HEGEMONY, MULTIPOLARITY AND INTERNATIONAL SYSTEMS

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Stability, Instability and the Hegemonic Challenge

If the first attempts by analysts of the international system in the 1960s/70s were guided by the goal of adapting the theory of the bipolar model to reality and defining alternative positions capable of finding solutions to the fundamental conflict of the system of that era, the change in the historical framework, the contemporary increase in the number of actors, and a more articulated distribution of power - both geopolitically and strategically - compel today’s specialists to redefine the stakes of the potential rivalry and conflict between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, the regrouping of poles in the world, and the characteristics of the current conjuncture. The objective is to better grasp the overall logics and the general movement that is emerging, starting from the main actors: the United States, Russia, and China. In light of this revision, the theoretical paradigm adopted will be that of the stability/instability of the system.

The degree of this duality - and therefore of the potential conflictuality of a conjuncture - depends essentially on the level of competition between the great powers, their ambitions and regimes, the surrounding sociopolitical security conditions, as well as the psychopolitical climate of the period, and finally, the historical consciousness of its elites and the state of the dominant hegemony. Indeed, the history of international systems is a history and a succession of hegemonies. In other words, it is a history of the stability or instability of systems, or again, in other terms, of empires.

Multipolarity, as a “pluriversum” or a universal world in perspective, is only a transition between two hegemonies. It is a historical moment of dangers and wars, a democratization of resistances and utopias, a period of instabilities. The monumentality of the hegemonic challenge is aggravated by historical considerations, because the element of coherence of a system remains hegemony, in its various incarnations: Roman, Spanish, French, British, or American. The deep historical thread between two systems, beyond the moral, political, and social claims of peoples and their rulers, remains the aspiration to hegemony and uncontested power, and this thread is always woven by the rising power, through its philosophy, its culture, and its past.

The Hegemonic Transition and the Two Faces of Multipolarity

The announced hegemonic transition, by its destabilizing nature, takes the form of a claimed multipolarity, and this underpins multiple and uninterrupted conflicts aimed at a greater balance of power. The true name of this struggle is anti-hegemonism, anti-globalism, and anti-imperialism. Since the empire is constituted by dominant unipolarity correlated with the subordinate integration of multiple actors, American hegemony and the balance of forces that guaranteed the stability of the long historical period from 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet regime require a general update.

Regarding the backdrop of the current period, the systemic transition is taking place today under the destabilizing influence of several trends:

1. The hegemonic decline of the United States;
2. The rise of China;
3. The civilizational “rupture” of Russia;
4. The de-Westernization of the world and the claims of the “Global South.”

From this perspective, the multipolar struggle appears alternative, carrying an anti-globalist and rebalancing order. In the course of a permanent dialectic, the freedom and universality of the national persons engaged in this enterprise reveal multipolarism with two faces and two contradictory aspirations: idealistic and realistic.

The idealistic, libertarian, militant, extremist, philosophical, religious, and even pacifist aspect is that of multilateralism which, starting from the imperfection of existing institutions, aspires to the autonomy and full independence of dominated, limited, or oppressed sovereignties. It expresses itself through a moral imperative, radical indignation, and political revolt. Its perspective is constituted by the emergence of a new hegemon and the use of all asymmetric or hybrid means of political power.

In opposition to this, the realistic option is the recourse to the calculation of interests at stake and the tightening of alliances into opposing blocs. The idealistic option motivates, through ideology (conservative or revolutionary), the struggle of resistance and opposition to dominant hegemonism.

The realistic option adopts the doctrine of historical antagonisms - that of a warlike succession of various forms of government and a logic of counterweights. It develops a strategy of permanent crisis, aiming at the upheaval of the situation and the discontinuity of international systems.

Their common point is the determination to build an alternative international order. In this second perspective, the international system can be defined as the set of political units whose coherence is ensured by the dominant hegemony and by the survival of political units protected by its power and included in its strategic orbit, in peace and in war.

