Global Power in a Shifting International Order: The West and the Rest

welcome my name is Michael Copps I'm called the chair of LLC I'm not sure that's entirely right now by just taking the directors job I'm not sure I'm one of the co-directors or family co-director of LSE ideas which I put together many years ago with my good friend Arnie Weston who's in the audience today we've been having a conference on American structural power we started with Jim O'Neill and we ended with Barry Buzan that's not bad for the day we had a fantastic conference just talking about the questions of American structural power and what it means both economically militarily politically and institutionally and I couldn't think of anybody better to in a sense conclude the day's proceedings and than Joe Nye josée say is a living legend and that's what you are Joe a legend who's still alive if you can keep both together for a few more years you know we are doing jolly world sometimes named the third most influential the sixth but influential and the tenth most influential I ask scholar in the world that's not bad going there are reasons for that because Joe has engaged with so many issues over such a long period of time so intelligently and so effectively and with such great communication skills he with Bob Cohen in the 1970s navigated the whole argument about interdependence and complex interdependence in in those interesting in that interesting decade called the 1970s which some of us can remember well but most of you can't because he went around he wrote a book on bound to lead on questions of American decline and then Joe guy got into power in a big way soft power which was a term he'd coined in 2004 and this is one of these academic ideas which was taken off and I think most of you probably heard of it which was one degree since you're all here this evening soft power smart power what kind of power the power gain the power to lead the power of the future Joe has done in orange come back he's a great communicator and we're really looking forward to what he has in all friend of the LSC and a very old friend of mines very nice to say global power and a shifting international order the west and the rest nobody better to talk on that the professor Joe Nye Harvard University welcome once again to the London School of Economics thank you very much BIC that's for that kind overly kind introduction I must say that I should warn you that when people would call my house when my children were growing up they say his doctor and I there would always say yes but he's not the useful kind so caveat emptor has asked me to say something about global power shifting international order and the rest and the west and there are many people in this audience I see here who know as much or more about that than I but let me give you some thoughts and then we can have some time with our q and A's to actually n converse about it or have different views about it let me first start by defining terms I'm not going to spend much time on it but for me power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want so if you think of power in that sense as that definition then they're basically three ways you can affect others to get the outcomes you want you can do it through coercion through payment or through attraction and persuasion and in that sense we need to think of power in all these ways certainly when I was studying power at Oxford or studying international relations years ago maybe ancient history as Mick says I remember listening to AJP Taylor his marvelous lectures and for Taylor a power and power itself was the ability to prevail in war and I think that's still relevant but it's not all what power is or what what matters so if you think back to the question of Tayler addressed in his classic book the struggle for mastery of Europe a great power was a country which was more likely to prevail in a European war but many people have said that in today's age the Information Age sometimes it's more important whose story wins than whose army wins and perhaps that ability both having a winning army and a winning story or the fact successful narrative is the secret of power but any case with that definitional down crown let me say that as we look at what's happening in the power in the world today there really are as I argued in my book the future of power two big ships going on one of which is a shift if you want that you can think of it as horizontal from one set of States to another set of states and this is sometimes called the rise of the rest which we're going to focus on but equally important and I'll come to this later in my talk there's a second power ship going on from state to non-state actors or you can think of that as a vertical shift and in some ways that's more complex or difficult to understand than the first shift the horizontal shift and at the end of my talk I'll try to relate those two types of shifts and indicate what that suggests is for the future power now what does IR theory tell us about the rise of the rest or power transitions well before I answer that question let me just say that it's very much conventional to talk about the power of the BRICS and in that same definitional sense let me say I think with all deference to Jim O'Neill for inventing a term which is very good for investors who wanted to make money in stock markets as a political concept the BRICS is really not a very useful concept the reason it's not useful is because it takes a declining power Russia and combines it with rising powers which of the others and it leaves out some other rising powers like Indonesia and so forth so I don't think as I did it is also fascinating to see that that that the Russians latched on to the concept it's a clever acronym to start the first beating of BRIC countries in yekaterina very kind of noises 2009 so it's useful for that sort of diplomatic purposes but if we're really trying to talk analytically about changes in the world I think the term brick is not a useful concept for the way we do it though it's now widely used and basically it involves countries some of which are our pluralistic democracies Britain Brazil India South Africa with countries which are relatively autocratic China and Russia but even more important I think is that these countries have deep internal differences and the Russian case really is different Russia and this is not an anti-russian comma because I hope it's not true yeah I mean I hope they will do something to make what I had to say now a self-fulfilling a fallacy but Russia is a country which is basically a one crop economy with a serious demographic problem and a terrible health problem the average Russian male dies at age 60 there's no other developed country in the world where that's true now there are in principle solutions to that and when Medvedev was president he suggested some but they were in unable to actually implement them so I think Russia is a country which has very serious problems I hope they can cure them but to lump them together with let's say China and India and so forth just in Brazil it just is not analytically what we need the the other thing of course about the BRICS is that most of its really about China and if you take the economics more and a half of it is China and China is an extraordinary case may the Chinese in three decades have raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and done an extraordinary job of increasing the scale of their economy overall so that's why you don't want an analytical concept that loves Russia with the problems it has with China and calling it something called BRICS hey enough for the my definitions of power and the rest not being BRICS and so forth so the main thing I think we need to focus on for IR theory is what does it mean when you have a transition of the type that we're seeing now if this horizontal shift of power