In the previous post,  I argued that the short-lived era of unipolar American hegemony has given way to  a new international dispensation best characterized as heteropolar rather than multipolar. This metamorphosis may be attributed mainly to a series of colossal strategic misjudgements and the profusion of diverse sources of power and influence globally. The implications for security and diplomacy are profound.

To be sure, and as was the case with the multipolar world dominated by the European Empires from the 15th to 19th centuries, there are once again many poles. But this time the differences between them far outweigh the similarities. These players share little in common.  Unlike in previous eras, the heterogeneous nature of today’s competing actors renders comparison difficult and measurement even more so.

That said, and although this is very much a new order in the making, we can begin to trace the contours and discern the content of heteropolarity, a condition which I believe will increasingly define international relations. New poles are forming, and old poles are evolving. In terms of identifying the major heteropoles in the early years of the 21st century, the following thoughts come immediately to mind.

The USA, even with a slightly leaner (but still growing) defence budget, will for the foreseeable future remain the world’s leading military, or hard power. It will continue as a leading centre of R&D, innovation, private enterprise, and post-secondary education; the notion of broad decline is hotly contested. However, as predicted by President Eisenhower in his farewell address over 50 years ago, an increasing reliance upon military strength is rendering America the praetorian pole. Its fundamental economic and industrial position in relative terms is fading fast, a trend accelerated by the hollowing out of its manufacturing sector, and compounded by the continuing financial crisis and the cost of foreign wars. Within a decade or two the mantle of leadership, and pride of place as the epicentre of the world economy, may well pass to the Asia-Pacific region generally, and to China in particular – with India not that far behind.

Together, these two countries will soon represent over one half of the world’s population. China is already the fastest growing manufacturing and industrial economy and the largest provider of consumer goods. With an increasing reliance upon advanced technologies, China is moving rapidly up the value-added chain. For its part, India is now the world’s back office, call centre and software incubator, offering services in the English language at prices no one can match.  Each of these poles is looking for increased recognition and for ways to advance their growing interests. Unlike the old superpowers, however, their middle classes are burgeoning rather than shrinking, and they are not rattling sabres.

Elsewhere, post-tsunami Japan, though often overlooked, is still the world’s third largest economy and a huge participant in international trade, investment and finance. Overtaken in GDP terms last year by China, the prospect of having to accommodate new rivals throughout the rest of rising Asia is likely to present Japan with significant political and cultural challenges.

Brazil today is closer than ever to the realization of its enormous potential. That country has secured its place as the political and economic dynamo of Latin America, and has become much more assertive in the international arena, and particularly in organizations such as the WTO. Brazil’s newfound heteropolar identity may find expression as a champion of cultural diversity or as the leader of the Global South.

Russia, as a residual empire with still-extant nuclear capability, seems intent upon consolidating its role as Eurasia’s energy and resource pole. These ambitions are abetted by its vast geo-strategic presence, memories of greatness and the perceived need to reassert its influence both in the “near abroad” and beyond. Europeans, especially, are wary of their growing dependence.

And, speaking of Europe… Beset by the current debt and monetary crisis, it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. While it will take time, and likely another recession, the Euro-zone’s present problems will eventually be worked through. Over the longer term, the continent’s strong suit of peace, prosperity, safe and livable cities, excellent public infrastructure, a rich historical heritage and thriving artistic and cultural life suggests that the EU is destined to lead the world in soft power, the power of attraction. The source of the Europe’s strength and the basis of its comparative advantage will reside not in a common defence and security policy, but in the demonstration effect, in the ability of Europe to project its success by example internationally.

Heteropoles are forming in all shapes and sizes. Certain countries, such as Turkey, Iran, South Africa, Egypt and Mexico, as well as regions, such as Southeast Asia and the Gulf states, will almost certainly figure in this new order.  Yet the emergence of a heteropolar world, one in which the drivers and ends of power and influence are no longer easily meshed, will inevitably cause friction. Among and between poles, edges are sharp, competition fierce, objectives divergent and interests difficult to align. Direct connection on issues of mutual concern, such as trade, the environment, and intellectual property, has already become difficult. Finding the basis for bargaining will be tough, the identification of trade-offs elusive and the act of balancing dizzyingly complex.

As has happened with the global economy, volatility in international relations is likely to become the new normal. Fragile states will fail. Sparks will fly. The trick will be to find ways to prevent fires. In that regard, while deterrence may still have a role, the actual use of armed force is unlikely to be of much utility.

Ready or not, heterpolarity means that it is now diplomacy which must be placed front and centre.

