Book review: “No one’s World: The West, the Rising Rest and the Coming Global Turn. By Charles A. Kupchan. Oxford University Press, 2013. 272 pages, U$ 17.06 (paperback, amazon.com)
In his new book, Charles A. Kupchan, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), discusses the most intriguing question International Relations scholars ask themselves these days: What will replace the Western World Order once the United States is no longer capable of exercising global leadership? Will China’s rise be “unpeaceful” and prove to be disruptive, as Mearsheimer argues, or will rising powers support today’s system that is ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’, as G. John Ikenberry writes? Who will rule the world once the United States’ reign ends, and what will such a world look like? Is it a ‘post-American world’, a ‘Chinese World’, or simply the good old Western World Order under non-Western leadership? Rejecting such predictions, Kupchan predicts that tomorrow’s world will “belong to no one”.
Before elaborating on this claim, the author briskly moves through centuries of history to explain why the West (i.e., Europe) was able to quickly develop economically and leave other, traditionally successful, regions behind, thus initiating Western global dominance. His main argument is that decentralized power structures due to the early division of the state and the church (king and pope) and the rise of a powerful bourgeoisie, which fought for political representation, helped Europe develop modern liberal states. In addition, the Reformation and the bloodshed it caused taught European societies about the necessity to deal with religious diversity.
The Ottoman Empire, by contrast, failed to develop powerful merchant classes, and it lacked the division of state and church, concentrating all power in the hands of the sultan. As Kupchan puts it, “the centralization of authority in Istanbul and the socioeconomic stasis that followed would ultimately deny the Ottoman realm the societal vitality, economic vigor, and political and religious pluralism needed to keep pace with Europe.” In a similar way, the leaders in China and India hindered the accumulation of wealth outside of the state apparatus, undoing their countries’ chances of rivaling European growth. None of the arguments made by Kupchan are new – he largely summarizes and simplifies ideas made by historians-turned public intellectuals, such as Jared Diamond and Ian Morris. He thus embraces a largely Western-centric world view, which describes the West’s rise as something self-contained and inevitable, not mentioning how important non-Western ideas were for Europe to prosper.
The book is more interesting when Kupchan writes about global order. While the world had historically been compartmentalized, with each region operating according to culturally particular and exclusive principles, the author argues that Europe’s rise helped create one single global system: As European powers conquered the world, “they exported European conceptions of sovereignty, administration, law, diplomacy and commerce” – thus creating what we now call the ‘Western World Order’. Kupchan writes that “remaking the world in its own image has perhaps been the ultimate exercise of Western power.” The West’s capacity to define modernity caused generations of non-Western thinkers argue about whether there was a difference between modernization and westernization — that, too, belies a strongly Western-centric world vision, which wrongly believes the key pillars of today’s order (such as self-determination) are of Western origin. Yet as any historian can attest, such ideas have multiple origins and cannot be ascribed to Western thinkers.
Presenting what he calls “hard cold facts”, Kupchan runs through well-known predictions by Jim O’Neill and shows that in a few decades, at least three BRICS countries will be among the five leading economies. While the United States still dominates militarily, it is only a question of time when, according to the author, China will overtake the United States in this dimension as well. China could thus, within a decade, declare its own Monroe Doctrine. The reader is left guessing here about what the US response to such a move could or should be.
Questioning common wisdom that even a non-Western power would essentially perpetuate a Western World Order, Kupchan predicts that there will be multiple versions of modernity. Not only do the characteristics of Brazil’s, India’s and China’s rise differ markedly from Europe’s, but their cultural DNA is different, too. This is hardly news, and the author fails to explain how internal peculiarities affect countries’ strategy vis-à-vis the global system. His assertion that “much of Latin America has been captivated by left-wing populism” and that this represents “an alternative to the West’s brand of liberal democracy” is highly controversial yet remains largely unsubstantiated. What are the characteristics of the “West’s brand of liberal democracy”? Is Brazil’s democratic system inferior to, say, Italy’s? Kupchan also separates Latin America from the West without explaining what definition of the West he uses.
The author speaks of the ‘West’ as if it were a cohesive bloc, a somewhat misleading idea to begin with. In Kupchan’s eyes, Brazilian President Lula’s decision to meet Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad serves as proof that Brazil will not accept the Western Global Order. Turkey’s quarrels with Israel are supposedly evidence of Turkey’s “drift away from the West.” Yet the West is not a tangible group of countries, rather an idea that has shifted its meaning through the ages. In the same way, Kupchan oversimplifies when he argues that the West stands for liberal democracy and free-market capitalism alone, and that the non-West is made up of autocrats and state-led economies. During the economic crisis, for example, the US government massively intervened in the economy, and many parts of China’s economy are in fact entirely dominated by private sector actors. The countries most open to trade are not located in Europe, but in Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong). As the author analyzes ‘autocrats’ in Russia and China, ‘theocrats’ in the Middle East and ‘populists’ in Latin America, he makes a series of bold predictions yet leaves the reader guessing about what leads Kupchan to these conclusions. None of the ‘non-Western’ actors (and Kupchan reduces the West to the US and Europe) seem to establish genuine democracies – a claim likely to find rejection in many regions of the world.
One of Kupchan’s rather unconvincing arguments is that India’s voting behavior in the UN shows that “its interests and status as an emerging power are more important determinants of its foreign policy than its democratic institutions”, thus implying the United States’ democratic institutions are somehow more important to US policy makers than national interest. Yet the history of US foreign policy is littered with instances when strong partnerships with non-democratic regimes were established to promote US national interest – not at least in the Middle East where Saudi Arabia remains an important US ally. This highly US-centric argument paradoxically shows how difficult it will be for policy makers in Washington D.C. to adapt to a truly multipolar world in which the United States will be one among several large actors.
The idea of a “non-polar” world is not really new – several authors, such as Richard Haass, have argued that no country will be able to replace the United States as a global hegemon. Kupchan interprets emerging countries’ independent foreign policy strategies as evidence that they will undermine today’s global order. Yet he overlooks that despite their growing strength, there is little evidence that countries such as China seriously challenge the norms and rules that undergird today’s system.
Finally, he argues that West should ‘restore solvency’ (recovering balance between resources and commitments) – i.e. scale back and come to terms with the West’s relative decline. This is an important observation, yet Kupchan offers little advice to policy makers about how to manage such a difficult downward transition. His calls for less individualism and more civic engagement sound more like helpless campaign slogans than actual proposals.
In the final chapter, Kupchan lays out a series of interesting ideas about what the New World Order could look like. He argues that “the West will have to embrace political diversity rather than insist that liberal diversity is the only legitimate form of government.” The author rightly observes that “even as the West does business with autocracies, it delegitimizes them in word and action.” In this essentially realist argument, Kupchan argues that while such a pro-democracy stance may be morally compelling, it was simply not pragmatic and made unnecessary enemies in the emerging world. While he says that democracies should continue to speak out against repression, this should not create obstacles to working with autocrats in a constructive manner. However, the author declines to specify at which degree of a dictator’s nastiness the West should switch from cooperation to condemnation.
Kupchan’s book is sprinkled with some interesting insights and ideas (particularly in the last chapter), yet the ground he covers is too vast, forcing him to remain superficial and relying on empty soundbites when commenting on other countries’ domestic affairs. “The world”, the author says, “is headed towards a global dissensus.” The prediction that we’ll live in a world with competing naratives (rather than a convergence towards a Western narative) is an important starting point. Yet Kupchan could offer more specific proposals of how to behave in such a world.
Read also:
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