existence as a “multipolar world”. Multipolarity, as a meaningful political concept is a product of later periods of history, especially the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Subsequently, this multipolarity was changed into the bipolarity of the Cold War, which dominated the second half of the twentieth century.
In the 1990s, during the post-cold war era, the prevalence of the United States was sometimes compared to that of Ancient Rome. However, that was more an effective metaphor than a serious analytical proposition. A careful look at this era reveals a more complex relationship among the most powerful international players expressed, for example, in the trade-offs made in the United Nations Security Council in 1994, when Security Council permanent members tacitly agreed on their respective leading roles in the crisis situations in Haiti, the Caucasus and Rwanda. The geographic and historical reasons for the distribution of leading roles among the US, Russia and France were clear and were thus accepted de facto by the wider international community. The result was not unipolarity comparable with the Roman Empire, but rather a cooperative scheme resembling the concert of powers of the nineteenth century.
In the 1990s, the United States, the world’s leading military, economic and political power, was described as the “indispensable nation” by Madeleine Albright, the US Ambassador to the UN and later US Secretary of State.2 Let us think about this choice of words which conveys two messages: American power and centrality ←4 | 5→in international relations and also an invitation to cooperate. Indispensability is a two-way street: the central player is indispensable to the others, but it can only succeed with an appropriate level of cooperation provided by the others. Multipolarity is implicit here and in practice, it depends on the quality of cooperation among the key players. The UN has witnessed many examples of this pattern. Various crises around the world could not have been successfully addressed without the participation of the US, the indispensable nation, but each of the solutions required the cooperation of others, in some cases, the key regional players and in others, additional permanent members of the Security Council.
Developments in the late 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a cooperative pattern which strengthened the role of the United Nations and the UN Security Council in particular, as a place of coordination and cooperation among the major powers. While not perfect, this pattern dominated the UN’s work and reached many areas of international relations, allowing for a high level of global strategic stability. This is an important achievement: strategic stability existed despite clear military imbalance. US military spending, the sole remaining superpower, was higher than that of all the other major powers (i.e. Russia, China, India, Japan and Europe) combined. Strategic stability in this situation of imbalance was an important element of global peace. It preserved, at least for the time being, the necessary rational state behavior with regard to nuclear weapons and enhanced the importance of nuclear non-proliferation as a central point for global peace.
The twenty-first century started with a shock when the US was attacked on September 11, 2001. The superpower’s response was strong and dominated by an overly militarized reaction to the threat of terrorism, called the “the war on terror”. This response culminated in the war against Iraq in 2003. Now, more than ten years after the war, it is clear that one of the war’s many effects was to demonstrate the limits of American unilateral action. In the aftermath of the war, the US returned to its role as the indispensable nation, the phrase coined a decade and a half earlier, and thus buried the notion of unipolarity.
This brings us to the second-stage answer. The first decade of the twenty-first century brought rise to several phenomena, long in the making, which define our world as essentially pluralistic, if not clearly multipolar. China’s economic rise, the emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group and the G20 all marked an important change in the global economic balance of power, one with the necessary though not yet visible strategic and military consequences.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 made its own contribution to the change. The EU’s relative decline of power and influence is probably not irreversible, but the EU will have to make a great effort to establish itself as a major global player. The US, on the other hand, was more successful in overcoming the crisis and opened ←5 | 6→a new chapter in its global role, which initially looked much more collective than unilateral in its outlook.
These changes cited above had a major impact on the global security, economic and political landscape which has moved towards multipolarity. However, a note of caution is necessary here. The situation now cannot be equated with the multipolarity and balance of power of the nineteenth century. Similar to earlier historical periods, the major powers of our era compete and cooperate, but unlike previous periods, today’s cooperation levels and interdependence is qualitatively much higher. Interdependence is measured daily in stock markets around the world and is a constant reminder that competition must be kept within limits. None of today’s major powers can afford competition which would destroy the existing economic equilibrium. The cost would simply be too high and would necessarily have political and security consequences beyond acceptable levels for each of these global players.
An additional feature of the current global pluralism is the growing importance of various security arrangements, both global and regional. These have been strengthened in the past two decades and have produced positive effects for global security and development. The number of large-scale armed conflicts had been decreasing until 2011, and there was a growing contribution to this trend by international security structures, underpinned by real power. The UN Security Council continued to play its role as the global body with primary responsibility for international peace and security. However, in the period following 2011, the situation deteriorated. The military conflicts in Libya, Syria and Ukraine were the main hotbeds of crisis, while, international security weakened and relations among the main powers were deteriorating.
On the other hand, international cooperative regimes such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Bretton Woods institutions have been largely maintained. They need further change and reform to better represent the changing distribution of economic and financial power, but this is not an impossible task. Reform and adjustment should be the order of the day for all international institutions, including the United Nations.
Third, how do these changes affect security issues today? This question can only be fully be answered with reference to regionally defined realities. The past two decades have continued to demonstrate the critical importance of the geographic imperative in today’s increasingly multipolar world. Therefore, I suggest that the third, and most important part of the answer to the question of multipolarity should be considered in relation to these geographic realities, especially Eurasia.
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When Sir Halford Mackinder, a British geographer and political thinker, and founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), published his celebrated article “The Geographical Pivot of History” in 1904, he explained global geography as consisting of the “global ocean” covering nine-twelfths of the globe, the “World-Island” consisting of Eurasia and Africa, and the lands of the “Outer Insular Crescent” included the Americas, Australia and smaller islands. He argued that the World-Island dominated the world, and that Europe and Asia were intrinsically linked. In his analysis, Europe was, in essence, a peninsula with a disproportionately long seacoast, which made it a strong maritime power and helped establish its historically dominant role. Nevertheless, Europe remained a peninsula, while the pivot area on which the fate of great world empires rested was the Heartland of Central Asia.3
Mackinder’s theory strongly influenced political thinking in the twentieth century and inspired much of the geostrategic thinking leading to World War II as well as post-war arrangements. Europe lost its earlier dominant role after World War II and was replaced by the North Atlantic Alliance. Together with the United States, the main part of the “Outer Insular Crescent,” Europe
