The Near-Unipolar World Reconsidered
Figure 1. Countries rescaled by the number of people earning more than $200 dollars a day in 2002. Source: WorldMapper.Org.
This is an ongoing conversation with Ted Fertik.
Thanks for the link man. Tooze (2014) was an amazing read! I want to talk about two things. First, I am going to shamelessly insist that I was right about the role of near-unipolarity in Tooze's schema. Second, I want to talk about how near-unipolarity relates to the history of the twentieth century. All quotes are from Tooze (2014) unless otherwise specified.
"In the wake of World War I think the stakes were higher." Why were they higher? "What was at stake was a new global order under the sign of what has been variously referred to as ultraimperialism, American hegemony, or Empire"; that Churchill described as "the pyramids of peace" (quoted in The Deluge). [Emphasis mine.]
The "central challenge facing the German political elite" was the "sheer scale of twentieth-century Anglo-American economic predominance." Tooze shows that the interwar order was one of unabashed Anglo-American cohegemony. The "main question" of the international politics of the interwar era is "how to understand the insurgency against the order." More pertinently, the question facing the Germans was should they "conform and assimilate themselves to its power" or "mount an insurgency against it"?
"We must view that struggle as more asymmetric, and thus as an expression of the combined and uneven development of the international system…" [Emphasis mine.]
"Neither the international relations of the interwar period, nor World War II itself are well-described by models…derived from the more truly multipolar world of the late nineteenth century."
I contended that the world from the close of the nineteenth century to the rise of China in the 2000s was secretly near-unipolar. I presented GDP numbers and argued that GDP was a good enough measure to detect near-unipolarity. But I also have strong historical reasons to think carefully about near-unipolarity---as the quotes from Tooze above suggest.
When I say near-unipolar, I mean that there is a especially strong state in the system such that no state could hope to prevail against it in a war or an extended rivalry; that there is no doubt about the identity of the strongest state in the system; and that when statesmen evaluate great power war and great power military alliances they had to care a great deal about the unipole's position---computations on the outcome of great power war and confrontation premised on the unipole's disinterest have to be thrown out of the window if the unipole weighs in the balance.
Note again that this is a weak definition. It just means that there is a football in a pile of tennis balls. The unipole may not even have a standing army. It may or may not exercise influence abroad. A lesser great power may run the maritime world and lesser great powers may worry much more about each other (especially their strong neighbours) than the unipole. In fact, if the unipole is insular and isolationist, it may not cause the other great powers any headaches at all. Indeed, they may even make fun of its extant weakness.
However, in a near-unipolar world, such disdain is contingent on the foreign policy of the unipole. Were the unipole to mobilize its war potential and be willing to use force on the world stage, the lesser great powers would have to eat their insulting words. Moreover, lesser great powers threatened by each other can be expected to try to secure the protection of the unipole. An alliance with the unipole is, after all, very useful given the rule of force in world affairs. The unipole may therefore get pulled into other people's fights despite itself. Even insularity and isolationism thus do not completely thwart the gravitational pull exerted by the unipole.
One could write a convincing history of the twentieth century in this frame of reference. The philosophy of history that such a work requires is almost insultingly straightforward. The basic fact of near-polarity serves as the single explanatory variable. That is, the twentieth century as the story of the clarification of the real balance of forces. Or history catching up with the secret topology of the world.
In this frame of reference, the outcomes of the main great power confrontations of the twentieth century---World War I, World War II, and the Cold War---were more or less known in advance. The game had, in fact, been rigged from the get go.
What explains the British surrender of naval preponderance in the Western Hemisphere in 1900? What explains the results of 1918? What explains the Washington Naval Conference of 1922? The stability of the interwar European order in the 1920s? The breakdown of that order and the turn to radicalism in 1931? The startling fact that not the winner but the power that basically sat out the Second World War dictated the postwar order? The outright capitulation of the second ranked power in the so-called bipolar world in 1989? All these questions have a single answer: The fact of the asymmetric size of the football.
Is it possible to construct a tighter, more parsimonious narrative frame? Is it not, then, a quite compelling frame of reference?
References
Tooze, Adam. "The Sense of a Vacuum." Historical Materialism 22.3-4 (2014): 351-370.