Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 19 – Arguing that “after
the Crimean events, the world will not be what it was” because key element of the
previous international system – the inviolability of national borders – has been
finally and irrevocably violated, four Moscow analysts say that this opens the
door to five possible “new world orders” in the future.
In an article on the “Russky
reporter” portal yesterday, Dmitry Kartsev, Vladimir shpak, Andrey Veselov, and
Nikolay Anishchenko say that “in a broad sense,” this principle was violated
with the disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia but that these events did
not challenge the principle in the way Crimea does (rusrep.ru/article/2014/03/18/after_crimea).
That is because in the earlier
cases, the four say, none of the pieces of the pre-existing country was
absorbed by anyone else and because until very recently, “the guarantor of
everything that has been taking place was the United States acting in the role
of a world policeman” even though, they argue, it violated its own principles
in pursuit of its interests.
Why did Moscow decide to act as it
has in the case of Crimea? The answer is simple, they suggest: “because it
understood that if nothing changes in the interntional system, only stagnation
and slow extinction awaits” the Russian Federation. Consequenty, “Russia decided to change the
world” even at great risk.
The four then offer a list of four
possible worlds that may result from the current crisis: a multi-polar world, a
bi-polar world “‘version 2.0,’” a unipolar world with a new Pax Americana, a
world of ‘‘beseiged fortresses,’” and a world without leaders. In their
article, they discuss the basic features of each, arguing that which one
emerges will hinge on how the powers act now.
Under the first scenario, the basic
players will be “EuroRussia from Lisbon to Vladivostok, the US, China, and
later Latin America and an Islamic khalifate. American hostility to Moscow will
drive Europe and especially Germany and France into cooperation with Moscow,
and Moscow will thus return to alliances with territorial rather than naval
powers.
The countries between old Europe and
Russia will be offered “a two in one” form of development: “the improvement of
their institutions and the mobility of an educated middle class from Europe,
and the development of infrastructure and new work places from Russia,” the
four say.
This scenario will return tohte
world to one resembling that at the end of the 19th and beginning of
the 20th centuries “with one essential difference.” The existence of
nuclear weapons will prevent “a new world war” and mean that the struggles
among the players will be conducted by “economic and political methods” -- especially
between Russia and the EU core.
The four Moscow
writers offer equally detailed descriptions of the other four scenarios, and
they acknowledge that the world could develop according to any one of them or
even according to some combination of two or more. Summarizing all the arguments in this
4400-word article is beyond the scope of this Window, but one additional aspect
of their argument deserves to be mentioned.
After presenting
their five scenarios for the future, the four writers also discuss four earlier
“world orders,” including the Westphalian system, the Vienna system, the
Versailles-Washington system, and the Yalta-Potsdam system. They point out – and this deserves to be
remembered in assessing their predictions – that each new system not only
reflected the breakdown of its predecessor but continued many of its
predecessor’s features.
That is likely to
be true again, an insight that should inform the decisions of policy makers who
either assume that the world will continue much as it has or that, after events
like the Crimean Anschluss, it will be transformed beyond recognition and thus
requires the overturning of all previous assumptions and policies.
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