When the stability and prosperity of the system are guaranteed more by peace than by conflict, the hegemonic phase is characterized by the consolidation and flourishing of an imperial form and the governance model as an example of successful integration. These are phases of flowering of the arts and sciences, phases of greatness and triumph, phases of intense international cooperation. When, on the contrary, the emergence of a hegemonic enterprise operates through a warlike challenge, the general mobilization of minds and resources requires a tightening of politico-diplomatic unity, a sneaky struggle against oppositions, and a latent tendency toward an authoritarian or autocratic “order.” These are phases of strengthening military alliances, moments of seeking homogeneity, real or apparent. The watchword of these periods is destabilization, local or global, of the system.

The crisis - of alternation or alternative of the whole - begins with a crisis of values and continues with that of institutions and political and military forces. It is always a central crisis, beyond its genesis or its peripheral manifestations, and as such, it can hardly be contained by a belated “containment.” Indeed, it is central because it is above all moral.

Bipolarity or Stability through Hegemony and the Balance of Forces

The preservation of Western unity and the ideological confrontation vis-à-vis communism were ensured during the long period of bipolarity (1945–1989) by a Eurocentric perspective of the world and a Western vision of the system. The collapse of the Soviet Union then signified the triumph of American hegemonism at its peak, and the balance of forces, including nuclear, represented the armed arm of a will confident in its historical mission. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse and then the dislocation of the Soviet bloc inaugurated an “epochal rupture” and preluded long planetary adjustments, leading to the current multipolar era with multiple antagonisms. These adjustments, begun in Europe, the Gulf, the Middle East, and Central Asia, extended to the various regional sub-systems, and the capital cohesive element of any system - American hegemony - began to suffer the backlash of imperial overextension, as well as a belated decolonization. America had inherited Britain’s role in maintaining the balance of forces and international stability on the continent and in the world, and it was now challenged in its global mission and in its leadership capacities. This challenge increasingly reaches its civilizational sources, its national morale, and even the scale of its scientific, manufacturing, and financial power.

From the exhaustion of globalization (1980–2008), state actors - the decisive pillars of any political order - suddenly awoke from a slumber that had led people to think of their disappearance. Today the planetary order revolves around two pitfalls, one geopolitical and the other strategic. The first, defined by its danger zone, designates the new center of gravity of the world and unfolds in the Indo-Pacific region. The second indicates the Rubicon to be crossed and the dynamic of antagonism and confrontation between the United States, Japan, and South Korea vis-à-vis China, Russia, and North Korea in the Sea of Japan and access to the South Pacific via Taiwan and the Paracel Islands, opposing America, Australia, and New Zealand to the expansionism of the Middle Kingdom.

The basic postulate of this analysis is that political factors, popular passions, ideological rivalries, diplomatic traditions, and wills to power play a more important role than prejudices or the economic factor in triggering conflicts. On the other hand, image, prestige, dignity, and ambition are everywhere and always pervasive.

Furthermore, in the radical turn recommended by the report of the “Council on Foreign and Defense Policy” of the Russian Federation entitled “Problems and Lessons of the Recent History of National Foreign Policy,” the total rupture advocated by this report targets Russia’s relations with Europe and the West, and the change of course with China is taking shape as a “partnership of utility” or “deepened partnership,” marked by increasing asymmetry. At the same time, the strategic interaction between the bear and the dragon - Russia and China - could tip the hegemony of the system and the civilizational order of the world.

The Decline of Hegemony

A more irrefutable factor than the others opens a new page in the history of international relations and influences the prospect of a redefinition of power relations between the “Great Powers”: the decline of American unipolarism and consequently the end of a period of stability, the dissociation of responsibilities (repercussions of a systemic crisis) and power (decision-making system), damaging democratic governance. Thus, the emergence of a candidacy for their succession is destined to pass through a period of crises and troubles and through another distribution of power and chained wars. It is under this morphology of the system that an implacable struggle will mobilize ideology, diplomacy, and military power so that everything can change in order to return to another type of stability. Thus decrees the history of the world, and thus decrees the doctrine of historical cycles and that of the transition from one system to another.