that I have talked about and particularly let me focus on China as the I mean there are many countries are involved in transition but let me focus particularly on China then the role of China and then relationship to the US what tools do we have in IR theory well we often use the term hegemony and we have two versions of theories of hegemony one is having the hegemonic transition Theory the other is hegemonic stability theory well a hegemonic transition Theory you guys suppose you could say Robert Gilpin's work is a there's a good example of this it harkens back to two cities from the famous lucidity and explanation of the origins of the Peloponnesian War it was caused by the rise and the power of athens and the fear it created in sparta and there has been an intendancy to say that when you have the hegemonic transition of this sort where a rising power creates fear in an established power it's likely to lead to conflict and to give you an example even people often cite World War one the rising power Germany and the fear it created in Britain which is actually a rather oversimplified view of the origins of world war one but it's often few by editorialists and others but if you look at the current world there are a number people who say that the rising power of China will create fear in the US which will lead to conflict and I suppose that among our colleagues who think about this John Mearsheimer who would be closest to somebody who has expressed as as as usual john expresses things extremely clearly whether they're right or wrong he's always clear and john has said and his words is that china cannot rise peacefully so there's a prediction there it's fairly clear and it's based on if you want hegemonic transition theory of the sort that Robert Gilpin outline 30 40 years ago now so one tool that we have to understand this global power shift and the West and the rest is hegemonic the transition Theory the other is ironically the almost the opposite hegemonic stability theory and this is often associated with Charles Kindleberger the the famous MIT economist and basically what Kindleberger said is you need a hegemon there needs to be a state which can act in the role of hegemon to be able to provide public goods for the world and when hegemonic transition is contested when there isn't hegemonic stability then those public goods will not be provided and Tarn Kindleberger used to use the example of Britain and the United States written averaged weakened from World War one the United States strengthened from World War one Britain was no longer able to provide the public goods free trade a stable monetary system and so forth that it had provided when it was preeminent but the Americans hadn't grown up the Americans had weren't ready to take on that response ability so essentially the great problem with collective goods as you all know is is the free rider problem why pay for something if you can ride the bus for free and the Americans were Free Riders so when Kindle burgers of you the problems of the 1930s were a problem of hegemonic stability the absence of a hegemon and the fact the country that had become the most powerful hadn't grown up so to speak it wasn't prepared to take this role led to the conditions of the Great Depression which of course led to the disastrous political consequences of Hitler and so on and on on story you all know well so we have this this tool are these two tools relating to hegemonic transition the hegemonic stability that we use in our theory but one of the problems I have with them is it's never quite clear how we define the term what's a hegemon by colleague and trend bobko hain if you look at his book after hegemony which basically argued that maybe Kindleberger wasn't completely right that maybe you could have public goods provided by institutions which I happen to agree with with Co hang on that but even in his book on after a Jevon you will find that if one place in the book he talks about the hegemon is a country with preponderant resources in another place a hegemon is a country able to maintain the rules well you'd say well country the pondered resources can they make rules but actually those are quite different definitions one is a definition in terms of power resources the other is a definition in terms of power behavior and those aren't always the same for example if you look at the United States and you say when in the 20th century was the United States most preponderant in power resources it would probably be 19 45 to 1960 then everybody else was weakened by World War 2 the u.s. strengthened the US had you know some people asked me 40 to 50 percent of world product in 1945 had who was the only country in possession of nuclear weapons and so forth so clearly by one measure power resources this was the peak of hegemony in terms of behavior of setting the rules or getting what you want the u.s. in that period of his peak behavior couldn't prevent communism coming to China couldn't prevent Stalin from getting nuclear weapons couldn't prevent Fidel Castro from coming to power right off our Shore so here we were at the peak of our hegemonic power by one measure to Germany and in terms of behavioral outcomes we were not doing all that well it's not as though these were trivial issues these were major issues that so we have to be very careful when we talk about hegemony to ask whether we're defining in terms of resources in terms of behavior because they're often not exactly the same the other point is that when people make predictions based on these theories hegemonic stability or hegemonic transition they sometimes neglect the role of human agency or leadership I've just this week published a book which I which is called a political leadership and the creation of the American era and what I did in this book was go back and look at the 20th century and ask the question did presidents matter did feeders matter so one way to think about it is in the beginning of the 20th century the United States is the second great power by the end of the 20th century the United States is the world's only superpower some people would say that was inevitable if you have a continental scale economy in two oceans and weak neighbors gonna happen it's all structural if that's true does it matter then who was president maybe presidents don't matter at all so what I did in this book is go back and look at the periods of expansion of American power in the 20th century and look at the presidents who were crucial in the decisions that they made and then and ask if he did a counterfactual history and you said suppose this person wasn't president and the next most likely person was president instead knowing what their preferences are and what decisions they would make would the outcome have been any different so I mean if thinking back you know Willie if McKinley hadn't been assassinated there would never have been a President Teddy Roosevelt the Republican establishment hated Roosevelt they saw him as a cowboy if Teddy Roosevelt hadn't run for a third term in 2012 which he had once promised not to do but did and split the Republican vote so that William Howard Taft was defeated and Woodrow Wilson was able to come in as a minority vote president there never would have been a President Woodrow Wilson and if Franklin Roosevelt hadn't decided to switch his vice president in 1944 and substitute Harry Truman for Henry Wallace there never would have been a Harry a president Harry Truman and so forth so what I do is a counterfactual history and go back through history and ask what difference did leaders make and the conclusion I come up with is about half of the leaders didn't matter but about half did half of them made some decisions which were absolutely crucial to the outcomes and therefore people who are predicting power shifts in hegemony or preponderance of resources on structure alone which