Globalization is not a politically antiseptic process

Why great-power conflicts remain a problem in an economically integrated world

Does Russia’s invasion of Ukraine indicate that the world has entered a new era of great-power rivalry and, potentially, conflict? Vladimir Putin’s stunning decisions to attack Ukraine, and the apparent blessing that he received from a Chinese government that also has designs on its neighbors, initially felt like a deeply ominous thing. But the difficulty Russia has had securing meaningful gains, the strength of the reaction by the west, and the toll of the invasion on the Russian economy may mean that Russia’s capacity to engage in other territorial adventures is considerably diminished, and that a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan by force is now much less likely.

But is that just wishful thinking? In recent days, a fascinating conversation has unfolded among historians, scholars of international relations and others. At the heart of the discussion is the simple question: why might a great power fight a major war?

Much of the recent discussion about the whethers and whys of a new great-power conflict has been a response to arguments made by John Mearsheimer, who has argued that the war in Ukraine is the fault of America and the west, which all but forced Russia to fight by expanding the footprint of blocs like Nato and the EU well into what Russia might reasonably consider its sphere of influence. Mearsheimer’s view of the war, as Adam Tooze summarizes it, is that:

Russia is a great power. Great powers…guard their security through spheres of interest. The US does so too, in the form of the Monroe doctrine and more recently in the Carter doctrine, which extends America’s interests to the Persian Gulf. If necessary, those zones are defended with force, and anyone who fails to recognise and respect this fails to grasp the violent logic of international relations.

This, in turn, is an expression of a more fundamental understanding of interstate conflict, which is, as Mearsheimer writes, that “the distribution and character of military power are the root causes of war and peace”. File that under big if true. Is it, though? Tooze takes issue with this view of conflict for a host of reasons. It treats Russia’s leaders as lacking agency and a capacity for moral reasoning, for one thing. Putin made the morally reprehensible decision to invade, and he might easily have opted for a different course of action. But as Tooze also notes, most people expected him to choose differently, for other good reasons:

Morality and legality are one reason for opposing war. The other is simply that over the last century at least, it has a poor track record for delivering results. Other than wars of national liberation, one is hard pressed to name a single war of aggression since 1914 that has yielded clearly positive results for the first mover. A realism that fails to recognise that fact and the consequences that have been drawn from it by most policymakers does not deserve the name. That does not mean that wars will not occur. But to postulate the future as an endless repetition of the hyped-up militarism of 1914 is to deny any capacity for collective learning. And it is counterfactual, especially in an age of nuclear armaments.

And so we might say that this invasion occurred because Putin, like Mearsheimer, has a fundamentally unsound view of what ends can and should be pursued through war. But because most world leaders do not think like Putin—and because Putin’s gambit has provided further evidence of the uselessness of war in pursuing both security and national greatness—we should not expect to find ourselves in a new era of dangerous military competition.

Yet that doesn’t seem quite right. We have to remember that before the world’s attention was focused on eastern Europe, it was frequently drawn to East Asia, where China has invested massively in building up its conventional and nuclear capabilities, has moved purposefully to become more economically self-sufficient, and has been behaving threateningly with respect to Taiwan, all while declaring its commitment to eventual reunification with the island. That’s a far cry from launching an invasion, but it doesn’t exactly scream that the days of territorial enlargement through violence are over and done with. 

Neither is China the only great power whose growing geopolitical stature seems likely to pose problems for the prevailing world order. There is also India, which has plenty of security concerns of its own, among them China. Indeed, the vote on a UN resolution condemning Russia’s aggression gave us the absurd spectacle of an Indian abstention: motivated in part by India’s reliance on Russian military hardware, which it reckons it needs to meet the threat posed by China, which of course also abstained, being a close strategic partner with Russia.

Despite China’s disconcerting behavior, and despite the shock of the Russian invasion, there remains a reluctance to believe that the Chinese government would really throw caution—and economic ties with the west—to the wind. Fareed Zakaria, for example, in an interview with Ezra Klein, argues that it is a mistake to treat China and Russia is inseparable allies, united by political ideology:

Russia benefits from international instability. It’s an oil state. Oil prices go up. It seeks to undermine international institutions and cooperation.

