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THE SCIENCES PO SERIES IN
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NEW
PERSPECTIVES ON
THE INTERNATIONAL
ORDER
No Longer Alone
in This World
Bertrand Badie
The Sciences Po Series in International Relations
and Political Economy
Series Editor
Alain Dieckhoff
Center for International Studies (CERI)
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Center for International Studies (CERI)
Sciences Po
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Bertrand Badie
New Perspectives
on the International
Order
No Longer Alone in This World
Bertrand Badie
Center for International Studies
(CERI)
Sciences Po
Paris, France
Translated by William Snow
The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy

ISBN 978-3-319-94285-8 ISBN 978-3-319-94286-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5
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Translated from the French language edition: Nous ne sommes plus seuls au monde: Un
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Preface to the English Edition
The political science of international relations grew for the most part
out of the euphoria following the victory over Nazism and its horrors
in 1945. Its body of writing therefore developed around an apology of
power and the quiet conviction that hegemony could be full of virtues.
The dialogue that was established between realists and liberals was on its
way to making history. The former deserved credit for grasping a world
in which one had to be strong and cunning in order to survive. To the
latter fell the role of recalling the importance of values that gave power
a purpose. They were thus perfectly equipped with all the necessary con-
cepts for entering the maze of budding bipolarity and the ensuing cold
war.
Yet there was a double danger there. First, without the slightest crit-
icism, these concepts had assumed enduring virtues that gradually made
them unresponsive to history, without being aware of their Westphalian
origins. It was as if they were endowed with a presumed immortality and
an insensitivity to the changing context. Furthermore, they were imbued
with a strange exhilarating property, forever reassuring those who had
sufficient resources of power. The instruments’ effective capacity mat-
tered little, as long as they were acquired in large numbers. The statistical
illusion acted like a methodological drug. GNP was quantified, missiles
were counted, questions were raised about divisions, military spending
was measured … and the resulting ranking was held to be as obvious as
it was intangible, a kind of Bible of new science. The quantitativists had
triumphed!
v
vi Preface to the English Edition
Consequently, few in the field of science or of action saw the change

that was coming. No one had foreseen the fall of the Berlin Wall, at least
not in the way it happened. But, even more, no one had thought that
more change was in the offing, a more substantial, more decisive, more
remarkable change because, this time, it was having an affect beyond the
world’s configuration to its very dimensions, scope and identity. The
Westphalian concept of the international—which had thus far reigned
supreme—was a Western invention, the famous order that in fact was
only comprised of a homogeneous group of states linked by the unity of
time, the proximity of cultures, the similarity of economies, and the affili-
ation of social structures. Globalization—which still has not been defined
with any precision—abruptly turned everything upside down, challeng-
ing everything, endorsing new actors, new cultures, new issues, new con-
flicts and, in so doing, made many of our categories outdated.
I am therefore suggesting that our old political science cannot sur-
vive without adapting to this conceptual tsunami. Whereas political
actors would often rather not see a change whose implications could be
too costly, it is crucial for political science to grasp that we are no longer
alone in the world and to build the new alterity that is affecting our per-
ception of the international, the nature of our difficulties and the actors
involved, and perhaps also our reading of history. Wars can no longer be
won in a new Battle of the Marne, conflicts are no longer settled through
deliberation by the European Concert, and choices are no longer made
only on the basis of Western visions. For that reason, the French edi-
tion of this book is entitled Nous ne sommes plus seuls au monde (We are
no longer alone in the world). The realization verges on the nightmarish
for many analysts and for those in power, but these considerations are
full of common sense and are aimed at re-examining our old political
science. It is my great pleasure to present this rather atypical book to
English-speaking readers. The task is so complex that it could clearly not
be accomplished without thinking outside the box.
Paris, France Bertrand Badie

December 2017
Acknowledgements
Chapter 6 was specially conceived for this English edition. The other
chapters were translated from the French book.
I am very grateful to Miriam Perier for her friendly help and to
William Snow for his wonderful translation. I would like to extend my
warm thanks to the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation and particularly
Armin Osmanovic for making this translation possible, in an excellent
show of intellectual and human solidarity. Having invited me to present
the substance of the French book to Senegalese readers, this German
foundation then made the English translation possible … We are no
longer alone in this world!
vii
Contents
1 The Old Order: From the “Balance of Power”

to the Oligarchs’ Club 1
2 Bipolarity, Unipolarity, Multipolarity 17
3 Societies and Their Diplomacy 37
4 Exploring the New World 53
5 The Powers at Odds with History 75
6 Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, Neonationalism 89
7 France, from Thwarted Ambitions to the Challenges

of Alterity 105
8 Conclusion 127
Bibliography 133
Index 137
ix
Introduction
The “international order?” The expression is used every day in circles of

power and in the media; but at the same time, the wars, violence of all
kinds, alliances made and unmade, and zigzagging foreign policies seem
a far cry from even the beginning of an international order. Conflicts in
Syria, Mali or Yemen that look nothing like what we remember from past
wars, a return to the Cold War which, from Kosovo to Kiev, is happening
outside any bipolar framework, deadly attacks reaching deep within our
societies, intertwined with a bloody Middle-Eastern political game that
we have trouble understanding. Never has the old expression “interna-
tional anarchy”1 seemed as appealing as today. Never has the notion of
an “international community” been so flouted.
And what can even be said about an international system that we
appear unable to characterize other than in referring to the preceding
one, which ended in 1989. It would seem that we are the timid actors
of a “post-bipolar system.” It is an astonishing example of intellectual
laziness. A quarter of a century has elapsed since the fall of the Wall and
we are still identifying ourselves with an outdated order! The laziness
is all the more appalling in that we are affected more than ever by the
international agenda, its torments and uncertainties. There are no longer
any barriers between the inner life of a nation and that of the interna-
tional system. We are all affected and all victims of failed policies, the
kind of serial failures disguised as fake victories, outdated formulas from
another age, more or less conscious ignorance of the new parameters on
the international stage. And yet, we are living in a context that can be
xi
xii Introduction
described and analyzed, provided that we rid ourselves of some old con-
cepts. We have induced and been subjected to rifts that can still be char-
acterized; we are acting in a world where we know the actors, or at least
we can strive to find out who they are. From the Sahel to Mesopotamia,
new kinds of conflicts are developing, American hegemony is wavering,
the Russian bear is back on its feet, the emerging countries are rocking
the boat, the destitute are legion and the planet is suffocating from our
not paying attention to humanity’s shared resources. Nevertheless, the
patterns and policies have remained the same. And couldn’t that lack of
even trying for lucidity be the beginning of a solution to our enigma?
There are times of great upheaval when it seems preferable to ignore
transformations, to do things as we always have, to act as if nothing had
changed. We treat the new ills as if they were the same as our illnesses of
the past. We’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that we are still back in
the Belle Époque. We use categories from the past to prolong the days
of privilege and ease a bit longer. We act as if we were still alone in the
world.
In a world that thinks in the short term, choosing intellectual laziness
is not necessarily absurd. The cost of adapting is always high in the near
future, and the payout for showing courage comes through only when
one is no longer of this world, or no longer wielding power at any rate.
Only statesmen consent to looking far ahead and going along with it.
Politicians prefer to win the next election by playing on their image as
precarious warriors. Pyrrhus still has a very bright future! In reality, the
triumph of this anamnesis has created a formidable vicious circle: the
more we see the present through the lens of the past, the less we under-
stand what we are living and the more we take perilous refuge in a finite
world. It is high time that we broke with the “geopolitical obsession”
that has taken over the media and chancelleries. This old-fashioned and
almost obsolete vision persists in taking a nostalgic view of the world and
its conflicts as prisoners of territorial, political and strategic perspectives,
when in fact the world has become mobile and transnational, structured
and refashioned by unprecedented social behavior, mainly around socio-
economic considerations.
Naturally, a few paltry new ideas have emerged at times to give the
world a new name, alas more as a passing fad than through scientific
rigor. There were the days of “multipolarity” evoked by the mid-sized
powers to reassure themselves and assert their role as the noble ones in
a more balanced world. There were the “superpower” days when the
Introduction xiii
United States was set above all others, but that had to be quickly shelved
when the American colossus kept losing wars. Then there were the days
of grieving and feeling orphaned, when we lamented the withdrawal of
support from the world’s policeman. And what about the days when the
turmoil was criticized by stigmatizing “rogue states” and “barbarians”
of all kinds suspected of wanting to reattack the new Rome? What of
the nth variation on the famous “yellow peril” bandied about the minute
Chinese competition crops up a bit too noticeably?
Contrary to those who ramble on about the “new turmoil” or
“chaos” of the world—another instance of laziness—, I am convinced
that we can see clearly to describing the current international system,
if we can place it in a historical context instead of fossilizing it there,
describe the rifts rather than deny them, understand the real issues by
looking beyond appearances. Changes, rifts and key issues are the matri-
ces of that analysis, whose main hypothesis is fueled by a striking con-
trast: the former powers played alone for too long in the international
arena to really know how to deal with globalization today. Pining for the
days when the Congress of Vienna (1815) put an end to Bonaparte’s
imperial undertakings two centuries ago, they daydream about a world
they could govern alone in the name of their so-called “special respon-
sibility.” This book shows that their plan makes no sense and would be
very dangerous if it did. The book’s purpose, running counter to the
dominant analyses heard in the media and in chancelleries today, is to
open up new paths for a fairer and more efficient foreign policy that
would endorse this beautiful Bambara proverb:
“You can’t shave someone’s head if they’re not there.”
Note
1. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1977).
CHAPTER 1
The Old Order: From the “Balance

of Power” to the Oligarchs’ Club
Abstract  To understand the confused evolution or the indignities of

the international system at the beginning of the twenty-first century one
needs to first grasp what came before it and understand the way interna-
tional relations have been configured throughout the modern era. This
chapter will consider the issues of sovereignty, competition, and power as
the fragile cornerstones of the Westphalian order, before turning to the
strengths and weaknesses of the oligarchic governance.
Keywords  Balance of power · Oligarchy · Sovereignty · Territoriality

Westphalian state · Power
One cannot understand the confused evolution or the indignities of the

international system at the beginning of the twenty-first century with-
out first grasping what came before it and succinctly describing the way
international relations have been configured throughout the modern era.
It all began with two totally unprecedented dynamics that emerged
in the Renaissance and gradually became established in Europe, then in
the rest of the world. For the first time in the history of humanity, the
international order was envisaged in a collective manner. Until the end
of the Middle Ages, in Europe and elsewhere, imperial constructions and
traditional monarchies coexisted, as well as city states that were not con-
cerned with building even the beginnings of an international system. The
© The Author(s) 2019 1

B. Badie, New Perspectives on the International Order, The Sciences
Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_1
2 B. BADIE
issue of coexisting with others was never conceived as such, or at any rate
was only imagined within the city or the kingdom. Relations with neigh-
bors, rivals, and competitors naturally existed but were overshadowed
from a political and legal standpoint.
Yet it was precisely through two legal instruments of an unprece-
dented nature—the Münster and Osnabrück Treaties putting an end to
the Thirty Years War in 1648 and founding what was called the “Peace
of Westphalia”—that nearly all the European states would negotiate
together a kind of order not named as yet but already resembling an
early international system. Naturally, one should not indulge in anach-
ronism and presume that this was their explicit objective. Still, the end
of the Thirty Years War defined the future core principle for all diplo-
macy on the Old Continent: striving to imagine and build a livable space,
substituting the juxtaposed sovereignty of territorial states in place of the
imperial order and that of universal Christianity; the independence of the
Swiss Confederation and the United Provinces (of the Netherlands) was
recognized, and the Habsburg Empire itself was henceforth composed of
three hundred and fifty sovereign states barely restricted in the exercise
of this new prerogative.
This unprecedented dynamic went beyond the mere negotiated con-
struction of European coexistence. It was not only a matter of collec-
tively establishing an order, but of explicitly mobilizing new principles in
order to found it, and defining the legal categories that would serve as
the basis of the international system being created, ensure its sustainabil-
ity and subject its actors to new norms. As proof that the break with the
past was complete, the Peace of Westphalia was the first formally multi-
lateral negotiation in history, foreshadowing the future.
What were these new emerging norms then? First, the principle of
sovereignty establishing, as Jean Bodin was already theorizing, that no
state could be forced by a “greater, smaller, or equal” one.1 Then, the
principle of territoriality whose fundamental accessory was the clear and
unequivocal definition of the concept and the reality of borders, but still
more of the idea that the political exists only through the territorial juris-
diction outlining its reality. Finally, we can see the first formalization of
the principle of international negotiation. Furthermore, it is interesting
to note that the art, technique, and law of negotiating began to be cre-
ated when the states themselves were not fully constituted. For that, they
had to wait until the nineteenth century!
1 THE OLD ORDER: FROM THE “BALANCE OF POWER” … 3
These innovations would weigh heavily on the future, explaining the

arrogant side of the heirs of the Peace of Westphalia. For the latter, the
cause was understood. They were indeed the inventors of an interna-
tional order they believed would be long-lived, and even of the very idea
of an international order. Through the domination they wielded over the
following centuries and, in particular in the nineteenth century through
colonialism, this concept that grew out of Westphalia would become
established the world over. Moreover, the task was easy, for the first
non-European partners were in fact themselves Europeans: the United
States which, when established as a state, was inspired by philosophy and
law from the Old Continent, and the Latin-American nation-states which
built their independence by drawing from major European jurists. As for
the vast countries of Africa and Asia, subject to European invasion at the
end of the nineteenth century, they were gradually subjugated or mar-
ginalized. In both cases their forced and often violent integration into
the international system was a way of asserting the sustainability of the
order that came out of the Westphalian adventure.
The fact remains that colonialism constituted a huge paradox, with
the Westphalian state system encountering the still keen memory of the
prior imperial form that never stopped haunting European nations and
was reinvented through overseas expansion. That memory has remained
very present for European actors, even if one recalls that the system
growing out of Westphalia was meant precisely to marginalize and make
extinct that political system, embodied at the time by the Holy Roman
Empire, with its concomitant territorial fragmentations and denial of
autonomy. And yet, the “temptation of empire” endured, either in its
traditional continental form, as revived several times in France by the
Napoleonic adventure, or in the extraverted version growing out of the
construction of the colonial empires, of which France and Great Britain,
as well as Portugal and Spain, were sponsors. If this imperial memory
has never totally left the European stage, it is because behind the spirit
of Westphalia there is an aporia that was not immediately grasped and is
even completely glossed over at times in the present.
Sovereignty, Competition and Power