most structural realists like to do are missing the role of human agency and I think one of the problems that we have in IR is often we get so enamored of our structural model we've kept that agency matters and there are some agency decisions which are crucially important I mean let me just give you one as an example in 1955 the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States recommended to Dwight Eisenhower that he used nuclear weapons tactical nuclear weapons whatever that meant against China because otherwise they'd be impossible to defend chemo and Matsu which are just off the coast of China Eisenhower's comment was my god we can't use those things on Asian boys again within ten years quite extraordinary comment of a moral sentiment if you wanted or moral choice imagine that he it had it had not been Eisenhower but had been Douglas MacArthur another World War two hero who had become president instead of Eisenhower which is not a far-fetched idea because MacArthur Guan could become president MacArthur would have used nuclear weapons what would the world look like today if instead of a 70 year old taboo against the use of nuclear weapons if we'd had nuclear weapons used every 10 years as normal tactical weapons or fewer than 10 years be a very different world that's a case of human agency making a big difference and just measuring the resources and thinking in structural terms doesn't quite get it I'm always amused that according to Walter Isaacson in his biography of Henry Kissinger Kissinger when he was teaching at Harvard believed that international relations was structural that that answered it but after he served in government he changed his position so where you stand on this question of structure and agency obviously where you stand depends on where you sit but I guess my point is that the theories that we use in IR hegemonic transition or edge monic stability particularly measuring them in terms of preponderance of resources and structural terms really don't capture all we need to know to do a good international relations theorizing and describing this shifting international order the west and the rest so I think we need to be very careful to bring if you want the first image back in the role of individuals as I said about half of the president's battered another half didn't it actually turned out it wasn't the ones that you or at least that I expected the matter most but that's believed that that's not tonight's topic but there's also problem what narratives you use to explain the context of the shift that's going on and one of the dominant narratives it's used now is either the decline of the West or the decline of the United States I mean decline ism is a very powerful metaphor and you know we were brought up on given than the decline and fall the Roman Empire and you know you have Paul Kennedy's wonderful work the rise and fall the Great Powers and so when one looks at this power shift that's going on the horizontal power shift I described today it's very tempting to say well you know it's American decline and so decline ism is a is a trope a very popular theme which is used again and again by editorialists or talking heads on TV or even some scholars and I think it's a it's a rather misleading decline I think that it it really doesn't help us to understand what's the nature of the u.s. power and where the u.s. is in the world if you go back to Paul Kennedy's book rise and fall the great powers which incidentally is the book that I responded to when I wrote down to lead way back in 1990 Paul had the view that there was a cycle and that America was in a position in the cycle that was similar to let's say Philip the second Spain or guardian' Britain so forth and he used the term imperial over stretch and it's intuitively satisfying the sense that it means that as a country expands as it becomes in quotes more hegemonic whatever that means as it expands it commits more and more resources to its external position both military and aid and propping up allies and the rest of this so as it devotes more and more resources of this it starves its own domestic economy and finally it gets imperially overstretched Joseph Chamberlain would not like you know began to worry about this and late 19th century Britain and so Paul talks about Imperial overstretch and the argument is the Americans suffering from imperial overstretch the trouble of that is it's actually quite a good model to explain one of the super powers the Soviet Union but not the other let me give you the reason why the Soviet Union did indeed get to a point where but nearly a quarter of its gross domestic product was spent on keeping its empire or its military position that's a huge burden in the meantime the Soviet economy domestically wasn't coping with the so-called third Industrial Revolution the development of the Information Age and information technology so Imperial overstretch is a pretty good explanation of what happened to the Soviet Union it's not a very good explanation of what happened to the United States today the United States spends about what five percent of its gross domestic product on its external burdens for including both military and a diplomacy and everything at the height of the Cold War the u.s. spent 10 percent so if Imperial overstretch is the model of what's happening to American power excuse me the curves going the wrong direction the theory and the data don't don't fit that doesn't stop people from theorizing but it does strike me that if we're being analytically careful we're not going to apply Imperial overstretch to what's happening to the United States and so I think in that sense the the the decline metaphor in that version is not very helpful it's also not very helpful in the sense that the decline metaphor has a an implied idea of something that's a life cycle that we can know what is the life cycle of a country power a great power whatever we can know the life cycle of an individual human it's very rare for any of us to live past 120 defend we usually get clout on fourscore years or threescore years and ten so I can look you in the eye and assure you that I have been declined you can just check my birth date you can be it's a very strong proposition but if you ask me what's the prospect that the United States is in decline because it's gone through some natural life cycle none of us know and it's not impossible to know the great example of this and I psyched this example in the book I did on the future of power it was Horace Walpole in the 18th century who said whoa is Britain after the loss of the North American colonies we are now reduced to a miserable island like sardinia that was on the eve of Britain's greatest century which was fueled by the Industrial Revolution so we don't know what the lifecycle of a country is and even if we did think we knew you don't know what the duration of the periods in the cycle are so that if you look at the Roman Empire yes we do know retrospectively about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire but it's worth remembering it took three centuries to go for me Apogee to the final collapse so we don't know where America is in terms of of a life cycle so as we use a term like decline we ought to be careful not to let the metaphor shape how we project the future I mean even if the Americans decline some day I don't know next year or in a century from now I have no idea and I don't think most people who write about it do either now one question you can ask is is America an absolute decline in its American power an absolute decline and there you can say you know what do we know about certain characteristic it has a lot of problems always has right from the beginning but if you look at American economy today you know in terms of world's leading universities number of Nobel Prizes the amount of R&D the you know you can do it through a whole