On this subject, R. Gilpin, the American theorist of hegemonic stability, supports the thesis that each system would involve an exclusive and distinctive hegemony, personified by a dominant historical actor. This hegemony would have recurrent characteristics of emergence, apogee, and decline, of which there are abundant examples: Rome for the Mediterranean and the ancient world; Spain for the “Siglo de Oro” (16th century); France for the “Grand Siècle” (17th–18th centuries); Great Britain for the 19th century and the Victorian era; the United States for the 20th century and “Imperial Democracy.” These political units - city-states or civilizational empires - do not tolerate the duality of powers and conceive only the exclusive uniqueness of all expressions of authority and command, civil and military.

Today as yesterday, hegemonism (or unipolarism) safeguards stability, which multipolarity calls into question, in a random and unpredictable dialectic. In periods of multipolarity, all factors of stability and normative integration (orders, institutions, statuses, and values) are contested and confrontation is ultimately rendered inevitable. The question then arises whether the use of force will target the system itself or whether the threat to stability aims at an improvement of status within the established hierarchy “within” the existing system. The problem of “systemic alternative” already arose in the bipolar era, but under a socio-economic aspect.

Stability and Peace - Peace through Multilateralism

Stability is necessarily based on a fluid set of shifting equilibria, both at the global and regional levels. However, if the preservation of stability, favorable to the dominant power, is not equivalent to peace as the silence of arms, the essential thing in the search for peace is the efforts to ensure that recurrent crises do not turn into direct strategic challenges between major nuclear powers.

Fundamentally, the historical tendency of a system is not dictated solely by relations between states as sovereign and independent entities in permanent rivalry of interests and values, but by the concern to escape anarchy and to establish or re-establish a stability and a legal and legitimate political order that allows a minimum of cooperation between nations. Since another essential characteristic of systems is the hierarchy of power, the guarantor of stability in heterogeneous systems is the unipolarism of a hegemon, while the critique of the imperial structure takes the form of associations and multilateral (egalitarian or bargaining) and multipolar (confrontational and bloc-based) organizations.

For Ashby, the international system is not only stable but “ultrastable,” in the sense that it behaves selectively toward its internal variables, rejecting those that lead it to conditions of instability.

The modeling of the system or of an alternative international order involves, for the hegemonic power, a vision of perspective and the future that integrates the interests of disruptive actors as well as general or local security concerns. Promoting an international order based on mutually recognized rules instead of that of the interwar period was the concern of the victorious power, America, when it created a universalist security organization, the United Nations, combining the multipolarity of the Security Council and the multilateralism of the forum of states, the General Assembly.

We observe today that the critique of the existing political order, full of unsatisfied expectations, uncertainties, and conflicts, operates through the questioning of the civilizational decline of the collective West. Its striking expression is the antagonism between two forms of government or regime with different legitimacies: autocratic in the East and democratic and post-democratic in the West. The former involve a revisionist and multipolarist foreign policy, and the latter globalist and integrationist strategies. For a long time, the United Nations has not had a pacifying or rebalancing effect vis-à-vis shifts in alignment or coalition that it could not compensate for through functional integration of resources. It has not been in phase with the needs of prevention and management of crises, nor up to its missions in peacekeeping operations (Mali, South Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan) for which it was designed. Indeed, the competition from multilateral summits (G7 or G20), which tend to become increasingly political, clearly shows signs of a loss of interest in international stability and the institutional immobilism of the UN. The 1945 international order is globally challenged not only by revisionist powers but also by the majority of emerging countries.

Instability and National Interest - Peace through Multipolarity

Faced with its new international responsibilities, the America of the 1950s and 1960s was able to federate around its leadership role the European and Asian countries through a system of alliances and “unstable blocs” and through an interventionist foreign policy. From a strategic point of view, it has always claimed control of paroxysmal central violence, and geopolitically, it has paid particular attention to the traditional subordination of the Asian sub-system to world politics, without having de facto renounced the position of preeminence already assumed in Europe since the defeat of Japan and Germany.

