On Bipolarity

Dear Reader!

I have no intention to disappoint you or annoy you in case you were honestly looking for something about bipolarity in international relations, so this post will be dedicated, in some measure, to the well-known concept of ‘bipolarity’- and problems that lie beneath.

Here you will find a blog post (within a blog post), written by Fox (not a doctor yet) and commented by Popper.

[15.05.2010]

[1:23 a.m.]

Fox

Hello, my honorable reader.

I’m writing my master’s thesis, so I thought about sharing a part of conclusion here. It’s not finished, but hope you enjoy it.

“It is now becoming apparent that the world order of the 21^st century will be shaped by a new global competition between the United States and China. Although many scientists and researchers have repeatedly pointed out the fact that China still has a long way up to the top, it may be able to challenge the US as an equal in a matter of a decade or two [Fuchs, 2009, Li Xiqing et al, 2010, Renard, 2010]. Even today China, being an influential regional player and a serious economic power sometimes questions the US supremacy in the Asia Pacific (as it was illustrated by the increasing regional integration, guided or highly influenced by China).

The reason for this bipolarity lies in the intrinsic features of the global political system. It is apparently a complex one, and many scientists showed the need of such system to have guidance, a leader, because it cannot exist and evolve in total anarchy. However, despite the cumulative power of the United States, it is still not enough for sustaining democracy and peace throughout the world, and this is the reason for the advent of new centers and poles [Polman, 2007].

There are other possible poles of power, such as the EU or Russia, but it is hard to imagine them deciding what the world will look like in future, due to these centers’ economic inefficiency (in case of Russia) or lack of unified political decision-making (in case of the EU) [Lisytsyn, 2007, Sionnach, 2008]. It is possible, on the other hand, that these centers, alongside with many others, will produce alliances with one superpower or another, and such process can be already seen now (e.g. joint Chinese-Russian military exercises are conducted more frequently).

The Cold War is long gone, and the coming bipolarity may hardly be reminiscent of the previous one, but the US should respond to it in a similar way. In spite of the strong economic ties between the US and China, deterrence would be a plausible option in most cases [Rebane, 2010]. This deterrence cannot be solely military; it has to comprise economic, cultural and political measures as well.

There are many advocates for supranational governance, but the last chapter of this work dedicated to the national-supranational debate has shown, using statistical data and mathematical analysis, that such structure is unstable and doomed to be destroyed by a new global conflict. A true multipolarity is hard to imagine due to the lack of other influential powers and no upcoming new ones, while unipolarity is already history. Today a balance of power (or, should I put it, the balance of powers) is one of the most possible paths for current world order to self-maintain peace and democratic progress without taking the risks of fragile and inefficient international institutional regulation.”

Hope I didn’t bore you, but this is what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Comments

 [16.05.2010]

[3:23 a.m.]

Popper

My friend,

There is a lot of stuff I’d like to argue with you about (like ‘polarity’, complex systems, math in social sciences), but I’ll stick to one thing – typologies.

It’s obvious that when you do science, you need typologies. Sometimes, however, we use too much of these and it doesn’t help us at all. ‘Bipolarity’ (and any other ‘polarity’) seems like a typology to me. It was rather good in explaining (partially) the Cold War era (well, there was the Non-Aligned Movement, so it’s not really a bipolarity, isn’t it?), but such simple idea cannot explain the international system, which you named ‘complex’.  You cannot answer a question “What is a human being?” with simple “living creature”.

Here comes this problem of over-simplification, the need for typologies.  Of course, when you look at a problem you must see it in a comprehensive way. Analyze the bigger picture (especially in your case of global order). See the whole at once. Remember the forest-trees metaphor? But if you pay attention only towards the forest, you may not notice a little bug or a disease on some tree that will doom the very existence of such forest: the over-simplification made you look in the wrong direction. I am not trying to lessen your analytical abilities, but I believe that every typology or simplification, despite how greatly they may help the seeker, must be empirically verifiable and falsifiable. It’s good that you verify your ‘bipolarity’ by some empirical data (I hope so), but you should try to prove it wrong. I know, sometimes the idea is just too perfect to abandon, but if it doesn’t fit the reality, it’s not science at all.

If I determine some forest as ‘green’, I may be partially right. But if it is already late autumn in Germany, I am surely wrong and must find another description (e.g., “red and yellow”). You can always add something to your theory, like exceptions and conditions, but if there are too much of them, you’d better rethink your ideas. The notion of ‘bipolarity’ (or any over-simplified concept) may be useful to describe the interaction between the limited amount of states, two countries (and some of their allies), but do you really think that in the 21^st century our complicated, fast-moving world can really be described that simple?