The basis for that aporia lay in the incongruities in the principle of sov-
ereignty: the international order was a juxtaposition of sovereign states
competing with one another. That competition already showed the
4 B. BADIE
contradictory nature of emerging legal thinking. On the one hand, there

was an attempt to produce an international norm designed to police
the interstate order being built; on the other hand, the function of sov-
ereignty was to recognize the absolute freedom of each state, which
shielded it from any rule claiming to be outside its authority. Thus the
very idea of war looming on the horizon as something normal, neces-
sary and absolute, an old idea which the Western powers would be hard
put to rid themselves of. Thus also the old mistrust towards interna-
tional law, a suspicion that persists even today, in particular in the United
States. Competition more or less freed from the rule of law suggested
at the same time that power remained the true principle at work in this
international order, in other words the freedom to constrain others,
especially neighboring states, whatever the means employed. That power
would become the great organizer of the new international order, which
they believed was to last forever. They would eventually become disen-
chanted, but much later.
Be that as it may, with power playing the role of natural arbiter in
interstate rivalries, it inevitably led to two typical situations that have
constantly alternated in the dynamics of the Western world. Either one
of the states turned out to be far more powerful than the others, reviving
the imperial tradition, which tempted Louis XIV in his day, Napoleon I,
and England in the nineteenth century. Or else the major powers were at
more or less the same level, then empire was no longer possible and the
world had to be organized through an oligarchy, a club of the powerful.
That more or less stable oscillation between imperial hegemony and
oligarchy has run throughout European history up to the present. With
the imperial mindset, relations of near submission prevail for all the
actors, who must accept that hegemony. On the other hand, in an oli-
garchic situation, that hegemony must be continually renegotiated in
order to be tolerable and sustainable. Thus the emergence of the concept
of a “balance of power,” a major category that has deeply affected the
history of international relations since the early nineteenth century. This
involved ensuring that the major powers were equal so that no one of
them would be tempted by imperial designs.
The great mentor of that new idea was the German chancellor,
Bismarck. Once France was defeated and Germany unified in 1871, his
whole problem consisted in finding a balance within Europe that would
stop its enemy across the Rhine from getting revenge and once again
dominating the continent. Thus, his elaboration of a complex system
of alliances, such as the “alliance of the three emperors” uniting Berlin

with Vienna and Moscow starting in 1872, then evolving toward the
“Triplice” connecting Vienna, Berlin, and Rome in 1882 and, the height
of complexity, a treaty of “reassurance” beginning in 1887 that picked
up Russia, which the chancellor was afraid of isolating. The great adven-
ture of cynical alliances was well and truly launched; it was here to stay,
deeply marking our modern international politics! In fact, Bismarck was
obsessed with the idea not of dominating Europe but of ensuring for its
main partners a kind of “bare minimum of power” so as not to chal-
lenge the overall oligarchic equilibrium. Thus, for instance, thanks to the
Congress of Berlin held in 1878 following the first war in the Balkans
and the Treaty of San Stefano that put an end to it, he sought to pac-
ify the rivals of a too clearly victorious Russia by offering a consolation
prize to a frustrated England which added Cypress to its collection of
possessions as a result! Who were the beneficiaries at the time of this
“bare minimum” of power? As of 1815, the candidates appeared almost
spontaneously: the four that vanquished Napoleon—Austria, Prussia,
England and Russia—formed the “Concert of Europe” and were soon
joined by France at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, despite its
defeat. These five countries would ensure the directorship of Europe,
their concerted power continuing with its ups and downs until the First
World War. The architecture of this directorship evokes a more contem-
porary reality: the G8. Its DNA is indeed the same. All the ingredients
were already there, and along with them the idea that the fate of the
world depends on an aristocracy composed of powers strong enough to
co-manage international life, but not solid enough to govern alone. The
formula was one that would last, with all its perils.
Naturally, for this solution of oligarchic governance to be relatively
consensual, none of the powers could feel in a position to “win the day”
by itself. It is understandable in this context why the United States has
always been highly reticent with regard to the “concert of nations” and
its practices, including formulas such as the G7, G8 and G20, about
which it has never been overly enthusiastic and which were mainly estab-
lished in its moments of relative weakness. Likewise, in the nineteenth
century England was the least enthusiastic member of the concert of the
Five, convinced that thanks to its mastery of the seas it could set up its
own Pax Britannica that the European club could only hinder. But in
the end that perspective of a “concert” of the powerful hobbled along
for nearly a whole century.
6 B. BADIE
Strengths and Weaknesses of Oligarchic Governance

The “concert” system was characterized from the beginning by two
birthmarks that never went away, two fundamental deficiencies that were
an expression of its basic conservatism. The first arose from the exclu-
sion, or ignorance, of society. With a view toward pure power and a
balance between those powers, societies—with the plurality and density
of their relations and interests—had no influence, or almost none. Not
only were they not integrated in any way into the mechanisms of this
oligarchic governance, but the main efforts by the “co-princes” of the
European order consisted in containing and quelling social outbreaks.
The story began in the 1820s with the first post-Napoleonic revolution-
ary stirrings that shook the continent: the attempt at a constitutional
revolution thanks to the insurrection in Cadiz, Spain (January 1820),
and rebellions in Naples and Sicily (July 1820). All this, amidst a host of
other events of a similar nature, led Metternich or Louis XVIII to assert
that the people have no business getting involved in affairs that pertain
above all to dynastic legitimism.
The second deficiency was linked to the very nature of oligarchic
governance: by definition, some are excluded from it. One could say
in modern terms that a sort of “second rank” of states and nations was
formed outside it, and its interplay with members of the club created
complex and destabilizing configurations. At the end of the nineteenth
century, the issue of the Balkans was a prime example that forever com-
plicated the task of the European concert from the moment it had to
deal with it. Two powers were interested in the region: Austro-Hungary
and Russia. And yet there was another tutelary power in the Balkans, the
Ottoman Empire, directly concerned yet almost totally excluded from
the European concert: studiously ignored, it was denied a major role in
international governance despite being needed. As for the small states
gradually created in the Balkan peninsula, they became all the more tur-
bulent by in turn not being integrated into the oligarchic logic. Think of
Serbia, which first began stirring things up in July 1876, deciding alone
to declare war on Turkey, then starting all over again in October 1912 as
an ally of Bulgaria and Montenegro, then repeating the same behavior
in June 1913… All of which led to the First World War. The Western
powers, focusing on who wielded the most power, were never good at
dealing with the “nobodies”: they paid dearly for it, and still are.
On the other hand, the oligarchy’s strongpoints lay in two fundamen-

tal factors. The first came from the feeling of equality and proximity link-
ing the members of the club, the idea that they resembled one another,
that they shared the same history and the same traditions, and that for
the most part they had the same, often conservative interests. That feel-
ing of equality and proximity was based on three modes of mutual recog-
nition whose intermingling, as we will see, would be the source of many
contemporary ambiguities.2 First, legal recognition simply acknowledg-
ing the other’s right to sovereignty. Along with that, political recognition
entailed acknowledging that the party concerned was entitled to jointly
manage the world, which naturally implied that others were not: this
would be the source of much future tension.
Lastly, the third type referred to the moral recognition acknowledg-
ing the other’s compliance with the values that were shared and deemed
essential. This last category went beyond realpolitik, which stops at the
second kind of recognition. What then came into play were the moral
judgments made about others. And yet, as soon as one accepted the
principle of oligarchy and inclusive governance, could those moral judg-
ments be anything but positive? Could one be a member of one club and
proclaim the other’s immorality? This is where the “diplomacy of con-
nivance” came in, forcing the Western states to make great allowances
for their partners, whether it be China, Russia, and even at one time the
United States under George W. Bush.3 This was the underlying prob-
lem. The logic of moral recognition was more or less a given and worked
rather smoothly within the conservative legitimist atmosphere of the
nineteenth century, while it literally exploded in the twentieth century,
in particular with the emergence of all-out totalitarianism and its avatars.
In the days following decolonization, the Western states had to define
themselves with even greater difficulty and cynicism in the face of polit-
ical systems based on values and ethnic and moral references that were
distinct from those that had founded the first concert of nations.
There truly was a bond uniting the members of the club, although the
legitimacy of their governance had to be validated by the others, most
of whom remained on the outside. This posed a classic but still funda-
mental question in political analysis: how and why does one agree to
be dominated? Why this “voluntary servitude?” Why, in the nineteenth
century, did the kingdoms of Denmark or Spain agree to bend to the
rules of governance of a club from which they were excluded? How can
you explain the willing acceptance of inequality among states by those
8 B. BADIE
who are the victims of that distinction? These uncertainties emerged in

the nineteenth century and culminated in the following century. What
was the real basis of legitimacy for the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences
following the Second World War, if not the idea that those not partici-
pating found it normal to be excluded and agreed to abide by the deci-
sions made there? The same kind of legitimacy was used to validate the
existence of the “P5,” the five permanent members of the UN Security
Council with veto power. Naturally, the Cold War helped to trivial-
ize that culture of hierarchy. The fear generated by nuclear deterrence
and the salience of the ideological confrontation between socialism and
liberalism had the effect of motivating those not enjoying the status of
“majors” to let their older brother decide for them. They even sought
out that sponsorship.
Today, that principle of hierarchy in international life is hard-pressed
and attacked from all sides, for clearly neither ideological alignment
nor nuclear deterrence is in a position to support it any longer. And
with the erosion of that hierarchical principle, a fundamental feature of
the Westphalian order has been challenged. As we will see, that incli-
nation was a perfect description of the changing fortunes of the Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which, starting in 1968, banned states that
were not members of the nuclear military club from gaining access to it.
Reluctance was rare back then, but in a non-bipolar context it was natu-
rally freed up.
The Weakness of International Law and Over-

Militarization
As a founding act of our international system, the Westphalian moment
also had other consequences. The first, as we have already seen, arose
from a major contradiction: they fetishized sovereignty—which tended
to reduce the weight of international law to a minimum—while at the
same time seeking to build an international order requiring institutions
that were already efficient. While the Westphalian system did not really
pave the way for a legal order worthy of the name, it nevertheless suc-
ceeded in producing norms that gradually established themselves in the
actors’ minds. Thus the tensions and carelessness of decolonization,
when the new independent states were told that Europe had instituted
a whole set of rules and practices which they had no choice but to rally
around unflinchingly. The newcomers, who were the majority, were not
allowed to participate in the redefinition or readjustment of these laws
imposed on them. They were entering an international system that was
not theirs.
The second consequence of the Westphalian moment grew out of the
“over-militarization” of the international order. International politics was
defined from the beginning as sovereignist, competitive and founded on
power. When these three features were combined, war inevitably became
the ordinary rule in international life. To such an extent that for centu-
ries no one really bothered to define peace, which seemed at the time
residual, merely conceived as “non-war.” Not only did war then become
the focus of the international system, but it also logically led to the mil-
itarization of nations. This is what the great American political analyst
Charles Tilly described as the symbiotic effect of “war making” and
“state making,” gradually outlining the contours of the modern state.4
Taxes, financial law, constitutional law, administrative law, and major
public institutions all historically owe much to war. This is in part why
the imperial memory never really faded after Westphalia. These nations
were above all military nations, and as such constantly moved closer to
the old imperial model which, by definition, was also in need of war.
That militarization of nations had several consequences. First, for a
long time, war validated the European princes’ right of life and death
over their subjects. Then, as this military instrument adjusted to society,
in particular after the French Revolution, conscription became a basic
right of citizenship, which thereafter was founded on a military, and
even warlike, vision of nation and fatherland. And yet, when we changed
worlds without actually realizing it over the past twenty or thirty years,
marked by the exponential progress of globalization, no one was con-
cerned with knowing if this militarization of nations was still adapted to
the upsurge in new social dynamics in international politics. Whether it
involved the growing socioeconomic integration in the North, or pres-
sure from societies in the South with a different history and origins. I
will come back to this later in the book. They were tragically out of step,
as the military power so present in Western memory was no longer the
most efficient tool for extinguishing or even merely containing the new
conflicts causing so much bloodshed in the South.
As a response to the observation that the Western tradition since the
Renaissance has failed to imagine peace, one could naturally point out
the efforts of a certain number of thinkers such as Kant, for example. But
10 B. BADIE
the basis of the German philosopher’s reading of peace was to consider

war first, thought of as a historical given. Kant’s peace grows more from
a certain anthropological primacy of war than from the definition of an
order naturally and spontaneously inclined to concord. This is also very
clear with Rousseau and Hobbes, who thought that as soon as we were
involved in social interplay, war became the essence of human relations.
These same suppositions are not necessarily found in all histories and
cultures, at least not in that form. It is rare in history for political sys-
tems to be built in opposition to equivalent systems. The Chinese path,
for instance, involves different formulas, as do the African empires and
Latin-American nations.
Nowadays, liberals are still singing the praises of the term “competi-
tion,” not only on an economic level but also to turn it into a feature of
achievement for human beings. The nobility of human action can seem-
ingly be built only through competition and self-assertion against others:
even Marxism is no exception to this vision. It wasn’t until the late nine-
teenth century that a more sociological than philosophical reaction arose
to that way of thinking. For Durkheim, the essence of the social aspect
was no longer to be found through conflict but rather through integra-
tion and solidarity. It would perhaps be the beginning of a new story.
The Emergence of a “Second Rank in the International

System”
Those excluded from the system were designated as the “proletar-
iat of states and nations”: this stock expression often led to simplifica-
tions. Even before fascism was formed, Italian nationalists including the
socialist Mussolini spoke of Italy as a “proletariat nation” to protest its
exclusion from the concert of the powerful and to justify its demand to
participate in European governance and naturally in colonial plunder-
ing. That demand was eventually acknowledged in the Treaty of London
(1915), a secret treaty through which Italy came to an agreement with
representatives of the Triple Entente to wage war against the Central
Powers in exchange for territorial compensations. And it was precisely
the unkept promises of that pact which disappointed the Italian national-
ists’ aspirations and fueled the resentment that led to the political success
of fascism.
This example raises the crucial question of the emergence of dissent-

ing actors who rebelled against the international system and developed
strategies for that purpose: the great issue of the late twentieth century
and the beginning of the new millennium. It went from the “pure” bal-
ance of powers option, simplified starting in 1947 to the two well-de-
fined sides in the Cold War, to the current situation giving free rein to
dissent. If you were not a member of the club, you could either serve in
a subordinate position and try to somehow benefit from that, or chal-
lenge it. It is interesting to see that this challenge did not emerge, or
barely, in the nineteenth century, in other words at a time when “the
others” (China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire) were not equipped to con-
duct oppositional diplomacy.
Japan, through the emperor’s proactive initiative, opted resolutely for
imitating and importing the Western model. China felt helpless in deal-
ing with the European powers’ desire to dominate, while the Ottoman
Empire, the “sick man of Europe,” was also considerably weakened and
limited to trying to imitate it.
However, with the terrible bloodbath of the First World War came
the first signs of a weakening—and discredit—of the European powers,
and new actors stepped into the breach. It was at this pivotal moment
that the first vague desires for non-Western regional groupings began
to emerge. Thus the Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen fostered
the creation of a “Pan-Asian front” whose tendencies were widely fol-
lowed in Japan, where the first Pan-Asian conference was held in 1926
in Nagasaki, followed by several others in Tokyo, then in Delhi. Even
before the First World War, the victory of the Nippon Empire in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1905 had a considerable impact on the imagina-
tion of young Asian intellectuals. On the Western side, it didn’t take long
to hush up the trauma of that first great military rout of the white man
by putting it down to an exhausted regime on its last legs, which the
dying empire of the Tsars effectively was to a certain extent. However,
the Japanese victory did fuel the beginnings of Pan-Asianism before
Japan itself turned to expansionist ultranationalism, earning the hostility
of a number of its former continental allies and admirers. In this way,
another story got underway whose outcome remains uncertain even
today. Was it the first hints of a new world? Of a reformed old world? Or
of a new world juxtaposed with the old one?
We have somewhat forgotten that Pan-Asian moment today. It is
nonetheless worth mentioning, especially in light of the future waves
12 B. BADIE
of dissent regarding Western hegemony. Sun Yat-sen could have con-

tented himself with espousing the ready-made Western way of building
a nation-state. Indeed that is what history retained a posteriori since
the Kuomintang is always referred to as a nationalist party of Western
inspiration and Sun Yat-sen as the first Chinese nation-builder to use
the nation-state model. But they overlook this phase of Pan-Asian aspi-
rations, as well as the extremely intense political-intellectual interactions
that existed at the time between China and Japan. It is often forgotten
that the latter was seen by young Chinese as the first Asian nation to
have defeated a European power, and when Zhou Enlai left China in the
summer of 1917, it was precisely to study in Japan.
Similarly, the first Pan-Islamic conference—and not Pan-Islamist we
would note—was held in Cairo in 1926, quite simply bringing together
Muslims who were trying to find their place in a world that already saw
itself as Post-Western. This first manifestation was carried out by ulemas
from the Islamic Al Azhar University. It decided henceforth to hold peri-
odic meetings in order to examine the regional and international situa-
tion. In fact, this first conference was followed by a second one several
months later, held in Mecca, then by another one in 1931 in Jerusalem.
The context was not neutral. Kemalist Turkey had just abolished the
caliphate and the void this created, as well as a possible rebuilding of it,
was the main focus of their work, paving the way for a persistent pro-
ject of which the Islamic State (Isis) is still availing itself to this day. In
reality, the participants at these conferences were already vaguely seek-
ing an order that would not stem merely from the universalization of the
Western statist model but would introduce something quite different.
It was truly a whole section of humanity trying to find itself but with-
out doing it the Western way. With them came the premises of a new
international system that would have a hard time getting established but
whose broad outlines could be seen in the principles of the Afro-Asian
Bandung Conference in 1955, a key moment that I will come back to
later on.
The first “assemblies of oppressed peoples” were also held during this
same period, such as the Anti-Imperialist Congress in Brussels in 1927,
backed by the Komintern and attended by figures such as the Indian
Nehru, the Algerian Messali Hadj, the Peruvian Haya de La Torre and
Sun Yat-sen’s widow. Nearly thirty years before Bandung, this was the
first attempt to build a kind of “union of the excluded.” The message
to the Europeans, to Westerners, was clear: “You are not alone in the
world, we exist too.” But these initiatives were still rather weak. Who in
Europe was concerned with the first Pan-Islamic conference in the 1920s
or 1930s? Who would take Sun Yat-sen’s Pan-Asianism seriously? Who
took note of the concomitant emergence of Pan-Africanism, the ideology
of the first African nationalist leaders (Nkrumah, Nyerere and Lumumba,
among others), which gave rise even before the Second World War to
international exchanges and conferences not only among activists from
the African continent, but also with West Indian and African American
intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois?
This first impetus did not carry much weight in a world still domi-
nated by the politics of the established powers. It was seen at the time as
a whirlwind of rhetoric and passionate speeches of no real political con-
sequence. What would have happened if they had given consideration
to those still vague aspirations? Moreover, do we know how to analyze
them even today? A single example: it was only two years after the first
Islamic conference in 1926 in Cairo that the now world famous Muslim
Brotherhood movement was born, which no one really noticed back
then.
The Soviet Exception and Its Repercussions

