Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

International relations and the new world governance
World War, which caused it to renounce having armed forces and capabilities
in keeping with its population and economic might. Since the end of
the Cold War Japan has followed the opposite path to Europe and, more
specifically, Germany, the nation with which it wished to share a destiny
during the last world war and with which it was forced to pay the price of
defeat. With an established democratic regime and intense, prosperous
relations with the West, the Japanese elites have turned around their
national strategy in pursuit of an even more intense relationship with the
United States and greater military capabilities. We do not know to what
extent this process will be altered by the arrival in government of a new
political group following the latest general elections.
Of the emerging states, nations like India and China have a size and
a population that allow them to take on greater challenges in international
politics. In these cases we may find a renaissance of the «balance of
power» mechanism that is characteristic of the Westphalian system. Their
national strategies and armaments policies—open-sea fleets, nuclear
capabilities—characteristic of «diplomacy of power» also recall times past.
The crudest «realism», diametrically opposed to Europeanist positions,
governs their assessments and doctrines. However, unlike in the 18 th and
19 th century, these new powers will act in a multilateral framework which
will tend to ease bilateral tension. There will not be a return to the balance
of power system, but this future framework will bear more of a resemblance
to it than the current one and, above all, it will be markedly different
from the Cold War system of blocs.
The limited capacity of most of the major powers and the characteristics
of each area cause the planet to be divided into specific areas, each
with its own players and security problems, which they will attempt to
resolve through exclusive systems and balances. While the India-Pacific
is structured around the emergence of China, this fact does not appear
to affect neighbouring Latin America, which has other kinds of problems.
Nor do the difficulties derived from the instability of the Arab world and
Russia’s demand for a sphere of influence, which determine European
security, appear to have much in common with the longstanding stability
problems in sub-Saharan Africa. Each area requires its own solutions,
which only the local governments will be able to find. New organisations
or the reform of some that already exist must provide responses to a new
reality. The extent to which they complement the United Nations system
or the existing organisations will vary from case to case, leading to an
asymmetric institutional architecture.
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