Should A Small Handful Of Countries Run the World? Why Or Why Not?
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The magazine Foreign Policy recent ran an article pillorying the demise of two of America’s special relationships: the United Kingdom and Israel. It spoke to recent changes internal to both the UK and Israel and made sure to highlight several prolific diplomacy blunders on the part of the Obama administration. The article called into question several important issues related to how key relationships current shape the important events playing out on the world stage.
Yet the article also forced me to examine a much more fundamental question: Should a small group of countries run the world at all in this time period?
Consider a few things as you reflect on the same question:
- The established economic and political order came out of high-level discussions by the eventual victor nations in the final two years of the Second World War.
- Two vanquished nations–Germany and Japan–have become global leaders in terms of economic influence, diplomacy, and humanitarian support, yet they have no permanent seat on the UN security council.
- India, a country of over 1 billion people, and an emerging economic powerhouse, seems to contribute very little to any global institution in terms of leadership.
- The current model came out of the twilight of the colonial era–and seems to share much in common with the ethos of it.
Should the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and others reform themselves to rejigger the new ruling elite? Or, does it make sense to create a new system in which power, influence, and control are distributed differently?
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The current patchwork of systems, structures, and alliances seems incredibly tired. Although the UN security council considers itself the arbiter of global security, it seems that alliances such as NATO, and recently the Gulf Cooperation Council, make the real decisions about who goes to war. The various economic organizations seem committed to funding many governmental infrastructure projects, yet a couple of central banks really determine which countries maintain solvency and which ones enter into sovereign debt default. Consider the following things:
- The global middle class is growing exponentially. More people have economic power and influence than ever in the past.
- Several large and high-profile countries are seeking a more active foreign policy and military role but struggle to do so, including Japan, China, Brazil, Germany, and India.
- Many of the traditional global powers–the US, UK, France, and Australia–are stretched thin and eager to focus on domestic issues.
- The last 15 years have shown that many of the challenges facing the world today can’t be resolved by one country flexing its might (e.g., ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other such groups).
The world feels more multipolar now than ever in the past.
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What do you, citizens of the world, believe about fashioning a new global order? How much responsibility to the traditional powers deserve? How much do emerging nations deserve to put their fingerprints on the world in the 21st century?
I would especially love to hear from those readers who lives or work outside of the country.
Please share your comments below.
Photo credit: Flickr/David Ohmer
Michael, thanks so much for you extensive and thoughtful comments.
Reflections On Our One World By Observers What it all comes down to, when it’s all said and done, when the fat lady does sing and we’ve come to the end of the road, when that’s all she wrote and there is no more, what it all boils down to and when we finally see the light, what it all means in the end is this. Human Beings are no more and no less than Life Aware Of Itself. That’s pretty much it, plain and simple. Early in human existence, as our awareness began to sprout, our primitive ancestors divided… Read more »
David, I am a citizen of India. You have correctly stated that mine is a country of more than a billion people but what you didn’t say is that it makes us the largest democracy in the world. When your president comes to my country or my prime minister visits your country it is described in the papers as a meeting of the oldest and largest democracies in the world. Such a powerful idea that. So why is it that India and other emerging powerhouses, like China, Brazil, and South Africa, have so little global leadership or visibility? This is… Read more »
Jean, thank you very much for your comments. I got “chills’ reading your words. You described accurately what I see as the opportunity: that emerging nations will leave their mark on the world, not that they will conform only to the established system. Thanks for pointing out that India is the world’s largest democracy. It’s an important point.
I look forward to a world that is run cooperatively rather than competitively. I look forward to a world that does not have central banks that rape and pillage citizens. I look forward to a world based on peace not war. I look forward to a world based on we not I. I look forward to a people centric vs. corporate centric world. I look forward to a world that is not driven by monetary gain but rather by a happiness and health measurement. I look forward to a gender balanced and in some ways gender neutral world. When our… Read more »
Thanks, Grant. The future can be quite exciting if we bring the right intentions to it.
Great article, thank you David. There’s a growing movement in the US to wake up from almost a century of being asleep economically, physically, & creatively. At the beginning of the 1900’s, we developed the prison school to produce round pegs for round holes. Maybe it was in response to an outside stimulus like German & Japanese plans. Maybe something else. School became mandatory. Now, with WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Federal Reserve Bank, United Nations, IMF, World Bank, NATO, Gulf Cooperation Council (I didn’t know that one, thank you!) & the computer age, we’re finally seeing the results of a 100… Read more »
Christopher, thanks so much for the comment. I truly appreciate it. I got excited reading your thoughts. It’s time to update and modernize.
“I would especially love to hear from those readers who lives or work outside of the country.” I assume by “the country” you mean the USA. I do this inadvertently myself, but I imagine it bothers non-Americans that Americans tend to assume that the internet is mostly American. But What a question! I can imagine that even entertaining the idea of global government is fundamentally evil, or stupid, to some, especially in America. There’s a certain type of person who vehemently opposes any type of global cooperation or concern, let alone anything that approaches a “New World Order.” “Them’s some… Read more »
Paul, thanks for the comments. And yes, you called out my unintentional assumption of “the country” as the USA. I agree that a new world order is unlikely in very near future; but I think more is actually happening outside of the USA than within it, so I think many of these shifts may be led by non-Western countries.