The instability of the Asian sub-system and its repeated crises (Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) transformed the rigid structure of bipolarity into a more complex global equilibrium in which Asia was to assume growing importance. Indeed, the rupture of the model of asymmetric relations between Asia and Europe manifested itself under the Nixon presidency when he revived the concept of national interest of old European Realpolitik as a legitimate and even moral end of his foreign policy. This adoption of national interest as the keystone of multipolarity in an open world was intended both to overcome the concept of domination and to ensure the exercise of active diplomacy and creative leadership. National interest as a pillar of conception and action recalls Richelieu more than American idealism and isolationism and takes up the policy of division and alliances in the international and global game. This “rupture” with the moralism of internal contestation was at the basis of the opening to Communist China, aimed at establishing a triangular dynamic that relegated Moscow to a disadvantageous and constantly unbalanced position. Hegemonism once again prevailed over the geopolitical isolation of a giant (China), while serving American interest and the stability of the system.

The Rupture with the Collective West.

The Two Identitary Concepts of State - Civilization and Eurasianism

Quite different is the current conception of the United States in the face of rising multipolarity. It is an ambiguous conception, but perceived as offensive, and consists in closing ranks, tightening the Atlantic alliance in Europe (NATO), and containing China in the Indo-Pacific through the tripartite military agreement of AUKUS (America, United Kingdom, Australia). Furthermore, a Euro-Atlantic strategy judged provocative and aggressive and held responsible for the Ukrainian conflict has led Putin’s Russia to adopt a “radical turn” in its foreign policy, advocating, in a report signed by four eminent specialists (S. Karaganov, F. Lukyanov, A. Kramarenko, D. Trenin), a total rupture with Europe and the West. This rupture is as much diplomatic as civilizational and is carried by two identitary concepts: that of the state-civilization, a potential future imperial federator, and that of “Eurasianism,” as a policy of vast spaces. This official document rejects any “legalistic vision of international relations,” according to which treaties must be respected, and brings Russia closer to China through what has been called an “axis of utility” or “deepened partnership” “destined to last!” A partnership presented by Xi Jinping in Beijing on October 13, 2023, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the “Silk Roads,” as a close strategic coordination.

By wanting to leave the West to return to the sources of its Euro-Asian identity, Russia - a national, Eurasian, and global power - puts back into play the failure of its centuries-old attempt to integrate into the now decadent culture of Western modernity, which had involved a constant lowering of its sovereignty, its tradition, and its religiosity.

Will this rupture be peaceful or conflictual? Will it be to the advantage of China, the Middle Kingdom, thirty centuries old? A continental, demographic, geopolitical, and spatial colossus - will it still be able to sacrifice 300 million human beings in a large-scale nuclear conflict, as Mao Zedong once affirmed (1960s), and guarantee its historical survival at that cost?

Multipolarity - to whose advantage and for what? Are we heading toward a new order or toward a new empire?

The De-Westernization of the World and the Emancipation of the “Global South”

Several indicators lead to interpreting the problem of decline as a hegemonic alternative to the United States and the West. Allison has clearly shown that out of 16 cases of hegemonic emergence since the Peloponnesian Wars, twelve ended in a major conflict. Would it still be the case?

Supporting each other, will Holy Russia and the Middle Kingdom be able to stand up to the “collective West”?

Does the Sino-Russian approach and their partnership of defense and security for a new world order extend to diplomatic negotiations between Iran, Iraq, and Yemen - in other words, to the stability of the maritime lines of the Gulf? Is it complemented by the BRICS Summit (Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa) in Johannesburg in August 2023? This summit had the ambition to outline the chessboard of a “world after,” through the contestation of the financial hegemony of the dollar (adoption of a common currency and long-term de-dollarization of international exchanges) and the expansion in 2024 to six new members (Iran, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). A tipping point or a new order?

The weakening of universal and multilateral organizations (G7, G20, IMF, UN) and the “financial emancipation of middle powers” (Financial Times) by the BRICS undoubtedly represent a success for the “Global South.”

However, will the set of emerging states manage to tip the political hegemony of the West? Will it manage to converge on common principles and geopolitical interests, shaping a systemic hegemony alternative to the one that has preserved global stability since 1945? By what federator and leader other than China?

Toward a new order? Toward a new Empire?