Almost a decade ago, at an annnual conference of the International Studies Association, I heard my colleague James Der Derian from Brown University use the word heterpolar to describe the new world order. I had not come across the term before, and was uncertain as to its precise meaning. Still,  it struck me at the time as an original idea, and those are rare. It lodged in my mind.

I took a first crack at developing the concept in Guerrilla Diplomacy, where I defined heterpolarity as: An emerging world system in which competing states or groups of states derive their relative power and influence from dissimilar sources – social, economic, political, military, cultural. The disparate vectors which empower these heterogeneous poles are difficult to compare or measure; stability in the age of globalization will therefore depend largely upon the diplomatic functions of knowledge-driven problem solving and complex balancing.

In preparation for a forthcoming conference at the London Academy of Diplomacy, I have been trying to further elaborate the implications associated with the emergence of a heteropolar world order. Those with an interest in the evolution of international relations may find the line of argument worth pursuing.

For the past few hundred years, high-level statecraft has been concerned mainly with attempts at balancing power in an ever-changing world.  From the age of European empires through to the end of the Cold War, the indicators of national power – armies, navies, missiles, warheads, economies, populations, territories – were carefully calculated, and then balanced and codified in an attempt to engineer stability. Numbers were important; alliances were made and treaties entered into for purposes of expressing or extending agreed balances. When imbalances arose, as they inevitably did, negotiations were re-opened. If the talks failed, war usually ensued.

And so was world order, however punctuated by periods of great upheaval, fashioned.

From the Congress of Vienna through the Treaty of Versailles and beyond, the search for international security turned on the efforts of diplomats to calibrate power in a manner which produced a workable form of equilibrium.  The threat or use of armed force served as the international policy instrument of choice and the ultimate arbiter in dispute resolution.  For the likes of Metternich, Castlereagh and Bismark, not to mention Churchill, Stalin and Kissinger, power was essentially a function of the ability to compel your adversary to submit to your will. Stability was engineered by fine tuning relationships within and between alliances, first in a multipolar, and then, following World War II, in a bipolar system dominated by the US and USSR.

All of this changed with the implosion of the Soviet Union and the advent of American uni-polarity in the early 1990s. This was a triumphal, if fleeting moment when history was said to have ended and the neoliberal Washington Consensus of decontrol and market freedom was imposed wherever it was not embraced. For large corporations, financial entrepreneurs, those with surplus capital, and more than a few felons, these were halcyon days.

But nothing lasts forever.  By the autumn of 2008, with the global economy heading into the worst recession since the 1930s, it had become clear that the one size fits all prescription of wholesale privatization and deregulation was not going to end well. That realization – in conjunction with a string of disastrous strategic choices perhaps best symbolized by the violent starburst of shock and awe unleashed over Baghdad in 2004 and the subsequent failed occupation – resulted in the end of American hegemony. Today, America’s prestige and influence are haemorrhaging. In the Asia Pacific and elsewhere, new poles are rising and the epicentre of global power is shifting.

Among the commentariat, and in both the academic and scholarly press, the mainstream view is that world politics have returned to some kind of a multipolar dispensation. The prefix multi suggests the existence of multiple poles of more or less the same type, as was the case in Europe, for example, in the 19^th century. From that observation it follows that traditional means can again be used to establish some kind of new balance, one based largely upon conventional assumptions about the nature of power and the use of influence.

As is so often the case with the received wisdom, there are good reasons to doubt this proposition.  With the advent of globalization, international power and influence have become atomized. Not only are they highly dispersed geographically, but the sources and substance of power and influence – hard or soft, smart, whatever – now vary enormously. The times when well-acquainted  negotiators came to the table with similar cards in their hands have gone forever.

New players. New rules.

This is a whole new game, one characterized not by similarity, but by difference;  not by the return of multipolarity, but by the advent of heteropolarity.

We will look more specifically at the shape of our heteropolar world order in the making in the next post.

In the previous post, I tried to show that during the 1980s and ‘90s the paradigm for the delivery of Canadian international policy shifted fundamentally. Over the course of those years, there was a deliberate move away from an emphasis on traditional, state-to-state interaction in the direction of public diplomacy (PD). This form of international political exchange features diplomats communicating directly with foreign populations and cultivating partnerships with civil society actors – NGOs, businesspeople, journalists and academics.  I also made the case that the PD formula, in conjunction with the right combination of political will and bureaucratic skill, can produce impressive results, especially if directed towards projects with broad popular and media appeal, such as a land mine ban or efforts to improve the lot of children in conflict zones.

