The world is multipolar now and this is a good thing
Unipolarity for extended periods means the worst kind of monopoly: institutional monopoly
Introduction
In the geopolitical sense, the world today is already very different from the world of the 1990s. That is because during the 1990s the world was unipolar, while as of 2023, the world is multipolar. But this is good: while unipolarity tends to result in peace, it also tends to imply the worst kind of monopoly in the long run which is the monopoly regarding political and legal institutions.
As history shows (2), for civilization to flourish, the system of international relations in which States are immersed needs to be decentralized, which in turn means that it needs to be multipolar in the long term. Therefore, as geopolitical power has been decentralizing, our world has avoided the potentially catastrophic consequences of a stable unipolar world order.
The shift from unipolarity to multipolarity
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US became the world’s sole great power; that is, the US became the only State in the world capable of enforcing its own sovereignty. While other countries needed to be on good terms with the US; otherwise, they could end up like Sadam’s regime in Iraq. This situation of unipolarity more or less accurately described the world in the 1990s up to the early 2000s.
It is the combination of demographic size, economic development, human capital, natural resources, and industrial resources that ultimately determine the potential military power of nations in our modern world. In terms of natural and demographic resources, the US is not exceptional; fluctuating around 4.5% of the world’s population over the last 30 years, the US was and is much smaller than China and India in demographic terms. Controlling a modest 6% of the world’s landmass, in terms of natural resources the US’s endowment is comparable to China’s and Brazil’s and much smaller than Russia. However, it was the US’s relative superiority in economic, scientific, and industrial capabilities during the 90s and early 2000s that allowed it to be the world’s sole great power at the time.
Since the year 2000, the US’s relative share of global “power” in terms of measurable indicators of economic, industrial, and ideological power has substantially decreased. While the US share of global GDP indicates a substantial but still rather modest decrease from a peak close to 21% in the late 1990s to 15.5% now (which still means the GDP of the rest of the world became 40% larger in relative terms), other indicators of economic, industrial, and ideological power show a much greater US relative decline: this is because a lot of GDP in the 1990s, as estimated by the World Bank, consisted of agricultural subsistence activity. These once agricultural economies have been rapidly developing over the last decades. As a result, their societies were transformed from technological backwaters into modern industrializing economies inserted into the global economy and international scientific networks.
For examples illustrated in the Figure above: in the late 90s, about 30% of the cars and trucks sold in the world were sold in the US; it was barely above 15% in 2022; the US’s share of scientific papers collapsed from ca. 30% in the late ‘90s to 14% today; the US’s share of the world’s electricity consumption was close to 30% in the mid-90s, less than 30 years later it is close to 15%; and manufacturing capacity has spread over the world, as evidenced by the decrease in the US’s share of motor vehicle output from nearly a quarter of the world’s total in the mid-90s to about 12% today.
At the same time, other countries emerged as peer competitors in the geopolitical arena. That does not mean that major emerging powers such as China, India, and Russia will form a military alliance to oppose the US; instead, it means that these countries individually are emerging as great powers that interact in the international arena as countries that maintain their sovereignty independently of the state of their relations with the US and also with one another. Indeed, it can be said that India and China are rivals to a greater degree than the US and China, given their geopolitical disputes.
Decentralization requires multipolarity in the long-term
For a civilization to flourish, this civilization needs to be embedded into a decentralized system of international relations with multiple independent States that operate their own set of political and legal institutions, and these States are genuinely sovereign: free to choose their local institutions. Theoretically, it is possible for this system of international relations to have a single hegemon who is much stronger than other States in the system if this hegemon respects the institutions of other States and does not seek to coerce other States to become its subordinates. In practice, hegemons of an unipolar system of international relations never act in such a way.
In Western history, we never had a stable hegemonic power with one exception: Rome. Other nations achieved hegemony during brief periods. Sparta was a hegemon of the Classical world after defeating Athens in the Peloponnesian War, but its hegemonic status lasted about 12 years, according to the Greek historian Polybius. Alexander the Great was a true hegemon, conquering most of the known world in 8 years, but soon after he died, his empire fragmented into four pieces.
Then came Rome, which was an absolute hegemon of the ancient world for nearly 500 years from the early 2nd century BC until the Crisis of the mid-3rd century AD. Even after the Crisis of the 3rd century, Rome managed to restore its status as the dominant, yet relatively weakened, power of the ancient world under Emperor Diocletian. This status of hegemony survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire as the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire was still regarded by the new barbarian kingdoms (occupying the former Western Roman provinces) as the ruler of their world. Rome’s hegemony ultimately lasted until the early 7th century AD when its armies were defeated by the Muslims (especially at the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 AD).