series of measures about creativity that's going on in the American economy and if you compare that let's say the ancient Rome which had no productivity and was wracked by internecine warfare there really it's a very different situation so a model of absolute decline as a strike me is very useful more interesting would be relative decline and that's where we come to this rise of the rest if you think of this as a situation where the Americans are here and but we'll use China for now but China was here and as China closes that gap you can describe that as the rise of the rest or you can disclose it or you can describe that narrowing gap as relative decline even though the America doesn't change suppose it doesn't change so you know you can use terminology of relative decline or you use terminology of rise of the rest I think it's more useful to use the term rise of the rest and the reason is even if the rest closed the gap with the United States doesn't necessarily mean they'll pass though is that a closing gap could be seen as relative decline doesn't necessarily prove surpassing now people can look at me and say my god how can you say that when everyone knows that China is going to have a larger economy than the United States within the decade and the answer is there's too much what I call cheap talk about GDP because of a size of GDP people assume that's the only measure of economic power and that that's the only measure of power and they're simply not the case when China's GDP passes the US and let's assume as within this decade it will be and let's assume you measure it either in purchasing power parity or exchange rates it doesn't matter too much from the point I'm gonna make it doesn't mean that China will have an economy equivalent to the US in terms of its sophistication which you might want to measure by per capita income and when China passes the u.s. is per capita income will be about the level of the u.s. in 1930 so there's a huge gap there one measure China will have economic power by the size of his economy that's a measure of the size of the population by another measure though China will still be quite poor and far less sophisticated as an economy so just on measuring economic power the fact that China will have a bigger GDP within I don't you name the number of years you want to choose doesn't prove that China has more economic power much less that it has more overall power for example if you look at military by heart China is increasing its capacity it has been increasing its military budget by that 10% a year or more and it has a greater capacity and it once had but the idea that it will have the ability to challenge the United States as a global military power within the next 10 to 30 years it's not not very likely and then if you look at soft power the third dimension I will talk about economic power and military power soft power to the third power this ability to attract others China is investing a great deal in increasing its soft power and the two Jintao told the 17th Party Congress in 2007 that China should increase its soft power and it has been spending billions of dollars on this very interesting recent new book by David Shum wall on China as a global power which has a great chapter showing how China is making these efforts to increase its soft power one of the problems with China and soft power is there's an unwillingness to realize that a lot of a country's soft power is produced not by government but by civil society and so long as China closely regulate civil society its leashing its capacity to generate soft power so to give you an example example I use the speech I gave it Peking University if you look at 2010 when you had the Shanghai Exposition which is a wonderful exposition if you if you ever visited it was you couldn't come out of that without appreciating Chinese culture it was just a wonderful thing what did China do after generating soft power through his successful Olympics and Shanghai Expo it locked up the you shall bow and let the world see an empty chair on the stage at Oslo that's called stepping on your own message in the advertising world but in other words until China is able to unleash civil society and that's going to be very difficult to do so is the nature of control by the Communist Party remains as it is China is not going to be able to equal the US and soft power just being able to generate a lot of broadcast by the government is not the form of credibility that you need through the soft hour so if we go back to the basic argument which is because China's GDP even bigger than the US China has passed the u.s. excuse me no on one measure if you want to call it GE theism China will be bigger than us but on per capita GDP another measure of each mounting power on military power and on soft power no China won't catch up with the US for quite some long time and just in case you doubt my word for it I did have an occasion in the last year to meet with the prime minister of China and his comment is this gonna take us at least 30 years to catch up with the United States but in a case this is not to argue that China hasn't done an extraordinary job it as I said earlier it's argue that the people then use this rise of China and the idea that China is passing the US to predict a hegemonic transition which will be violent I think are mistaken basically if China were like Germany challenging when Britain in 1914 then it might generate a degree of fear which could lead to the type of cycle that Thucydides originally described but if China in fact is going to be quite behind the u.s. as a matter of decades then there's no reason for the Americans to be so fearful we don't have to overreact when Britain was trying to understand what was happening with German foreign policy Germany had already passed Britain by 1900 in the manufacturing power what is it 1906 when air Crowe writes his famous memorandum saying how in the world do we understand German policy you know flailing out all the world in these strange ways and we have to therefore to respond to German capacity because we can't understand German intentions that was a situation where fear did have a powerful effect if China is as I say 30 years behind the u.s. even 10 years 20 years behind the u.s. it's not like Britain and Germany in 1919 14 the Americans don't have to respond with that sort of fearful response so if hegemonic transition Theory depends upon the rise in the power of X the fear it creates and why then it's not clear to me that the rise of the power of China indeed create that Mearsheimer like fear in the United States any case so the hegemonic transition problem I think is one which has been overstated in terms of predicting conflict from the rise of China and the effects will have on the US but let me conclude this in the next five minutes because make said I should shut up at 7:20 by going back to the issue of hegemonic stability and the problem of public goods and the problems that are created by this second shift that I described the vertical shift from state to non-state actors and what we see there is that there's been an extraordinary information revolution not the first time the world seen an information revolution at Gutenberg it saw this earlier but if you look at Moore's Law the ability to double the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months or so it's led to an extraordinary change in the reduction of the costs of computing power so that in let's say 1970 to 2000 the last quarter or so of the 20th century the cost of computing declined a thousandfold that's very abstract and I sometimes use an example to illustrate if the cost of an automobile had declined as rapidly as the cost of computing power you'd buy an automobile today for about 15 pounds now anytime the price of something or the technology goes down that dramatically the barriers to entry go down so