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 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.

South of the border, there have in recent years been a growing number of voices expressing serious concern over the militarization of American life.

I certainly share that sentiment.

Is an F-16 fly over and trooping the colours  really appropriate for the opening of the Super Bowl?

The USA is apparently becoming the Praetorian pole in an increasingly  heterpolar world order. Still, I think that a debate of this nature is culturally healthy, and have always admired the fact that some of the most trenchant, even withering criticism of U.S. policy and actions comes from domestic sources, including not least that country’s many military academies and war colleges.

Even in the mainstream media, a decade’s worth of assumptions used to justify deploying the military to pursue the epically misguided global war on terror are finally being questioned.

One could only wish that a similar degree of the scrutiny accorded defence issues in the USA  might one day be evident in the discourse on international policyin Canada.

Apart from a few faint echoes in the academy and a handful of specialized publications, that discussion here  is practically non-existent. I find that most unfortunate.

Canadians need to start talking about the kind of military that they require in the face of all identifiable threats and challenges. They must then somehow try and square the outcome of that conversation against a thoughtful consideration of whether or not the defence capability that they need matches the one that they have got.

I have my doubts.

* * * * * * * * * *

Post-Afghanistan, the Canadian forces are fully kitted up. Main battle tanks and artillery. Light armoured vehicles and troop transports. Heavy air lift. New fighter aircraft are next.  By international standards, they may be small, but they are sharp. After a period of rest, they will again be ready for combat.

But here’s the rub. Garrisoning our borders will not stop infectious disease. We won’t find alternatives to the carbon economy by sending out an expeditionary force to capture them. Generals and admirals won’t be able to save us from a warming planet or changing climate.

That said, and to be sure, in the firmament of international policy there is a place for hard power instruments, and I am certainly not an unequivocal pacifist. Having a capable military gets you a place at the table at NATO headquarters in Brussels, and the ear of some influential people in Washington.  And  not just hawks and neo-conservatives.

But is that enough?

Militaries exist, in the first instance, for capturing or killing enemies, and for compelling your adversary to submit to your will. This is what armed forces  were designed to achieve and why they are lethally equipped.

It seems unlikely, for example, that any kind of diplomatic intercession could have stopped Hitler and the Nazis. The problem is that, early in the 21^st century there is no threat out there that looks remotely like the Third Reich, or even Imperial Japan. In the nuclear age, moreover, large scale conventional war has become inconceivable.

In fact, the enduring lesson of the Cold War is that militaries work best when they are not used. Take the blade out of its sheath for purposes of doing harm, and it tends to make a terrible mess, as can be witnessed today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Libya seems set to become the next case in point.

The problem with leading with the sword is that you run the very real risk of allowing policy to become an instrument of war, rather than vice versa.

* * * * * * * * * *

Today, militaries are being deployed as first responders in complex emergencies, such as natural disasters in fragile or failed states. In such cases, the questions must be put: how, when, and with what should a nation intervene? Given the elemental purpose of the armed forces, in humanitarian intercessions are they really the most appropriate international policy instrument, or do they just get the tasking because they have the nominal capacity while the other instruments have been allowed to wither for lack of resources? When resources are scarce, does this represent a misallocation?

Crucially, could not purpose-built civilian organizations do a better, more cost-effective  job?

A decade ago, recruitment advertisements for the Canadian Forces had the memorable refrain. “There’s no life like it”. Soldiers were being shown keeping the peace.

Today, the slogan is “Fight” and soldiers are shown going to war.

If security is the flip side of development, does this re-alignment make sense?

None of this came up in the recent federal election campaign, which is unfortunate.

It is time to begin an overdue national conversation on where to go with defence policy, international security and the Canadian military.

Editor’s Note. A few days ago I received an email from one of my younger brothers. While cleaning out some old files, he came across a paper which I had sent along for comment back in the spring of 1993. It was entitled At the Crossroads and had been prepared for delivery at a session of the Canadian Learned Societies on 07 June of that year.

