As a follow on from the comments on Tuesday, Richard N. Haass’s article, The Age of Non-Polarity is available from the Foreign Affairs website. This talks about a world that is no longer defined by a small group of powers but instead by large, dispersed power centres. From the article:
The twentieth century started out distinctly multipolar. But after almost 50 years, two world wars, and many smaller conflicts, a bipolar system emerged. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, bipolarity gave way to unipolarity — an international system dominated by one power, in this case the United States. But today power is diffuse.
Also, at least in the media that I interact with, the impression is given that America and China are on near equal footing (in terms of superpower status). However, at the moment, China is on a far lower level than the United States. In fact, America, the European Union, Japan and Germany by itself (depending on whose figures you have faith in) all have larger economies than China. In the case of the USA, the economy is significantly larger than that of China. From the media coverage at the moment it would be easy to assume that China was, at the very least, the second largest economy, but this isn’t the case.
Of course, China’s economy is growing strongly while the power of the US seems to be on the decline. Still, this fact seems to be leading to a portrayal of the state of the world in some of the media which is not accurate. My perception on this may be a bit skewed as I live in Australia and so the role of China is more important in the media I read than it would be in some other countries.
Tags: China, non-polarity, politics, Superpowers, United States
