Nezavisimaya Gazeta October 27, 2003 Multi-polar Vision Andrew C. Kuchins Director, Carnegie Moscow Center
President Putin's current trip to Asia, the longest foreign travel of his presidency, once again has given him the opportunity to express his support for a multi-polar world order. In his interview with Al Jazeera last week, Putin also again emphasized that his interpretation of the 'new multipolar world' is not a justification to confront or promote conflict with the United States, but instead places emphasis on multilateralism as a more just way to manage global affairs.
Also in his Al Jazeera interview as well as his article recently in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Putin echoed former Soviet leaders and foreign ministers with the statement, "That not a single major global or regional problem can be solved without Russia's active and equal participation is a geopolitical reality." Okay, so the latter statement is a slight exaggeration designed to appeal to Russian patriotism during the campaign season. Still, it is undeniably true that Russian participation in efforts to resolve three of the most pressing regional problems-all dealing with the Bush Administration's "axis of evil"-in Iraq, North Korea, and Iran has played a more constructive role in the past year.
Mr. Putin's multi-polar vision may not really be so far off the mark as it is a little premature. In the 1990's former Russian foreign minister and prime minister Yevgeny Primakov also famously advocated a multi-polar world order and promoted Russian ties with China and India, even calling for a "strategic triangle" to bring those powers together to jointly resolve many pressing international problems. But Mr. Primakov's multi-polar world, including strategic formulas like a Russo-Sino-Indian quasi alliance, was clearly conceived in order to confront or at least contain U.S. uni-polar hegemony. The strategic triangle idea never got off the ground because China and India-as well as other major powers-had and continue to have greater incentives to maintain good relations with the U.S. than to ally with a weakened Russia against the U.S. The United States enjoys today a combination of economic and military power that is unprecedented in modern history, and this has for the most part compelled other major powers to conclude that "if you can't beat them, join them." While we must beware of exaggerating or underestimating U.S. power, the current uni-polar structure of power is likely to endure for the next decade or so. However, it will not last too long into this century.
The emergence of a real multi-polar world will not come about imminently as a result of decisions of other major powers to ally against the U.S. or the efforts of Mr. Putin and others to wish it into existence. Rather, it will emerge primarily because the structure of economic power in the world will change. And it is likely to radically change from what we are familiar with today.
An interesting study of world economic growth to the year 2050 published this month by the prestigious U.S. investment banking firm Goldman Sachs concludes that in 2050 China, India, Russia, and Brazil will be 4 of the 6 largest economies in the world, with the United States and Japan rounding out the top 6. Currently the top 6 in dollar terms are the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and the UK. By mid century China, the U.S., and India are likely to occupy the top three slots in that order with economies at least 5 times the size of Japan, Brazil, and Russia which will all have nearly equal gross domestic products (GDP).
The reports' authors (the report can be found at the Goldman Sachs website) acknowledge that their key assumption underlying these projections is has each country maintaining policies and institutions that are conducive to growth. Gross domestic product increases will be due to relatively higher growth rates coupled with dramatic currency appreciation over time. Not coincidentally, the four countries whose weight in the world economy will most dramatically increase are those with relatively high populations and those who for various reasons did not implement particularly effective or enlightened economic policies for most of the 20th century. In effect, they can use the first half of this century to make up for lost time. Such dramatic improvements in relative standing are not unprecedented, and the report points to the huge increases in GDP that Germany, Japan, and Korea achieved in the second half of the twentieth century. Although Russia's anticipated demographic decline will erode overall GDP growth, Russians will be especially pleased if the Goldman Sachs' projections are realized because they anticipate that Russian per capita income growth will reach the level of major European countries including Germany, France, and Great Britain.
Whether these projections are precisely correct is not the main point here; but the conclusion that major change is afoot is undeniable. Since economic power is and will be the most important factor in calculations of global power relations, it is highly likely that the world correlation of forces in a few decades will be vastly different from those of today. The multi-polar world that existed for more than two centuries until the end of the World War II was fraught with major wars and the tragic loss of massive amounts of blood and treasure. History shows that the rapid rise of new major powers in the international system has increased the potential for major war. So Mr. Putin is likely correct in asserting that a multi-polar world is emerging, but the inevitable change in the global balance of power will require extraordinarily effective and innovative means of global governance to maintain the peace. As the old proverb goes, "Beware of what you wish for!"
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