After Rome, there have been several attempts at restoration of hegemony in the Western Eurasian world. Just after the final collapse of Rome’s hegemony in the 7th century AD, the Muslim Caliphates attempted to conquer the known world to impose their religion in their sacred jihads. European conquerors also attempted to become rulers of the known world soon after Rome’s fall, from Charlemagne in the late 8th and early 9th century up to Napoleon in the early 19th century. His Napoleonic Empire was briefly the hegemonic power of the world at the time. Thus, the US’s status as the world’s sole great power in the 1990s and early 2000s was a relative status that was achieved by other powers in previous centuries but for a limited amount of time. This unstable hegemony also applies to the US, whose unipolar moment lasted for a comparable length of time as Sparta’s.
In all these cases, and especially in the case of Rome, the only State that achieved a stable hegemony in the history of the Western world, the hegemonic power used its superior military power to coerce other States. For example, according to political scientist John Mearsheimer, the US has invaded seven different countries since the fall of the Soviet Union, mostly with the excuse to “spread democracy.” Rome imposed their oligarchic form of government on the once democratic Greek city-states across the Mediterranean; as Hansen (2008) explains, following the rise of Rome, the most common form of government across Greek city-states shifted from democracy to oligarchy, moving in the direction of a similar form of government to Rome’s political system. Eventually, as Bresson (2016) argues, the decentralization of the ancient world was eventually replaced by the centralization of the Late Roman monarchy, ultimately destroying classical civilization.
It is true that the US’s tenure as the world’s sole great power during the ‘90s and the 2000s was also a period of great prosperity across the planet. However, that also held for the ancient world during the first generations of Roman tenure as the ancient world’s sole great power. Instead, unipolarity appears to take generations to lead to institutional monopoly (the imposition of institutions of the hegemon to all the States in the system of international relations). Then, it might take further generations for it to lead to a decline in the quality of institutions, which might ultimately result in civilizational collapse (Classical civilization) or stagnation at a low level of development (which was the case of Imperial China, a fate perhaps worse than collapse as its stable absolute and centralized monarchy locked its civilization away from the possibility of sustainable development). Thus, avoiding unipolarity appears to be a necessary condition for a civilization to continue to flourish.
Is war that bad for civilization?
War between States is the ultimate manifestation of geopolitical conflict. It occurs when States have different objectives and (typically) different expectations regarding the feasibility of each State in attaining their objectives. Thus, war can only occur between two states if they expect to have relatively symmetric levels of military power. Thus, wars involving great powers on both sides can only occur in a multipolar world.
As multipolarity is a necessary condition for a flourishing civilization, military confrontations involving great powers are a natural feature of a flourishing civilization. It is not a coincidence that periods of greatest intellectual and artistic flourishing occurred near the dates of great wars. For example: (1) The devastating Peloponnesian War occurred during the middle of the Classical Period, perhaps the most dynamic period in human history before the Industrial Revolution. (2) The last 250 years featured many of the most devastating wars in history but also the greatest speed of scientific and technological progress.
The war in Ukraine that has been active since early 2022 represents the first war after the fall of the Soviet Union that has directly or indirectly involved great powers on both sides. This war thus demonstrates that our world has already avoided unipolarity: in an unipolar world, this war simply could not happen. It is a situation very much unlike the one when Iraq tried to invade Kuwait in the early 90s; the US easily defeated its military. In Ukraine, there is much greater symmetry between the spheres of power involved (Russia’s and the US’s). It is like it was between the US’s and the Soviet Union’s spheres of power during the war in Vietnam. Therefore, while this war has been a terrible development for the people directly affected, it proves that our world now is not unipolar.
The war in Ukraine also illustrates why multipolarity is a necessary condition for stable political decentralization. When the US decided to invade Iraq in 2003, it was the only great power in the world, so there was no opposing great power to back Iraq against the invasion. As a result, Iraq’s regime was easily toppled by the US. In contrast, Russia attempted to topple the regime in Ukraine, but Ukraine could count on the US to help it as the opposing great power to Russia. It is only thanks to the fact the US has opposed Russia that Ukraine’s sovereignty has survived the war so far. Multipolarity thus allows countries to have a good chance of maintaining their sovereignty even if they are threatened by a great power because then a competing great power becomes incentivized to back its regime.
Conclusion
A flourishing civilization is a civilization characterized by great power politics and confrontation. This was also true during Chinese civilization’s greatest period of cultural and intellectual flourishing; it is often called The Warring States period but also the period of the Hundred Schools of Thought.
As our 21st-century world is decentralized, with 200 sovereign states and several great powers, we have achieved a necessary condition for the long-term flourishing of our global civilization.
References:
Bresson, A. 2016. The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy.
Hansen, M. H. 2008. Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City State.
Are the spheres of power involved really that analogous? You say that the conflict in Ukraine is proof of a multipolar world, but I've heard the exact backwards argument as well.
Russia invading Ukraine is one of its final attempts at influence over the world, and it is failing miserably at it. The war in Ukraine is just evidence that Russia truly is a fallen state, we are seeing the small remains of a previous global pole.