Few questions of global governance today are as consequential as the following. Is the post-World War II order dead and a new one yet to be conceived? Do we, therefore, exist in an age of monsters? Or are we back to the old order as it was conceived in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Humankind is witnessing conflicts playing out concurrently on five continents. The rise of unprecedented trade tensions across the world triggered by President Donald Trump’s attempt to de-structure the international architecture of commerce. Russia’s war in Ukraine that began in February 2022. The conflicts between Israel on one side and Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and Iran on the other since October 2023. And the rise of China over the past three decades, which has attained portentous overtones in large parts of the world. The added dynamic is the latest India-Pakistan standoff, the worst since the Kargil War 26 years ago, and the US bombing of Iran.
Modern strategic thought is, essentially, a European construct because of an era of experimentation with ideas and the impulses of colonialism. The arrival of mechanised printing animated the Renaissance, Reformation and other humanist movements. Those, in turn, gave structure to contemporary strategic canons.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 sanctified the construct of a nation-state. Cardinal de Richelieu, the first minister of France in the first half of the 17th century, propounded the concept of raison d’état—each nation acting in its best national interest. It was closely followed by the doctrine of balance of power, an alliance system conceptualised by Hugo Grotius and first put into practice by William of Orange, later King William III of England, in the second half the century. These three doctrinal templates laid the foundational stencil of international relations that is kosher even today.
The Concert of Vienna, which came into effect in 1815, tested these three hypotheses. It ensured an uneasy peace for the next 99 years till World War I—except for the Crimean wars of 1854-56.
In May 1892, in a memorandum to Russian Foreign Minister Nikolay Girs, the adjutant general of the Russian army, Nikolai Orbuchev, explained why the traditional method of determining casus belli had been overtaken by modern technology. What mattered most was who mobilised first, and not who fired the first shot.
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated. Within a month, the doomsday machine of general mobilisation, coupled with raison d’état, unleashed itself upon Europe. Once Austria-Hungary and Germany started to mobilise, other European powers followed suit and a world war commenced. By 1918, this Armageddon had left 17 million people dead.
Two decades later, the imperatives of the alliance system triggered the Second World War. In 1938, German troops annexed Austria and then occupied Sudetenland, a part of German-speaking Czechoslovakia. Almost a year later, the Nazis marched into Poland on September 1, 1939. Great Britain, according to the terms of the Anglo-Polish Pact, declared war on Germany two days later; France followed suit. When the war dominos finally stopped, 85 million were dead.
These mobilisation templates and alliance systems were carried forward to the Cold War with the addition of the MAD or mutually assured destruction doctrine—inserted into the dynamics of war by nuclear weapons—until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. We are now in the third age of nuclear weapons.
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama, in his acclaimed book The End of History and The Last Man, argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the “end point of mankind's ideological evolution” and that the liberal template would be the default world order.
However, in 1996, Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he argued that the epoch of ideology had reached an inflection point, and thereafter, humankind would regress into an age delineated by cultural conflict all over again. Clashes would be along religious, ethnic and cultural lines.
Both Fukuyama and Huntington were gazing into the crystal ball, trying to predict the ebb and flow of historical impulses in shaping the post-communist world order that had led to a unique situation of unipolarity in international affairs.
On September 11, 2001, when semi-state actors put the only omnipresent hyper-power, the US, on notice by crashing passenger-filled jets into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, liberal democracy certainly had not emerged as the global choice. The events of 9/11 inaugurated a new chapter in global affairs, wherein ‘war on terror’ became the new buzz phrase.
The events in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021 demonstrate that despite the US spending $2.3 trillion on the war, or almost $300 million a day, the country did not turn into a democratic haven for the Afghans. In fact, Afghanistan was a classical test case for the Fukuyama thesis, courtesy the direct involvement of the US for over 20 years.
Neither was it a clash of civilisations—for, if that had been, the US would not have engaged with the same Taliban it ousted 20 years ago. The Doha Agreement of February 29, 2020 paved the way for the return of the Taliban. It was a classical case of raison d’état at play.
The invasion of Libya in 2011 under the rubric of Right to Protect did not turn that country into a democracy. The impulse was to get rid of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s despotic regime, as the Iraq invasion in 2003 was to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
Likewise, after the collapse of communism in the 1990s, China did not become democratic, nor is its ominous rise a civilisational struggle with other cultures. It is again purely driven by what China perceives as its national interest—the Middle Kingdom’s destined place in the natural order of things.
Therefore, the affairs of people and nations are still governed by two fundamental precepts, both dating back to the 17th century. The first, raison d’état, and the second, the balance of power doctrine and alliance system. Technology and economics can be drivers, but are not determinants. The determinant is still state sovereignty.
We are indeed back to the old order. This would, unfortunately, be the fundamental underpinning of the new world order in the decades ahead.
Manish Tewari | Lawyer, third-term MP and former Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)