One of the most common questions people ask is, “Who rules?” Who rules their society, city, state, region, continent…? In our era of globalization, the question is quite legitimate and common: “Who rules the world”? The answer to the question “How do I(we) live?” also depends on the answer to it. And more importantly: “How long will we live and how will we end our lives”? This answer resonates with deepest human fears. In the political-governmental sphere, it is inextricably linked to issues of war and peace, which only further underlines the importance of the question “Who rules the world”? It depends on the character, capacity and intentions of those who rule whether, when and where a war will happen, how cruel and destructive it will be, how long it will last, who will win it, what will come after it …
Bipolarism
Fifty years ago, the answer to the question “Who rules the world” was quite simple. At that time, in a very visible and recognizable way, the world was ruled by “Americans and Russians”. It was the era of perhaps the most complete bipolarism in human history, especially from a global perspective. The key characteristic of the whole world at that time was the race for global domination of two grandiose military-political-administrative systems, embodied in the leadership of the USA and the USSR. In the value foundations of these systems lay two thoroughly elaborated ideological systems with universalist pretensions, i.e. with a tendency to impose themselves on the whole world — liberal capitalist democracy and Marxist communist dictatorship.
Literally every state, nation, political regime, armed formation, party, movement … every actor was positioned on a scale from “pro-American” to “pro-Russian”, and that position was a key determinant for each of them. Even with actors who were at least formally markedly averse to both key poles, such as Peron’s Argentina or later Khomeini’s Iran, or with those who on principle refused to take sides, such as Tito’s Yugoslavia — their position was primarily determined by the fact they are impartial in the crucial race, not by their other, autonomous features. No attempt to form a “third pole” that could threaten or effectively challenge the bipolarity in terms of power and influence has succeeded. The most ambitious of these attempts was the Non-Aligned Movement, which brought together wide circle of actors, precisely on the premise of challenging bipolarism. But by the end of the bipolar era this movement was recognized exclusively as “something in between” and by no means as a third pole, competitive with the other two. After all, a significant number of Non-Aligned Countries were recognizably pro-American or pro-Russian.
It is clear when the era of bipolarism began. This happened in 1945, when with joint efforts of epic proportions, the Western Allies (a broad coalition of states and resistance movements led by the USA) and the USSR (the first country of communism, which also controlled a significant number of resistance movements) defeated the Axis Powers in World War II. This event is formative not only for the era of bipolarism, but also for later periods, including today.
We all still live in a “post-Second-World-War world”. Since then, there have been no globally or even regionally relevant political actors who would try to publicly base their actions on the ideological values inherited from the Axis Powers. The term ‘’Cold War’’ expressed the symbolic significance of the Second World War as a key cornerstone in the history of mankind. It is attributed to the American-Russian confrontation in the era of bipolarism. The term implies a distinction in relation to the “hot war”, such as the one that ended in 1945, and which completely changed the face of the world, not just in the political sense. Admittedly, the Cold War also had its distinctly “hot” periods and segments, among which only the most glaring were the Korean and Vietnam Wars. But none of them represented such a significant turning point in the history of the whole world and the definition of the global order as WWII.
Ideological and value systemic differences were great among the victors of the Second World War. In its last phases, the contours of the future bipolar world were clearly outlined. In later episodes, we will return to a more detailed analysis of the world in the bipolar period, including its periodization and other items, as well as in the case of the Second World War and its context. Now we are moving back closer to our time.
Unipolarism and the question of its end
The end of the era of bipolarism is also clear. It took place in 1989, when the Warsaw Pact collapsed — a military superstructure of the communist pole. Its members automatically adjusted their political and economic orders to liberal-democratic-capitalist models from the West. The dominance of the United States and the military superstructure of their half of the former bipolar world, the NATO pact, became undeniable. As early as 1991, the USSR itself disintegrated, and it’s former federal units became independent. The Russian Federation, which was dominant among them, did not show any pretensions to world domination in the former Soviet style.
Until then, the position of every political actor on the planet was chiefly determined on the scale between the USA and the USSR; since then, that position has been determined in relation to the only remaining dominant pole — the USA. That is when the era of unipolarism, unseen on a global level in earlier human history, undeniably began. Some actors, such as the Non-Aligned, tried to find a “third way” between the dominant poles in the era of bipolarism, mostly without success. Opposition to the only dominant pole reduced the actors willing to resist it, including the states, to the level of “world pariahs”, often with grave consequences. Let us remember Saddam’s Iraq and Milosevic’s Serbia. A political, economic and military coalition was formed against each of these actors relatively quickly. This brought them complete isolation from the rest of the world, economic ruin and military defeats.
