Page 56 - bne magazine March 2017 issue

56 Opinion COLCHIS:
The contagion of ‘unpolarity’
Michael Cecire of New America
In December, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, was killed in an apparent terrorist attack by
a Turkish police officer claiming revenge over Russian involvement in Syria. While indisputably tragic, Karlov’s assas- sination is also a potent reminder of the complex dynamics that undergird affairs in the overlapping border regions of
the Middle East, Europe and Eurasia. Although the attack in Ankara asks its first questions of Turkey-Russia relations, it bears the contextual weight of a far greater aperture: the fate of Syria; geopolitical alignments in the broader Middle East; the Russian occupations in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia; and America’s dwindling claims to global indispensability. More generally, the Ankara attack both foreshadows and is,
in part, an outcome of an increasingly un-polar world.
The radial chaos enveloping and emanating from Syria is what the end of Western hegemony looks like. The Syrian conflict – only the most destructive of a snaking archipelago of humani- tarian and security crises in Eastern Europe and western Eurasia – is the product of vacating Western power, and the resulting competition by local powers for their pieces of the pie. In the vast and expanding borderlands where the vestiges of Western writ hold increasingly minimal sway, no new struc- tures have popped into existence to take their place, and chaos is the reigning force – not postmodern institutions, concerts of great powers, or romanticised 19th century armchair real- ism. “Unpolarity”, instead, governs the affairs of millions, and threatens contagion far and wide.
Whither the West
The notion of polarity describes a system where one or more convening great powers establish rules, norms, or at least agenda-setting preferences for the conduct of international relations. If the “unipolar” world, taken for granted since
the end of the Cold War, describes US international primacy, “unpolarity” might be defined by a decided absence of pre- ponderant power. Before the bipolar era of US-Soviet competi- tion, Great Britain’s ocean-borne merchant empire held broad primacy, but its power was frequently shared and variously contested by a concert of other great powers (“multipolar”) – France, Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany’s various iterations, Japan, and an emerging United States.
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After two catastrophic world wars, which exposed the inherent volatility of the multipolar balance of power, the Soviet Union and the US established a bipolar, hierarchical international sys- tem. Independent great powers still existed; some as allies and clients to either the Soviet Union or the US (sometimes first
to one, and then the other), and some pursued “non-aligned” policies. But they all subsisted according to an international framework forged by one of the two superpowers.
Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the hierarchies did not disappear so much as shift in favor of a so-called "Washington Consensus", which emphasised globalisation, free markets, and (albeit less explicitly) liberal democracy. Supported by
an international multilateral infrastructure to incentivise, govern, and police a liberalisation agenda, the US presided over enormous international influence and an era of unprece- dented (if also inconsistent) peace and prosperity. Meanwhile, the dearth of credible competing ideologies to the American model – and the sheer magnitude of US economic, military, and cultural hegemony – led to musings about American "hyperpuissance" and the "end of history."
By any measure, the US is and will remain the world’s colossus for years to come. Yet, a series of stumbles – economic and geopolitical, exogenous and self-inflicted – have dramati- cally narrowed the margins of American superpower. Rapid advances in technology, economic dynamism abroad and diminished Western civilizational confidence (stemming from recessions, elongated foreign adventure, and domestic politi- cal gridlock) have helped accelerate the US’ relative decline. Meanwhile, an increasingly internally-fixated and cynical American body politic – which catapulted Donald Trump to power, ironically in part due to those same issues – looks set to supercharge those same trends.
But while Western decline has given rise to a cottage industry of analysis, commentary and even science fiction about the likeliest successors to American hegemony, the “post-Ameri- can world” will have few structural parallels to the era of Pax Americana. In many respects, US hegemony was a unique phenomenon in the globalist structures it built, the inclusive power-sharing it engendered, and the array of rules and norms