All this opposition to the international system—whose chaotic pace dom-
inates our lives today—was already incipient in those times. Only when
channeled by the Soviet government did it give the illusion of being con-
trollable with the usual instruments of power.
The particular case of the Soviet Union is worth looking into for that
reason. Compared to China, the Muslim or African worlds, Russia had
the distinction of coming out of the European concert. After the Great
War, the young Soviet government, heir to the Tsarist Empire in fact if
not in law, long hesitated between a desire for dissent or for the “club.”
In the heat of the Bolshevik revolution, the desire for dissent naturally
prevailed; furthermore, the West left them no choice. It was at the time
of the Baku Congress in September 1920, which brought together del-
egates from the “peoples of the Orient,” where Moscow championed
all those who felt oppressed by the great colonial powers. Beyond the
alliance with labor parties in colonial or dominated countries, the
Bolsheviks also appealed to national bourgeoisies. The emancipation of
peoples excluded from the Westphalian system sometimes even seemed
more important than the global proletarian revolution. One mustn’t
14 B. BADIE
forget that in 1926 Soviet authorities invited father and son Motilal
and Jawaharlal Nehru to Moscow. Nehru always retained something
from those days, and when he became Prime Minister of an independ-
ent India, he consolidated a deep and sustained alliance with his Soviet
partner.
Clearly the Westerners did everything they could to push the USSR
onto the “dissenting” side, first by refusing to recognize the Soviet gov-
ernment, by establishing what Maréchal Foch called a “cordon sani-
taire” around the country, then by deferring its entry into the Society
of Nations (September 18, 1934). The “choice of dissent” was thus not
only an effect of the Bolsheviks’ subversive impulses, but probably also
the only option remaining open to them in concrete terms: as we shall
see, this precedent was to be frequently imitated subsequently.
But that option of dissent ultimately had its limits: the Soviet Union
eventually became a member of the “club,” mainly under Stalin’s impe-
tus. That evolution was expressed not only through the USSR’s admis-
sion into the LN (League of Nations) but also through the latter’s
deliberate intention to ally itself with democracies against fascism and
Nazism. And, far from being a break, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
subsequently trivialized Moscow’s entry into international politics, which
the new tsar wished to be just as it was before: fluid and freely compet-
itive. Unhappy about the failure of his attempts at Western alliances,
Stalin might have chosen to withdraw into a Eurasian identity; but, fol-
lowing the most extreme realpolitik dogma, he preferred to collude with
Nazi Germany, heir to one of the constituents of the nineteenth century
European concert: a fine, strong continuity. When, as a victor in the
Second World War after a switch of alliances, Stalin eventually convened
all the conferences he was to mastermind—Moscow, Teheran, Yalta, and
Potsdam—it was always with the idea of actively building the club of
which the USSR claimed henceforth to be a crucial element.
It is worth noting the striking similarity to the approach taken by
Vladimir Putin today. In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly in
September 2015, the Russian president made a point of mentioning that
alliance with the Western world at the time of the Second World War
(naturally overlooking the first phase of the conflict). He was showing his
desire to share world governance with the Western powers and implied
that there could be no international stability if Russia was not closely
associated with it. Ukraine and Syria are two remarkable pretexts for the
Kremlin’s pedagogical ploy to prove that world governance cannot be
carried out without Russia’s complete return to the club from which it
was excluded.
This has not prevented Putin from keeping another iron in the fire,
thanks to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Now that the
disastrous effects of the Moscow-Beijing schism are only a bed mem-
ory, post-Cold War Russia has turned to China and created this new
organization consolidated and broadened moreover through the BRICS
(Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). As we will see in subse-
quent chapters, the SCO and BRICS are veritable “breeding grounds”
for protest diplomacy. They include all the emerging powers outside
Europe and the West that are at odds with the G7 and the daily man-
agement of the international order. There is no better insight into the
paradox constituted by Russia’s exclusion from the G8 after the Crimea
affair, showing the extent to which the Western powers have trouble
understanding what it means to be banished, as Moscow was in 1989.
Oligarchic governance has its risks: sharing when you must, but exclud-
ing when you think you can! A difficult balance, nearly impossible in a
world that is no longer bipolar today.
Notes
1. Bodin, Jean, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale. Written by I. Bodin, a
Famous Lawyer and a Man of Great Experience in Matters of State, Out of
French and Latine Coplet, Done into English by Richard Knolles (London:
Impensis G. Bishop, 1606). Retrieved February 10, 2018, available at:
https://archive.org/details/sixbookesofcommo00bodi.
2. Matthias Iser, “Recognition between States? Moving Beyond Identity
Politics,” in Recognition in International Relations, eds. Christopher
Daase et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 27–45.
3. Bertrand Badie, Diplomacy of Connivance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012).
4. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in
Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter D. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer,
and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
CHAPTER 2
Bipolarity, Unipolarity, Multipolarity
Abstract  In talking about the Cold War, the term “bipolarity” is

frequently used, including in the very definition of the underlying

notion of “polarity.” If we are to put things in perspective with a sub-
ject that is more complex than it seems, we must first consider that
polarity is an exception in the international history, and then learn to
distinguish between power polarity and group polarity, two major reali-
ties that are often confused. The former describes competition among
states that may claim power status, in other words that have the objective
resources to do so and are perceived as such by others. What is the use
of being objectively powerful if others fail to acknowledge that capacity?
This chapter will first consider issues of nuclear reality and ideological
antagonism before questioning the transition from antagonism to diar-
chy. It will examine the erosion of the bipolar system stemming from the
South and from so-called peripheral conflicts, the contentious legacy of
non-alignment and the fleeting illusion of unipolarity. Finally, the author
stresses what an “apolar” world may be and how it may have finally
caused the return of the oligarchic club.
Keywords  Bipolarity · Unipolarity · Multipolarity · Nuclear power

Global South · Peripheral conflicts

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_2
18 B. BADIE
In talking about the Cold War, the term “bipolarity” is frequently used,
but without rigor, including in the very definition of the underlying
notion of “polarity.” If we are to put things in perspective with a sub-
ject that is more complex than it seems, we must learn to distinguish
between power polarity and group polarity, two major realities that are
often confused.1 The former describes competition among states that
may claim power status, in other words that have the objective resources
to do so and are perceived as such by others. What is the use of being
objectively powerful if others fail to acknowledge that capacity?
Asking questions about power polarities thus consists in deter-
mining if one is dealing with a hegemonic system or an oligarchic one.
There are few historical examples of hegemonic systems. I mentioned
the Pax Britannica that reigned from 1815 up to the growing power of
Germany. American hegemony during the Cold War naturally enters into
this category, but was mainly shared with Moscow in a kind of American-
Soviet “joint rule.” There was a very brief moment of American uni-
polarity after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it quickly disappeared. In
other words, clear and simple moments of hegemony are in fact rather
rare. The rule is oligarchy, which describes situations in which a plurality
of powers emerges that are more or less in free competition with one
another. As for group polarity, it corresponds to periods when the powers
put an end to their dispersion and move toward “side-taking” situations,
based on the grouping together of a certain number of states around a
leader. These sides could be variable in quantity, even if international pol-
itics generally encourages duality, in accordance with the time-honored
friend-enemy dichotomy.
Likewise one must dissociate polarity and polarization. Polarity
describes a juxtaposition of powers without qualifying their relation-
ships. Polarization implies a potential or real confrontation. Thus a whole
range of scenarios is possible: there are dispersed powers in competition
without necessarily entering into a direct conflict, situations in which
that competition results in a confrontation, situations in which that con-
frontation is organized around well-structured sides; lastly, one could
imagine contexts, extremely rare in fact, in which a hegemonic power
dominates all the others.
The bipolarity that we experienced from 1947 to 1989 was not only
polar but also polarized, leading to a confrontational stance between
the poles. Moreover, a mindset of rallying together came with it: not
only were there two antagonistic powers, but there were also a certain
2 BIPOLARITY, UNIPOLARITY, MULTIPOLARITY 19
number of small or larger states that united around them. Finally, both
sides were dominated by a “superpower,” as they were called at the time,
driven by a claim of rivalry with the alter ego, or peer competitor, and by a
secret wish to divide up the world in a joint rule.
It is worth noting that this was a totally unprecedented configuration,
to the extent that bipolarity has existed only once in the history of inter-
national relations. This did not prevent at least two generations of polit-
ical actors from convincing themselves that it was likely to last, to the
point of being confused with the very idea of an international system.
Furthermore, it generated a whole vocabulary, a whole series of tech-
niques, institutions, political, diplomatic and military practices of which
we are still to this day the direct and often unconscious heirs.
Nuclear Reality and Ideological Antagonism

Why has our consciousness and vision of the world been so profoundly
affected by what is after all a rather fleeting “bipolar moment?” It is
always easier with hindsight to find explanations through which to spec-
ulate about a phenomenon that was largely an accident of history, an
exceptional alignment of the planets. That accident was based on the
conjunction of three factors. The first came from the nuclear reality and
its entirely original nature. In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
it became evident that this totally unprecedented weapon, although it
would not necessarily enable one to win, would lead to the destruction
of the other if used. As long as only one power had a monopoly on it,
it would have an absolute, terrifying advantage since it could annihilate
everyone without any risk of being pulverized itself. But as soon as one’s
adversary became equipped with the same weapon, a very particular logic
was set in motion that is known as “capacity of mutual destruction.”
There was no longer any question here of victory or defeat, since it
was simply the possibility of the two belligerents’ annihilation that pre-
vailed. However, with the emergence of the nuclear duopole (US-USSR
starting in 1949), all states deprived of the weapon had no chance of
surviving unless they aligned themselves under the protection of one
of the superpowers. For the first time in history, protection became the
absolute rule in international politics. For the first time, it was impossible
to envisage one’s place in the international system outside that logic of
protection, which also implied sides and leaders of those sides.
20 B. BADIE
Previously, the logic of protection between strong and less strong

did not have that absolute quality because no one was at risk of total
annihilation, even by one stronger than oneself. Alliances were quite
flexible and each state could build its own autonomy at a lower cost.
Henceforth, and it was an unprecedented and remarkable phenomenon
in international relations, there was no longer any question of bridging
the gap separating the two super-adversaries. With the nuclear era, pro-
tection became so vital that it became very risky and dangerous to stray
too far from one’s side. Charles de Gaulle was highly aware of this when,
in 1962 in the heat of the missile crisis, he aligned himself unhesitatingly
with the US in the face of Khrushchev’s USSR.
The other new aspect arose from the world’s polarization between
two ideologies. Here again, the phenomenon was totally unprecedented.
Previously in the world, ideologies did not have the structuring virtue
they acquired at the end of the Second World War. The two victors over
Nazism indeed claimed allegiance to highly different political philoso-
phies: centralized Marxist socialism that was state-run and authoritarian,
and a liberal orientation advocating the virtues of individualism, a free
market and democracy. For the first time, ideology interfered in a deep
and systematic way with international politics. Nations and nationalism,
which once structured those politics, saw themselves almost downgraded
through this face-off between two messianisms that claimed to embody
on their own the promised end of History. As a result, the instinct for
protection previously discussed went far beyond mere pragmatism.
Whichever side one aligned with had a philosophical identity that wid-
ened the differences. One did not align oneself merely to be protected,
one swore allegiance willingly or not to one of the two poles in this dual
system.
One might argue that there have been other moments in the history
of international relations where ideologies played an important role.
Thus one could say that the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries left their mark on international politics, but on a limited
scale that ultimately only concerned a piece of the European continent,
not the entire world. Moreover, while ideology was then a partial vector
of identification and alignment, it did not structure all of international
politics. Furthermore, Protestants and Catholics soon joined together
in disparate coalitions. During the War of the League of Augsburg
(1688–1697), it was a coalition of Protestant and Catholic states that
fought Louis XIV. Likewise, in the nineteenth century, the split between
legitimism and nationalism did not produce such clear and lasting align-
ments. On the other hand, during the Cold War, the two dimensions
were mutually reinforcing. The two ideologies fueled a radical simplifica-
tion of the international system which in turn, through its oversimplifica-
tion, fueled ideological tension. Undoubtedly, the antagonism between
Marxism and liberalism would not have been so strong if it had not been
based on competition between the two politically, diplomatically and
militarily structured blocs.
Lastly, beyond these two clashing ideological systems, two forms of
socioeconomic and political organization were really pitted against one
another, again in a totally unprecedented manner. The force of that
antagonism was all the more exceptional given that each of the two sys-
tems had at its disposal a kind of outgrowth on the opposing side. This
was of course the role played by the national communist parties in NATO
countries, supported by a working class still not well integrated into soci-
ety, particularly in the southern European countries. In France and Italy,
the Communist Party brought in over a quarter of the vote, making it a
major social power. On the Soviet side, dissidence was gradually built up
that also expressed a lack of integration within the system. These two dis-
sidences drew their ideal from the opposite model, the European work-
ing class, especially in southern Europe, perceived the USSR as a kind of
“paradise,” while the dissenting social forces on the Soviet side increas-
ingly identified with Western liberalism and individualism.
That dynamic gave meaning to the competition between the two sys-
tems and gave the social and political struggles taking shape on both
sides an intensity and relevance at least as strong and decisive as that of
military competition. Not surprisingly therefore, the progressive integra-
tion of the working class and the regression of communist parties at the
end of the post-war economic boom contributed to the weakening of
the Soviet bloc, which thereby gradually lost a part of its supporters in
the West while, on the contrary, discontent and dissidence continued to
grow stronger in the East. Bipolarity ran out of steam and the bipolar
system ended up collapsing from the moment the rigidity of that ideo-
logical, political and socioeconomic duality was challenged on both sides
by ongoing social transformations. Thus it was not only, or even mainly,
through military competition that the West prevailed over the East. The
delegitimization and decomposition of the economic and social system of
the Eastern bloc countries led to the fall of the Wall, finally resulting in
the muddled and ambiguous situation known as “post-bipolar.”
22 B. BADIE
From Antagonism to Diarchy

