Living with Uneasy Newcomers: The United States in an Emerging Multipolar System

Abstract

The future international system will be Westphalian. It will appear as more Westphalian than the international system which emerged from the Viennna Congress in 1815. Its composing elements, having the quality of sovereign states, identify less emotionally with invented communities. There will be “nations”, but their grip on the minds of the people will be less the in case of the unitarian Nations of the homogeneous language groups of the early 19th century with their tightly knit communities of common destiny.

It will be Westphalian also because some of the new emerging powers function in very different patterns in comparison to the United States and to what United States has experienced in its relations with the countries of Africa and Asia. As these are new powers and no more only objects of Western politics, the United States will be unable to implement its ideas on the proper working of world political and economic relations.

The new configuration emerges from the unstable character of a unipolar system under the conditions of the actual possibilities of social integration in developed capitalist systems with high levels of consumption. The 1960s had been characterised by the end of the equation between (colonial) empire(s) and national survival which had characterised the European foreign policies at least since the middle of the 19th century. The projection of power beyond one’s borders had become either less necessary or become