people who are priced out of the market in the 70s can now participate so for example in 1970 if he wanted to have the capacity to make a phone call from London to Beijing to Johannesburg to Brasilia and to Washington simultaneously you could do it technologically you could do it it was very very expensive and so it was rationed by price to things like governments or multinational corporations today any of you can do that for free on skype so a barrier to participation which was launched a major barrier has fallen or to give you another example in the 1970s when I was working in the Carter Administration one of the great secrets that we had was that we could take a picture of any place on earth with 1 meter resolution and we spent billions of billions of dollars on that today any of you can go on Google Earth and get a better picture for free so being priced out of the market doesn't mean the government's are suddenly obsolete on the contrary what it does mean is that there many more actors able to crowd the stage and non-state actors are now able to do things that were previously reserved just to governments and that leads to a situation where there are a lot of new transnational problems problems created by non-state actors which cross borders outside the control of governments and those are issues where in fact you are going to need collective action to deal with these collective Bad's or if you want their alternative for collective goods I sometimes use this this metaphor of a three-dimensional chess board in which of the top board of military power the world is still unipolar there isn't any other power able to project military power globally but on the middle board of economic relations among states the world's multipolar and has been for a couple of decades this is the field where when Europe acts as an entity it's actually larger than the US but on the bottom board of transnational relations things that occur outside the control of governments whether that be financial transactions that are larger than the budgets of some countries or whether it be climate change or whether it be pandemics or whether it be terrorism these types of problems these transnational problems are often generated by non-state actors and states can only deal with by being able to have the capacity to organize collective activity there's no way that any one state can deal with this alone hegemon or not so this is why we need to think about the second aspect that I described Charlie Kindle burgers hegemonic stability theory I'm less worried as I suggested about hegemonic transition leading to a battle between the US and China there could be a battle between us people make mystical formations mistakes I mean it's not totally out of the question but that worries me less than the question of how we're dealing with the power shift to non-state actors and whether we're going to be able to organize to create the institutional structures whether formal institutions or informal networks to deal with the collective goods problems that are generated by this vertical shift of power that to me is a is a problem that actually worries me more than I'm worried by the traditional Gilpin Mearsheimer power transition from side to side so as we deal with with the with the topic that that make to sign the global power shifting international order I think we want to remember that power has a zero-sum dimension in which you act over others power over and that's still relevant being keeping a balance of power in the let's say the South China or East China Sea is you're still very important that tends to be zero Sun but there's also power with others as well as power over others and that's where collective action comes in or another way of putting it to go back to my original definition if power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want and of many of the issues that we're dealing with such as international financial stability climate change pandemics transnational terrorism our issues which we can't handle alone then we can only succeed if others succeed as well only if we have power with others not just power over others and one of the great challenges to deal with the topic that we're thinking about of the shifts they're going on is are we ready to think clearly about this power with as well as power over about the vertical responses to the vertical shift as well as the horizontal shift not too long ago the National Intelligence Council which I once headed issued a report on what they thought the world would look like in 2030 and what they said is that the u.s. is not going to recover the primacy or hegemony if you were to use that term that it had in the 20th century but it is going to be the leading state it is gonna be premise interpares what's different with the rise of the rest is we're gonna have to pay more attention to the parries and the u.s. is going to have to learn to work with others better than it does now if it's going to deal with things which matter very much to our citizens as well as to others in terms of being global public goods so to me the challenge that we face in answering this is how are we going to adjust our thinking about global power and a shifting international order in ways where we don't become trapped by traditional metaphors of decline or period over stretch or threats that come out of China's rising power and so forth and also are able to think about the question that will V be able to create the institutions both formal and informal to deal with the public goods problems that this vertical shift is creating for us back to me is really the heart of the question so thank you very much for your time it's a moisture it was fantastic and a fantastic conclusion to my day and a fantastic opening to what I think will be a great discussion and I'm gonna start it Joe you're right objectively you're right your conclusions are solidly optimistic and liberal is that how policymakers in Washington and Beijing are thinking these days that is my worry I I share with you I share much for your announcement that in fact overwhelming in most of it and when we write our next book together perhaps we could do that together good but I just worries me that whatever you say on the objective terms the power of you know it's not shifting in the ways of talking about China's much weaker than is made out to be blah blah blah the United States should not be fearful and China should not be pushing hard on the ground it looks a bit more problematic now is this mr. perception is understanding or whatever the other thing is every time I go to a conference now John Mearsheimer never looks so happy I mean he keeps going as I told you so you know because he was arguing this against big Basinski a few years ago about the inevitable power transition conflicts so I agree with your analysis the question is are the mr. leadership in Beijing listening to you or somebody else and all the people in Washington actually beginning to think that there is a u.s. decline and the China is rising and I responding to that the tilt to Asia the pivot to Asia is at least interpreted in some circles as being a response to what is perceived as China's rise and it's setting off that security dilemma which you're trying to avoid let's start with that one and then open up to the rest of us yeah well your points are a very good one to make in the sense that you know that's why as I said in this book just structural explanations aren't adequate human agency matters and people who make the wrong decision or I have misperceptions or make miscalculations and throw off-track things which structurally shouldn't happen indeed you could argue this is counterfactual that World War one really is not just a structural question it also involves a certain accounts in miscalculations that were made by leaders I mean the basically I think the Germans felt that