Looking back, it can be seen that Canadian PD reached its apogee under Foreign Minister Axworthy (1996-2000). At a time of severe government-wide cost-cutting, Canada fundamentally down-sized its international ambitions, but that exercise was not translated into a retreat from the field. To be sure, the large scale, long range, potentially world changing projects of the post-war decades  – poverty eradication, conflict resolution, global environmental conservation – were gone. In their place, Canadian officials proposed a series of special projects – for example, curbs on the trading of “blood” diamonds and small arms – designed for implementation within media-friendly diplomatic niches. They did not always succeed, but each initiative featured a defined start and finish. Upon completion, the Minister could simply call a press conference, declare victory and move on.

Minister Axworthy learned, and very quickly, how the use of soft power could make a virtue of necessity. Conventional diplomacy was still necessary, but it was no longer sufficient when it came to influencing foreign governments. That influence was best brought to bear through their publics, and through international public opinion, especially when compulsion was not an option and democratization had expanded the scope for exercising influence indirectly.

The requirements associated with this burst of activism imposed significant costs upon DFAIT’s staff, already struggling under the burden of increased demands and reduced resources.  Moreover, some strategic opportunities were missed. In 1996-97, for instance, the department’s Communications Bureau proposed the launch of an ambitious project which would have vaulted Canada into the digital age by establishing an integrated global presence based upon satellite broadcasting, the internet, public diplomacy, international education and branding.  In the end, however, at a time of diminishing capacity across government, the Canadian International Information Strategy (CIIS) lost out in Cabinet to the campaign to ban land mines (later christened the “Ottawa Process”). Canada might today be more effective and influential in the world had circumstances – particularly timing and the economic environment – been more propitious during that critical period.

In bureaucracy, there is often a lag between action and reflection. The Axworthy years were so frenetic that there was little time to think through the full implications of his program in terms of the design, structure and operations of the foreign ministry. As a result, generic interest in PD within the DFAIT apparatus actually peaked following Axworthy’s departure. For the first five years of the new century, significant efforts were made weave PD into the department’s modus operandi. A new PD Secretariat was established in Washington to coordinate advocacy activities in the USA. The idea of  “mainstreaming public diplomacy” was central to a comprehensive reform package launched by DFAIT’s  Deputy Ministers in 2004 and entitled Building a 21^st Century Foreign Ministry, or FAC21. When Prime Minister Chretien stepped down the same year, the new leader, Paul Martin, commissioned a comprehensive international policy review. In the final, five volume report, A Place of Pride and Influence in the World, PD was highlighted as “the new diplomacy”.

Although it has been scarcely more than a decade since Axworthy left office, the years of Canadian public diplomatic activism now seem long ago and far away. Ironically, despite the many practical successes and, later, some focused internal interest, PD never received the extent of budgetary support which might have been anticipated. This is doubly curious because although Axworthy’s Liberal successors, John Manley, Bill Graham and Pierre Pettigrew, did not share his enthusiasm for human security, they did seem to buy into PD. Manley mandated a public diplomacy working group within the secretariat conducting his – albeit short-lived -  Foreign Policy Update in 2001, and beginning in 2003 Graham used the interactive potential of the internet to reach out to Canadians with his Foreign Policy Dialogue. But political interest in undertaking concrete diplomatic initiatives had waned well before the January, 2006 election of a Conservative minority government. Almost immediately, the previous administration’s policy review was shelved, government communications were centralized and placed under strict control, and DFAIT officials were gagged.

Canadian public diplomacy, already in decline and tainted lethally by its association with the outgoing Liberal government, effectively disappeared.

Memories of independent Canadian leadership on global issues are receding, the drift towards continental integration continues.

In May 2011 the Conservative party was returned with a majority, and John Baird, a prominent and influential Tory insider, was named Foreign Minister. The new minister speaks of the need for a “tough”  foreign policy, and the overall emphasis favours the military over diplomacy and development assistance. Yet there are stirrings within DFAIT of a possible PD renewal. A modest experiment has been launched allowing several of Canada’s European ambassadors to engage foreign audiences using social media platforms Twitter and Facebook, and this enterprise may eventually be expanded to include the participation of all Canadian missions.

That said, even under a best case scenario Canada will still be trailing most of its diplomatic competition, both within the OECD and beyond. Unless and until DFAIT regains the full confidence, trust and respect of its political masters, and is once again called upon to perform, any return to the halcyon days of Canadian PD activism seems unlikely.

I have recently been reviewing a new book entitled Diplomacy in the Digital Age, which is a collection of essays prepared in honour of Allan Gotlieb, a former Undersecretary of State  for External Affairs and Canada’s ambassador in Washington from 1981-89. It is an absorbing anthology, and contains valuable entries penned in some instances by those who worked with Mr. Gotlieb during his time in the USA. Quite apart from eliciting specific reactions to the content of the volume, reading it has also spurred me to reflect on the larger issue of what became of Canada’s once considerable contribution to the study and practice of public diplomacy (PD).

