A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics by Zaki Laïdi

Author:Zaki Laïdi [Laïdi, Zaki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781134705436
Google: hciEAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17498274
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1998-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

The end of superpowers

Although the source of the crisis in international cooperation can be found in these various factors, it can be understood fully only by taking into account another central factor of the post-Cold War period: the lack of a super-powerful actor able to impose collective discipline on the others. The difficulty experienced by an organization like the IMF in imposing a collective discipline on the G7 countries stems clearly from this uncertainty about relative strengths, and from the disappearance of an actor that could produce hegemony. After the Cold War, and especially after the Gulf War, the United States believed its politico-military power could be converted into economic power. In other words, it believed its political authority would help it impose conditions for economic recovery on Japan and Germany—without itself having to make any sacrifice, such as in its budget. Today this power to link economics to politics is more tenuous for at least two reasons. The first is that Europe and Japan are catching the United States up economically: these three groups are now almost equivalent in strength. The second stems from a decline in the ‘fungible’ (substitutable) nature of the symbols of power. That is to say, it is increasingly difficult to capitalize on political or military power to demand commercial or technological concessions from partners. Though politics and economics are more closely linked than ever, diplomatic-strategic weapons have lost too much ground compared to the other realities of the international field to allow a state to use them to gain clear advantages in other domains.13

The end of the Cold War confirmed the weakened nature of classic diplomatic strategies in the international field and, in consequence, the probable decline of the concept of ‘major power’. In this respect the theme of a ‘unipolar world’ as expressed by the United States was a contradiction in terms.14 Admittedly the GATT crisis underlined the endurance of the power game between Europeans and Americans, but it had probably never occurred to the United States that it was possible to balance trade concessions from the Europeans with maintaining their military guarantee in Europe.

If the notion of superpower is probably destined to perish with the end of the Cold War, it is because the cost of supremacy is becoming prohibitive. But consideration of the exponential costs of power would be incomplete without a reference to the widening split between military power and economic power. The search for military strength is held back by the search for economic strength.

During the Cold War, military research led civil research. There was a relatively simple linear path from basic research to applied research, first directed towards the military sector, then towards the civil sector. The benefits of major military programmes on the civil economy were such that the monopolization of research and development budgets by the military sector did not seem negative in character. The United States thus succeeded in being simultaneously a great economic and a great military power, in building a ‘Cold War economy’ that was not entirely irrational.

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