Introduction.
Farer, Tom
POLITICAL AND HUMANITARIAN CRISES LIKE THE LIBYAN REVOLT OR
GRADUALLY unfolding humanitarian challenges like climate change are
reminders that, despite the greatly enhanced number, influence, and
resources of transnational nongovernmental actors and networks as well
as the multiplication of intergovernmental forums and institutions,
powerful states remain the principal players in the drama of global
existence. Their acts and omissions can determine our collective fate.
Of course, behind the affective symbols and operational structures of
states are the elites who control and deploy them, however transiently.
They are simply human beings filled with the same demons and doubts,
passions and premises, both conscious and unconscious, as the rest of
us. Yet by virtue of their control of the state, those elites enjoy an
agency that few others can rival unless they in turn succeed in assuming
control of the state's symbols and structures.
To be sure, today's governing elites are subject to more and
more varied nonmaterial constraints than the "deciders" (if I
may borrow a word from former president George W. Bush) of earlier
centuries when the known world of most people lay within a twenty-mile
radius of their villages. Even then, however, the will of persons at the
apex of the state was not untrammeled. For centuries, transnational
associations of knights, the Templars being one of the most famous,
enjoyed a broad autonomy wherever they headquartered. Before there were
universal legal norms, there were the norms declared and applied to
Christian monarchs and lesser nobles by the popes and promulgated and
monitored through the church's vast transnational network of
priests and orders--norms such as respect for the security of persons on
pilgrimage. Markets also acted as constraints. If extortionately treated
by one European monarch, experts in the development and production of
weapons could move themselves to the domain of a more accommodating one.
The same applied to bankers. As the power of religious sanctions for
moral norms ebbed during the nineteenth century, secular conscience
constituencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross rose in
their wake to exercise some limits on the discretion of rulers. And in
the post-Napoleonic years, rulers of states integrated into the
monarch-defending concert of Europe experienced the pressure for
conformity to majority will as well as the benefits of collective action
that characterize intergovernmental organizations.
Still, the radical reduction in the cost and ease of movement and
communications, the spread of education and urbanization, the triumph
(conceivably transient) of liberal ideas and practices in trade and
investment, and the related elaboration of intergovernmental norms and
institutions, transnational enterprises, nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), and now social and religious networks (national as well as
transnational) have diversified identities and multiplied communities of
interest and value. The totality of these developments has necessarily
increased the costs of actions by elected as well as unelected leaders
which cut sharply across the grain of widely accepted behavioral
norms.(1) Nevertheless, there remains scope for the exercise of brute
will, whether in choosing war over a difficult peace as in the invasion
of Iraq, or in choosing decimation over conciliation as in the second
Chechnya war, or in discounting tomorrow's climatic disasters in
favor of today's uninterrupted growth in gross domestic product
(GDP).
Yes, state elites can be colonized by other actors and their
authority to command can erode if they ignore widely shared norms. They
are not immunized from the passions, ideals, and prudential judgments
circulating in their social environment. At the end of the day, however,
states with their symbols, structures, and governors do have a measure
of independence, and through their acts and omissions they decide, as
they are now deciding in the case of Libya, who shall live and who shall
die and who shall eat and who shall go hungry. Any international public
policy journal must at some point, therefore, turn its attention to
pivotal states. And if it is at the same time a journal concerned
particularly with international norms and transnational institutions as
well as actors, it would be quite natural for it to mate the two by
asking authors to illuminate the multilateral diplomacy of states that,
by virtue of their power and prestige, their internal solidarity and
diplomatic finesse, play or are coming to play important roles in the
structuring and operation of global governance processes.
The multilateral diplomacy of the United States and its European
allies has a long and well-chartered history. So it seemed sensible to
devote space and intellectual energy to states that are just now
emerging as consequential actors, not only because less is generally
known about their approaches to and uses of multilateralism, but also
because they are inevitably undergoing a process of social learning. In
their position, improvisation and continuous adjustment in light of
experience and discourse with other actors is bound to mark their
diplomacy. Even if they already appear to have a distinct vision of the
kind of international system that will best serve their respective
national interests and values, that vision is likely to continue
evolving as it encounters the hard realities and the unexpected
opportunities stemming from the experience of competition and
cooperation under conditions only partially fixed.
There was an unavoidable element of the arbitrary in deciding which
states to include in this special issue. Influence obviously involves
much more than the size of one's armed forces and GDP. In
international fora, a quite small state with a tiny army (a state like
Norway) can punch well above its weight, for instance by helping to
channel the concerns of strong NGOs and social networks, by its
association with the era's zeitgeist, and by its readiness to take
a relatively cosmopolitan position in most issue areas. More generally,
a state with a vision of national interest that emphasizes schemes of
mutually advantageous cooperation with other states is likely to play a
much larger role in the evolution of global governance than one
similarly endowed in terms of wealth or military capacity that seems
determined to favor self-aggrandizement at every conjuncture, whatever
the costs to other actors. No doubt rogue states like North Korea have a
certain temporary consequence, but they are necessarily the object, not
one of the subjects, of multilateral diplomacy.
In the end, we chose to focus on five states: Brazil, Russia,
India, China, and Turkey. Because we believed that the authors would
require a good deal of space in order to illuminate the causes, general
structure, exemplary instances, and trajectories of each country's
multilateral diplomacy, and because we wanted to provoke and to help
structure discourse about the nature of multilateral diplomacy and about
the kind of global system that may be evolving independently of the will
of national actors, we concluded that for these purposes we would need
to use both this entire issue and a special section in volume 18, number
2. In part for editorially contingent reasons we decided to include in
this issue the studies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Moreover,
editorially linking these four countries is consistent with the growing
prominence that the "BRIC" acronym and idea have acquired in
international relations discourse. While Turkey may not yet have quite
the political and economic heft of any BRIC state, its innovative and
expansive diplomacy as well as its bridging role between the West and
West Asia and its experiment in Islamic democracy have given it a
salience we chose not to ignore.
Preceding and, I believe, enriching the country studies in this
issue (and the one that will appear in volume 18) are the two Global
Insights. Both begin with the premise that "the unipolar world is
passing into history." In "The 'New' Multilateralism
of the Twenty-First Century," Fen Osler Hampson and Paul Heinbecker speculate about the impact that emerging powers will have on
intergovernmental institutions. They underscore the tension between, on
the one hand, calls for more transparency and accountability and, on the
other, the imperative of more efficient collective action in the face of
intensifying threats to human welfare. Observing the ongoing transition
to a new multipolar power structure, in "Emerging Powers in an Age
of Disorder," Randall Schweller asks and proposes an answer to the
question, "What sort of global order will emerge on the other side
of [this] transition?" Are the "optimists" right when
they envision the smooth integration of emerging powers into the
Western-made liberal world order? Are the "pessimists" more
persuasive in their anticipation of an ugly replay of past power
transitions? Or are they equally unpersuasive in assessing the prospect
for multilateral cooperation?
I want to congratulate all of the authors for their rich
contributions to this issue.
Notes
After serving fourteen years as the dean of the Josef Korbel School
of International Studies (1996-2010), Tom Farer, coeditor of this
journal, has become University Professor at the University of Denver. He
is a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of
International Law and the Human Rights Quarterly. His most recent book
is Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The
Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
(1.) In general, normative constraints restricting the choices of
private-sector leaders also have multiplied and become more
consequential.
