Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, debate is underway about the current framework of the current world order. CRI"s Luo Bin has more.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990"s, many observers suggested the United States became the world"s leading Super Power. However, with China"s rise through the prevailing years, some have suggested a new world dynamic is being formed. Wang Gengwu with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences suggests this theory is somewhat outdated. "We now have a system where we have one superpower, the United States, but trying difficult, as the United States has found, to maintain a system where it had absolute supreme dominance in world affairs, extremely difficult. And one superpower was never going to be strong enough, you need all kinds of solutions, but for the moment anyway, we have to think in terms of whether we find a new order quickly, or to just simply improve what we now have, to try to improve on it and eventually find something better than better in the hope of one day achieving something that could be permanent and consistent." Professor Barry Buzan with the London School of Economics and Political Science also says he believes the future will be a world without Super Powers. "There is diminishing unevenness in the system so the core is getting bigger, the number of countries able to benefit from the real modern world of power is increasing, the number of countries that we think of was underdeveloped is indeed decreasing, if you follow that logic forward, this suggests a world without superpowers. It will be a world with great powers and regional powers. But it won"t have any superpowers." Buzan says the concept of Super Powers is an outdated philosophy. "It"s pretty strange when you think about it that one country should be able to dominate the whole system, or even one or two countries. So we are heading for, it seems to me, a world without superpowers, nobody"s gonna get there any more. So the world we are heading into is one in which powers are going to be more distributive." Despite this theory, many observers still anticipate China"s influence on the world stage to rise. Professor Robert Keohane with Princeton University says one of the factors leading to this suggestion is the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. "China now finds itself in a situation with respect to the World Bank. Heads of the United States in the past few years have been pursuing intelligent policy. It would have anticipated the AIIB, the United States would not only have endorsed its creation, but would have joined it, not from altruism, but in order to have a voice in the organization." The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were formed out of the ashes of World War II. Creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has been touted by some as the next step toward the creation of a newer, more inclusive world order when it comes to financing development. For CRI, this is Luo Bin. |
