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States and Their Future. General Analysis Picture Credit: Slavoj Zizek argues that popular discontent over the economic crisis has brought about an effort to curtail and usurp democracy itself. While democracy was once heralded as a fundamental component of a prosperous modern society, political elites seem to feel that democracy, and by extension sovereignty, can be an intolerable threat to economic prosperity. Zizek points to arguments that troubled or underdeveloped economies may need to be superintended undemocratically, so as to prevent disruptive populist politics from emerging.
However, technocrats and political elites have revealed their own incapacity to effectively manage the eurozone crisis. A Brighter Year Ahead for the Caribbean? January 10, The Caribbean faces a great deal of political and economic uncertainty in the coming year. The eurozone crisis has gradually declined in intensity, but some policymakers and observers feel that important obstacles to economic recovery remain. Economist Costas Lapavitsas argues against those who contend that a fiscal union represents a realistic solution. Austerity exacerbates rather than solves the contradictions of this development model.
As a result, Lapavitsas concludes that the crisis will continue through , with negative consequences for the regional economy. The European Union has developed a reputation for political openness and integration, even as the economic crisis has drawn the future of the European Monetary Union into question.
While the EU has employed the rhetoric of human rights since its inception, the immigration policies and procedures of its member states have been criticized for numerous instances of mistreatment. Some EU states have detained migrants for extended periods in harsh conditions and have returned migrants to countries with poor human rights records. Cyprus has agreed to the terms of a bailout agreement that, once given final approval, will allow it to receive emergency financial aid in exchange for severe austerity measures.
New restrictions placed on the travel budgets of bureaucrats and political leaders are likely to attract media attention. However, the more consequential concerns relate to the imposition of higher taxes on the general public, potential cuts to healthcare and other social services, as well as new regulations governing working schedules in the public sector.
After becoming President of Egypt in June , Mohamed Morsi had to face the difficult tasks of appointing a new representative government, extricate the military from governing structures and stimulate the economy. To avoid future financial crises, national leaders should put into practice the ideas of the late economist John Maynard Keynes, regarding government intervention in the economy. Governments must regulate banks and financial speculation and pursue fiscal policies that strengthen the role of the nation-state in the global economy.
Transnational challenges such as pollution, terrorism and climate change undermine nation-states' status as principal actors in international relations. But this article argues that many university professors still base their curricula on the myth of the nation-state. By focusing on the nation-state, they not only overlook global solutions, they further assume that the nation-state is a coherent and homogenous entity.
The author calls for a stronger role for non-state actors, human rights, and ethics in the study of international relations. In this openDemocracy article, the author argues that the existence of nations is not a question of fate but the result of power-politics, accidents or wars.
For example, the article describes Tibet and Palestine as victims of "post-colonial sequestration. In this OpenDemocracy article, the author puts the China-Tibet issue in a historic perspective, considering their respective notions of sovereignty. During the first half of the 20th century, Tibet was de facto independent as China did not seek absolute control.
But as China grew wary of Western Empires, the country's nationalistic ideas increased. This way, nationalism became a means of legitimizing full sovereignty over Tibet. Large oil companies, Western governments and ethnic minority groups all challenge Nigeria's sovereignty over the oil-rich Niger Delta.
This paper explores how these actors' quest for oil wealth, land, water and self-determination have "redefined" state sovereignty. The Movement for Emancipation of the Niger Delta MEND is fighting the government and large oil companies to gain control over the delta, claiming their right to self-determination. This Guernica article argues that, since the US occupation, Iraq has lost its sovereignty. Both the US and Iraqi government try to present the appearance of autonomy for the country.
However, several US policy decisions, such as the building of a wall around Sunni districts, show that the US undermines Iraq's independent decision-making. Pointing out that a country's constitution is a key symbol of its sovereignty; the author criticizes the US controlled drafting of Iraq's constitution in He concludes that only complete withdrawal of occupation troops will give Iraq its independence back.
States are constantly evolving and since the Cold War, globalization has accelerated the process of change. But the report warns that international donors should be careful not to undermine domestic policies by imposing a Western conception of the state. Though richer than it was six years ago, the Russian state has sacrificed political freedom and economic justice through the concentration of power and wealth. According to Andrei Illarionov, former economic adviser to President Vladimir Putin, the "corporatization" of the Russian state has reinforced the power of wealthy "insiders" while marginalizing citizens and alienating Russia's neighbors.
As with other corporate states, such as Libya, Angola, Chad, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, Russian citizens can only restore civil, political and economic freedoms by challenging the state from the bottom up. The UN system was founded on state sovereignty and protection from foreign intervention. From human rights to the provision of peace, sovereign states provide most social services. Whether weak or strong, some states either cannot or do not perform these functions. In their place, NGOs represent popular sovereignty by conveying the will of "we the peoples" as set out in the UN Charter.