It once seemed that bipolarity was based on the balance of forces, that
the Soviet Bear and the American Eagle balanced each other in terms of
power. In reality, the fading of bipolarity reflected the extreme precari-
ousness of the factors upon which it was based, far more than on a logic
of power that would have enabled one of the two sides to prevail. The
decline of the Soviet bloc was not primarily linked to a lessening of its
power as such, but to the erosion of its social model and the concomi-
tant decline of its power of seduction to dissenters on the Western side.
With these considerations in mind, one should also understand that
bipolarity was never a monolithic phenomenon and that is was con-
stantly evolving over the course of its brief history. Between 1947 and
1967, bipolarity was marked by the extreme rigidity of radically intran-
sigent behavior and a lack of willingness to communicate beyond the
“iron curtain” separating the protagonists. It was the height of the
Cold War, with climactic moments like the Berlin blockade in 1948
and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The two powers hardly communi-
cated, except to hurl abuse at one another during certain sessions of the
Security Council, even though the Soviet Union left it at the start of the
Korean War. However, from 1967 to 1989, bipolarity adapted. It was
a time of “peaceful coexistence,” then of “détente,” strained somewhat
by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This thaw in relations
between the two powers was orchestrated by various major diplomatic
initiatives, including the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin in 1971 and
the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe held in Helsinki
in 1975. From then on it was a matter of bipolarity that was no longer
radically antagonistic but in a sense diarchic. The parallel between the
two main protagonists lay paradoxically in the perception of their weak-
nesses and in the stalemates in which they were involved in this and that
region around the world: the American defeat in Vietnam, the USSR’s
setbacks on its own side, the wars in the Middle East, where the “two
policemen” had trouble imposing their will. Forced to cooperate due to
these weaknesses, they also discovered they could benefit from that col-
laboration, first of all on an economic level, thus the importance of the
SALT agreements in the 1970s, which made it possible to contain the
strategic arms race: the economic argument is always stronger in setting
de-escalation in motion in this regard. These negotiations were a good
deal for the economically weaker USSR, but also for the U.S., undergo-
ing a period of recession that caused a great deal of strain.
This cooperation was all the more beneficial for both sides by trigger-
ing a quite unprecedented dynamic: the two partners could bask in the
glow of joint rule. Contrary to what is often imagined, the world was not
divided up at Yalta, but rather starting in 1967 when the two powers not
only learned to talk to each other, to mutually acknowledge one another
as leaders, but also to act in connivance with each other, going as far
as fully recognizing their geographical spheres of competence. The year
1967 was when the first meeting occurred between Johnson and Kosygin
in Glassboro, followed by a whole string of summits between Nixon and
Brezhnev that continued with their successors at the same pace. It was
during these moments of dialogue that the two major powers strove to
find pragmatic solutions to various international issues; and when they
couldn’t, they agreed on how to put them on hold, such as in the Arab-
Israeli conflict which, although not really taken care of, was contained
by an unprecedented framework of constant communication between the
two superpowers.
Lastly, the year 1967 was importantly followed by the signing a year
later of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter was
emblematic in that it perfectly reflected the new climate of diarchic coop-
eration: the two superpowers defined the system enabling them to lock
the door of their little nuclear club. It also shows to what extent this
connivance developed within a hierarchical framework still that of the
dying Westphalian system, which was becoming untenable. In 1968, the
NPT was accepted by the entire international community, with a few
rare exceptions (India, Pakistan, Israel). The submission of the small and
medium-sized powers—in this case, the nuclear-free states—to the major
ones was still a given. Barely anyone challenged the game of two sides or
polarization. Nearly everyone, willingly or not, believed that the super-
powers had good reason to act as they did. Once that diarchic bipolarity
was gone, it became on the contrary very hard to practice. Keeping it on
life support is totally out of step with the current reality of our world,
where challenges to the hierarchical legitimacy of the most powerful is
radical and constant. And yet, a presage of those challenges appeared
from the beginning of the era of bipolarity. The system was in reality
a “conundrum”: there were already too many actors disputing it even
though people refused to listen to them.
24 B. BADIE
Stirrings in the South: The Flaws of Bipolarity

It is symptomatic that the first signs of the erosion of the bipolar sys-
tem came above all from the South. Nothing in the East–West relation-
ship was really capable of shaking up the diarchic model. Naturally, one
must take into account General de Gaulle’s wishful thinking about going
it alone, his protests, starting with the 1958 memorandum, against an
Atlantic Alliance that did not give him a full share in running it. There
was of course the schism between Moscow and Beijing (but this was
already in the South), and, on a far more modest and less virulent scale,
the relative distancing of Ceausescu’s Romania, which followed in its way
the Titoist schism in socialist Yugoslavia. But, in the end, none of these
“divergences” fundamentally modified the order of things.
In the previous chapter I evoked the way in which the first Pan-Asian,
Pan-African and Pan-Arabic movements had expressed their distrust with
regard to the European powers. That distrust was expressed again, with
far greater force and visibility, during the Bandung Conference in 1955,
albeit weighted down by a formidable paradox. Professing its Afro-
Asianism, the conference intended to highlight the existence of a third
force, a bloc that was neither East nor West, and whose watchword was
non-alignment, which had become the lasting designation of the move-
ment that grew out of this first major Afro-Asian meeting. Nonetheless,
the different protagonists at Bandung were the first to follow a highly
developed logic of clientelization with respect to the two superpow-
ers. This was the case for four of the conference’s sponsors—Indonesia,
India, Pakistan and Ceylon (the future Sri Lanka). Two others, Pakistan
and Ceylon, aligned very quickly with the Western side. John Kotelawala,
the Sri Lankan Prime Minister at the time, did not attempt to conceal
his “Westernophilia,” while Pakistan formed a close alliance with the
United States, even if it meant simultaneously relying on China. On the
other hand, Nehru in India and Sukarno in Indonesia had clearly turned
toward Moscow.
The second paradox was that, while these countries in the South were
demanding full acknowledgement of their sovereignty from their former
colonial masters, they were appealing to the North to support them in
their efforts at development. In order to survive at the time, one needed
help, and to be helped one had at least to be clientelized if not aligned.
The strength of bipolarity had temporarily won out over the Southern
people’s emancipation narrative. At the same time, this new world, not
well integrated into the international game, gradually became the main
focus of international conflicts. And yet, while it may be relatively easy to
clientelize states, it is far more difficult to control the conflicts underpin-
ning them. While negotiated bipolarity may have protected Europe from
war, the Old Continent was no longer the world’s battlefield. The latter
had moved to the South where wars developed over which bipolarity had
no hold. Things were really starting to change.
One could already begin to see the main features of the “great mis-
understanding” that struck the world after 1945. The Northern powers,
intoxicated by the apparent success of the American-Soviet joint rule that
seemed to be working better and better, were convinced that they could
retain control over all international events, and in particular conflicts
known disdainfully at the time as “peripheral.” This was the main pur-
pose of the whole economic and military arsenal of vassalization and cli-
entelization. But, in reality, the more such conflicts developed, the more
the Northern countries’ capacity to control them declined. In other
words, we were no longer alone in the world.
Bipolarity Undermined by “Peripheral” Conflicts

The first of those conflicts was undoubtedly the Korean War, which
revealed the difficulties already experienced by powers such as the Soviet
Union and China in controlling their North Korean ally. The U.S. took
advantage of this to consolidate a military dictatorship in South Korea
that was totally subservient to its interests. But the Korean conflict “did
not spread too far” and the turmoil was kept under control.
Things went differently in the Vietnamese conflict, for three reasons.
First, contrary to the Korean War, the Vietnam War developed in a con-
text of competition between the USSR and China. This double patron-
age, which North Vietnam made terrific use of, already introduced a
dysfunction into the system. Secondly, the U.S. experienced in South
Vietnam what it had been spared in Korea, a truly partisan war. It then
began to discover that fighting a society is far more difficult than fighting
a state. To be sure, one cannot deny the presence of North Vietnam in
the background, but the Viet Cong’s infiltration and activity in South
Vietnam was something quite different from frontal combat between
two states. This was the same type of conflict the other Western pow-
ers had just experienced in the wars of decolonization in Madagascar,
Indochina, Cameroon and Algeria of course, with regard to France; as
26 B. BADIE
well as all the bloody episodes in the British Empire’s withdrawal from
its overseas territories: in Malaysia, where it didn’t do so badly and finally
succeeded in subduing the communist guerillas, and in Kenya, where the
conflict with the Mau-Mau nationalist rebels was much harder to handle.
These emerging conflicts in the South brought to the fore new mili-
tary practices which turned out to have nothing to do with the theory of
war as it had been developed by the major Western strategists. Initially,
the Soviets thought they could congratulate themselves on the situa-
tion. Decolonization was a Western problem, and not only was Moscow
shielded from any accusation of colonialism, but it could also use those
conflicts to weaken the West. It was somewhat like the atmosphere at
the Baku Congress that resurfaced in the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR
defending everywhere the cause of oppressed and colonized peoples, and
in particular within the forum of the United Nations. But the schism
between Moscow and Beijing undermined the Soviets’ self-confidence
and showed that there were other candidates perhaps in a better position
than the Soviets to defend the Afro-Asian cause. Lastly, the Soviet Union
was caught in its own trap when it discovered that it too had a “southern
flank” which it dominated in an imperial and neocolonial fashion. The
Afghan episode was the defining moment in that evolution, the Soviet
Union’s “little Vietnam” from which it never recovered. It should be
noted that this geopolitical reversal of fortune in the Third World took
place during a very short lapse of time between the fall of Saigon in 1975
and the fatal decision to intervene in Afghanistan in December 1979,
triggering the disintegration in the 1980s and the final destruction of the
Soviet model.
But even before that debacle, the Soviet Union found itself a pris-
oner of the clientelization game. In conclusion, it was easy to stigmatize
the Western powers contending with their colonies or former colonies,
but it learned subsequently at its own expense how difficult it was to
enforce its tutelage over those same countries. The USSR experienced
some good fortune with India, which prevailed over its Pakistani rival, as
resoundingly attested among other things by the war of independence in
Bangladesh in 1971. Thus the alliance between Moscow and Delhi never
constituted a major diplomatic disadvantage for the Soviets. However,
other regional conflicts produced less fortunate consequences, notably in
the Middle East. Not only did the Soviet Union not succeed in clien-
telizing the whole of the Arab world, but it had to undergo the pain-
ful consequences of certain shifting alliances. Its clients—initially Egypt,
Syria and Iraq—had to coexist in a complex relationship with other states

that were also hostile to Israel but adversaries of the Soviet side, such
as the traditional monarchies of the Arabian peninsula and Jordan. Syro-
Jordanian tensions in the fall of 1970 thus followed the famous black
September episode during which King Hussein of Jordan tried to elimi-
nate the PLO’s presence on his soil, leading Hafez al-Assad to send tanks
to the border of the Hashemite kingdom. This initiative seemed an ill-
timed decision that thwarted the Kremlin’s plans in the region, and it
had to adapt to a pace of conflicts it was not at all in control of.
A complex diplomatic game thus confused diplomatic matters for
Moscow. The case of the Horn of Africa is particularly eloquent. Initially,
pro-Soviet Somalia clashed with the Ethiopia of the Negus, allied
with the West. But a Marxist-leaning revolution backed by Moscow
had barely overthrown the latter when the Somalian leader Siad Barre
changed sides. It was therefore a draw at best. Elsewhere this revolu-
tionary Third-Worldism practiced by the Soviets became mired in wars
of position with equivocal results, such as in southern Africa, where the
conflicts in Angola and Mozambique did not lead to the easy victories
to which those wanting to reap the fruits of a painful decolonization
process felt entitled. Admittedly, actors from the South proved them-
selves to be reluctant players of full alignment. Nasser moved closer to
Moscow while remaining viscerally anti-communist and fundamentally
hostile to the Egyptian Communist Party. Saddam Hussein turned to the
West to raise the stakes, notably during his eight-year war with Iran, but
even before that, when he began a “civilian” nuclear program. Jacques
Chirac went to Baghdad in the fall of 1974. The Iraqi “rais” came to
France the following year to visit Cadarache, the site of the Atomic
Energy Commission, to meet with the new French prime minister, to
go to the Élysée Palace and provide substance for the “Osirak” pro-
ject which included among others the French companies Bouygues and
Saint-Gobain.
The Limits of Joint Rule

For all these reasons, the bipolar system quickly lost credibility among
countries in the South. First, the actors realized that they had their own
resources at their disposal and did not need to “stick with” a Western
or Soviet sponsor in order to survive. In becoming the actors clos-
est to the new conflicts they acquired a strong capacity to influence the
28 B. BADIE
international agenda, and they knew how to cash in on it. They also
noticed that their Soviet patron was too compromised in preserving the
advantages of joint rule with the United States to be a completely relia-
ble protector. If Moscow was only lukewarm in backing its Arab protégés
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it was due to the strategic priority of
the peaceful coexistence negotiated with the US. At some point the ben-
efits of effective patronage ran the risk of being destroyed by the cost
of the falling-out it could trigger with Washington. Joint rule thus con-
tained a potential contradiction that was fatal to it.
There was more proof of the uncertainties of power: the turbulent
new conflicts that lacked any discipline and that the two major powers
could no longer control. Furthermore, in this strategic game, the weak
could now exert pressure that was more effective than the missiles the
powerful were likely to deploy as dissuasion. The reason for this was
simple. When a power was well established it risked losing a great deal,
whereas the weak, with not many resources, ran no great risk of show-
ing their resolve and going it alone. In a military adventure, Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq or Hafez al-Assad’s Syria had a great deal less to lose than
Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, trapped by a series of international constraints.
Weakness creates a realm of perilous freedom that is still underestimated
to this day: too great a gap in power kills power.
That growing margin of autonomy on the part of clients and vassals
was all the more explainable given that yesterday’s nuclear constraints
were of far less consequence in the South, and in a different way in any
case. First, in the background, it had evolved, several middle-sized pow-
ers both in the North and South having succeeded in getting through
the barbed wire of nonproliferation. Either in the British way, by acquir-
ing the weapons under American protection. Or in the Gaullist way,
striving to show that one could acquire them alone, as proof of national
independence. Once China had entered the game, the five-member club
was formed, to which must be added the nations that refused to sign the
NPT, including India, Pakistan and Israel. Exiting the nuclear duopoly
did not fundamentally change things per se, since the new nuclear pow-
ers could not compete with the two superpowers. But from the moment
the international stakes were less and less defined by East–West relations
and more and more by the North–South relationship, they were abruptly
aware of an unknown: of what value was this “weapon from the North”
in dealing with conflicts increasingly occurring in the South? Strategic
reflection changed little. Some, notably Kenneth Waltz in the U.S.,
believed that the possible multiplication of nuclear actors in the South

would be a way of rebalancing international relations.2 Others worried
about the eventuality of non-governmental proliferation of nuclear weap-
ons: terrorists could get hold of miniaturized nuclear arms and use them
on cities.
This was pure speculation, without progressing on the essential point.
Nuclear weapons had to be the last resort within the framework of tra-
ditional warfare, but what could it do nowadays faced with new kinds
of conflicts? As a result, the tutelary capacity of the most powerful, who
had invested so much in that distinction, was once again discredited. The
“club of five” was no longer alone in the world.
The Contentious Legacy of Non-alignment

While the strategy of non-alignment never really took off, the specter
of it never really went away either. The real heirs of Bandung and of
the non-aligned movement today are all the examples of “dissent-
ing diplomacy” expressed in various forms in the international arena.
The so-called non-aligned countries quickly saw not only that they
could not lay down the law—beyond trying to have an influence on
the fringes in certain international negotiations—, but also that the
notion of non-alignment no longer mattered after bipolarity had weak-
ened then vanished. The movement’s main actors were well aware that
they would never be a force of organization, or of co-governance of the
world. However, they soon realized that they could be a sort of “plebs”
of the international system. And also that through the intermediary of
a few good public speakers, they could participate as full partners in
international political debates. Algerian diplomacy set an early example
in this unprecedented role, which it handled with a certain skillfulness.
Beginning with the Algiers conference held in 1967, 77 countries from
the South signed a charter which today includes over 130 countries but
has kept the name “Group of 77.” It suggested that the “nobodies” in
the international system could play a role in a renewed and democra-
tized system. Although it did not take shape, this eagerly awaited role
became the basis of a dissenting discourse that ushered in a new kind
of diplomacy. By excelling in that unprecedented game, one could raise
the stakes and possibly become an effective “deviant” or “delinquent,”
learning how to properly use its potential to harm in order to have an
influence on the world’s fate, including in dramatic ways.
30 B. BADIE
The most extreme, although not the most frequent, examples of

this behavior could lead to the use of oppositional violence in the
form of terrorist acts used for national diplomacy, clearly thwarting the
Clausewitzian tradition of frontal warfare. Certain countries have pro-
moted this strategy, either continuously or at times: Iran in the 1980s,
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, Libya under Gadhafi.
A conclusion may be drawn here in the form of a paradox.
Admittedly, the non-aligned movement never led to an institutionalized
political order, but its heirs had a great deal of influence in the world by
participating more and more in defining the international agenda. It is in
their territories that the main conflicts are developing in the world today,
involving their key issues and the social deficits burdening them. One has
only to listen to Iranian President Rohani, a seemingly moderate leader,
explaining that his country has a capacity to control an extremely heavy
regional agenda, if not the international one, that is quite probably supe-
rior to that of the United States or Russia. The real shift in the world
dates from the moment when conflicts moved South. The fleeting illu-
sion of unipolarity or of oligarchic governance could not withstand these
deep dynamics.
The Fleeting Illusion of Unipolarity

