It is a fair question. Notable books recently published in an attempt to answer it include Parag Khanna’s The Second World, which considers that three empires will now dominate the world; Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams, which reckons the new era will be characterised by complexity and the unpredictable presence of many powerful countries; and Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, whose title you might imagine to be self-explanatory but for the fact that Zakaria argues that the US will remain the single most powerful country.

There is, however, a basic problem with the answer given by such books, one that is displayed by The Post-American World on its very first page. Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, says that the world has seen “three tectonic power shifts” in the past 500 years, by which he means great changes in the distribution of international power. First there was the rise of the western world, which began in the 15th century. By the western world he presumably means Europe, since his second shift was the rise of the US, which he dates from the final years of the 19th century. Many historians would consider the American period to be a subset of the European era. That would be awkward, however, for it would deprive Zakaria of his book title and his chosen designation of the third power shift towards a post-American era, which he also calls “the rise of the rest”.

This era is otherwise known as globalisation, a period during which the US’s long post-1945 effort to convince others of the merits of free trade and liberalised capital markets has finally paid off. But having talked of a 400-year western era, then a 100-year American one, the evidence that this new era is a third tectonic shift, relies on statistics and anecdotes from a handful of years. This jump from broad sweeps of history to contemporary analysis is where the problem of era books arises.

Khanna, a scholar at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, sought to emulate Arnold Toynbee, a great 20th-century British historian, by touring the world and reporting on what he saw in the 50 or so “second world” countries he visited, by which he means ones that are neither poor nor rich. Yet on the basis of that journey he, too, chose to come up with an over-arching theory, the idea that the world is now going to be dominated by three big countries or blocs: a declining and (he thinks) incompetent US; a peaceable European Union; and a rising, bumptious and potentially aggressive China.

The trouble with this thesis is not what it includes; it is what it leaves out. What about the other countries that are growing and are getting more powerful? Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, Mexico, Iran and many more will not buckle down easily to three global “empires”, to use Khanna’s chosen term.

The real villain in all this is surely the Cold War. For more than half a century, commentators had the benefit of a simple way in which to analyse the world. We could all be divided into communists and capitalists, into supporters of the West or of the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, that simplicity was lost. Scholars have been looking for a substitute ever since.

But what if the world is not simple enough to be defined? The argument of Kagan’s admirably short book is that it is not. We are not, as Francis Fukuyama infamously wrote, at “The End of History”. Instead, we are in a multi-polar world in which many countries are becoming powerful, nationalistic and ambitious, and in which the rules of the game will be disorder and unpredictable behaviour.

In truth, this messy, multi-polar world has been evident since the end of the Cold War. In that time, the US’s stance has fluctuated, from the “reluctant sheriff” in the title of a 1997 book by Richard Haass, now head of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to the “indispensable nation” cited by Madeleine Albright when she was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, to the unilateralist approach of President Bush. But the essential trend of the world has not changed in that time. Whether or not that makes the period a new era, or just a further phase of American leadership, is a question best left to historians in decades or even centuries to come.

The author is a former Editor of The Economist.
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

(Businessworld Issue 17-23 June 2008)