As the US grants nominal independence to Iraq, Adam Hochschild takes a look at the phenomenon of countries "where most real power is in the hands of someone else. US pressure for resolution of "the Cyprus problem" appears less motivated by political goodwill than the possibility of using Cypriot reunification as a template for Iraq's reconstruction, and for mending diplomatic bridges with Europe. Political scientists often argue that globalization and multilateral institutions are undermining the importance of national sovereignty.
But in this chapter from Sovereignty in Transition , author Michael Keating argues that these analysts fail to recognize that the sovereignty concept is changing and taking on new meanings. For example, many minority groups reaffirm the sovereignty concept to gain more autonomy - rather than full independence. Keating advocates a "plurinational democracy" to accommodate the increasingly integrated world. The UN will present to Greeks and Turks the most comprehensive peace proposal in more than 10 years. The Greeks seek a two-zone federation linked by a central government and the Turkish Cypriots want a confederation of two independent states.
The Bush administration's unabashed unilateralism reveals its imperial desire to sweep away civil society participation, citizen diplomacy, and multidimensional forms of conflict prevention. This article warns, "we are entering into an imperial world order maintained by a Leviathan nation in search of monsters to slay. The new US doctrine of "pre-emptive action" kills the principle of state sovereignty. Looking at recent case studies, Foreign Policy recommends that "the international community set more modest goals for nation building and then tailor those goals to each country's reality" to avoid a quagmire.
Will globalization ultimately strengthen or destroy the nation state? Will it lead to more democracies or more revolutions? A Foreign Policy debate attempts to answer these complex questions. Anna Leander of the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute argues that the international society of states and private actors have challenged the nation-state's monopoly on legitimate violence as well as the definition of legitimacy.
A new report ,"The Responsibility to Protect," supports the view that an international duty to save civilians at risk trumps the sovereign rights of states. The Globe and Mail. Sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that three different types of nation states exist and that globalization transforms each one in a different way. He concludes that the nation-state has come closer to a universal form but with a different kind of sovereignty and administrative control of political power. London School of Economics. As Wilson himself put it: The dramatic upheavals of the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War set the stage for another American-led attempt to build a liberal order.
A new moment to remake the world had arrived. Basic questions about power, order and modernity had to be rethought. From the s onwards, the viability of western liberal democracy was itself uncertain. The violence and instabilities of the s and s forced liberal internationalists—and indeed everyone else—to reassess their ideas and agendas. The First World War was a jolt to the optimistic narratives of western civilization and progress.
But FDR and his generation—facing the even more frightening rise of fascism and totalitarianism, followed by the horrors of total war, the Holocaust and the advent of atomic weapons, not to mention the collapse of the world economy—seemed to face a far more formidable, even existential array of threats. Modernity itself showed its dark side. In this setting, FDR and his contemporaries found themselves advancing a new—more world-weary—vision of liberal international order.
Paradoxically, it became both more universalistic in its vision and more deeply tied to American hegemonic power. In the s, liberal internationalism was reframed. The liberal internationalism of the Woodrow Wilson era was built around civilizational, racial and cultural hierarchies. It was a creature of the western white man's world.
It was a narrow type of principled internationalism. Wilson-era liberal internationalism did not challenge European imperialism or racial hierarchies. British liberals explicitly defended empire and continued to see the world in racial and civilizational terms. The s saw a shift or reformulation of these ideas. Universal rights and protections became more central to the ideological vision. FDR's Four Freedoms of speech and worship, from want and fear were the defining vision for this new conception of liberal international order. The postwar order was to be a security community—a global space where liberal democracies joined together to build a cooperative order that enshrined basic human rights and social protections.
At the same time, these universal rights and protections were advanced and legitimated in terms of the American-led Cold War struggle. The United States would be the hegemonic sponsor and protector of the liberal order. It would have rules, institutions, bargains and full-service political functions. To be inside this order was to enjoy trade, expanding growth, and tools for managing economic stability.
Inside, it was warm; outside, it was cold. Countries would be protected in alliance partnerships and an array of functional organizations. In other words, in the postwar era, liberal internationalism became both more universal in its ideas and principles and more tied to an American-led political order. Over the Cold War decades, American-led liberal internationalism emerged as a distinctive type of order. The United States came to take on a variety of functions and responsibilities. It came to have a direct role in running the order—and it also found itself increasingly tied to the other states within the order.
It upheld the rules and institutions, fostered security cooperation, led the management of the world economy, and championed shared norms and cooperation among the western-oriented liberal democracies. In the management of the world economy, the Bretton Woods international financial institutions became tied to the American market and dollar. American liberal hegemony, as a type of international order, had several key characteristics. First, it was built around open multilateral trade. In many ways, this was the key vision of the postwar American architects of liberal order.
