Cold War and cold warriors

New thinking is required for a new world

While Germany celebrated the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War in Europe, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall, some remnants of that inglorious era remain. North and South Korea, the Palestinian problem and, in a manner of speaking, the Af-Pak logjam. All essentially legacies of the Cold War. So, while Europe may pop champagne bottles, Asia will have to wait before it can celebrate the end of the Cold War legacy. But there is a bigger legacy issue waiting to be addressed. That is the intellectual legacy of the Cold War. The idea that one or two or even five Big Powers can run the world. In some ways, the creation of the G-20 has undermined this Cold War legacy, but the G-20 is as yet a talk shop. Unless institutions of power are able to re-adjust themselves to new global power equations of the post-Cold War era, we cannot really say we have put the past behind us. The reconstitution of the UN Security Council (UNSC) is the biggest such institutional change waiting to happen. True, the composition of the UNSC was decided much before the Cold War erupted, but it is the balance of power politics of that era that consolidated the present Council. Indeed, the idea of a G-2 condominium between China and the United States is also based on the fantasy that like during the Cold War era, the US and its adversary can team up to run the world. In fact, in India some may be quite comfortable returning to the certainties of such a bipolar world, in which India can once again become the leader of the “non-aligned”!

On a more serious note, it must be emphasised that the new post-Cold War world is neither a unipolar world nor a new bipolar world. It is, and will remain for the foreseeable future, a multi-polar world. This is the real legacy of the end of the Cold War. The international system has returned to the 19th century distribution of power in which a concert of several major powers will run the global system. The challenge before humanity is to ensure that the concert does not degenerate into a cacophony with multiple conflicts occurring. This will require statesmanship on the part of global leaders. US President Barack Obama has demonstrated that kind of statesmanship by reaching out to world leaders in Europe and Asia. India too has repeatedly emphasised that it is happy to work with other major powers to grapple with the problems of our times. However, both in the US and Russia, and indeed in China and even in India, as in many other countries, there are cold warriors who still think in terms of global or regional hegemony. The era of such hegemonic power is over. The international community will have to learn to deal with several major powers playing a role on the world stage. If global and regional institutions have to evolve to capture this new reality, they must be willing to accommodate the thinking of a new 21st century citizen.