better to have the war before the railways were built that allowed the Russians to get their troops to the frontier the Schlieffen Plan with them they obsolete anyway point is people make calculations and miscalculation so you could imagine for example when East China Sea a situation worried Chinese local ship captain does something which isn't designed by people of Beijing but faces pushes people in Beijing into a difficult situation of either backing down and losing face or taking a robust alternative he say then that's not a facetious example in 2010 you may remember there was a Chinese fishing trawler which bashed into a Japanese Coast Guard ship and it was not something on orders from Beijing it turns out that the fishing captain was drunk but once it happened it was impossible for leaders in Beijing to say oh forget it and it wound up leading to the Chinese embargoing the exported rare minerals to Japan and a turn Japanese opinion strongly at the Chinese at a time when Japanese opinion was actually somewhat more have Billington theory there had been some efforts by some politicians in Japan to improve relations with China so as one of my Japanese friends said China's behavior in respondents of strongly to this was an own-goal though there's it really hurt China more than help but from the point of view a Chinese leader saying am I going to be criticized on the blogosphere and in the bureaucracy for being weak and giving in to Japanese no so you can get I mean I don't was not meaning by my description to give a Pollyanna view of the world but and and that's again the recent buy in this new book I placed so much emphasis on the interplay between structure and agency what are saying is it's structurally I don't see the need for this therefore if we can persuade people that that's the case but it's not like Britain in 1914 or whatever then maybe you won't have the misperceptions and the miscalculations histories for surprises and so I'm not predicting I'm just writing the structural circulation ability right okay let's lost the lets said wish it was the people they yeah come on let's let's right into the middle here to profess it down equal I want to bring I'm only gonna choose two people I know faster and then I don't know I know Danny we started professor Danny Crowes a part of economics here right okay thank you very much professor nyah I'm intrigued by your recasting of a Gemini stability theory in your description of a move from horizontal power shift to a vertical power shift and part of the idea here of course is that by moving to the vertical power shift dimension we make much clearer what the global public goods are that the hegemon needs to try for but I wonder if they're one of the real problems with hegemony stability theory as a way to understand IR is that those are actually relatively few and far between those problems where we can agree what the global public good is it's true nobody wants pandemics it's true we don't want more international terrorism but in terms of something like international financial stability we're views differ sharply on the moves that are needed to restore the world international financial stability having a hegemon justify itself through hegemony instability theory seems to be problematic well I think that's a very good point and I also think that if you look at the response to the 2008 financial crisis which was largely made in America MidAmerican fault what is interesting is that the way in which the Obama administration replied was a way in which began to bring other states in so the use the creation and use of the g20 for but also the discussion of realignment of quotas in the IMF are basically ways I mean the Americans learn slowly that I would argue this is example of their learning John ikenberry uses here tonight and has written about this very well which is there's something about the openness of American hegemony an openness in the sense of willingness to share power and others being getting help some part of the set some of the rules I think is encouraging ok so I think your point if the Americans use Kindle burgers theory in a simplistic way and say we're Britain and we're good all ourselves then I think you I would not be very optimistic but the idea that the Americans can learn to share more power not totally I mean there are lots of limits on the way they do things I think is a source for some optimism so I but I think your point is well-taken straight up very universe Mike downturn you I was going to ask what do you think that in a in a shifting international order the domestic structure of the west and the rest might make a difference to their soft power capabilities as we've seen recently there's there's been a well-publicized hunger strike in Guantanamo Bay where over 100 people are going on the hunger strike but if if are hundreds Chinese prisoners go on hunger strike in the middle of the forest do they make a sound and obviously there are restrictions on budgeting if if the relative balance is changing and the West must must publish the budget and develops more scrutiny than the rows will that potentially affect soft power capabilities and also if I can another question China's had quite a lot of soft power success in in West Africa especially and other parts of the developing world so do you think that the West still has a chance to keep any software and we have great on the on the soft power of the US I think it's it's damaged by Guantanamo so I mean I think there are things and if you actually look at the before that the invasion of Iraq you could measurement the attractiveness of the United States drops by about 30 points per country in all Western European countries and it dropped by even more than that in Muslim countries so you can seed actions which the Americans take which reduce American soft power but at the same time a lot of American soft power comes from non-state actors from civil society so the fact that people could be protesting American policies but still wanting to go to American universities it's something that the witch it indicates the the the diverse nature of the sources of American soft power I hate the Chinese they're the the they haven't got to that point with unleashing civil society so Chinese got a certain amount of soft power from the success of their economy it's a it's a model which attracts others that's your West African case they also get a certain amount of soft power from their culture it is a very Chinese traditional culture very attractive so these Confucius Institutes are able to create attraction but when they when you lock up I Weiwei or Leo shall bow you're you're just not gonna compete in Paris or London you may not do too badly in Lagos or the car I don't know but in terms of of the countries which probably are most important in terms of power I think the Chinese are gonna I mean they may have certain degree of soft power that is important I'm not belittling it but it's not clear that it's going to be greater than American or British soft power when you when you put it on the larger scale so I actually don't worry all that much about the Chinese activities in Africa I mean it to me Africans can take care of their own thinking and I don't I think the fact that that there's an attraction to the Chinese situation at times abetted by Chinese aid you know that's I think to me is not a great worry that it won't be a permanent factor so I I think there's a I think the Americans ought to be more careful about how they Shepherd their soft power was a good case but are we going to lose a soft power battle with China in Africa or elsewhere I don't think so okay I'm gonna take this right here there's a lady up there and there's somebody here yeah and there's somebody in greets I'm gonna take three make them shorten it snappy good mind thanks yeah mr. Knight so you touched very briefly on the role