During the war, the question was debated: This was the era when most of the world's regions were divided into imperial zones, blocs and spheres of influence. The American strategic judgement was that, on the contrary, the postwar world would need to be open and accessible to the United States. Out of these worries, the United States launched its efforts to open the world economy and build institutions and partnerships that would establish a durably open global order. International agreements, embodied in the Bretton Woods system, were designed to give governments greater ability to regulate and manage economic openness to ensure that it was reconciled with domestic economic stability and policies in pursuit of full employment.
The visionary goal was a middle ground between openness and stability. Free trade was essential for the sort of economic recovery and growth that would support centrist and progressive postwar political leadership in the United States and Europe. But trade and exchange would need to be reconciled with government efforts to ensure economic stability and the security of workers and the middle class.
Social and economic security went hand in hand with national security. Third, the postwar liberal order was built around new and permanent international institutions. To a greater extent than in Wilson's day, post liberal internationalists sought to build order around a system of multilateral governance. This was a vision of intergovernmentalism more than supranationalism.
Governments would remain the primary source of authority. But governments would organize their relations around permanent regional and global institutions. They would conduct relations on multilateral platforms—bargaining, consulting, coordinating. These institutions would serve multiple purposes. They would facilitate cooperation by providing venues for ongoing bargaining and exchange.
They would reinforce norms of equality and non-discrimination, thereby giving the order more legitimacy. And they would tie the United States more closely to its postwar partners, reducing worries about domination and abandonment. The result was an unprecedented effort across economic, political and security policy spheres to build working multilateral institutions.
Fourth, there was a special emphasis on relations among the western liberal democracies. FDR's Four Freedoms were of this sort, and so too were the principles of multilateralism embedded in the postwar economic institutions. But the order itself was organized around the United States and its liberal democratic allies and clients. The fact that it was built inside the larger Cold War-era bipolar system reinforced this orientation. Architects of the order understood that there was a special relationship among the western liberal democracies.
At first this encompassed essentially just western Europe and Japan; but in the aftermath of the Cold War a larger and more diverse community of democracies took hold. The essential premise of American global leadership was that there is something special and enduring about the alignment of democracies. They have shared interests and values. American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama have acted on the assumption that democracies have a unique capacity to cooperate.
This liberal hegemonic order flourished over the decades of the Cold War. It provided a framework for the liberalization of trade and decades of growth across the advanced industrial world. Incomes and life opportunities steadily increased for the postwar generations of Europeans, Japanese and Americans.
To be inside this liberal hegemonic order was to be positioned inside a set of full-service economic, political and security institutions. The foundations of this postwar liberal hegemonic order are weakening. In a simple sense, this is a story of grand shifts in the distribution of power and the consequences that follow. The United States and its allies are less powerful than they were when they built the postwar order.
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The unipolar moment—when the United States dominated world economic and military rankings—is ending. Europe and Japan have also weakened. Together, this old triad of patrons of the postwar liberal order is slowly dwindling in its share of the wider global distribution of power. Rather, it is simply a gradual diffusion of power away from the West. China will probably not replace the United States as an illiberal hegemon, and the global South will probably not emerge as a geopolitical bloc that directly challenges the US-led order.
But the United States—and its old allies—will continue to be a smaller part of the global whole, and this will constrain their ability to support and defend the liberal international order. The political troubles of western liberal democracies magnify the implications of these global power shifts. As noted above, democracies everywhere are facing internal difficulties and discontents. The older western democracies are experiencing rising inequality, economic stagnation, fiscal crisis, and political polarization and gridlock.
Many newer and poorer democracies, meanwhile, are beset by corruption, backsliding and rising inequality. As democracies fail to address problems, their domestic legitimacy is diminished and increasingly challenged by resurgent nationalist, populist and xenophobic movements. Together, these developments cast a dark shadow over the democratic future. During the Cold War, the American-led liberal order was lodged within the western side of the bipolar world system. It was during these decades that the foundations of liberal hegemonic order were laid.
This had several consequences. One was that the United States became the sole superpower—the world entered the unipolar moment. This made American power itself an issue in world politics. During the Cold War, American power had a functional role in the system: With the sudden emergence of unipolarity, American power was less constrained—and it did not play the same system-functional role. New debates emerged about the character of American hegemonic power. What would restrain American power?
Was the United States now an informal empire? Ironically, the crisis of the US-led liberal order can be traced to the collapse of Cold War bipolarity and the resulting spread of liberal internationalism. The seeds of crisis were planted at this moment of triumph.
Global Political Orders
The liberal international order was, in effect, globalized. It was freed from its Cold War foundations and rapidly became the platform for an expanding global system of liberal democracy, markets and complex interdependence. During the Cold War, the liberal order was a global subsystem—and the bipolar global system served to reinforce the roles, commitments, identity and community that were together manifest as liberal hegemony. The crisis of liberal internationalism can be seen as a slow-motion reaction to this deep transformation in the geopolitical setting of the postwar liberal international project.