In today’s international system, a shift of the Western world is already at work, in various forms and typologies in Europe, Africa, and the turbulent Middle East. A common guiding thread, which at the same time constitutes an accelerator and a revealer of the movement, is constituted by the claim of a new, alternative, and multipolar order - often indefinable, but always set against the hegemonic power in place, regional or global.

The anti-globalists of philosophical or idealistic inspiration, enamored with the concern for sovereignty and independence, often evacuate from their struggle the notions of power relations, national interest, ambition, excess, and war. Retaining from social complexity only the passive notion of resistance, they forget the radical instinct of man to dominate, fight, and conquer, by persuasion or by force.

If hegemony is the global concept of this will to preeminence, any political conception that evacuates the doctrines of power, command, subjection, and physical force is misguided and dangerous, because it is disarming and ahistorical. It thereby ignores the resistance of the “status quo” and the rejection of change.

Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Change

The search for a shared political “order” varies according to conjunctures, the spirit of conservation or change, the homogeneity or heterogeneity of ideas, beliefs, and societies, engendering stable or unstable forms. “Panta rhei” (everything passes, everything flows) was Heraclitus’s formula for change and existence, of existential order.

Since power in politics is the measure of all things and all regimes, the causes of change could not leave philosophy indifferent, and Aristotle identified four (matter, form, means, and end). For us, matter is society and its structure; form is the slow evolution or the shattering rapidity of change; means or effective methods are persuasion and violence; finality consists of antagonistic philosophies.

In the international domain, a system is stable if the dominant power (or hegemon) accepts increases in power or prestige of emerging powers, whether through cooperation or competition. The system is unstable when the heterogeneity of interests and values becomes the stake of change. From this perspective, multipolarism as a claim to an anti-hegemonic order is both unstable and conflictual and clearly claims a systemic alternative.

Anti-Hegemonic Struggle or Systemic Transition?

Given the profound heterogeneity of the two major geopolitical spaces of the West and Eurasia - democratic and autocratic - how do relations of stability and instability, or of war and non-war, influence the decisional multipolarity of heads of state and government with respect to the stated goal: the rebalancing of power or the anti-hegemonic confrontation? How is the current conjuncture evolving, which makes peace impossible and war probable?

Hegemony and Its Paradoxes

Struggle - and therefore instability and conflict - is the inevitable counterpart of the transition from one system to another and constitutes the dynamic dimension of any conjuncture of change. The imbalance of poles is the upheaving factor of situations of instability. Going back in history, the period of the Augusti, following Caesar’s accession to power, marks the opening toward the hegemony of the empire and imperial stability after the disorder of the Republic. Can current multipolarity be considered the equivalent of the Republican period of Rome, that of the bold triumvirates, for control of the Senate of the Quirites and the Roman Republic? Could one dare say that multipolarity is Roman democracy in action and the more propitious ground for adventurers (the triumviri / the elites) instead of the interest of the plebs and the “Principate”? If multipolarity is democratic instability, the empire is imperial order and stability - that of an unbalanced balance and a deterrence of uncertain anti-imperialist revolts (Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan). As proof, and against all detractors, the ancient myth of the empire continued until the Middle Ages. As demonstration, the choice of Dante Alighieri, who wrote the treatise De Monarchia in praise of the empire with universal citizenship at the heart of the fragmentation of the medieval cosmopolis. Of the same nature are the words of Niccolò Machiavelli in the Renaissance with the utopia of Il Principato, o dello Stato Moderno, as a missed national hegemony by “il Valentino” or Cesare Borgia. Then again, the federation of German principalities, manipulated by Cardinal du Plessis de Richelieu, ally of the Protestants against the Catholics in the name of “Reason of State.”

The requirement of order and stability, linked to the concept of hegemony, has as its existential foundation three types of power: ideocratic, political, and military. In its integral hierarchical form, hegemony is the empire, the only one capable of ensuring geopolitical and strategic stability to its advantage and of establishing a shared and diffuse international trust.