of digital diplomacy or of this online space which a lot of people are saying is an extension of a public sphere for the very reasons you said it's reduced to cost to entry and a lot of people can do it but at the same time you mentioned that generating broadcast by the government doesn't bring you credibility so I'm just wondering if you can comment on all these digital diplomacy efforts for instance by the UK by the US by non-state actors and at the same token when you have media organizations for instance like Al Jazeera who are also taking advantage of the online and the media space in order to project their own variations of soft power it's non-sexual and there's something yeah please sir yes that's great no good question I want as many people to Kevin as possible that's what okay thank you very much for the interesting talk my name is Jim blowhole from the Overseas Development Institute my crafting is kind of similar to Professor quas and it is about global public goods and if the legitimacy of being cashman is about one's ability and willingness to provide sustainable global public goods to the rest of the world how do you think the formation of the BRIC economy is it's going to make a contribution to that especially in the economic stop me thank you thank you very much in green hi my name is Sarah just a quick question on the importance of democracy and creating soft power or at least striping one soft power and wondering whether the China's Chinese administration's ultimate sacrifice will be a transition to democracy before China can really exert any kind of considerable amount of soft power in the world great yeah well on the first question on the changes in technology in communication the the existence of the Internet the blogosphere the Twittersphere and so forth makes things much more complicated and it's very interesting if you're trying to do public diplomacy as a government and you're doing it just by broadcasting the great danger is that in an Information Age where there's such a plethora of sources of information the scarce resources attention and attention goes to credibility and government broadcasting is not always very credible a rare exception to this I think is the BBC and one of the reasons the BBC maintains credibility is because it is able to bite the hand that feeds it now there's being self-critical is of your country is a way of maintaining credibility so it's not that government broadcasting can't generate any soft car I think Britain proves that you can but if you ask with China's efforts but I'm using China's example but I don't mean you could make it for other countries as well if you take these vast expenditures in CCTV becoming a CNN or you take if you take for that matter gutter in down to zero if it's regarded as the Masters voice then it doesn't have credibility and then it doesn't generate soft power so if you're doing clever public diplomacy nowadays you really want to figure out how do you use the Twittersphere in the blogosphere to get lots of voices from citizens to citizens the trouble with that because it is very awkward for ministers to in Parliament who say wait a minute you're saying a foreign service officer of the Her Majesty's Government criticized Guantanamo you know publicly on the Twittersphere and but if you don't allow that you don't get the credibility so there so the problem how do you organize public diplomacy nowadays it's got to go beyond broadcasting but once you let go beyond broadcasting you have all the problems of democratic accountability and it's not an easy problem now on the question of global public goods and can the BRICS contribute to global public goods well again I don't like the term BRICS can China contribute to global public goods yes can India yes Brazil yes in kind I suppose Russia could if it wanted to invoke the resources to it but the as an entity the BRICS announced an investment bank to be a rival to develop a bank to be a rival to I guess the World Bank but it doesn't seem to have taken off and so in principle I suppose you could say that the BRICS as an organization could contribute to global public goods we haven't seen it yet on the question of democracy and China if China became democratic then the constraint that I saw or described on Chinese soft power would presumably go away if it were democratic it would unleash its civil society and an Unleashed Chinese civil society would be like an Unleashed British French US German civil society it would be some good things and some bad things made you think of American civil society there's some aspects which are attractive there's some which are tract about American culture but China would then be like others and it wouldn't have the problem that I described which is the fact that it can't it can't let go no there's I was giving a speech in Shanghai and student stood up at Fudan University said how do we increase Chinese soft power and I said relax not very helpful What did he say and replied you okay he was quiet yeah yeah I wonder why there's a question at the back there and there's a question at the front here no come on to the balcony in a moment yeah at the back of it from st. Jude again and I'll pick up some more okay yeah please thank you very much um I had a question about picking up on fess Cox's question actually around whether the human agency will will find a comply with the relatively positive is we put forward and it was really around I mean it seems to me that the US are pursuing the only credible strategy the race was trying and engaging and hedging at the same time but getting the balance right so clearly the trick and what I haven't seen is an articulation of what a peaceful accommodation of China as a regional power in the asia-pacific actually looks like what compromises are going to be required on either side and will cite both sides be willing to make them do you have a view on what they might look at that okay compromises in the region yeah one of the front bodies then I profess and I my name is for each I'm sure then I used to be a student here at the LSE in fact I Scott so as a lecturer of mine well done see you later I want to just take it away from China for for a second and actually pick up on your point about monstah act as you mentioned now sharing the stage with States and take the specific example perhaps or a growing trend particularly in the MENA region whereby you have non-state actors who actually have now transited and have become state actors so whereby a lot of the us as interlocutors in the post Arab revolution countries were previously oppressed by very regimes at the u.s. for many decades purposefully kept in power and how you felt that you know those particular cases might play out specifically we've had to with reference to the u.s. encouraging these nascent states to understand representative government in the way that the US Europe and most of the West understand and called liberal democracy okay yeah I'm the first one how could you imagine accommodation with China there is a certain amount of accommodation occurring already I mean the Americans complain bitterly about China's undervalued currency and basically if you look at the situation about 90 percent of that problem is solved now you can get quibbles from economists I mean solve partly by some adjustments in exchange rate Part B by inflation partly by some accommodation but certainly the US and China have had a strategic economic dialogue which goes back several years and in that process you know you don't at the end of it say gee we just agreed on everything that's rare in the press conference but if you look at the the net question of whether China's exchange rate is still severely undervalued that it's damaging us industry I know colleagues of mine tell me who are economists so I'm they're better people to judge that I tell me about 8090 percent of problems