In the aftermath of the Cold War, Western countries made the mistake
of thinking that the “victor” would initiate a time of unilateral domina-
tion of the international system. Following the rules of arithmetic, they
posited that a player’s failure in the diarchic system automatically led to
a unipolar world. Arithmetic is an infinitely respectable subject, but does
not apply to international relations.
The bipolarity initiated in 1947 was based on the idea of protection:
one had to be subordinate to one of the two alliances to protect oneself
from the threat posed by its opponent. But, once the threat was gone,
that narrative of alignment no longer made much sense. Under such cir-
cumstances, what arguments could justify this perpetuation of American
hegemony? Added to this “arithmetical” mistake was a misjudgment
about the context. The world of 1989 was totally different from that of
1947. Decolonization had been completed, the battlefield had shifted
from the North to the South, and the different constituent units of that
South, whether of states, peoples, social groups or religious and cultural
communities, had achieved tremendous autonomy. The fall of the Wall
supplied them with additional arguments strengthening their claims for

emancipation, dissent, and even deviation. Furthermore, globalization
had totally changed the equation. Societies were now establishing con-
tact among themselves with an intensity that defied the traditional vision
regarding the capacity of governments. “Intersocial” communication was
often faster and more effective than communication between states. That
“intersociability” naturally included economic exchanges, but also immi-
gration, relations between religions, and ethnic and tribal support sys-
tems, the latter becoming all the stronger due to the incipient collapse
of prefabricated and imported states, particularly those growing out of
decolonization, as well as from the dislocation of the Soviet bloc. The
colossal mistake had been to believe that this new world could be man-
aged like the old one, resorting to the same hegemonic postures, with
triumphalism reinforced due to the apparent void created by the demise
of the Soviet Union. The Clinton administration gradually emerged
as the very symbol of this “continuism.” In January 1997, the first
“post-bipolar” American president did not hesitate to appoint as head
of the State Department Madeleine Albright, personifying the spirit of
the Cold War through her origins and family history. The daughter of
a Czech diplomat who had left her country just after the Prague coup,
she had established a name for herself at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies as one of the foremost specialists of the USSR.
And yet, at the dawn of this new age, Clinton’s predecessor George
H. W. Bush had begun to advocate for a “new international order,”
showing a certain restraint in the use of American force in refusing to go
all the way to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the liberation
of Kuwait: an intuition about the South’s complexity, or a discreet deal
with Mikhail Gorbachev who already feared US expansion in all direc-
tions? Similarly, rather than consolidating Israel’s total domination of its
considerably weakened neighbors and adversaries, he deliberately chose
to use his victory in the Gulf War to try to revive negotiations in the
Near East by convening the Madrid Conference which, although a dead
end, nevertheless succeeded in bringing together all the parties. It was all
the more commendable given that he had achieved remarkable success
with Operation “Desert Storm,” leading a true coalition supported by
all, including Moscow, Hafez al-Assad in Syria, and China which made
the operation possible through its abstention on the Security Council.
Yet it was the very same George H. W. Bush who made the fatal choice
32 B. BADIE
of maintaining the existence of NATO, a way of entering the promised

new world that was reluctant and highly overcautious.
This hegemonic conservatism was furthered by Clinton, who hardly
possessed his predecessor’s international experience, and several of his
failures soon showed that unipolarity was an illusion. The first was the
fiasco of the “Restore Hope” intervention in Somalia, which led to the
humiliating retreat of American marines from the Horn of Africa, reveal-
ing the nature of these new “asymmetric conflicts” opposing guerillas
“weak” on paper to a power mired in its own gigantism. Then it was
Washington’s incapacity to define itself regarding the Yugoslav conflict,
taking the total opposite stance from its diplomatic position of striving
henceforth to rid itself of its European burden. Bill Clinton was unable
to interpret this new symptom of the imperial Russian breakdown, or to
give it the attention it deserved. Likewise the absence of follow-up to the
Oslo Accords regarding the Israel/Palestine issue, treated by Washington
with an inexcusable naiveté and thoughtlessness, led to a series of set-
backs all the way to the famous Camp David II conference held in July
2000. There, the President of the United States demonstrated that
despite his total commitment to the negotiations between belligerents,
he was incapable of either establishing his role as mediator or influencing
his Israeli protégé. Lastly, I would point to the diplomatic fiasco repre-
sented by the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, its hundreds of thousands
of dead, the passivity of the international community and, even more
staggering, of the sole superpower, whose representative on the Security
Council was compelled to recall that there was no question of interven-
ing in Rwanda because it was a “sovereign state.”
All these “tests” confirmed that there was nothing unipolar about the
new international system. In fact, there was little more than five years
between the fall of the Berlin Wall and NATO’s bombing of Serbia that
marked the gradual return of the Russian-Western antagonism. With
the intensification of what Moscow perceived as aggressions against its
Serbian ally, Russia reemerged on the international stage. That dynamic
reached its climax with the Kosovo episode in 1999, during the final
phase of the Clinton presidency. In response to the NATO operation
against Serbia, Russia suspended its cooperation with NATO as of March
24, 1999, while on June 12th, Moscow sent troops to take position at
Pristina Airport: a true Cold War operation … but after the Cold War! It
was a way of showing that there was not just one master, that the West’s
unilateral actions were no longer acceptable and that whenever Russia’s
fundamental interests were at stake, Moscow would have to be dealt with.
The Pristina Airport episode was just the first example of behavior
that could be seen throughout the Ukraine crisis initiated in November
2013 and that is still manifested today in the Syrian crisis. It is always the
same mindset, and the same implicit message from the Russian govern-
ment designed to fight its marginalization. And always the same path-
ogenic effect of a form of hegemony created through exclusion. From
this standpoint, maintaining and expanding NATO to countries from the
former Soviet bloc constituted a major risk. When the question was put
on the agenda of a summit for the organization in 1991, it was reported
that George H. W. Bush asserted there would be no question of break-
ing up the Atlantic Alliance even though the Warsaw Pact was already
defunct. François Mitterrand is said to have replied: “You are announc-
ing the rebirth of the Holy Alliance.”3 From the moment an alliance
is no longer justified by the concrete threat of an opposing group, it is
nothing more than a hegemonic message without limit. This is exactly
what Tsar Alexander I of Russia had tried to do with the Holy Alliance.
To establish itself, hegemony must have the support of the majority of
its partners, or at least their resignation. When it operates through oppo-
sition to others, or certain others, it fuels constant confrontation that
threatens it at every moment. A real hegemon must be capable of doing
without alliances.
An “Apolar” World
The other defeat came from countries in the South, now capable of
breaking with the narrative of protection imposed by the Cold War and
of successfully playing the autonomy card. The most active protagonists
in the developing world began to define themselves against the North,
no longer needing to take a position with respect to East or West.
Yet, showing one’s opposition to the North now meant pitting one-
self against the United States. This was reflected in the rise of power-
ful anti-Americanism, one of whose first major echo chambers was South
America and its leftist nationalist regimes that were emerging in the
2000s in the US’s backyard.
It was also in this context that the attacks occurred on September
11, 2001, which some thought would instigate an era of “asymmetric
conflicts,” whereas it was only an expression among many others of a
dynamic in progress for far longer. More than a breakdown, 9/11 was an
indicator highlighting the effectiveness of a new form of violence capa-
ble of striking at the very heart of a power thought to be invulnerable.
34 B. BADIE
The American reaction gave free rein to a messianic exacerbation of the

desire for unipolar hegemony manifested in the form of neoconserv-
ative ideology. Clinton already adhered loosely to certain aspects of that
intellectual construct. George W. Bush and those spurring him in that
direction (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, among
others) pushed it to the extreme through the project of regime change,
first applied to the Middle East, then virtually anywhere their hubris was
liable to ordain them to do so. The negation of the other became as
absolute as it was warmongering, because deep down this project only
tolerated partners in its own image.
We know the outcome, and its startling contradiction. That unipolar
hyper-determination only concealed the real configuration of the post-
bipolar world, in fact far more concerned with apolarity and the devaluing
of a power that had become powerless.4 The United States suffered one
failure after another, incapable of winning a war, while the medium-sized
Western powers experienced the same setbacks at their own level.
A world then began to emerge of “every man for himself,” where increas-
ingly autonomous actors played their own cards, with local successes
which encouraged them in that direction.
We may recall that “clustering polarities” only respond to the need to
deal with a threat. But the latter was now so multifaceted and indecipher-
able that aligning with a major sponsor not only came with a high entry
cost, but was often counter-productive. The former hegemonic stability5
turned into “hegemonic instability,” its protection obliging and exposing
more than it assured tranquility. Thus the highly ambiguous, but increas-
ingly widespread strategies that could be seen in particular in Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan. Former “clients” of the United States, these states found
ways to outwit and get around the patronage of the major powers at a
lower cost. How not to be disoriented by the position of Pakistan, offi-
cially a pro-Western country but whose secret services discreetly support
the Taliban, or by that of Saudi Arabia, an old networks to Al-Qaeda, and
even in an indirect way to the Islamic State? And yet there is a rationality
in their attitude that cannot be ignored in the new post-bipolar context.
The Return of the Oligarchic Club

At the same time, with the growing uncertainties about the nature of
this new international order, one could see the oligarchic rationale taking
back the upper hand. The United States, like any power with a hegem-
onic purpose, was never a big supporter of oligarchies and clubs. It was
with little enthusiasm that it reluctantly joined the G6 formed in 1975 at

the initiative of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, becoming the G7 the follow-
ing year. One should not forget that the very idea for these groupings
arose at a time when American hegemony was considerably weakened by
the dollar crisis (it was abandoned as the reference currency in 1971 and
devalued twice in quick succession in 1971 and 1973), the Vietnamese
debacle, and the Watergate scandal. Faced with this triple weakness of
their transatlantic partner, personified by the insipid figure of President
Gerald Ford, the Europeans thought they could renew their “concert”
mindset. From then on, there were alternating periods of oligarchy and
comebacks by the United States, such as during Reagan’s presidency,
automatically leading to the weakening of the “Gs” (7, 8, etc.).
However, the context of relative confusion that characterized Bill
Clinton’s presidency allowed them to regenerate, and in the 1990s the
oligarchic club became so sure of itself that it ended up co-opting Russia,
despite its having long waited at the door of the G7. With the rise of the
emerging powers, this G7 + 1, soon defined as the G8 (before Russia was
again excluded in 2014), rapidly appeared insufficient. The Asian crisis in
1997 thus led to the constitution of a G20 of Finance Ministers, but it
took until 2008 before this grouping became the G20 of heads of state.
Year 2008 is a symptomatic date because it coincided with a double
weakening of American power under the effect of, on the one hand, the
Iraqi defeat and the clear failure of neoconservatism, and on the other
hand, the election of a new president of the United States who was to
adopt a totally different perspective with regard to international affairs.
The G20 grew out of this “transitional void” in November 2008, when
the recently elected Barack Obama had not yet taken office. But this new
organization was soon left to vegetate due to the reticence of the old
powers to overextend the foundations of world governance.
It is easy to understand how the emerging countries, snubbed and mar-
ginalized, strove to circumvent and contest oligarchic governance, looking
for new forms of support and associations that deconstructed any narrative
of polarity, which I will examine more closely in the following chapters.
Notes
1. Owen Worth, Rethinking Hegemony (New York: Palgrave, 2015).
2. Kenneth Waltz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better,”
Adelphi Papers, 171, International Institute for Strategic Studies, London,
1981.
36 B. BADIE
3. Roland Dumas, et al., La Diplomatie sur le vif (Paris: Presses de Sciences

Po, 2013).
4. Bertrand Badie, L’Impuissance de la puissance. Essai sur les nouvelles rela-
tions internationales (Paris: Fayard, 2004).
5. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Los Angeles,
London, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
CHAPTER 3
Societies and Their Diplomacy
Abstract  Understanding the nature of international relations today by

looking at traditional geopolitical maps and absorbing strategic reflec-
tions only, is insufficient. Societies are bursting into areas once reserved
only for diplomacy. The 1980s ICT (Information and Communication
Technology) boom played a fundamental role in transforming even social
behavior. It was the real factor of globalization that lastingly revolution-
ized the planet. This chapter first examines this invisible revolution of
societies and nation-states and how the social took over key geostrate-
gic considerations. The author questions the two globalizations and the
revenge of the local, and finally opens the debate on what a new sociol-
ogy of international relations may be.
Keywords  Diplomacy · Communications revolution · Intersociality

Globalization · Sociology of international relations
One cannot understand the nature of international relations today only

by looking at traditional geopolitical maps and absorbing strategic reflec-
tions. One must take the leap and consider these societies bursting into
areas once reserved only for diplomacy. From that point of view, the
communications revolution that came in the 1980s with the ICT (infor-
mation and communication technologies) boom, was to play a funda-
mental role even in transforming social behavior. It affected telematics,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_3
38 B. BADIE
the multimedia, audiovisual and telecommunications sectors, in other

words sounds, images, and information. Indeed, it affected everyone,
from the most powerful to the destitute living in the shantytowns of the
South. It established itself as the great innovating factor, the main pro-
ducer of a deeply transformed worldwide arena. Never had international
relations been so shaken up by technological change. One could even
go so far as to say that this break was of even greater importance than
the invention of the atom bomb, in a more progressive and often less
visible way. Nuclear arms only modified one aspect of international life,
admittedly a determining one but still sector-based. The communications
revolution overturned all the parameters upon which the Westphalian
system had been built, and affected individuals deep down. It was the
real factor of globalization that lastingly revolutionized the planet.
First, the revolution turned upside down the distance effect at the
heart of international politics. That ancient and basic parameter had
given meaning to territoriality and allowed it to build a preliminary con-
cept of the international system. It also enabled nations and nationalisms
to be established and to singularize each political unit and its historic tra-
jectory on the world map. It was this distance effect that once gave a
decisive advantage to the governors over the governed. Only the gov-
ernors could overcome distance thanks to their sovereign instruments,
while the governed were in some sense separated from one another by
virtue of the vicissitudes of nation-building. Lastly, distance guaranteed
sovereignty. States were all the more sovereign if their potential adver-
saries were far off and possessed only limited means of reaching them.
Remoteness was a guarantee of stability, protection, order, and assertion.
With widespread communications anyone could establish contact with
anyone, at whatever distance and above all without being limited by bor-
ders. As technology became more sophisticated, people had to learn how
to live in a world where there were no longer 50, 100 or 193 actors (the
number of member states in the UN), but 7 billion potential actors lia-
ble to engage in a whole series of international actions while ignoring
or circumventing their leaders’ choices and flouting any concern with
sovereignty.
This quiet revolution—which indeed never gave rise to any spectac-
ular or dramatic rifts—gradually built up the dynamic of globalization,
with absolute discretion at first. This enormous upheaval started to be
perceptible while the world was still totally ensconced in bipolarity and
3 SOCIETIES AND THEIR DIPLOMACY 39
in the comfort of a conceptual universe that encouraged it to minimize

anything that might shake it up.
The Invisible Revolution of Societies and Nation-States

