Global citizens in a world of disorder: Colin James reflects on New Zealand's place in an increasingly troubled international environment.

• Author: James, Colin
• Position: Essay

The world is in a disorderly phase. This is driven in part by geo-political and geo-economic events, including the mass movement of people, and in part by disruptive technological change that is fragmenting and dispersing power, eroding the sovereignty of individual nation-states and beginning to turn us from citizens of nations into global citizens. This multi-generational transition is likely over time to require a range of informal and semi-formal supra-national governance arrangements. A role for New Zealand, as a disinterested global country-citizen, could be to suggest prototypes of such arrangements, starting in the South Pacific.

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The world order has given way to a world in disorder. Where does New Zealand fit? Where do New Zealanders fit? Those questions have poignancy as, 100 years from getting entangled in a bungled intervention in the Middle East amid the disorder of the First World War, our troops are there again amid disorder contributing to another stumbling 'Western' intervention. A difference is that in 1915 there was public enthusiasm and now there is not.

For four decades after 1950 geo-politics were regulated by a standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, two nuclear-armed super-powers with a reciprocal interest in not starting 'mutually assured destruction'. With the United States were European and Anglo offshoot allies and assorted client autocracies. With the Soviet Union were its subject territories, communist allies and autocracies, though over time China's communism acquired a divergent quasi-Confucianist dimension. This was in essence a bipolar world.

There was one near-flashpoint, in 1962 over Russian missiles on Cuba, which recent analysis suggests the United States overplayed to the point of heightening the risk of conflict, but it passed. (1) However, there was much skirmishing on the peripheries of the two spheres as both sides sought to draw into or keep in their orbits other countries, including those newly independent of colonial rule. There were conflicts where the two sides or their proxies butted against each other on the ground. One was the Korean War of 1950-53. Another was the eventually successful two-decade-long bid for national self-determination in Vietnam led by nationalist communists, first against the French colonial administration and then against the United States' attempt to preserve a Korea-style north--south divide.

People, countries and governments knew where they stood. The super-powers knew where they stood. When New Zealand opted out of the mutually assured destruction framework with a nuclear-free policy in 1984, super-power United States treated us as an outcast. That, too, was an over-reaction, with eerie overtones of the Cuba missile episode.

Unipolar world

When the Soviet empire collapsed, the United States was left as the only true superpower. This was a unipolar world. Some, notably Francis Fukuyama, mused that this might portend the 'end of history', that is, the triumph of liberal democracy and market capitalism.

Within fifteen years the unipolar super-power was mired in unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just being very big and armed with high-technology weapons and unlimited hinds was no longer enough. A British army officer, Emile Simpson, wrote that in Afghanistan war was not as Clausewitz had stated it, an inter-state activity that is polarised, decisive and finite. It was, he wrote, near-impossible to distinguish between enemies and friends: one local commander who was notionally on the side of the Afghan government in Kabul rented' out some of his forces to the local Taliban because they had agreed to pay for them. There were not two sides. Everyone was on his/her own side. (2)

Meanwhile, China had concentrated from 1978 on building its economy. Economic power usually delivers political power. China unsurprisingly has been asserting its claim to what it regards as its national territory, including islands and marine areas on its east coast and stretching far to its south between Vietnam and the Philippines. In May it reaffirmed that offshore claim in a defence white paper. (3) The United States has been harrumphing about that and has been reforging its alliances with South Korea and Japan. Expert commentary on China's assertiveness--or is it aggressiveness?--ranges from the reassuring to the scarifying. (4)

But China's rise, which also includes expanding investment abroad to secure raw materials, building and strengthening transport, political and trade links with countries to its west and building infrastructure projects in South America and Africa to cement good relations, has not resulted--at least not yet--in the construction of a new bipolar standoff between the incumbent super-power and a rising power on the way to becoming a super-power (if it is not one already). There does not appear (yet?) to be the tight parallel some, such as Robert Kagan, see between China-United States in the 2010s and Germany-Britain in the 1900s decade which led to the First World War. (5)

Other players

Why not? First, there are some big players who do not fit on either side.

India, big and slowly improving economically, has also been harrumphing a bit about China and joined the United States in January in some strong words about China's island building in the South China Sea and bullying of the Philippines and Vietnam. India is wooing Japan as a mutual counterweight to China. But India is also trying to understand and deal with China, and China has shown interest in investing in India. Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping are still early in their expected decade-long rule. How they get on will have implications for world order. New MFAT chief executive Brook Barrington could usefully do some work on this and then tell us his conclusions.

To India's north, Russia has also set out to regain territory by backing rebels in Ukraine and annexing Crimea and by exerting pressure on and offering inducements to other neighbouring countries to join its economic sphere of influence. It has sought to rebuild relations with China. It...