Working in theory.

AuthorModelski, George
PositionLetters - Letter to the Editor

As a life-long student of international relations with a penchant for theory, I feel challenged to comment on the theoretical portion of Clifford Kupchan's "Real Democratik" (Fall 2004)--in particular the prediction that "the contemporary international order", viewed as both "normatively good" and "empirically inevitable", will be marked for the next several decades by "unprecedented American unipolarity."

Like its cousins, bipolarity and multipolarity, unipolarity has been a key term of international relations. But the time has come to take another look at it. The conventional view equates polarity with raw power--a concentrated distribution of military and economic capacity. (I used this approach in my 1974 monograph, World Power Concentrations, one of the first, if not the first, attempts actually to measure unipolarity.) That is the metric (indexed by military expenses) basically used by Kupchan.

The main reason for taking another look at the "raw power" metric is the rising complexity of contemporary world politics. Most day-today international problems are increasingly processed in institutional and multilateral contexts, such as summit meetings, regional bodies, international financial institutions and the like. In this context, institutional power means decisional or voting power. Unipolarity here means control of a "one party" system, and is measured by the ability to obtain favorable outcomes--and one of the relevant metrics is world public opinion.

I tend to agree with Kupchan that in today's international system, unipolarity probably prevails in terms of raw (military) power, but I do not think it obviously does so in relation to institutional power. In fact, some recent trends point toward the growth of a "bi- or multiparty" system in that area.

Multipolarity is a fact in the world economy. Two or three decades ahead, unipolarity is still probable for forces of global reach (commanding sea, air and space) but not for all the aspects of military power.

If unipolarity claims to be the unique source of the public goods of world order, then its exercise labors under all the well-known burdens and criticisms of monopoly power: excessive costs combined with underperformance. Because it yields high profits but deteriorates into incompetence, a monopoly attracts competition and generates serious conflicts.

On such grounds, a monopoly is morally suspect, but there is an exception: when a monopoly naturally emerges from a process of...

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