but solve over the last few years so there's an example of accomodation but an area where I think we should put more effort is energy and climate China builds one new coal-fired plant every week that co2 is a collective bad the global public bad and if we could help China develop its shale gas capacities by helping with easing any restrictions on the export of technologies related related to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling you could cut China's admission admissions sorry the emissions in half without cutting their growth rate no there's you go you you can you could imagine this is the case where is China gets better at this and we get better at it we're both better off so I think energy and climate would be an area where I would place a fair amount of emphasis on on another area of accommodation on the question of non-state actors in the Middle East it's interesting if you look at the experience of Tahrir Square what was called the Arab Spring two years ago you had a generation of people who were empowered by new technology to overcome collective action problems that could actually communicate with each other get together and as we saw they produced a situation where the Mubarak regime had to respond an event she left office as it turned out they didn't have the capacity through Facebook or Twitter or whatever to organize political parties that could win in elections so if you asked did it produce a democracy produce something different from what there before but I think it's the jury is still out as to what will happen in terms of democracy but it's the if you ask how should the US or how did the u.s. respond to it what's interesting to me is that Obama took a bet and when he was communicating with Mubarak he bet on the Tower Square generation and some people said big mistake for example the Saudis said this is terrible thing to do and Obama basically made a bet that history of the longer term was going to be on the side of the tower square generation we don't know whether he met the right bet or not I mean it's too soon to tell but it is interesting that rather than following the traditional policies that as you described them of siding with the stable autocrat because you know the stable autocrat he took a different thing and I hope it turns out right I got to up in the balcony who's there who's got the first one one there and one there and then there's a lady in the middle you know so I just take this through that may bring us together do apologize I've been trying to bring as many people as possible so yeah please yeah okay hi professor and I just a quick question Russia bringing the theme to Russia in the context of global power shift where do you see Russia how can it use its soft power wisely and what can Russia do to achieve a positive image yeah okay I think and sorry I'm so biased I'm terrible gentlemen there please yeah so yeah I'd like to go back to China and I'd like to know if you um say that one shouldn't take the hegemonic translation of theory too seriously on the grounds that China still has a long way to go to match the United States in terms of its capabilities how do you explain China's so-called new certificates to thousand eight I mean how do you explain the fact or how would you explain Chinese intentions when it comes to the Senkaku Islands for instance thank you okay last question for the evening yeah please yeah my question is about local elected officials on the global stage I think we see more of them because it's easier to get on the global stage do you consider local elected officials on the global stage to be non-state actors or state actors and then what are the implications for state sovereignty and the balance of power on the on Russia I think the after the elections in Russia and Vladimir Putin won the elections but he basically lost in the streets there was a a generation that was protesting against him and he turned to basically nationalism to generate domestic political support to delegitimize the protesters and I think that's been very damn damaging through Russian soft power I mean locking up these young women Riot who did the song in the Cathedral putting people on trial for protests and so forth this is her Russian soft power and I think it's too bad I mean I if we Russia wanted to increase its soft power think of the glories of traditional Russian culture music literature paintings I mean there's so many things that are attractive about Russia but it's a pity to see that appealing to nationalistic and xenophobic ways to maintain your domestic political support has occurred like this I grow to piece about a foreign policy blog well why China and I sure don't get some power in some of my thoughts are explained in greater length there but I'd like to see Russia change his policy music I think it has many Admiral paratroop admirable characteristics on China and new assertiveness I think what happened after the year 2008 China grew at 10% a year u.s. was in a severe recession there are a lot of Chinese who thought that this proved that US was in decline and China was rising and I think the new assertiveness was a miscalculation and the I think it turned out to be quite expensive to China in fact if you look at China's relations with Japan Korea India and by Korea and South Korea India Vietnam and several other countries they were much worse after this new assertiveness so it was an expensive bet for China that the US was in decline that was on the rise and the Chinese begin to realize the top leaders begin to realize this by by about the end of 2011 diving whoa state councilor writes an essay saying maybe we should go back to dong Zhou Qing's advice take your time and but I think that before they got back to that position they had done themselves considerable damage if you take the last question about local elected officials in a sense they are state actors but they can also play a very important transnational role I guess it was the 1970s at Bob Kane and I coined this phrase trans governmental relations away parts of governments not necessarily the top level of governments but lower burocracy lower elected officials can form coalition's across state and can affect the relations among states so in the sense that when you have let's say local government officials who go to conferences have different ways of communicating with each other on the blogosphere and whatever there you become what we call trans governmental actors the trans government coalition's I think many of problems that we face in terms of these problems created by the information revolution that what I call the vertical power ship are going to require both transnational and trans governmental coalition's to try to produce the networks that will be useful in solving them yeah okay well first of all I apologize so now the number of hands had gone up and I couldn't bring everybody in so I try to bring as many in but I do apologize it's always good it's always a good idea I think to always finish on a high note with lots of hands going up with none at all this has been a great day for us in ideas it's been a great day discussing the United States Craig Calhoun our new director said this morning we've got to take the United States even more seriously you'll be doing in the school and I think this is at least one of the contributions so thank you for your many good questions but more importantly thank you for Joe Knight Joe is doing many things but the one thing he's not doing at the moment may have noticed is declining so can we put our hands together for non decline

Channel: LSE

Views: 19,035

Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics, University, College, Public, Lecture, Event, podcast, Seminar, Talk, Speech, Professor Joseph Nye, Global Power, The West

Id: NMETJ-sRhLo

Length: 79min 38sec (4778 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2013