Decade of disorder

I was in Newcastle on 9/11, giving a speech about the future of manufacturing in the northeast. I was chuffed to get my first interview at the BBC regional TV studio. Then I heard about the attack on the first tower in a taxi on the way to South Shields.

The decade since has been the most traumatic for the west since the 1930s. Now, as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we must ask ourselves how to draw a line under it, and salvage a position of stability and confidence. It will demand a radical shift in the way we think.

Over the past few centuries, there have been three systems of international order: economic and military domination; a balance of power; and shared sovereignty. They can coexist, as they more or less did in the years after 1945 in different parts of the world. But today America is on the back foot, economically and militarily. New powers like China and India are rising, not risen, mixing assertiveness with emphasis on their “developing” status. Europe, where shared sovereignty has been embraced, is struggling to hold the ring within its own borders, never mind as a global player. The nations and people of the world are more intertwined than ever, as ideas, information, finance, migrants and problems flow ever more seamlessly across the globe.

The last decade was one of disorder. September 11th was the trigger, but Iraq, the financial crisis, global economic imbalances and the Arab Spring have all played their part. The weakness of the international system—on trade, climate change, Israel/Palestine—has added to the growing sense that no one is in charge. Sometimes the feeling is giddy; more often it is unsettling.

The first reasons for this disorder lie in the stunning asymmetries of the past ten years, when the trusted metrics of power and influence seem to have been inverted. A non-state actor, al Qaeda, sent the world’s most powerful state into convulsions. Ungoverned space in places like Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia suddenly became a threat to governed societies. Power has shifted from strong states to connected citizens, using mobile phones to witness and count (at a server in South Africa) electoral votes in Zimbabwe, expose state violence in Syria, and organise millions of demonstrators in Tahrir Square. A company of volunteers, Wikipedia, which didn’t exist 15 years ago, put one of the world’s largest companies, Microsoft, out of the encyclopaedia business that it seemed destined to dominate. Roadside bombs have driven back the most advanced armies.

The commitment and capability of al Qaeda to wage global jihad was (and is) a new and serious kind of threat. One of several reasons that the notion of a “war on terror” was misguided was that it allowed people to think that al Qaeda was just another terrorist group like the IRA, Baader-Meinhof or the Red Brigades. It wasn’t—and isn’t. Al Qaeda has a world view, not just a local view. It aspires not just to change, but to revolution.

Unfortunately, this new security threat gave force to military endeavour, when the predominant part of the struggle should have been political and diplomatic. I don’t see there was any alternative to our determination, in 2001, to drive the Taliban from Kabul. The tragedy is that, once it had been done, the peace was lost rather than won.

The Bonn conference of December 2001, called to draw up a new Afghan constitution, was a conference for victors, not for the vanquished. Whereas America built its own democracy from below, Afghanistan had imposed upon it one of the most centralised constitutions in the world—despite being one of the most decentralised societies in the world. Tragically, the signals from former Taliban in Kandahar, that they wanted to be left alone in return for staying out of politics, were misread. So they were driven out to Pakistan, where they reconvened.

America has dedicated remarkable resources to the fight against al Qaeda. But the battle became an enforced detour from the vital diplomatic task of building new rules and institutions for an interdependent world. And while the decade began with the US wanting a break from global leadership, it ends on a similar note.

In 2000, Bill Clinton said in his final state of the union address: “Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats. Never before have we had such a blessed opportunity—and, therefore, such a profound obligation—to build the more perfect union of our founders’ dreams.” The focus, in other words, was to be domestic. George W Bush ran for president on a foreign policy based on humility; as Condoleezza Rice put it in Foreign Affairs in 2000, America should not be the “world’s policeman.”

President Barack Obama echoed a similar sentiment in his first inaugural address, saying that the nation-building he wanted to do was at home. He repeated this in June in explaining the withdrawal of “surge” troops from Afghanistan. Equally, no Republican presidential candidate today seems to see any mileage in being an internationalist.

Yet while America has yearned to look inward, and Europe has actually done so, the rest of the world has been busy making its fortune. In 2000 India and China accounted for just over 4 per cent of world trade; today this figure is nearly 12 per cent. In the last decade, 63 per cent of global economic growth has come from emerging economies. The Asian middle class is growing at 50-70m a year. The Gulf is sitting on $1 trillion of foreign exchange reserves. For the BRIC nations, al Qaeda was never the main game. Their focus was economic growth.

This leaves a final reason for disorder: a philosophical divide about how to govern the modern world. Marshall McLuhan coined the notion of a “global village” in the 1960s. Today its central tenet—that we are interdependent—is widely embraced. But there is a yawning divide about the village’s rules.

The core issue concerns whether national sovereignty can and should be qualified. This plays out in every aspect of international affairs. All the UN member states signed up to the so-called “responsibility to protect” in 2005, but UN sanctions on the Syrian regime, a regime responsible for the loss of at least 1,400 lives, are blocked by Russia, China and India on the grounds that internal security is an internal matter.

The notion that interdependence should require a fettering of national sovereignty is, frankly, a minority view. The EU is not currently a great advertisement for its virtues; the Americans are leery, and the Chinese and Indians deeply sceptical of the idea. Having emerged through political and economic struggles for independence, the last thing they will countenance is interference in their internal affairs. This is one major reason why, from climate change to trade to human rights, the international system is unable to promote effective action.

I think the best way to understand the current situation comes from an analogy Madeleine Albright offered me. She says international policy in the Cold War was like steering down the Panama Canal, while policy after the fall of the Berlin Wall was like steering a ship in the English Channel: clear water on all sides, but land visible too. Today, foreign policy is like being on the open seas, with no rules beyond the 200-mile limits, and no sight of land.

If that is right, we face some urgent tasks. The first is to reassert diplomacy’s place in international politics. Richard Holbrooke said to me that since 9/11 America has suffered a “militarisation of diplomacy.” We now need the opposite. In a world of asymmetric threats, we should follow through on the US Department of Defence’s own field manual, which says that, in counterinsurgency, politics should have primacy.

Second, we must reconceive our notions of a balance of power: it should not just concern states, but states and peoples. As the Arab Spring has shown, the ubiquity of information means that the coalitions of the future need to be formed by the people, not just the elites. That applies at micro level, in the villages and valleys of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also at the macro level, in terms of how we manage the global system.

Third, we are moving into an era of resource scarcity. Aside from the atom bomb, this is the most dangerous economic and security development in two centuries. If you think the blame game in Europe over Greece is bad, just wait for arguments about who is causing drought and food price inflation. These are not just “environmental” questions. They are questions of justice and responsibility, and they need stronger regional and international institutions.

Finally, the west is going to have to rediscover the joys of multilateralism and shared sovereignty. That is tough when, in Europe, nobody wants to pay Greece’s bills. But multilateralism is a global insurance policy against the determination of any state to abuse its power. The problem is not that the EU and other multilateral institutions are too strong; it is that they are too weak. Regional institutions in the Arab world, Africa, Latin America, and East Asia are an obvious and necessary development.

A century ago Norman Angell argued in The Great Illusion that military expansion could not bring about economic security; that it would happen the other way round. In truth, neither is achievable without politics—and in the year of the Arab Spring that is the most important lesson of all.