Professor Alexander Orakhelashvili
In my latest piece of inter-disciplinary research published in Chinese Journal of International Law I discuss the role of great powers in the management of major crises in international relations, at times they way that has provoked both academic and non-expert perception that great powers act as a form of international government. I conduct a comparative analysis of the 19th century European great power concert that included Austria, Britain, France, Prussia/Germany and Russia, and the United Nations Security Council in which five great powers (Britain, China, France, Russia and the USA) enjoy a privileged position of permanent membership and the right to veto any substantive decision that they do not find acceptable. A common element underlying these two arrangements – one relatively ancient and another one functioning in our modern times – is the principle of the unity of great powers. This unity itself generates a factor that could well merit presentation through a basic concept of the interdisciplinary relevance – the concept of the critical mass of international power.
Both the European concert and the UN Security Council have possessed such critical mass of international power, because their ranks include(d), in both cases, a sufficient number of great powers whose backing (or at least lack of their opposition) is required for the viability of the relevant decisions relative to the management of major international crises. To illustrate, the European concert managed to deal with challenges posed by Napoleonic France and Russia in Crimean War because their ranks were united or at least not overtly fractured; the UN Security Council has managed to deal with South African apartheid or Saddam Hussain’s Iraq precisely for the same reasons. However, no coalition has so far managed to deal with the nuclear energy challenge that comes from Iran, because great powers are not prepared to deal with this problem with a united front.
The historical record shows to us that great powers in 19th century were more successful in arranging regularised cooperation between them than they are today. Capitalising on some historical preconditions that operated as an initial booster for their concert, great powers also underwent a learning process to engage in patient and peaceful diplomacy based on the understanding each other’ interests. Multilateral diplomacy was in essence an art of putting up with persons representing regimes or governments of which you do not necessarily approve and even of forming long-term relationships with them. The culture of doing this enabled statesmen to bridge gaps and find solutions for difficult issues. Therefore, the initial adhockery turned into a regularised pattern of constructive peace-making. The aim of everyone was a political equilibrium that would guarantee peace, not destruction or suchlike of other great powers that could easily have led to a war between great powers. Through this gradually acquired culture and skill of the conduct of negotiation and diplomacy, great powers have managed to operate as a collectivity even if the maintenance of that collectivity required repeated ad hoc agreements between them.
It may seem paradoxical that after 1945, though even more from the end of the Cold War onwards, the unity of great powers could not be taken for granted, even though they operate against the pre-established framework of UN Security Council whose authority and procedure can enable great powers to adopt decisions about multiple crises. The main factor preventing great power unity is that, after the end of the Cold War that has been widely seen as a triumph of liberal and democratic political and economic systems of the West over the “rest”, also coinciding with the initial increase of the power gap between the USA on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other, the idea of great powers being of equal social status on the international plane is not a pill that could be swallowed so easily in all political quarters. Political discourse of past decades has been inundated with slogans “democracies everywhere”, “axis of evil” or “outposts of tyranny”, and a somewhat a priori classification of countries as liberal and illiberal, as “goodies” and “baddies”, has subconsciously at least entered the mindset of analysts and policy-makers alike. Political realism has a rather adversely strong view about the feasibility of an international order based on such classification of States. Positive international law does not look with favour at any such generalised premise either.
This perception has not disappeared even though the end of US-led unipolar world is difficult to contest. By contrast, diplomatic contacts between great powers have, and increasingly over the recent decade, also become a matter of public relations, in the sense that diplomatic moves and decisions are calculated not necessarily in terms of how successful they are intended to be, but also in terms of how wider audiences of policy-makers, press columnists or pundits will receive or assess them. Several decades ago, Sir Harold Nicolson warned against exposing the intricate detail of diplomatic affairs to the vagaries of public opinion, as diplomacy was a subtle affair to be handled by those qualified and competent to handle it, while today one is at times left to guess whether the outcome of diplomatic negotiations is a constructive outcome or a press release or statement aimed at a national audience or opinion.
In such circumstances great power unity is unreal and the critical mass of international power cannot be constructed to deal with any international crisis. Individual great powers are left to assess their political priorities on their own and to that end what they think is required. While policy-makers are not prepared to rectify this problem, nor does academia show any sufficient effort to show how that could be done. For one, the inter-disciplinary academia has done precious little after the end of the Cold War to address the problem of the lack of the critical mass of international power. Instead, the increased attention went to the notions of liberal hegemony and “liberal international order”, and more is queried today about as to whether the now defunct liberal order could be replaced by a similar form of organisation than about the implications of the lack of the critical mass of international power. Nor is the currently fractured discipline of international relations – reminding us of the tower of babel with its multiple ramifying theoretical trends – in a position to unlock the puzzle of what went wrong in post-Cold War international affairs and why the reliance in both theory and practice on unreal concepts of liberal hegemony and order have been counter-productive. Without the lead from IR, international lawyers would not be able to sort this problem because hegemony and related topics are rather marginal to the analysts of the consensual system of positive international law. Now as ever, there is no feasible alternative to inter-disciplinary dialogue and enquiry that is based on understanding the essence of international relations and international law, respectively as a process of power political struggle between States and the system of consensually agreed rules that regulate relations among the same States. Liberal, constructivist and contractarian theories are impotent in both preventing major crises from emerging and in resolving them. Political realism and consensual positivism are in a unique position to demonstrate the essence of problems that prevent the emergence of major international crises and depict the ways of resolving those crises.