Thomas Friedman’s Theory of McGlobalization has been proved wrong.
One minor casualty of the recent conflict in Georgia was the doctrine of peace through McGlobalization — a belief first elaborated by Thomas Friedman in 1999, and left in ruins on August 8, when Russian troops moved into South Ossetia. “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s,” wrote Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
Not that the fast-food chain itself had a soothing effect, of course. The argument was that international trade and modernization — and the processes of liberalization and democratization created in their wakes — would knit countries together in an international civil society that made war unnecessary. There would still be conflict. But it could be contained — made rational, and even profitable, like competition between Ronald and his competitors over at Burger King. (Thomas Friedman does not seem like a big reader of Kant, but his thinking here bears some passing resemblance to the philosopher’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” an essay from 1784.)
Is this the emergence of a New Cold War as author Scott McLemee seems to speculate? I’m dubious. I think Vladimir Putin is a cult of personality just as powerful as Barack Obama, except with a wider license to steal and write new rule books on a whim.
With former KGB man Vladimir Putin as head of state (able to move back and forth between the offices of the president and of the prime minister, as term limits require) and the once-shellshocked economy now growing at a healthy rate thanks to international oil prices, Russia has entered a period of relative stability and prosperity — if by no means one of liberal democracy. The regime can best be described as authoritarian-populist. There have been years of frustration at seeing former Soviet republics and erstwhile Warsaw Pact allies become members of NATO. Georgia (like Ukraine) has recently been invited to do so as well. So the invasion of South Ossetia represents a forceful reassertion of authority within Russia’s former sphere of influence.
The 21st century will be full of new paradigms, including the end of single world superpower. Whether or not we recognize it, the nation-state itself is dying, and the United States is leading the slow decline.
“It is difficult,” writes Furedi in a recent essay, “to discover clear patterns in the working of twenty-first-century global affairs….The U.S. in particular (but also other powers) is uncertain of its place in the world. Wars are being fought in faraway places against enemies with no name. In a world where governments find it difficult to put forward a coherent security strategy or to formulate their geo-political interests, a re-run of the Cold War seems like an attractive proposition. Compared to the messy world we live in, the Cold War appears to some to have been a stable and at least comprehensible interlude.”
Follow the fortunes of private mercenary army and megacorporation Blackwater, which despite its tarnished public reputation continues to thrive. The New Cold War will be a very different animal. The United States has been overextended for five years and the Georgian conflict is an exclamation point on the sentence that tells us where we’re headed.
The Duck of Minerva – an academic group blog devoted to political science – has hosted a running discussion of the news from South Ossetia. In a post there, Peter Howard, an assistant professor of international service at American University, noted that the most salient lesson of the invasion was that it exposed the limits of U.S. influence.
“Russia had a relatively free hand to do what it did in Georgia,” he writes, “and there was nothing that the U.S. (or anyone else for that matter) was going to do about it…. In a unipolar world, there is only one sphere of influence — the whole world is the U.S.’s sphere of influence. Russia’s ability to carve any sphere of influence effectively ends unipolarity, if there ever was such a moment.”
What if, instead of Russia invading Georgia in response to a stupid move by a politician, it had been China invading Taiwan in response to a stupid move by a politician? The conflict between Russia and Georgia is far from being over, and there are at least ten other flash points in the world that could blow up in the face of the world’s self-appointed policeman at any moment.