The legacies of super power: Terence O'Brien looks at influences that henceforth will shape international events and considers their impact on New Zealand.

• Author: O'Brien, Terence

The very idea of super power is an invention of the 20th century. It is the product of that era of two immensely destructive world wars and a 40-year long Cold War that imposed an ideological straitjacket on our world, which still, some 20 years after its end, influences mindsets of some policy-makers in powerful capitals. According to the dictionary, the term 'super-power' was first employed by an American historian, W.T. Fox, in 1944 to describe the situation created by the end of the Second World War where, he concluded, that 'great power plus great mobility of power defined a superpower'. (1)

Fox identified the United States, Soviet Union and Britain as possessing the required attributes, but, of course, events transpired in such a way that Britain, exhausted by war and confronted by an empire restless for independence, slipped irresistibly from pole position--leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as sole contenders. The Soviet Union claimed communism as the ideology of true progress and social justice for the world, while the United States, which had organised itself impressively for both war and victory as well as escaping the scourge of conflict on home soil, promoted democracy, rules-based international behaviour and free competition of ideas and interests as the basis for human improvement. Each super-power assembled around it a group of like-minded states and East/West competition was born. New Zealand dutifully took its place amongst the West. The great majority of states comprising the international community, new and old, however remained uncommitted to either camp--in the non-aligned movement.

With the benefit of hindsight it is clear now that the Soviet Union, in terms of wealth and welfare when compared to the United States, was never really a super-power. Indeed, the Cold War witnessed sustained advance by the United States to a position of supremacy. When the Cold War ended in 1989-90 with the break up of the Soviet Union, there was a deep American sense of accomplishment that amounted to triumphalism. It heralded, according to one American mandarin, 'the end of history'. The United States was now the super-power. This, however, created paradoxically the need to define afresh the United States' national interest in a world that it now dominated. It is proving in practice quite difficult to define US true interests other than that the maintenance of America's supreme standing requires, at least in the minds of many policy-makers, that it permanently out-performs all other nations in every direction. This led one European leader to re-brand the United States as 'the hyper power'.

Legacies are, in one sense, bequests passed on to others when the originator departs the scene. That is not the sense intended by this contribution, which conceives super-power legacies as influences that henceforth shape international events, including the positioning of smaller countries like New Zealand that delve well beneath the stratospheric dimensions of super-power existence. There are in this sense three inter-connected parts to America's super-power legacy and, as suggested below, all three variously influence New Zealand's situation.

Manifest destiny

First, there is America's traditional sense of its manifest destiny to change the world and its values into an image of America itself. This constitutes a profound influence upon international relations. According to this script, Providence has selected the United States as 'the indispensable nation' to lead an unregenerate world to a better future. Yet experience shows that leadership in international affairs politically, economically or militarily is either bestowed or it is asserted. This is especially true in the globalising economy that increasingly shapes political, economic and cultural life on this planet. Leadership that is bestowed enjoys essential legitimacy, while leadership that is asserted in coercive ways does not. (2)

The energy and imagination displayed by the United States when creating the institutions and rules of international affairs (for example, the United Nations, WTO, IMF) revealed Washington's acute realisation that legitimacy as a super-power would be enhanced by mediating leadership through international institutions that command wide support. Indeed, institutions help create habits of co-operation amongst nations that are in the end as important as the rules of co-operation. (3) But the era of decolonisation and the emergence of a whole host of new nations during the course of the Cold War inexorably altered the balance of membership and of interest inside the international institutions.

Thus the United States grew hesitant and disillusioned with its own handiwork. The 'indispensable nation' was no longer able to direct or supervise the institutions in ways that privileged its own interests. A preference for working with, or alongside, smaller coalitions of like-minded countries increasingly influences actual US international behaviour whether on peace and security issues with NATO, a notable legacy of super power now being extended with a global role to rival or supplant the United Nations, or in economics and trade, with the United States preferring to work with a handful of governments like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, in which Washington's interests can be the more assertively and successfully secured.

Foremost legacy

A foremost super-power legacy of the 20th century is the way in which the United States succeeded in elevating, for the first time in history, the basic values, interests and aspirations of the human individual into a universal charter for human rights. This was memorable, although in our world of widely differing culture, tradition and religion, the secular elevation of values driven international relations in this way is a sensitive, even provocative business, and so it has often proven to be. Toleration of diversity, after all, is a real value also in and of itself. The spread of human rights and democracy by coercion, moreover, creates resistance in places where realities or aspirations are different; and especially if persuasion...