Specifically, the globalization of liberal internationalism put in motion two long-term effects: First, with the collapse of the Soviet sphere, the American-led liberal international order became the only surviving framework for order, and a growing number and diversity of states began to be integrated into it. This created new problems for the governance of the order. During the Cold War, the western-oriented liberal order was led by the United States, Europe and Japan, and it was organized around a complex array of bargains, working relationships and institutions.
Indeed, in the early postwar years, most of the core agreements about trade, finance and monetary relations were hammered out between the United States and Britain. These countries did not agree on everything, but relative to the rest of the world, this was a small and homogeneous group of western states. Their economies converged, their interests were aligned and they generally trusted each other. These countries were also on the same side of the Cold War, and the American-led alliance system reinforced cooperation. This system of alliance made it easier for the United States and its partners to make commitments and bear burdens.
It made it easier for European and east Asian states to agree to operate within an American-led liberal order. In this sense, the Cold War roots of the postwar liberal order reinforced the sense that the liberal democracies were involved in a common political project. With the end of the Cold War, these foundational supports for liberal order were loosened. More, and more diverse, states entered the order—with new visions and agendas. The post-Cold War era also brought into play new and complex global issues, such as climate change, terrorism and weapons proliferation, and the growing challenges of interdependence.
These are particularly hard issues on which to reach agreement among states coming from very different regions, with similarly different political orientations and levels of development. As a result, the challenges to multilateral cooperation have grown.
States and Their Future
At the core of these challenges has been the problem of authority and governance. Who pays, who adjusts, who leads? Rising non-western states began to seek a greater voice in the governance of the expanding liberal order. How would authority across this order be redistributed? The old coalition of states—led by the United States, Europe and Japan—built a postwar order on layers of bargains, institutions and working relationships. But this old trilateral core is not the centre of the global system in the way it once was. The crisis of liberal order today is in part a problem of how to reorganize the governance of this order.
The old foundations have been weakened, but new bargains and governance arrangements are yet to be fully negotiated. Second, the crisis of the liberal order is a crisis of legitimacy and social purpose. During the Cold War, the American-led postwar order had a shared sense that it was a community of liberal democracies that were made physically safer and economically more secure by affiliating with each other. The first several generations of the postwar period understood that to be inside this order was to be in a political and economic space where their societies could prosper and be protected.
Trade and economic openness were rendered more or less compatible with economic security, stable employment and advancing living standards. The western-oriented liberal order had features of a security community—a sort of mutual protection society. Membership of this order was attractive because it provided tangible rights and benefits. It was a system of multilateral cooperation that provided national governments with tools and capacities to pursue economic stability and advancement.
This idea of liberal order as a security community is often lost in the narratives of the postwar era. The common interests were manifest, for example, in the gains that flowed from trade and the benefits of alliance cooperation. They lack the ability to plan, anticipate, and prevent. These organizational limitations have significant consequences on the composition of values.
Understanding among peoples mitigates much conflict. While pluralism beyond borders thrives in this situation, civil society networks do not have the ability to broker peace in countries torn by civil war. Nor do they have the means to redistribute resources significantly. Individuals are freer to communicate, associate, and bond with people from other countries; they are no longer bound to geographical constraints.
For example, multinational corporations with professional paid employees can overwhelm other global actors. This will present challenges to regulation and distribution. The anarchy of states is mitigated by alternative centers of power such as international civil society, international organizations, and regional unions. These centers contain dense webs of transnational social ties. International organizations are strengthened on top of the institutional structures that exist today.
The UN has stronger enforcement capacities and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund regulate the flow of capital and international investment.
General Analysis
Regional organizations will play a larger role. It presents the least risk of tyranny from other individuals, states, and organizations. This situation can be characterized as having the greatest political possibility in contrast to the guaranteed political success of a unified global state defined below or the uncertainty of international anarchy. However, liberty will be variegated by civil society, state, and region: This multiplicity of actors will also raise questions for the prospects of peace for the worst off. It will be difficult to determine who will be responsible to ensure basic human rights for those people in power centers indifferent to liberty, justice, peace, and pluralism.
Although the UN will have more force for humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping, there will be greater chances for failure since accountability and responsibility will be difficult to achieve among diffuse power centers. Thus, there is a danger that great powers may assume a genocidal indifference toward some in order to achieve a larger peace. Additional disadvantages include slow decisions, no perpetual peace, and no single identity. Like the decentered world there are multiple power sources and international organizations, however, a federation of nation-states is oligarchic, and the greatest powers act as the central mediators.
States must chose to give up sovereignty in return for a contract with a constitutional division of power. The political characters of state regimes are similar. An oligarchic order allows for better material equality.