The emergence of current multipolarism comes from the decline of the hegemon and its crisis. Indeed, the management of the hegemonic crisis essentially aims to ensure the maintenance of order (global stability), the hierarchy of power (sovereignty and legitimacy of leadership), and international change (the adaptation of statuses and ranks of allies or vassals). The impossibility of a formal and personalized Empire on a planetary scale is due today to pluralism, the diffusion of powers, and the complexity of their cross-interactions. From then on, the model of conflict that is taking shape is systemic, and its cultural referent is a civilization or a plurality of them, having succeeded in universalizing their interests and values.

Huntington and the Crisis of Paradigms

Not having adopted the theory of great cycles nor drawn a lesson from the secular curve of the hegemony of the great empires (Spanish, French, British, or American), Huntington nevertheless contributed to giving birth to the new way of writing history in the Anglo-Saxon world, without the pathos of German philosophy of history or the becoming of civilizations à la Spengler. He reminded us that the West is no longer the “sole subject” of universal history and that it is not the intellectual field of its inner monologue. It is on the basis of a “crisis of paradigms,” to which he provided a notable solution, that it became possible and necessary to resume the debate on the old notions of Orient and Occident.

Civilizational Instabilities and the Return of Empires On the Times of Repeated Anti-Hegemonic Shocks

Following a current of thought from Spengler to Toynbee, from Quincy Wright to Ortega y Gasset, Huntington’s hypothesis is that “in the new world, conflicts will not have their origin in ideology or the economy. The great causes of division of humanity and the main sources of conflict will be - he adds - cultural. Nation-states will continue to play the primary role in international affairs, but the main global political conflicts will pit nations and groups belonging to different civilizations against each other. The clashes of civilizations will be the front lines of the future.” With 30 years of hindsight, we can correct this forecast by asserting that “the great periods of instability will be civilizational and that their probable outcomes will mark the changes of international systems and the return of empires. These instabilities will integrate ecology, demography, migrations, and conflicts. They will be multipolar and will affect large swaths of continents, millennial religious antagonisms, and state and supra-state forms that have governed disparate peoples. Civil, terrorist, and hybrid wars will strike the peoples’ desire for peace and make anxiety and fear everyday occurrences, because periods of civilizational instabilities will be times of repeated anti-hegemonic shocks.” In periods of civilizational instabilities, civilizations will disappear on their own lands, swallowed up by others that will take their place, because large-scale invasions of peoples and nations have already been announced, carrying de-structuring, inter-ethnic, and intersectional struggles from which any idea of future and society is banished. Projections concerning moving tectonic plates could initially oppose a clash of titans between Orient and Occident, Northern and Southern hemispheres, galloping demography and demographic winter, stabilized equilibria in the West and incessant dislocations by waves and contagion in the East; ultimately, struggles of “carnivorous powers against herbivorous powers.” Then, in a second phase, around besieged cosmopolises and a fanatical and threatening interracial and interreligious encirclement, the transformation of the initial “Great Game” will take the form of societal collapse and the mutation of political rivalries into struggles between clans and mafias, or between legal powers and shadow powers monopolizing the old state violence. An incessant repetition of anti-hegemonic shocks will settle into the vacuum of a dominant and stable power and, to emerge from chaos, will demand the return of empires in reaction to disenchantment, as the Latin poet Phaedrus, critic of democracy, well saw in the fable “Ranae regem petierunt” (the frogs demanded a king), later taken up by La Fontaine.

From the “Era of Negotiations” to the “Era of Permanent Instabilities”

Thus, in a disputed European and international reality, following the failure of the time of negotiations (Minsk I, Minsk II, and the suspension of the New START treaty), we have entered the era of permanent instabilities - that of the clashes of worlds, of the feared confrontation of civilizations and empires, announced by the floating of “unstable blocs” and by multipolar political claims. As for the West, the planetary scene, which we learn about with difficulty, never ceases to remind us that its fate is not decided in advance and that it may dissolve in perspective through a long crisis of systemic transition, but that the choice of paths and means to reach the outcomes will ultimately bear on the type of war that will resolve the dilemmas of the political: “chained wars” in the manner of the 20th century or “systemic revolutions,” according to the multi-secular scansions of Strausz-Hupé?