The quiet communications revolution had an even deeper impact than
the mere deconstruction of the effect of distance. It outdistanced tra-
ditional international relations, which should rather be called “inter-
state relations,” through a whole network of “intersocial” relations. As
civil societies freed themselves from the burden of state constraints and
social actors became more autonomous, including with respect to their
national community, world politics would become increasingly character-
ized by the predominance of intersociality over internationality.
The job of teaching and research in international relations was itself
transformed! Everything now had to be revised according to this new
intruder, all the more discreet as it was almost never designated as such
and had no real institutional manifestation. This absence of institu-
tionalization was both a strength, because it guaranteed a kind of pro-
tective invisibility to intersocial relations, as well as a weakness, to the
extent that it made it very difficult to create established partnerships.
Intersociality is a fundamentally ambiguous phenomenon because it
creates opportunities—for cooperation, support and mobility—, while
paving the way for a whole range of perils: the rise of local and national
social conflicts on a worldwide scale, the increasing role of identity-based
and religious parameters, the globalization of social frustrations, ine-
qualities and intolerance. Power fades in acknowledging the devastat-
ing effects of rampant and badly handled urbanization, the spectacularly
decreasing age of populations in the South and the increasing age of
those in the North. Unemployment, particularly troublesome in the
youngest societies in the South, constricted regional then international
politics. At first it was a source of mobility, then of conflict. Anger arising
from the failure of human development was now being expressed in a
globalized world of imagination. Yesterday’s destitute had horizons lim-
ited to their local society, whereas today they are quick to perceive them-
selves as part of a world where they also see the wealth it flaunts and
its indifference toward them. That globalized imagination is increasingly
the crux of fundamentally social situations of conflict. All the diplomatic
strategies on earth and all the weapons in the world cannot do a thing
against it.
40 B. BADIE
Intersociality also involves all the social, individual and collective

actors, migrants, or on the contrary investors, multinational corporations
and NGOs, international media, preachers on the internet and institu-
tional churches interacting hundreds of thousands of times every day,
making and remaking the global arena, without being subject to any
decrees. Finally, it is the trivialized meeting of intermingled cultures, but
which are also used to assert distinct identities.
The famous “clash of civilizations” is one of the most emblematic ana-
lytical frameworks resulting from these transformations. The image, as
simplistic as it is intellectually convenient, is from Samuel Huntington.1
Since we are no longer alone, clearly a culture can no longer organize the
world by ignoring others, the behavior they exhibit, their ways of see-
ing, thinking and perceiving themselves. Under the effect of increasing
exchanges, globalization inevitably leads to an ever-expanding hybridiza-
tion of cultures that were once separate and distant. On the other hand,
positing the premise of their irreducibility in the form of a “clash of civ-
ilizations” is a way of preparing on a daily basis a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Stigmatizing the other, suggesting the superiority of what one is, point-
ing out sartorial and culinary distinctions, attaching a political order—or,
worse, a social contract—to a given culture amounts to fabricating exclu-
sion, ghettoizing globalization and preparing confrontations that have
no reason to exist. It is turning intersociality into a new matrix for war,
reproducing on the scale of globalization the “war-making/state-mak-
ing” that was the core of the Westphalian system. Except that the latter
was capable of inventing the balance of power to limit its own damage,
whereas the “clash of civilizations” denies any choice of balance by cling-
ing to the principles of hierarchy and antagonism.
Individuals and social actors have become—in a more or less orderly
way—the mediators of a more global than international political game
that has confined governments, diplomats, and their armies to an essen-
tially reactive role. Resorting to the traditional weapons used by states,
their reactions tended to miss the mark and aggravate the disputes
increasingly opposing the latter and social actors. What the wars of
decolonization had begun to establish now took on an importance that
the weight of Westphalian memory forbade them from imagining.
Social behavior thus became the focus of international politics, dis-
qualifying traditional strategic analysis, deterritorializing conflicts,
understating the importance of their sovereign nature. Resentment,
humiliation, frustration and suffering were the everyday lot of the new
international relations. Not only was one no longer alone in the world
in dealing with the new states, but one was also no longer isolated from
the innumerable social politics that are a part of the everyday diplomatic
agenda.
In that area, a long prehistory at first blocked any challenge to the
Westphalian dogma. Perhaps it even reinforced it at first. Intersociality
is formed through a long-term process involving the difficult emergence
and discovery of the social element within different national communi-
ties in the making. The social and political were from a certain stand-
point completely separate at the dawn of our modern era. Due to the
inertia of modes of governance, to the weight of caste and class hier-
archies, but also to less developed means of communication, societies
seemed destined to live outside the political, on the level of sociological
reality in some way. In rural society, political relations presumed a fac-
ulty of communication that was practically non-existent from a technical
standpoint. One learned very belatedly about wars being conducted, or
that the king had died and already been replaced by his successor.
The first phase of the emergence—and politicization—of the social
aspect was specifically linked to the rise of the first forums for debate in
the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment.2 These new spaces
were linked to the city and to increasing exchanges. Its cafés, theaters
and literary salons were places for sociability and dialogue that intensified
relations between social and political spheres. That intensification was
gradually reflected in the sphere of international relations, largely pre-
served from any intrusion of social issues during the eighteenth century,
until the French Revolution in 1789 was responsible for changing that
situation. Citizens in arms, the mobilization of societies behind political
causes, the mission conferred on soldiers of the year II to go and liberate
the oppressed people of Europe were all symptoms of a transformation
in the essence of international relations. The nature of war in particular
was changing. It was no longer a tournament between princes, but rather
a mobilization of societies in the service of a political cause. This was the
premise of the nineteenth and twentieth century nationalisms founded
on the “imagined community”3 of citizens made into a people through
the techniques of rising communications and state mobilization.
In this dynamic of fusion or gradual hybridization of the social and
political, the state and nation were made to be reconciled, providing
the Westphalian system some respite. They shared a respect for borders
and for communication remaining chiefly within them. The state was no
42 B. BADIE
longer merely the dynastic center. It was becoming an organized politi-

cal community that perceived itself as such and was manifested in more
and more omnipresent and sustainable institutions, and in increasingly
abiding affects. This is what really formed—and continues to form—the
strength of nationalism.
How the Social Took Over Key Geostrategic

Considerations
One can imagine the turn of events when communications changed
gears and were no longer merely a matter of circulating information
inside the national sphere, but of broadcasting it on a worldwide scale.
Thus the use of TAT-8 fiber-optic cables, laid down in 1988 to commu-
nicate between the two sides of the Atlantic, immediately caused such an
increase in exchanges that there was no longer any difference—techni-
cally at least—between a national and an international exchange. It was
no longer simply merchandise crossing borders but ideas, sounds, and
images. This created a space of quasi-immediacy on a relational level that
soon granted all social actors truly international status.
All these factors contributed to producing the everyday reality of what
is known as soft power, a new multifaceted decision-making entity that,
depending on the case, could complement, complicate or destabilize
traditional power politics. There was also, if not an international pub-
lic opinion, at least a public opinion about international issues, in fact
an increasing interaction between national opinions capable of forging
certain representations of global issues that hitherto had been virtually
absent from traditional diplomatic relations.
This then was the new stage, and these were the actors. But, with this
same trend, the plot was also changing, to the extent of redefining the
very nature of key international issues. Indeed, this was the real revolu-
tion affecting international relations: henceforth social issues had caught
up with and outstripped political and military considerations. Major
social issues on an international level have turned out to be far more
determining and to provide more structure than geostrategic elements.
It is the pace of advances and failures in economic and social develop-
ment, and oddly of what is known nowadays as “human development”
that defines the real framework for international competition, tensions
and conflicts.
One of the most telling examples of this evolution involves analyzing

conflicts, which have changed profoundly. Instead of being the effect of
competition for power, as in the days of interstate politics, they appear
to be the effect of weaknesses linked to the collapse of states, social
breakdowns, the failure experienced in building civil societies and social
bonds, economic disasters and human insecurity factors.
These are so many factors that are liable to gradually drive whole
societies to warfare and transform peaceful—or at least not very con-
flict-driven—social entities into truly warlike societies. With the rise of
the social dimension in the international arena, weakness has thus won
out over power through its aptitude for defining the new relationships
governing the world stage. One need only look at the classification of
countries based on the Human Development Index (HDI)4 and their
geographical distribution. The map of the lowest HDIs coincided almost
perfectly with the map of contemporary armed conflicts. At the bottom
of the list are countries in the Sahel such as Mali, Niger, Chad; farther to
the east are Eritrea and Somalia, and farther south, the Central African
Republic, the countries in the Great Lakes region and the Congo Basin.
In Asia, the HDIs are generally superior to those in other African coun-
tries, but Yemen and Afghanistan, two war-torn nations, are coinciden-
tally at the bottom of the list.
Thus social distress is usually closely linked to the proliferation of
potentially conflictual ideological dynamics. And, more generally, this
“socialization” of global issues has completely shaken up the familiar
categories of international relations: going from sovereignty to interde-
pendence, from the primacy of power to the destabilizing role of weak-
ness, from territoriality to mobility, from a Clausewitzian reading of war
founded on the clash of states, to conflicts linked more to the breakdown
of societies. Here again, it is the entire Westphalian system that has been
called into question. Another grammar of war has arisen, mainly outside
the scope of the old world.
The Two Globalizations and the Revenge of the Local

One should however be wary of thinking that this socialization of global
issues, itself linked to the dynamics of globalization, only concerns devel-
oping societies. That would be forgetting that intersociality is also at
work in developed countries, where its main ambiguities lie. Seen from
the North, one may quickly come to the conclusion that globalization
44 B. BADIE
has led to the victory of multinational corporations, to the enriching and

strengthening of the most well endowed, and the submission of the poor
to the rich. Intersociality has indeed had this effect in hegemonic coun-
tries that imposed the law of the marketplace with respect to the Welfare
State that was finding it hard to adapt. The most advanced states felt—
and still feel—threatened by these new transnational forces, embodied
for instance by giant firms that often have a higher turnover than their
own GDP and avoid taxes through fiscal optimization.
Nevertheless, looking at globalization from the South, the reality
seems more subtle and complex. One can see that a globalized world
may also create opportunities, gradually opening up a vast field of dissent
leading to societies that are bursting onto the political scene— admit-
tedly still in an uncertain and somewhat disorganized way—, accelerat-
ing mobilization and political awareness, even creating support networks
from parts of the South to others and from North to South. It is as if
there were two globalizations. One that is accelerating the awareness of
actors, whoever they may be, prompting them to fight against a dicta-
tor trying to be appointed president for life or against a polluting waste
management facility that multinational corporations are forcing on some
megacity in the Gulf of Guinea, particularly in Ghana, the Ivory Coast or
Nigeria. Meanwhile the other is putting people under the control of the
marketplace, pointing to pressure on food distribution networks, block-
ing industrialization, strengthening customer relations for the benefit of
a small local oligarchy.
Neither of these two globalizations has conclusively won out over the
other. Contrary to some of the altermondialist rhetoric, no one can claim
that the dictatorship of international capitalism was firmly and sustaina-
bly established through globalization. Social before inevitably becoming
economic, globalization will evolve depending on what world diplomacy
does with it, in other words not much for the time being. Imagine that
food insecurity has never been the subject of any debate on the UN
Security Council, and health security has only been discussed twice!
Worse still, world diplomacy continues to approach these issues through
interstate relations, thus creating one of the most gigantic vicious circles.
In doing this, it marginalizes even more social actors capable of innova-
tion and promotes even more fossilized and corrupt local states, further
aggravating the situation.
Another pitfall consists in believing that globalization is the nega-
tion of things local. This would be a naive and distorted vision of the
phenomenon. Essentially, globalization does not automatically sanction

the victory of the global taken literally, but rather fuels the revenge of
the social versus the political. The latter, by definition, cannot be glo-
balized. It is blended in with the construction of the city, necessarily
based on delimitation if not on sovereignty. When involved in globaliza-
tion, one partly leaves behind the political to come within the framework
of the social, in widespread (economic, cultural, and even expostulatory)
exchanges. Thus the huge consequences of global governance and the
extraordinary difficulty of reinventing the political sphere on that scale.
But if the social aspect is expressed while ignoring or circumventing bor-
ders, then it must be built on a new basis. It will then mobilize refer-
ences known to all and, of course first and foremost, local society. It is
for this reason that the local has resurfaced today with such vigor, and
that globalization has not eliminated particularisms, quite the contrary.
This return to identity-based particularities has allowed individu-
als to find their bearings in the new global arena. Thus, all progress in
globalization is translated by localist and identity-based forms of expres-
sion. They are more localist when the individual feels safe regarding the
construction of this new global arena; on the other hand, they become
identity-based when threatened. The identity-oriented symbol is then
displayed in a dissenting and exclusive way, in an attempt to shut down
the globalization narrative. This includes the main base for European
populism, as well as all the variants of fundamentalism which, from Islam
to Hinduism and from Christian fundamentalism to extremist currents in
Judaism, are part and parcel of the daily news.
But the rise of the local may be expressed through open activism, such
as in major cities that have embarked on projects of international coop-
eration, the NGOs that create transnational coalitions of actors in local
civil society, or again the interregional cooperation developing all over,
beyond borders, mountains, and rivers … Here we can see one of the
positive and triumphant faces of what is sometimes known as “glocali-
zation.” Regional Europe ultimately turns out to be far more active that
the community’s institutions, whereas Asia, so strained in its national-
ist and sovereignist postures, has offset those relics from a world it did
not choose through “natural economic territories,” informally linking
Taiwan and continental China, bringing together Singaporean, Malaysian
and Indonesian rivals in “growth triangles” and even prompting a
“Hong Kong of the North” around the Tumen River, allying for a time,
46 B. BADIE
although with some difficulties and prevarication, China, Russia, Japan,

Mongolia, South Korea and … North Korea!
Beyond this revival of the local, globalization has stimulated oppo-
sitional behavior. Thus, concord and mobilization alternate, as if to
indicate that the new world is destined neither for consensual uto-
pias, nor for confrontational implosion. In designating globalization,
the American sociologist and political analyst James Rosenau has quite
rightly evoked the concept of “turbulence.”5
The individual who perceived himself for generations as strictly rooted
in the local or national now stands in relation to a world that he is
often ignorant about and discovers abruptly, often at his own expense.
To him, globalization has naturally become a public forum for protest-
ing against the global injustice and inequality that are destabilizing local
areas. One of the first effects of intersociality has thus been to scale up
a whole range of protests that are all the more unbridled for no longer
being addressed solely to the prince, the one in charge of the city, but
to the supposed “masters of the world,” to all those whom one rightly
or wrongly thinks are controlling and defining the international order.
A new public space is thus emerging. The old canonical protesting that
grew out of our Western history is no longer alone in the world.
This new oppositional discourse draws from the globalized imagi-
nation referred to earlier, not a uniform ideological entity recurring as
before all over the planet, but based on the contrary on a whole range
of opportunistic hybridizations between local and global. The resulting
new rhetoric of contention is based both on the global imagination and
on local “resources of meaning” that reinforce its credibility and vital-
ity. The complexity and wealth of social forums and recurring forms of
worldwide dissent that have grown out of the great Seattle demonstra-
tion in November 1999 at the WTO summit are witnesses of it. Lastly,
this contention has now taken as its target not only the nearby elites,
but all those perceived as responsible for the world order—or disorder.
Globalization has thus generated a tremendous dynamic of generalized
accusation in its most diverse forms: anti-Westernism, anti-imperialism,
the denunciation of “crusaders” or infidels, the rhetorical repertoire
changing depending on the nature of the actor.
The qualitative difference between this contemporary “Westernophobia”
and more traditional forms of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism
should be pointed out. The nature of anti-colonialism was to fit in with
an espoused national framework. The “anti-colonial moment” was, in this
regard, a great time of celebration of the virtues of the state and nation,
including in many countries in the South that had only an insufficient and
often distorted understanding of it. One worshipped the state without hav-
ing really experienced any prior state culture. It was desired and validated,
being perceived both as a tool for emancipation from the colonizer and as
a space for a separate and distinct group within the international system.
During the time of the independence movements, it was a preglobalized
context. One should not forget that the bulk of decolonization was con-
ducted in the 1950s and 1960s, when the concept of globalization did not
even exist and its reality was rarely perceived and totally embryonic. Once
countries in the South had acquired independence, the scene changed,
giving way to the collapse of these “imported” states for which some had
fought so hard, to their being bogged down in a series of dysfunctional
dynamics, then to their transformation into extremely oppressive authori-
tarian machines that soon lost all legitimacy. With the failure of the state,
new identities were substituted and mobilized in the social fabric that were
essentially community-based, tribal or religious in nature. And as globali-
zation was gradually discovered, borders and territories no longer played
as crucial a role as they had during the phase of anti-colonial mobilization.
The denunciation of failed states then went hand in hand with the start of
globalized mobilization. Thus the highly sensitive nature of this postcolo-
nial evolution that has had an increasing influence on world governance.
The new contention generated by globalization is no longer really
aimed at the parent state, but at a global world held responsible for the
main woes, even while being perceived as the only body capable of deliv-
ering them from their situation of extreme poverty: through the possi-
bilities opened up by migration or through activating various forms of
transnational solidarity. This new world is designated as both guilty and
unjust but also as a source of the greatest hope. For the migrants fighting
today against the barbed wire on the borders of Hungary and Slovenia,
Europe remains an infinitely greater provider of employment, comfort,
and security than the world they came from. If you think about it, in the
first decade of this century, the active population only increased by 15
million in the developed countries, but by 445 million in the developing
countries; while Italy has seen its workforce decrease over the past fifteen
years, Nigeria has gained 25 million more… Paradise has thus earned a
place in the imagination and succeeded in mobilizing people! But this
paradise whose shores one hopes to reach is also made up of territories
such as “9-3”6 in France or Molenbeek in Belgium that no one seems
48 B. BADIE
to know how to integrate and that harbor men and women who risk at
times perceiving themselves as both victims of globalized modernity and
as combatants mobilized against an unfair and ungodly order.
Toward a New Sociology of International Relations