The Government of Canada was until fairly recently regarded as a somewhat of PD pioneer. That reputation would now be difficult to sustain. Indeed, I have come to the rather stark realization that whatever this country may at one time have achieved by way of advancing its interests through PD, those days are now long gone.

In official and political circles in Ottawa today, little or nothing is heard of PD. Diplomatic representatives can no longer connect directly with foreign populations unless their scripts have been pre-cleared, and even the use of the term has been discouraged. Within the foreign ministry (DFAIT), the function has been almost completely de-resourced.

Hence the questions must be put: what, exactly, did Canada manage to achieve in terms of public diplomacy outcomes over the past several decades?  Why has PD fallen from grace? Can any lessons of broader relevance be adduced?

Canadian academics, and several several serving and former diplomats have over time been active in the conceptualization and analysis of PD. Publications such as Allan Gotlieb’s I’ll Be With You in a Minute, Mr. Ambassador, Gordon Smith’s Virtual Diplomacy, Rob McRae and Don Hubert’s Human Security and the New Diplomacy, Andy Cooper’s Celebrity Diplomacy, Evan Potter’s Branding Canada, and perhaps even my own Guerrilla Diplomacy have been seen by some to break new ground in the field.

In addition to these intellectual contributions, the Canadian foreign ministry has been deeply involved in the practical application of PD. Beginning in the 1980s, most of Canada’s major diplomatic undertakings – the 1981 Cancun Summit on North-South relations; Prime Minister Trudeau’s 1984 peace crusade; the acid rain and free trade pacts with the USA;  the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone layer depletion, and; the Commonwealth campaign to end apartheid in southern Africa – included a significant PD component. Even if not labeled as public diplomacy at the time, a willingness to connect directly with foreign populations, the strategic use of the media, and tactics such as forging partnerships with business and civil society were integral to each of these initiatives.

In early in the 1990s, and quite explicitly so by the second half of the decade, PD moved even closer to the centre of Canadian international policy.  In the organization and delivery of the 1992 Rio Summit on Environment and Development,  throughout the so-called “fish war” with Spain in 1994, and particularly during the four year tenure of Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy (1996-2000), PD, and the related notion of soft power, were the order of the day.

Charged with implementing the severe expenditure reductions  associated with the government-wide Program Review exercise of the mid-1990s, Axworthy must have concluded that the page had to be turned on old ways, and that global order projects would accordingly have to be set aside. But he was clearly not prepared to accept that this meant inaction. To the contrary, he demanded that DFAIT officials identify innovative ways for Canada to “make a difference”. He was determined to find opportunity in adversity, even if faced with opposition on the part of the US and other major powers, and indeed of many Canadians.

DFAIT staff rose to the challenge, and came forth with a series of proposals. In the campaigns leading to the signature of the Treaty Banning Land Mines in 1997 and to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 1998,  Axworthy attained his objectives by nurturing  partnerships with international civil society and similarly-inclined countries. He also reached out in an unprecedented fashion to the journalists, the academic community and NGOs at home, mainly through creation of the Canadian Centre for Foreign Policy Development and the Public Diplomacy Fund at DFAIT.

The same approach, in varying degrees, was seen in initiatives intended to limit the spread of small arms, to underscore the plight of children in war zones and curb the use of child soldiers, and to restrict the sale of “conflict diamonds” through the launch of the Kimberly Process. Canada also sponsored the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, whose final report, The Responsibility to Protect, though initially overtaken by the events of 9/11, resurfaced and was adopted in principle at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2005.

Taken together, Axworthy’s achievements were artfully – and, in part, retrospectively – packaged by officials into a remarkably coherent program which came to be known as the Human Security Agenda. Although that policy direction did not survive for long following the Minister’s departure from office, the record of activity in the second half of the 1990s stands nonetheless as enduring testament to the power and potential of Canadian PD. It was a high point which has not since been revisited. To a significant extent, I would suggest that whatever remains Canada’s positive international reputation – its brand –  still relies on these, and earlier accomplishments.

I will return to an assessment of PD’s decline in the next post.

In the last entry, I tried to illustrate how changes in domestic Canadian politics, in combination with the imposition of capacity reductions on the Department of Foreign Affairs, had contributed to a turn away from this country’s internationalist traditions. Today, I continue that line of inquiry with an exploration of the profound shifts in the nature and orientation of media coverage, as well as the impact of Canada’s rapidly changing demography.

