Great Power Loneliness: Reflections on the 160th Bergedorf Roundtable

... commonplace all over the world, and voters are feeling a certain nostalgia for orderly times. Good old great power diplomacy is back and is once again at the center of any peacemaking effort from Ukraine and Syria to the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea. Behind most of the rational approaches to global politics today there is a firm belief that statehood is better than statelessness, because only with a monopoly on violence can order be maintained at a given piece of land. This is why the Westphalian system is certainly here to stay. An amazing majority of both Asian and European participants were explicit about this position, not expecting any substantial challenge to state sovereignty as a central concept in world order. Not the common ...