We will analyze this epoch in more detail in the coming episodes, mainly through a comparison with recent developments. Today, there is practically a general consensus that the unipolar world no longer exists. Those who rejoice in this fact agree, as well as those who despair because of it. However, there is no consensual answer to the question: “When did the era of unipolarism end?” Let’s start searching for that answer with one event that suggestively imposes itself as a relevant possibility — the attack on the USA on September 11, 2001. It is extremely symbolic as a previously unimaginable attack on the very heart of the American “World Empire”, New York and the Pentagon. After more than a decade of global domination, the United States got a brutal reminder that they are not invulnerable, even “at home”, even less than during the Second World War.
These attacks, however, promptly led to an unprecedented wave of global solidarity with the United States, even by actors who were not particularly sympathetic to them. The then-formed broad coalition against the perpetrators of the attack, the Afghan radical Islamists — the Taliban (former US allies against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the era of bipolarism), proved, however, to be a “swan song” of unipolarism, or at least its peak. The then President of the United States, Republican George W. Bush Jr., using the coalition to overthrow the Taliban and establish international governance in Afghanistan, immediately went “a step further”, perhaps unaware of strategic repercussions. He proclaimed the “Axis of Evil”, which consisted of radical communist North Korea, Iran as a state with an order based on Shia Islam, and, most importantly — Iraq under the secularist and nationalist (formally pan-Arab) dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
Iraq as a litmus paper of the changing of epochs?
Iraq’s role in many of these developments and epochs carries strong symbolic potential. Iraq was one of the pillars of the “American pole” in the Middle East at the beginning of the bipolarism era. After the coup and the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, it became one of its key opponents with pro-Soviet tendencies. However, after the overthrow of the radically pro-American monarchy in Iran in 1979, Saddam Hussein (the absolute dictator of Iraq since 1969) became a kind of US tool against the newly formed Khomeini theocratic order in Iran. Washington assessed it as more dangerous than the Iraqi one.
It is symptomatic that during the brutal and long war against Iran (1980–1988), Iraq enjoyed the favors not only of the United States and its allies, but also of the USSR, which was skeptical about the development of the situation in Iran. Searching for the “third way” in a radically bipolar world, Iraq then looked successful almost as one of the few champions in that discipline — Yugoslav dictator Tito. Historical-geopolitical turning point of 1989 is embodied, among other things, in a radical change of the position of Saddam’s Iraq. By inertia, he continued to act as a “Cold War profiteer” who, on the basis of his “perfect” position, went for the “dividend” deserved by his supposed restraint of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution.
That dividend was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, just before the collapse of the USSR. The newly born global hegemon, instead of ignoring this behavior of its former ally, promptly formed a coalition that completely defeated the Iraqi army by light speed intervention. The USA imposed a peace agreement which prohibited Iraq’s aviation from flying over more than half of its territory. These are precisely the territories inhabited by predominantly separatist Kurds in the North and by Shia Muslims in the South, which are majority of Iraq’s population but were oppressed by the regime and oriented towards its enemy Iran. Both Kurds and Shia Muslims were developing significant guerrilla movements and activities.
It is precisely this Iraq, which the administration of his father George Bush Sr. (President 1989–1993) reduced from the status of an informal ally to a permanent status of “world pariah“ that his son Bush Jr. (President 2001–2009) targeted in the total military invasion of 2003. He did that on the wings of the global support to US, after the Taliban attacks and under accusations of producing weapons of mass destruction. The weapons could be used as in the 9/11 crisis, only with far more severe consequences. However, the absence of evidence that Iraq possessed such weapons and cultivated such intentions led to the global pro-American consensus turning into its complete opposite — the first significant blow to unipolarism since 1989.
For the first time, not only “world pariahs” like Saddam and Milosevic opposed American power and politics. Now, French President Chirac, echoing De Gaulle’s former policy, clearly and unequivocally said “No”. German Chancellor Schroeder, an eager ally in the bombing of Milosevic’s Serbia in 1999, also expressed systematic and consequential refusal. Such a “No” was already a harbinger, one could even say an indicator, of a kind of geopolitical revolution — the violation of undeniable American domination of the world at the very moment it was at its peak.
In the following episode, we will try to answer the question “Did the invasion of Iraq, as Bush’s at least formal reaction to the Taliban attacks, mark the end of the unipolar order”, as well as “What came in its aftermath?” This will bring us closer to our central questions: “In what epoch and what kind of a global order do we live today?” and “What can we expect in the near future by comparing our order to similar ones in contemporary history”?
