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A tale of two worlds: core and periphery in the post-cold war era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2009
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As the world moves away from the familiar bipolar cold war era, many international relations theorists have renewed an old debate about which is more stable: a world with two great powers or a world with many great powers. Based on the chief assumptions of structural realism—namely, that the international system is characterized by anarchy and that states are unitary actors seeking to survive in this anarchic system—some security analysts are predicting that a world of several great powers will lead to a return to the shifting alliances and instabilities of the multipolar era that existed prior to World War II. For instance, John Mearsheimer argues that “prediction[s] of peace in a multipolar Europe [are] flawed.” Thomas Christensen and Jack Snyder argue that states in a multipolar world can follow either the pre-World War I or the pre-World War II alliance pattern, thus implying that a third course is improbable. They further assert that “the fundamental, invariant structural feature, international anarchy, generally selects and socializes states to form balancing alignments in order to survive in the face of threats from aggressive competitors.” The realist argument predicts that great powers in a self-help international system will balance one another through arms races and alliance formations.
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References
1. We define a “great power” as a country possessing the will and the capability to alter events throughout the international system. For more on the debate about whether a bipolar or multipolar world is more stable, see Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979)Google Scholar; Rosecrance, Richard, “Bipolarity, Multipolarity and the Future,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 10 (09 1966), pp. 314–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deutsch, Karl and Singer, J. David, ”Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability,” World Politics 16 (04 1964), pp. 390–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gaddis, John Lewis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System,” International Security 10 (Spring 1986), pp. 99–142CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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55. Force has been used in other ways in the periphery to provide for greater security, a stronger state, or both. Hanlon described South Africa's policy of destabilizing its neighbors in the early 1980s as a policy designed to ensure South Africa's economic hegemony and to prevent its neighbors from carrying out attacks against its apartheid system. Napper argued that Somalia's 1977 intervention in the Ogaden was designed to add the Somalian population there to the existing Somalian state. See Hanlon, Joseph, Beggar Your Neighbours (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1986)Google Scholar; and Napper, Larry C., “The Ogaden War,” in George, Managing U.S.Soviet Rivalry, pp. 225–53Google Scholar.
56. Some states, such as South Korea, have prospered even while maintaining large military budgets, but these states are the exception rather than the rule in the periphery.
57. Walt, The Origins of Alliances.
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59. We are grateful to Peter Katzenstein for reminding us that a leader in civilian technologies is in a position to become a leader in military technologies.
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79. Ibid., p. 150.
80. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics.”
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86. The narrowing of core state interests in the periphery is paralleled by a consensus about these interests. While the first tendency mitigates against intervention by the great powers, the second heightens the opportunities for such intervention. In sum, the great powers have fewer motives to intervene, but when they do find reason, they will act with less hesitation, as they did in Iraq.
87. One potential new form of continual engagement is through international peacekeeping forces. For a review of possibilities, see the conference papers on “United Nations Peace-Keeping” as published in Survey, vol. 32, 05–06 1990Google Scholar. A more probable form of engagement is through the creation of a diplomatic peace corps by the core states. Great powers such as the United States could be called upon to provide arbitrators and negotiators for crisis situations. Chester Crocker's role in the Angolan-Namibian peace accords could serve as a model for future engagements.
88. For a discussion of these capabilities, see Ross, Andrew L., “World Order and Third World Arms Production,” in Katz, James Everett, ed., The Implications of Third World Military Industrialization: Sowing the Serpents' Teeth (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1986), pp. 277–92Google Scholar.
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90. On Africa's declining wealth, for example, see World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 11 1989)Google Scholar.
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92. Regarding macroeconomic structural adjustment, see Ayres, Robert L., Banking on the Poor: The World Bank and World Poverty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar. The Japanese foreign assistance budget includes one of the smallest allocations for grants of any aid-giving country. Rather than giving grants, Japan prefers to give loans that are tied to the export or import of some Japanese product or investment. Under the Reagan administration, the United States also moved toward tying more of its foreign assistance projects to American commercial interests. Even the middle powers that have been renowned for giving aid based on “humane internationalism” are increasingly tying assistance to commercial projects. See Stokke, Olav, ed., Western Middle Powers: The Determinants of the Aid Policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1989Google Scholar.
93. See Krasner, , Structural Conflict; and Keohane, , After Hegemony, p. 253Google Scholar.
94. There are some conservative organizations (such as “Edintsvo” [unity] and the United Workers' Front) that seek to revive the Soviet Union as the center of world socialism, but these organizations are small and have no real power.
95. By isolationist, we do not mean autarkic. On the contrary, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin seek to integrate the Soviet Union and Russia with the rest of the international system as much as possible. What we are emphasizing is that neither the Soviet Union nor Russia is capable of influencing international issues that do not deal directly with the Soviet Union, as was evident during the Gulf War.
96. On this point, see also Rosecrance, , “Bipolarity, Multipolarity and the Future,” pp. 315–16Google Scholar.
97. In “Back to the Future, Part II,” pp. 191–92, Hoffmann, Stanley notes that the bipolar world of Thucydides was certainly not stable. In “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World,” International Security 13 (Fall 1988), pp. 55–79Google Scholar, John Mueller emphasizes neither bipolarity nor nuclear weapons but instead argues that the major states learned from the destruction of World War II that war is not a viable option.
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