It goes without saying that this emergence of the social dimension in
the world arena has been a true shock for international relations stud-
ies. With regard to this abrupt challenge to established patterns and con-
ceptual routines, two ways of reacting can be seen: on the one hand, a
posture of ignorance that was an encouragement to act as if practically
nothing had changed; and on the other hand, a courageous but incom-
plete attempt to take a totally fresh look at the discipline. I would point
out that the denial of reality achieved a certain measure of success. In
the community of researchers in international relations, it mainly drove
the dominant trend, the “realists” of every persuasion who still see inter-
national relations as the preserve of states clinging to their own power.7
From their point of view, power politics continues to be the basic ele-
ment in international relations, and the emergence of new economic,
social and cultural factors remains a marginal phenomenon that has not
fundamentally modified the behavior of states or their diplomacy.
This response was all the more tempting in the days of the Cold War
and “peaceful coexistence,” which bipolarity seemed to preserve, in a
way “freezing” traditional concepts of power politics. The denial of real-
ity continued well beyond that, and among those practicing it them-
selves. A former French minister of foreign affairs recently explained that
societies and public opinion should not interfere with diplomacy, that it
was beyond their competence, and that allowing public opinion into the
diplomatic arena would be like welcoming a sick person’s family into the
operating room.
If one were to take that strange metaphor a bit further, one could
point out that social actors have long been in the operating room and it
would be wise to accept them there, even if it means making them put
on sterile scrub suits. It is totally unrealistic to think that we can keep
them out of the room on a long-term basis. In reality, not only is the
success of professional diplomats not always guaranteed, but the incom-
petence of non-governmental actors is far from pre-determined. In
certain situations it is even the NGOs’ actions that have most actively
contributed to reestablishing peace, as illustrated by the examples of
Aceh and Mozambique. In the first case, the Henry Dunant Center
for Humanitarian Dialogue played a remarkable role in the negotiation
process between 2000 and 2002, which led to peace between the seces-
sionist rebels from the north of Sumatra and the Indonesian govern-
ment. In the second case, no one could overlook the contribution of the
Sant’Egidio community in finding a solution to the civil war that pitted
the Renamo against the Frelimo from 1976 to 1992… These practices—
commonly known as “track II diplomacy”—were far from negligible,
mobilizing private actors gladly welcomed into the operating room.
The reaction was altogether different on the part of the neoliberals.8
For them, this upsurge of the social dimension only confirmed their
original intuition, legitimizing aspirations too long deemed utopian. At
the heart of neoliberalism, the virtues of exchange and of the individ-
ual heralded the time when societies would usher in peace. Thus, they
welcomed with enthusiasm the arrival of non-governmental actors into
international politics, but assumed that it would only occur through a
generalization of trade and the triumph of democracy. The Wilson doc-
trine continued to be their main inspiration.
They therefore remained in a state of wishful thinking, short of what
the social dimension was really trying to say and what this new era would
bring. Let me be clear. The main issues linked to the contemporary cri-
sis in international relations have arisen not so much from the dynamics
of democratization or the intensification in economic exchanges, rather
they are linked first of all to the state of social disintegration affecting
a certain number of countries. Far from obeying any linear teleology of
Western democratization that only needs to be encouraged through the
old recipes valid anywhere and anytime, this new sum of conflicts and
social tensions requires the use of new tools of political intervention.
It also awaits new narratives of international cooperation that cannot
foresee the aspirations of various emerging non-governmental actors.
Democratic engineering is often illusory, formal, attached to the naive
idea that voting is all it takes for a democracy to exist, disregarding the
fact of obtaining beforehand essential public freedoms and above all
building a minimum of social bonds capable of fostering a real social
contract. The huge volume of literature of a liberal bent devoted to
“transitology” appears to have forgotten this.
In fact, the sudden appearance of this social aspect in the international
arena encompasses both the best—for instance, the fifteen million people
who marched on February 15, 2003 to oppose the war in Iraq—and the
50 B. BADIE
worst, such as the community, tribal and religious tensions fueling mul-
tiple forms of radicalism in all societies no longer able to establish them-
selves as states. The reality is far more complex and difficult to grasp than
certain liberal illusions might lead one to believe.
The alternative to these two conceptual stalemates consists in con-
structing a true sociology of international relations that would lead to
two major perspectives. First, international relations should not be seen
as a separate sphere. It is made up of social phenomena like any other,
it too is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives even if on a par-
ticular scale. Secondly, the configuration of international relations no
longer complies with, and will most likely never again comply only with
state initiatives, for the latter are increasingly destined to react to social
dynamics rather than to act upon them. This social dynamic is made
up of profound changes such as the intensification of communications,
development, urbanization, demographic pressure, migratory reality,
social mobility, the collective imagination, and social violence. And let us
not forget the weight of humiliation, frustration, failure and anger which
have become some of the inescapable social passions of international life.
The latter now evolves far more to the pace of anger in society than to
the diplomacy of “cold state monsters.”
The world was not made in one day, and neither were the sciences.
Will we be capable of creating a subtle and fair sociology of international
relations within an acceptable time frame that is up to the demands
and challenges of our times? To be sure, there have already been some
remarkable efforts in that direction.9 And yet it is hard to see how a new
discipline is being created that would be more empirical than theoretical.
The time has probably come to return to the great founders of the social
sciences: Durkheim, Weber, Marx and Tönnies.10 International relations
must no longer be merely an analysis of the configurations of power, it
must also establish itself as the science of the “tectonics of societies.”
Notes
1. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1989).
3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 2006 [1983]).
4. This index established by the UNDP in 1990 measures human devel-
opment by matching the gross income per inhabitant with purchasing
power parity, life expectancy and level of education.
5. James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and
Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
6. 9-3 is a vernacular name for the French département 93, which includes a
number of Parisian suburbs with a reputation for being “troublesome.”
7. Robert Ned Lebow, “Realism in International Relations,” in
International Encyclopedia of Political Science, tome 7, eds. Bertrand
Badie, Dirck Berg-Schlosser, and Leonardo Morlino (Thousand Oaks,
Los Angeles: Sage Publisher, 2011). As a theory of international rela-
tions, realism constructs its analyses on the preeminent role of power,
leading each state to compete on the international scene with the exclu-
sive goal of optimizing its national interests.
8. Claiming allegiance to the principles of freedom and individualism, the
neoliberals in international relations, contrary to the realists, advocate
promoting rights and exchanges, and power limited by institutional
intervention.
9. Of particular note: the work of James Rosenau (1924–2011), whose sem-
inal book, Turbulence in World Politics, op. cit., was published precisely at
the time when the bipolar illusion was collapsing, in 1990.
10. Guillaume Devin, ed., Dix concepts sociologiques en relations internationales
(Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2015).
CHAPTER 4
Exploring the New World
Abstract  The international arena is inseparable from social actors, their

behavior, culture, and expectations. We’ve come a long way since the
European concert that brought together princes and dynasts with the
same mindset and culture. Today, the politics of diplomacy are perpetually
hostage to the density of globalization and the complexity of—sometimes
clashing—narratives. The end of bipolarity had fueled the illusion that the
United States remained alone on its hegemonic pedestal, a posture which,
as we established earlier, has been extremely rare throughout history while,
until 1989, the proceeding aspiration only manifested on a diarchic basis,
versus the Soviet Union and with it. We also saw that, after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, the unipolar illusion lasted little more than three or four
years. After examining the illusions and setbacks of hegemonic power, this
chapter turns to the three stages of the American reaction and the appeal
and limits of soft power. The author then considers the frustrated Russian
empire, the European Union’s lost opportunities, the emerging countries
frustrated expansion, and finally turns to China and questions its discretion
and assertion.
Keywords  Globalization · United States · Barack Obama · Russia

NATO · European Union

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_4
54 B. BADIE
The international arena is inseparable from social actors, their behavior,

culture, and expectations. We’ve come a long way since the European
concert that brought together princes and dynasts with the same mind-
set and culture. Today, the politics of diplomacy are perpetually hos-
tage to the density of globalization and the complexity of—sometimes
clashing—narratives.
The end of bipolarity had fueled the illusion that the United States
remained alone on its hegemonic pedestal, a posture which, as we estab-
lished earlier, has been extremely rare throughout history while, until
1989, the proceeding aspiration only manifested on a diarchic basis,
versus the Soviet Union and with it. We also saw that, after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, the unipolar illusion lasted little more than three or four
years.
Although NATO was maintained, and the idea of a “Western fam-
ily” was perpetuated, the end of “side-taking” and the weakened pro-
tection narrative greatly stretched the ties between Atlantic allies, as
it did between patrons in the North and clients in the South. In fact,
the constituent illusion of the unipolar moment is tied to an event not
involved in the collapse of the Soviet bloc: Saddam Hussein’s invasion
of Kuwait and the formation of a vast coalition in charge of ousting Iraqi
troops, under the authority of Security Council Resolution 678. The
dying Soviet Union voted in favor of the resolution. China, anxious to
make people forget the events at Tiananmen Square the previous year,
and to be accepted within the international system, kept a low profile
and abstained. American leadership appeared to be so undisputed that
the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar,
felt almost stripped of his role by a mere American general, Norman
Schwartzkopf, leading the multinational Operation “Desert Storm.”
The idea that Washington was now leading the world and winning
on all fronts was reinforced by the concomitant rise of American soft
power, the kind of sweet and seductive domination that went through
the (mainly cultural) media and collective imagination imported from
the United States. A consensual victory in the Gulf, NATO sustained,
diplomatic initiatives launched such as the Madrid Conference on the
Middle East—all major events fueling the hope in some people that the
American superpower could solve all the conflicts on the planet thanks to
its political, diplomatic, and military capability. In fact, a providentially
operational multilateralism had led to concretizing for the first time the
idea of an “international community” and embodying it in American
4 EXPLORING THE NEW WORLD 55
power, the only one with the strength to preside over it. Its victory was
great, but bitter for the others, who were to remember it later.
Illusions and Setbacks of Hegemonic Power

There is naturally a direct link between the victory over Saddam Hussein
and the preservation of NATO. What happened between 1989 and 1991
reproduced on a smaller scale the process that was experienced in 1945.
Just as American power had delivered the world from the Nazi horror
then, it had now won the Cold War against the Soviet enemy, while
power politics was reawakened at the same time in order to cancel the
annexation of Kuwait, a sovereign member state of the United Nations,
by a greedy and dangerously authoritarian neighbor. NATO became
attractive just when it would have been logical to dissolve it!
This apparently irresistible quality of American power was reflected
even in university debates at the time. Certainly, models of analysis based
on the absolute primacy of power had begun to be seriously criticized
by all those who highlighted the rise of exchanges tied to globalization,
such as the tensions linked to the South’s emergence. But the death
throes of bipolarity and the new image of the United States as victor
due to its superiority fostered the emergence of “neo-realism,” led by
Kenneth Waltz, which materialized the very year of the “second Cold
War,”1 the revival of the idea of “hegemonism”2 and a show of “offen-
sive realism” by John Mearsheimer in his book The Tragedy of Great
Power Politics, published in 2001.3 Obsessed by this Spinozist “conatus,”
this effort made by all to maximize one’s power, the author was happy to
point out that it was American power that had liberated France in 1945
and Eastern Europe in 1989. Nothing more could be said in response,
end of discussion.
And yet these certitudes were in turn shaken up. While the fires were
being rekindled in Europe with the Yugoslav conflict, the Middle East
soon reassumed its role of “power image scrambler.” While the Balkan
conflict revived US-Russia tensions and Moscow’s ambitions, the
Russo-American consensus was crumbling in Iraq, as Russia was find-
ing it increasingly difficult to accept the military pressure Washington
wanted to exert on Saddam Hussein. However, instead of the old rivalry
between powers that one might have imagined returning, a different
image was emerging: the growing capacity of the “little guy” to assert his
views and change the game, substituting a potential to harm for power,
56 B. BADIE
and the herd instinct of the “big boys” rather than trusteeship over their
little brother.
But the main issue probably lay elsewhere. This new era of globali-
zation and depolarization was expressed not only in a tremendous
devaluation of power, but also in a rush toward self-rule. The weaken-
ing narrative of protection and alliance linked to bipolarity led some of
the United States’ most faithful allies to withdraw from the American
umbrella. Thus Germany shifted to a kind of neutralism, or at least to
disengagement from key military and geostrategic considerations, ena-
bling it to achieve full economic hegemony within Europe. Canada, the
faithful neighbor, was seen to distance itself from Washington under the
leadership of Jean Chrétien. Turkey, once a sentinel for NATO at the
border of the Soviet world, also forged a degree of autonomy, in par-
ticular when Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Islamist-leaning AKP came
to power in 2003. Once the USSR was defunct, the Atlantic Alliance
had to become multifaceted. The question of NATO’s purpose was even
raised, all the more given that it began to deploy forces in places far away
from the Atlantic region, such as the Pamirs and around the Horn of
Africa, fields of action that had nothing to do with the initial reasons for
its creation.
Above all, the effectiveness of power was eroding in the face of new
forms of violence and conflict. They were truly entering the twenty-first
century. It has been said that 9/11 was a turning point out of which
a new world would develop. In reality, it was only the most spectacu-
lar symptom of the slow rise of an unprecedented form of violence. It
swept away all the assumptions of a Westphalian legacy that had struc-
tured Western diplomacy since the seventeenth century, with most polit-
ical leaders not really aware of it. Suddenly, sovereignty lost its relevance
and was not compatible with the basic idea of security. Violence ignored
borders, and for the first time the United States had been challenged
on its own territory, while the very idea of territoriality was caught in
an upheaval. There were no longer any compact or unified theaters of
operation, but rather non-Euclidean connections between highly remote
battlefields. The World Trade Center became the temporary focus of a
conflict whose center of gravity was the Middle East, just as in November
2015, Ile-de-France was in a way “annexed” to a battlefield located in
northern Mesopotamia, pulling the greater Brussels area (where some of
the Paris attack jihadists were thought to be from) into this challenge to
standard geography.
The Three Stages of the American Reaction