I offer a selection of unabridged excerpts below, in hopes that readers may find them of some interest as a very early critique of the “New World Disorder”, neo-liberalism,  and what has come to be known as globalization.  For ease of handling, I have divided the post into two parts, the first of which follows:

At the Crossroads

Bubble, bubble, toil and…

These are ironic times. The end of the Cold War has lifted the pall of nuclear Armageddon, and the doomsday clock has been wound back. Yet few have felt any tangible benefits, and the work of multilateral institutions, policy analysts and decision-makers has been made immensely more complex and difficult. While the familiar patterns of behaviour imposed by the rigours of a superpower stand-off have faded from view, the outlines of the next global paradigm are only beginning to coma into perspective. The icy hand of death has slipped from the tiller, but the passage into unknown waters promises to be anything but smooth.

… trouble

The implosion of the former Soviet Union, USA retrenchment, the dominance of internal preoccupations in Europe, and the rapid emergence of Japan and its satellites presage the commencement of an erratic, tumultuous era. Angola. Afghanistan. Yugoslavia. Georgia. Somalia. Former, future, and would-be countries, some of indescribable obscurity, are convulsing in recurrent spasms of localized violence which have come to represent the primary characteristic of this unruly transition.

So much for the peace dividend. In the swirling maelstrom of the late twentieth century, we face a host of new and potent threats to international peace and security. An international leadership vacuum and epidemic public cynicism and disdain for the political process have added to the sense of uncertainty and drift.

The cauldron is boiling…

The collapse of the Berlin Wall was a powerful symbol, but the impact of that event was in important respects misleading: from the rubble has emerged a highly Euro-centric focus which has eclipsed many of the broader consequences of global re-alignment. The wider reverberations of the disintegration of the old order are beginning to be felt, and in that regard German reunification may seem, in retrospect, like the easy part. Though the recrudescence of the far right is a deeply disturbing by-product, consider the possibility that regional powers – Russia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, China – may be unable to resist to be drawn into the vortex of a disintegrating Central Asia.

What if Tajikistan and Nargorno Karabach are only the beginning? Notwithstanding that chronic instability in this area may represent a real threat to world peace, few have begun to assess the implications. For much of the Third World, the end of the Cold War means the loss of a crucial source of leverage, and that may translate into desperation as economic circumstances worsen.

… and a new table is being set

Many ethnic, religious, and communal eruptions appear to have emanated from colonial or imperial residues. In other cases the origins of contemporary violence may be impenetrably shrouded in the mists of time, vaguely millenarian, or simply no longer relevant. But the frequency and intensity of these occurrences, and the inability of the international community to do anything to stop them, have underscored the frailty and foibles of the current international dispensation. Though the need for nuanced understanding and subtle analysis has never been more acute, crucial decisions appear increasingly to be based on narrow or short-term considerations rather than careful assessment.

Governments everywhere are finding a near complete lack of domestic constituencies willing or able to act with effect in support of a reconstructed international agenda. Despite Bush’s best efforts to raise the profile of foreign policy issues during the US presidential campaign, the Clinton victory was achieved with virtually no public discussion of international affairs. This is significant. The political leadership of the world’s remaining superpower is utterly preoccupied with infrastructural renewal, health care, the social pathology of the permanent underclass, and related internal concerns, while other international actors have intensified the pursuit of their global ambitions. In North America, many are looking inward just when they should be looking out.

The outset of a new year, and indeed, of a new decade, is as good a time as any to pause and reflect.  As far as I can determine, the roiling, whirling forces of globalization which have been dominant for at least twenty years continue to cut all ways.

