Multipolarity - the choice of up and coming powers

Cold War rhetoric is once again beginning to bedevil the relations of the big powers. For instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently berated the US as behaving imperialistically in world affairs and of triggering a new arms race by planning to expand an anti-missile defence shield in parts of Eastern Europe.

"There was a desire among several international actors to dictate their will to each and everyone and to act not in accordance with the norms of international life and law. This is very dangerous and unhealthy... In our view it is nothing other than diktat, than imperialism", Putin was quoted recently as saying. He also said that tensions had emerged in inter-state relations of late "because the world changed and there was an attempt to make it unipolar" following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Punctuating these stinging comments of a Cold War kind were some developments on the ground which were starkly evocative of the dangerous arms races of the NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation years. Reports said that Russia had test-fired a new inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM), the RS 24, "capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads". This is seen as an attempt to counter US moves to bolster an anti-missile defence shield in countries which were at one time considered Soviet satellites, such as Poland and the Czech Republic.

A Kremlin spokesman was quoted saying that Russia was planning a "totally effective" response to US plans on installing the anti-missile system in those parts of Europe which were under the influence of the Soviet Union.

All this came in the wake of the G8 summit in Germany which brought together the world's foremost powers on deliberations concerning the world's economic future. The issues in both sets of developments are not unrelated because they all essentially impinge on the distribution of wealth and power in the current political economy.

The angry public protests which greeted the G8 Summit demonstrated the degree to which economic globalization is yet to prove a genuine equalizer, in terms of power and wealth, among states and within states.

To be sure, the vast majority of states swear by economic liberalization and the market system and this includes Russia. But the issue to contend with is that within this "comity" of liberalized economies, some states are "more equal" than others.

The US, for instance, continues to be the world's mightiest economic power. China is the world's fastest growing economy and India too is indicating its ability to be one of the world's bounciest economies.

It is among these up-and-coming economies that there is a growing concern over "unipolarity", or to put it in more simple terms, the might and wealth of the US. These emerging big powers would like to see the current political economy as "multipolar" rather than "unipolar", because it is in the former order that they too could expend in economic and material terms. Accordingly, they would look apprehensively at "imperialistic" modes of behaviour and designs and plans that smack of hegemonism.

These preoccupations with power would naturally spill over into arms races because economic and military might combine in national power and pushes states up the global power league.