions on when and how to act will have to be left up to a nation state, no doubt the United States. This is just a particularly obvious example. Other issues will emerge in an unstable world of fluctuating national boundaries that the international and regional political organizations of the next generation will not have the resources or will to control.
As this is written, the EC and the UN, and in the background NATO and WEU, have allowed strife in the former Yugoslavia to reach an increasingly dangerous and destructive stage. If the United States ends up playing the lead in the name of an international organization, this will not amount to a true international response. The inability of existing multilateral organizations to act collectively and expeditiously in a situation that can be resolved only through the introduction of capable military forces is likely to persist in the near future. This inability will be particularly marked in areas far from the center of European attention, such as Somalia.
Ways Forward
Two strands of the evolution that we have briefly summarized could lead independently to the goal of an adequate world Community, or might coalesce at some future time into such a Community. The first is the strengthening of a universal political organization, which today means the United Nations. This is proceeding, but we have suggested that the UN will approach the creation of an adequate world Community at a slow pace. The second is the extension of currently existing partial and regional regimes to serve the major functions we have ascribed to a World Community. The idea of an agreement among major states that would guarantee the peace was widely discussed in governmental circles in the United States, Britain, and France before and during World War 1. 6
It was thought that if major countries with similar political and social systems could unify their forces and international policies sufficiently they might be able to prevent threats to the values they represented as well as to world peace. This was essentially the approach that Clarence Streit recommended after the collapse of hopes that the League of Nations (and later the United Nations) could guarantee peace. After World War II, NATO went beyond previous wartime alliances in that it permanently placed major components of the forces of the leading developed democracies under a single general staff. In theory, and to some degree in practice, it represented a substantial transfer of sovereignty.
In the 1990s NATO is at a crossroads. As suggested above, some want to expand its umbrella over all of Europe, including the CIS countries. Those Europeans critical of the extension of American power may prefer the CSCE or WEU to play this role. But unlike these organizations, NATO has another direction in which it might move, for NATO was conceived as an organization that bore defensive responsibilities for an area much larger than Europe and whose functions were intended to be much more than military. In practice, of course, the bulk of NATO's activities have been restricted to the European arena and largely to military affairs. And support for extending NATO's responsibilities worldwide and for readdressing the nonmilitary parts of its charter may also be hard to generate in a United States intent on reducing overseas obligations. Still, those who think a world democratic community might be an interim solution to the problem of world Community are likely to look to NATO as either the basis or the model of such a development.
NATO may also provide a way to bridge the gap between a less than universal democratic world community and the universal ideal represented by the United Nations. If the United Nations finds it requires military forces capable of sustained engagement then it may have to choose between turning to the United States or NATO for those forces. In an optimistic recent review of the expansion of the role of the United Nations in providing collective security, Gardner nevertheless questions whether the UN will be in a position to mount a serious military campaign in the near future on the basis of a simple adding together of contributed forces. Gardner adds: "If the UN wishes to make use of the military forces of another international organization, it will have to look to NATO. Making NATO an executing agent for UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations both inside Europe and possibly beyond is an option that should be seriously explored." 7 But if NATO were used in this manner, this would imply that the group of democratic states that provide its forces would be the decisive voice in the relevant decisions of the world community. To this extent, the interim regime of the democratic world Community that some desire will have been brought into being.
The Continuing Inadequacy of the Attitudinal Basis for Community
This may be the world we are moving toward. But even if we are, will this amount to more than the unsystematic imposition by the powerful of intermittent order, too often after the fact? In spite of Europe's apparent inability to act militarily even within its own sphere of influence, the evolution of opinion that is necessary for the development of either an adequate world or democratic Community is most advanced in Europe and the Commonwealth states. This suggests that the key to the evolution of a Community able to meet the tests that Morgenthau has suggested will be found in the evolution of public and elite opinion in the United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan. Internal problems occupy the attention of publics and leaders in the first three; a similar shift of attention may be occurring in Japan. Today, the leaders of these states show no sign of a willingness to surrender the degree of sovereignty that an effective Community requires. This is as true of legislators and administration officials in Washington as it is of the old men in Beijing. These countries are not ready to spend the money that the Community would require. Even today, insufficient and unreliable funding severely restricts the development of United Nations capabilities in many areas, not least the military. Whatever our hopes and whatever our suggestions to augment the trends that we have identified, perhaps through new institutional initiatives, we will need to think through how our proposals will be received and acted upon in these five states. We may find that the development of that loyalty to the Community that Morgenthau described as the first requirement for an effective world order is as important as any other issue that our conference might address. On the other hand, it also may be that this development can only be achieved through the creation of new universal or less than universal world institutions that through their effectiveness will come to command such loyalty.
NOTES
1. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, Revised by K. Thompson, 6th edition (New York: Knopf, 1985), pages 525-541.
2. Gerard J. Mangone, A Short History of International Organization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), pages 173-174.
3. Richard Gardner, "The Role of the United Nations in Collective Security", manuscript of paper delivered to the Trilateral Commission's Lisbon Working Group, 1992.
4. For the figures up to 1964, see Francis A. Beer, Peace Against War: The Ecology of International Violence (San Francisco: Freeman,1981), page 99. The complexity of the net of interlocking organizations within the restricted world of advanced democracies is suggested by James R. Huntley, Uniting the Democracies: Institutions of the Emerging Atlantic-Pacific System (New York: New York University Press, 1980). His wheel of intergovernmental institutions (page 343) has been successively expanded, most recently in April, 1990.
5. Yasushi Akashi, "The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia", Paper delivered at the Lisbon Meeting of the Trilateral Commission, 1992.
6. See James R. Huntley, Pax Democratica: A Strategy for the 21st Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). (This existed only in working drafts at the time the foregoing paper was written.)
7. Gardner, "The Role of the United Nations in Collective Security".
For the role of democracy in creating order, you may be interested in a paper on the history and promotion of democracy.