As the Euro-zone’s continuing debt and monetary crisis has underscored, growing global economic interdependence means that all nations are vulnerable and exposed to events unfolding beyond their frontiers. At the same time, travel, tourism, immigration and the Internet have contributed to a vast increase in cosmopolitanism. These realities, however, are rarely reflected in the overall news mix, and less so in the content behind the headlines. Even as Canada’s increasingly diverse and multicultural  population charges ahead ever more completely into the culture and ethos of globalization, the coverage of international affairs in the mainstream media – television, radio, newspapers – continues to slide. To the extent that the media informs and conditions the public and political spheres, this paradox will have broader implications.

Why the general pullback from international affairs reporting? Among the explanations: the crisis in journalism associated with the rise of on-line publishing, and the resulting budget and personnel cuts; media multiplication and fragmentation; a loss of institutional memory; the closing or consolidation of foreign bureaux; a preference for shorter and less complex stories; an absence of analysis; a fixation on personalities the visually and emotionally sensational… earthquakes, tidal waves, family tragedies, plane and train wrecks.  Fewer journalists, with increasingly stretched resources, are covering the IR ‘beat’, and those that do tend to prefer writing about the military, especially if they have been embedded. Meanwhile, citizen reporters with hand held digital devices provide an increasing amount of the raw feed – think about the dominant images of  9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Arab Spring or the storming today of the British Embassy in Tehran. Crowdsourcing rules. For these reasons and more, there appears to be a widespread conviction among media managers that Canadians, for example, just aren’t as interested as they once were in receiving professional reporting on world affairs.  Those who are have little choice but to rely upon specialized sources and the web for anything but the most basic information.

These changes in media structure and reporting priorities have both prefigured and reflected major shifts in the public environment.  From roughly the end of WWII until the late 1980s, the notion of a bi-lingual, bi-cultural, ‘true north strong and free’ was one of the mainstays behind Canadian internationalism. There existed in Canada a broad, comfortable, middle class consensus around the most central aspects of international policy, which included containment and deterrence, but also a commitment to development assistance and peacekeeping. Such was the essence of Cold War comfort. But those old verities no longer fit. In the intervening years, that entente has been riven, and its demise hastened by the emergence and growing popularity of highly particularistic, single interest lobbies. The pre-occupations of these groups range from from Timor to Tibet, from rainforests to reefs, and from alternative energy to “ethical” oil. They include gender, human rights, small arms, and child soldiers, to name a few.  It is difficult just to reach, let alone attempt to draw together such a fragmented constituency.

The crumbling away of a cohesive and supportive domestic  foundation for Canadian internationalism – and Canadian diplomacy – seems also to be associated with the rise of non-state actors. Trends in the domestic polity are now deeply influenced by the activities of all sorts of new players – philanthropic NGOs, transnational businesses and religious extremists come immediately to mind.  All compete for attention. So, too do the international machinations of prominent individuals such as Bono, Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie and George Soros. States and statesmen have had to make room for celebrity diplomats and civil society.

In recent years, and especially since the Great Recession of 2008-10, job insecurity, stagnant or shrinking incomes, and a growing disquiet over matters closer to home have joined with the rise of issue-driven advocacy and generational change to increase levels of discomfort. They have also induced fatigue, apathy, and cynicism.

Today many citizens, perhaps feeling adrift in this turbulent and confusing world, appear to have redrawn the lines of their individual moral engagement in closer proximity to the front door. Beset by lingering doubts about governance at home and facing a range of vexing, if not intractable challenges abroad, many seem to be re-scaling their engagement in the world. In most  OECD countries the majority of people now see their government’s priorities as overwhelmingly domestic – health care, education, the environment and managing the economy dominate, with most issues related to international affairs (defence, aid and foreign policy) barely registering in comparison.

Whether anaesthetized by spin doctors, spoon fed by embedded journalists, or turned off by endless streams of infotainment, people everywhere seem to be paying less attention to either the world or to their place in it. There are occasional spikes -  the invasion of Iraq, the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, echoes from events in Iran or North Korea. But these are at best minor peaks in a valley of indifference. Global issues, including the hardy perennials of peace, development and human rights are rarely rated among the most pre-eminent of popular pre-occupations.

Now the province mainly of specialists and experts, international policy has come to exist in a kind of floating world, a disconnected bubble somehow severed from the everyday and animated more by a sense of visceral values than an appreciation of concrete interests. It has become somewhat of an exotic, far removed from more pressing or immediate concerns. As was demonstrated convincingly during Canada’s spring 2011 election campaign, citizens are looking inwards, just when they should be looking out, and this bodes ill for any kind of a broadly-based internationalist revival.