China, as a general principle, does not do that. It benefits enormously from international stability, from international order, even from international institutions. What it wants is to become powerful within them, so powerful, that you cannot violate its sovereignty.

China’s number one principle for the last 20 years, and what it criticizes the U.S. for, is state sovereignty, the inviolability of state sovereignty. Which is why this whole business with Russia invading Ukraine has been so awkward for Beijing. So what they want is to grow powerful within the world as it exists.

You can see this in the fact that they want to become powerful in the U.N. They want to become powerful in the I.M.F. They want to become powerful in the World Bank. They don’t want to overturn these institutions.

Zakaria, I think, is making two points here. One is that the west shouldn’t get caught up in ideological conceptions of geopolitical rivalries, in a way that leads us to drive countries like Russia and China ever closer together. And sure, fair enough. But the other is something like an expression of the Angell hypothesis, or the Golden Arches theory: that countries which have benefited enormously from participation in an open global economy should, if they’re thinking clearly, understand this and refrain from taking actions which endanger that prosperity. China doesn’t want to destroy the system, Zakaria is arguing; it merely wants more influence within it, such that it can do what it needs to do to protect its sovereignty.

But this, I think, is where we have most struggled to learn the lessons of the past. Economic integration between countries necessarily entails a loss of sovereignty on the part of those countries. The removal of barriers to trade involves a process of policy harmonization, in which governments give up some control in order to gain access to other markets. In doing so, they open up new pathways across which the ideas and values of different societies flow and interact. Interdependence reduces governments’ room for maneuver, even with respect to what seem like purely internal matters. Economic integration is not a politically antiseptic process.

So while the Russian invasion can seem something like a fluke of history, which didn’t really need to happen, the backdrop to the invasion—in which geopolitical rivalries are intensifying and renewed great-power competition becomes a realistic possibility—reflects this tension between great powers’ desire to have all the benefits of an open global economy on the one hand, while on the other maintaining national sovereignty and the right to have the kind of political system and society they want. That tension can’t be wished away, and while we can certainly hope that it doesn’t lead to more and worse interstate conflict, there is certainly a chance that it might.

More broadly, if we’re thinking about why we didn’t see major wars between industrialized countries after 1945, this has to be a part of the explanation. It is one thing to say that close economic ties across western Europe and the Atlantic are desirable, and another to establish the conditions under which most people in most of the relevant economies deem the loss of national sovereignty that such integration entails to be acceptable and legitimate. For long and bloody years these conditions were not met. Yet once they were established, a durable and prosperous peace became possible. 

In the postwar decades, those conditions weren’t in place with respect to the free world and the eastern bloc. But then economic ties between those spheres were very limited. It was only in the past decade or two that the world again confronted a situation in which great powers which were not prepared to make deep concessions of sovereignty developed close economic ties. And that’s the difficult situation that America and China are now trying to negotiate.

That doesn’t mean that war with China is inevitable, or even likely. Nuclear weapons make such a conflict too terrible to contemplate. But in considering why countries might turn their back on the integrated global economy, or why relations between America and China might deteriorate to the point that accidental military encounters become a serious worry, we have to reckon with this unresolved tension. Or to reframe the initial question somewhat: under what conditions might deep economic integration between America and China be sustained? The answer, I think, is a context in which the people of each country deem a cession of sovereignty to the other to be benign and legitimate. And that, in turn, requires a shared belief that the societies are engaged in more or less the same sort of project, in more or less the same sort of way. 

How to achieve that without engaging in a horribly destructive war is a separate and difficult question. It seems to me that building a strong community of mutually supportive democracies, of the sort that people in other countries might be keen to join and which they are free to join, is one potentially promising approach. But an important first step is to understand the nature of the challenge we face in seeking to construct a peaceful and prosperous world.