Consider, for instance, this initial sampling:

• Long-serving Tunisian President Ben Ali – one of the region’s less despotic rulers in one of its more stable and prosperous countries – has been driven from power in a revolt which few, if any saw coming

• The Australian states of Queensland and Victoria, which have in recent years experienced severe drought,  now face disastrous flooding

• Baby Doc Duvalier, a reviled former dictator forced to seek exile in France in 1986, has returned to his still earthquake-devastated homeland, Haiti, for reasons as yet unknown

• A previously obscure Icelandic MP and one-time WikiLeaks volunteer spokesperson, Birgitta  Jonsdottir, has become a near-celebrity, mainly by virtue of the attention lavished upon her by the US Justice Department

• After decades of intermittent civil war and failed peace negotiations, the results of an internationally-monitored referendum suggest that Southern Sudan is now headed inexorably towards independence

• The latest mass shooting incident in the USA has unleashed torrents of political vitriol and interpersonal venom, but has not appreciably advanced the case for gun control

Add to this mix a smattering of, say, suicide bombings and IED blasts in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq,  and what emerges is a pretty good snapshot of the day’s news.

At first blush, it doesn’t sound much like anything that would have inspired Louis Armstrong to record “What a Wonderful World”.

For those old enough to remember, it is hard to believe that we have been living in this sort of highly unpredictable environment for nearly a generation. Twenty years ago, much of the planet’s population was just beginning to come to terms with the fact that the Cold War had actually ended. Weakening walls, not tumbling towers were the dominant image. Today, many of the students in my fourth year international policy seminar at the University of Toronto were not born when the Brandenburg Gate once again unified, rather than divided Berlin.

Since then, the job of the international relations analyst – and the diplomat, and the soldier – has only become more complex and difficult.

As historians are fond of remarking, however, change is seldom found in the absence of continuity, and in that respect it is perhaps worthwhile to cast a glance backwards.

The Cold War was about ideological rivalry, territorial competition, and a struggle for client states on the part of two giant blocs. But there was more to it than that. And despite its established conventions and unwritten rules, in my experience the Cold War was far from dull.

During the early days of glasnost and perestroika in the mid-late eighties, I had been posted as political officer at the Canadian Embassy in Ethiopia, an ancient country located in the contested Horn of Africa and wracked by the civil war and famine. At the time, I likened it to being assigned to a theme park designed by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. With the world-wide geopolitical and strategic landscape evolving rapidly from freeze to flux, it was a fascinating time to be doing diplomacy.

From 1989-92, I returned to the headquarters of the (then) Department of External Affairs, working as senior intelligence analyst for Central, South and Southeast Asia.

Looking back on that period, it has become clear to me that many had come not only to know, but to love that familiar scheme of things. The Cold War fit its adherents like a comfortable,  well-worn coat.  It served as a world order model, a moral compass and an all-purpose frame of reference. Like the Global War on Terror – or the Long War, or Stabilization Missions, or Overseas Contingency Operations –  today,  budgets, bonuses,  promotions and reputations depended upon fealty to the Cold War’s assumptions and unconditional belief in its precepts.

When confronted in 1989 with incontrovertible evidence, for instance, that the Soviet Union was withdrawing from Afghanistan or vacating its naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in Viet Nam, many balked is disbelief. Some responded acrimoniously when such lines were pursued. On those occasions,  I often imagined myself in conversation with one of the more zany cast members featured in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Dr. Strangelove.

Similar individual reticence, if not wholesale institutional resistance can be encountered in 2011 if one argues that security in the age of globalization has less to do with counter-terrorism than it does with finding solutions to more profound and enduring challenges such as underdevelopment, resource scarcity and climate change.

In fact, I have become convinced that three key elements of Cold War thinking have been carried forward into the present, and now represent the intellectual and psychological foundations that underpin the West’s continuing fixation on terrorism and Islamic extremism.

Those recycled ideas? A black and white, us-versus-them world view; the characterization of the principal threat as universal and undifferentiated, and; the militarization of the international policy response.

The consequences have been catastrophic.

More on all of that, what it might mean over the next decade, in the next posts.