The Clausewitzian world was therefore left behind where state adversar-
ies confronted one another with their armies and sovereign instruments,
and where the unit of account was military power in the strictest sense of
the term. Faced with this abrupt devaluation in power, the United States
reacted in three contrasting stages. The first was naturally the neocon-
servative moment, which has already been discussed. In the face of this
new violence manifested on 9/11, immediately labeled “barbaric,” the
American superpower waved the banner of civilization and took a messi-
anic position. Through its suffering and sacrifice, it would rid the world
of evil. The result was a dangerous Manichaeism (“you’re either with
us or against us”) perfectly illustrated by George W. Bush’s two pres-
idencies. The famous doctrine of “transformational diplomacy,” then
of regime change, covered a triple objective: intervening everywhere
around the world to contain evil, to destroy it, and substitute an order
that was evil with one that was good. The outcome was notably the Iraqi
disaster for which we are still paying the consequences.
The second phase was one of doubt, specifically triggered by the set-
backs and dead ends of the Iraqi adventure (which added nearly 1000
billion dollars to the US budget). In university debates, liberal analysts
picked themselves back up. Soft power came back into fashion. The idea
of pluralism, part of American cultural DNA just like Wilsonian messian-
ism—and sometimes in contradiction with it—was redeemed and once
again highlighted. All things considered, the world could also be plu-
ral. The presidential election of November 2008 occurred during this
time of doubt. The rebellion against neoconservative hubris crystallized
around a candidate with an unprecedented profile. Barack Obama was
new from every standpoint. As they say nowadays, he came from “diver-
sity.” The first black president, he was one of the few political leaders
to have maintained a position hostile to American intervention through-
out the Iraqi tragedy. Finally, he took a proactive stance (“yes, we can”)
and talked about change in a way liable to appeal to an electorate that
had greatly evolved in its demographic composition, and could almost
be described henceforth as a coalition of minorities (African Americans,
hispanophones, recent immigrants, etc.), which the neoconservatives had
not seen coming.
Once elected, Obama tried in his way to deliver the changes prom-
ised. The new American president was not an agitator. He wasn’t
58 B. BADIE
trying to power through. He was also a man intimately acquainted with

afflicted and marginalized populations in the United States. Initially for
him, health care reform, or “Obamacare,” was in fact a more important
theme than foreign policy. All the more so because at the time when he
was elected, international politics was no longer in the forefront. The fire
of neoconservatism had gone out and the Arab Spring wasn’t even loom-
ing on the horizon. As the flames were gradually calmed in Iraq, Europe
began to enter an economic slump that led it to turn its back on strategic
and geopolitical issues.
Obama’s first term consisted mainly in dealing with the failures of
neoconservatism: the withdrawal from Iraq, a vain attempt to inch the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict toward peace, and a highly cautious strategy in
Afghanistan. Moreover, Barack Obama had not been opposed to inter-
vention in that country and deemed that the Iraqi adventure was divert-
ing the United States from pursuing its efforts on Afghan soil. The focus
was then placed on eliminating Osama bin Laden, which was done on
May 2, 2011. It was therefore not a total break, all the more so because
in terms of domestic politics his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
embodied a certain classicism in carrying out foreign policy.
The results of his first term might have seemed somewhat disap-
pointing on the international side, where the major breakthrough was
above all doctrinal, through the Cairo speech given on June 4, 2009.
There, for the first time, an American head of state recognized the
world’s plurality. Or again, the speech before the UN General Assembly
on September 23rd later that year where he talked about “new bonds
among people” and where the multilateralism stigmatized by his pre-
decessor was restored. His second term, however, turned out to be far
more pragmatic and proactive. Barack Obama was the first president of
the United States to confirm almost explicitly that his country was no
longer capable of ensuring the kind of hegemonic leadership that his pre-
decessors had wanted to preserve or impose. In all likelihood only a man
from a minority background could see that this was an impossible aspira-
tion and that one had to agree to building true alterity within the inter-
national system.
Considering the long history of the United States, there is a general
consensus about the succession of two distinct phases. The first, isola-
tionist, was formalized as early as 1823 by the Monroe Doctrine; the sec-
ond, imperial and universalist, resulted from its participation in the two
world wars, the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. The beginnings
of a third phase, perhaps short-lived, could now be imagined of a world

founded on plurality, as it was set out for the first time by an American
president in the Cairo speech. This story makes sense to the extent that
each phase was based on a compelling component of American culture:
the first on American exceptionalism, the second on its messianism, and
the potential third one on the ideas of polyarchy and pluralism that are
an integral part of the political ideals long forged across the Atlantic.
They can be found in particular in very old speeches on the balance of
power. But Barack Obama gave the impression for the first time that this
founding idea of American culture could expand into the international
arena and that the Huntingtonian discourse about the “clash of civiliza-
tions” could be succeeded by the beginnings of a discourse on the plural-
ity of civilizations.
One of the reasons why history may remember that second term
stems first of all from the “falling-out” with Israel, which was an unu-
sual break in American foreign policy. No American president had ever
distanced himself so markedly from an Israeli head of government: on
the settlements, on what policy to adopt regarding Iran, on the pros-
pects of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, going far beyond the
quarrels that had opposed George H.W. Bush and Yitzhak Shamir in the
early 1990s and for which the American president was so criticized. The
results were scanty, as Israel did not alter its policies one iota with respect
to the Palestinians, but the constant herd mentality of American policy
regarding Israel was abandoned for the first time.
Barack Obama was naturally frustrated by the unfavorable con-
text that paralyzed so many of his initiatives. This was the case with
his thwarted wish for a rapprochement with China and Russia, which
clashed in both cases with his partners’ irreducible determination to con-
solidate their status in a world that had become very unequal. In particu-
lar, it hampered Vladimir Putin’s ambition to restore Russian power too
abruptly erased from the map of world governance. The lesson seemed
clear: a crisis of power as experienced at the turn of the century, made
of multiple uncertainties blending a devalued capacity of the one and
conspicuous exaggeration of the other, led to a wild race for status, each
state trying to preserve its rank in a destructured world.
However, the major agreement on Iranian nuclear power on July 14,
2015, desired by Barack Obama, went far beyond its official objective.
Behind this treaty was the entirely new idea that there were legitimate
regional powers in the Middle East. While not openly acknowledging
60 B. BADIE
that it was up to the latter to resolve regional issues where the major
powers had completely failed, the idea was beginning to make headway.
Soon after the agreement was signed, moreover, Iran was included in the
process of attempting to find a solution to the Syrian conflict.
Out of the same impulse, the reconciliation in progress with Cuba
showed a different way of looking at Latin America, while a far more
sustained interest in Africa was expressed, as well as a certain sensitivity
about major questions involving humanity’s shared resources, including
the environment, and about issues such as climate change.
Naturally, it wasn’t a done deal yet and counter-trends to this new
pluralist sensibility put up a strong resistance everywhere in the United
States. The weight of economic interests and of the military-industrial
complex was undeniable, Tea Party demagogues did not give up, and
champions of realpolitik and hard power were still influential. Not to
mention that the presidential election in November 2016 was liable to
bring partisans of the old imperial concepts back into the White House.
It is not so easy to write off two hundred and fifty years of messianic
policy.
The Appeal and Limits of Soft Power

Be that as it may, it is absurd to talk about an American “decline.” First,
because there is no real decline from the standpoint of the traditional
instruments of power, the United States accounts for 43% of the world’s
military spending, it possesses the finest army in the world, and the most
sophisticated technological resources. On the other hand, it is the effec-
tiveness of its power that is on the decline. If that power belonged to
Botswana or Guatemala, the result would be the same. Faced with the
new conflicts described earlier, the traditional instruments of power, in
particular the military, no longer function. The famous “revolution in
military affairs” that was emerging in the 1980s—almost in unison more-
over with the evolution in Soviet strategic thinking—seems out of sync
today. The doctrine of “zero death,” of fire-and-forget, of “war at a dis-
tance,” and the illusion consisting in using drones to make anonymous
strikes on defenseless populations—as well as on the supposed targets—
does not readily lend itself to conflicts that are not the product of states
but are “coming” from societies. That doctrine is even counter-produc-
tive and plays into the hands of local “entrepreneurs of violence.”
But what of the soft power of the United States., the influence of
the American lifestyle and collective imaginary (imaginaire) conveyed
through consumer society and cultural industries? In Latin America, the
wave of left-wing governments displaying more or less virulent anti-im-
perialist rhetoric in no way reduced the appeal of that mindscape for the
local population. And if we are talking about the complex relationship
of emulation between China and the United States, some have observed
that Xi Jinping’s daughter studied at Harvard, whereas Obama’s family
never had any intention of sending Sasha and Malia to study at Tsinghua
University in Beijing.
To fully grasp the intricacies of this complex phenomenon, it is use-
ful to highlight the striking contrast opposing cultures given to a more
or less messianic universalism and those that do not strive for universal-
ity. Chinese culture is in the second category. The Chinese are rather
indifferent to what happens beyond the borders of the Middle Kingdom
unless their direct interests are at stake. When Chinese diplomats and
businessmen show up in Africa, they are not concerned with build-
ing governments that look like carbon copies of the People’s Republic.
Perhaps this is because China has never been animated by a strictly reli-
gious culture. The fact remains that its concern with universalization and
thus with cultural dissemination has always been minimal, apart of course
from its sphere of imperial influence, that is to say the far eastern regional
area. There is a blend of strength and weakness here. Universalism, on
the contrary, is a show of power; it is frightening, and there are few cul-
tures more strongly marked by that feature than the United States.
In fact, isn’t the real rival of American soft power to be found rather
in a potential Muslim empire, equally driven by a true universalist mes-
sianism, a strong belief in the duty to export a revelation which they are
the custodians of? Is this not the key to many of the tensions and accusa-
tions brought about by both sides, to the fears and perhaps even hatred?
Aren’t the fantasies that go along with this perception all the more vivid
because on the one side there is an obsessive fear of the loss of hegem-
ony, and on the other side so much accumulated resentment, humiliation
endured, and inequality observed?
American soft power remains an undeniable reality. The United States.
produces less than 10% of the world’s films, but it monopolizes over 50%
of world screen time. The American model prevails over all others in
terms of consumer patterns for food, clothing, leisure, and music. Even
so, soft power has never succeeded in being a substitute for hard power.
62 B. BADIE
Liking Coca-Cola or Jennifer Lopez does not lead people to adhere to

American foreign policy positions. This can be seen in the case of Latin
America for instance, where the Americanization of consumer patterns is
intense yet does not involve adhering to what they call the “gringo” for-
eign policy. Not to mention the Middle East, where lifestyles are increas-
ingly based on the American model but where anti-Americanism has
reached record levels in public opinion. It is an important lesson. The
“American dream” is far from having the hoped-for ripple effect in polit-
ical behavior, and in no way serves its plans for political hegemony.
Soft power can even be picked up and used against the United States.
by those it is intended for. The strength of Chinese policies is in export-
ing their best students to the United States, and once they have returned
to China, in blending American and Chinese know-how, thus enabling
them to make up for the capability gap that separates them from their
rival across the Pacific. Confident of its superiority, the United States
“imports” students but exports relatively few of them, such that it has
stayed within the limits of monocultural training, however technically
excellent. Perhaps American domination will be better ensured when a
massive flow of American students starts going to Chinese universities.
Globalization empowers interdependence and reciprocity in a way that
Western countries have not.
Russia: The Frustrated Empire

One cannot approach the issue of the Old Continent’s place in the
international system today without examining its relationship to Russia,
clearly a fundamental actor in the European powers’ old politics. The
events of 1989–1991 led the West to think the Cold War had ended with
the victory of the Western side, without any direct military confronta-
tion. That illusion of a “battle-less victory” already failed to take into
account the thirty million dead in acts of war, which still seems like a sad
“check” to be paid for “peaceful coexistence.” By adding the victims of
the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Africa, and the wars of
decolonization, the total score is almost three times the number of vic-
tims from the First World War.
Over and above that hidden record, there was a too simplistic belief
that Russia could be labeled a “defeated power” and treated as such. It
was thought, also rather prematurely, that the defeat of the USSR sig-
naled the establishment of neoliberalism as the default worldview. It was
inferred that the time had come for Western world governance. This was
a return to the 1815 Congress of Vienna, except that this time Russia
was not included. The spirit and method remained similar. While there
was a relative marginalization of the United Nations Security Council’s
role and an evolution in the “P5,” which became de facto a “P3” (the
United States, France, and the United Kingdom monopolizing most of
the resolutions submitted), world governance shifted to the G7, mainly
composed of Western powers (Japan being a kind of “extreme West”). It
would become the G8 and include Russia only belatedly (1997), briefly
(less than twenty years, from 1997 to 2014) and, in fact superficially.
There was a huge gap between Russia’s treatment as the “defeated
one” in the Cold War and the expectations of the Russian population,
who felt they had been freed from a Soviet order that had died out qui-
etly and therefore had no reason to be “punished” by the “victorious”
powers. They retained the memory of centuries of world co-governance,
an almost integral part of their identity, and of their status at any rate. As
a result, that punishment, perceived as unfair, became an almost auto-
matic source of extraordinary frustrations. The target of Russian resent-
ment was the Westerners’ exclusive claim to world governance and their
attendant institutional provisions.
One should not forget that Russia has a past—and even a lasting
identity—that is imperial, and it is much harder for an empire than for
a nation-state to accept defeat. A nation-state can recover quickly from
defeat, whereas an empire sees itself above all as wounded in its assertion
of influence and domination. Depriving Russia of its status as a world
power naturally fueled particularly virulent revanchist impulses. During
the days of Boris Yeltsin, those impulses were relatively held in check,
for the immediate effects of the breakdown of the Soviet world were still
too significant for the Russian president to react by raising the imperial
banner. But the minute Putin took power in 1999 things were quite
different.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia was excluded from nearly all
governance mechanisms, with the exception of its place as a perma-
nent member of the Security Council. At the same time, all the for-
mer so-called “popular” democracies were integrated into NATO
and the European Union. Even worse from Moscow’s viewpoint, cer-
tain former Republics, such as the Baltic states, were also co-opted by
those two bodies. And the possible future integration of Ukraine, and
even of Georgia, has not helped to alleviate Russia’s sense of isolation,
64 B. BADIE
and even of encirclement, feeling today that it has been excluded from
the great game, like in 1917, even though it is no longer cultivating
any revolutionary desires that could prompt it to “break ranks.” All
the mechanisms for the purpose of including Moscow in the manage-
ment of European and world affairs—the Partnership for Peace, the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Europe-
Russia Partnership—froze up. Thus the increasingly fierce and deter-
mined reaction from Russia, willing to do anything to regain its status in
the international arena.
This touches on one of the most important aspects in the new inter-
national relations. One is no longer really competing for power, the
nature of which is less and less understood and which cannot be used
against that of the United States; rather one is fighting to acquire or
regain status and be recognized. In the days of bipolarity, status was
automatic. By definition, the leader of one side had the status of a
“co-prince” of the world and all nuclear power had its place in the sun.
Henceforth, the quest for status would be a constant combat to maintain
one’s rank.
Russia is a good example of this endless race. First, Moscow intends to
regain a strong presence on its borders because, like all empires, Russia
is obsessed with managing its periphery. This can be seen in Moldavia
with the Transnistrian affair, in the Caucasus with the efforts to detach
South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia. One could also point out
the more discreet attempt—directly touching NATO—to mobilize
Russian-speaking populations in the Baltic states. Moscow authorities are
engaging in diplomatic activism that is quick to spot the “underbelly”
in the post-Soviet space, and highlight the regions where it is easiest to
“engage.” Ukraine is paradigmatic from that standpoint, as it is a coun-
try whose ethnonational definition is subject to controversies and divi-
sions, not to mention the fragile status of Crimea, whose incorporation
by Kiev is recent and debatable. But it is not merely the post-Soviet space
that has lent itself to this game of reconquest. Contrary to the United
States and Europe, Russia directly borders the Middle East and deems
that its national interests are directly at stake there.
The Western reaction to this reaffirmation of Russian power was no
doubt heavy-handed. Instead of defining the framework of renewing
Russia’s association with world governance, it thought only of excluding
it. The G8 went back to being the G7 in 2014, and the Ukrainian affair
was handled by the West in a rather irrelevant way. After these missteps
by a partner turned adversary, the Syro-Iraqi crisis was a real godsend for
Moscow, which in one fell swoop and almost miraculously regained its
status as a power, arguing in a henceforth quite convincing manner that
this reinstatement was not directed against the Western side but rather
against Isis, the latter’s chief enemy. It is too soon to draw any conclu-
sions from that episode, but two observations can be made about it.
Russia appears to have succeeded in restoring its power and is now equal
to the Western side; but that equality of power could also turn into an
equality of weakness, because it now needs to use that power not to rees-
tablish it status—which after all would be quite easy—but to govern the
world and handle conflicts, which is another matter altogether.
Russia’s other undeniable success was in managing to create a whole
network of alliances despite the West’s efforts to isolate it. Today,
Moscow is perhaps the only power in the North with true allies in the
Middle East. It is single-handedly dealing with Bachar al-Assad’s regime,
which the West was too quick to try and exclude from any negotiations,
and it has managed to develop excellent relations with Iran. Farther to
the East, one can see a classic of Russian imperial history: its capacity
to turn to the East whenever things are not going well on its Western
flank. This was already the choice made by Ivan the Terrible and his suc-
cessors, who reacted to the closing of Western Europe’s doors after set-
backs experienced during the Livonian War (1558–1583) by looking to
Siberia: the Lena was reached in 1628 and Yakutsk was founded in 1637.
Today, the alliance with China embodies that strategy, an alliance that
Beijing is willing to accept because it is no longer in a position of inferi-
ority like Mao Zedong was with regard to Stalin and his successors. This
is the reason for the creation and activation of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation, established in June 2001 and including, under the aegis
of Russia and China, the Republics of Central Asia, and soon India and
Pakistan, while counting as observers, Iran, Afghanistan, Belorussia and
Mongolia.
Lastly, Russia is gradually carving out a prime position in the new
world of so-called “emerging” counties by participating in a new
grouping, BRICS, which I will say more about later, alongside China,
Brazil, India and South Africa. Naturally, as in the Middle East, where
the risk of getting bogged down is not small, this new Russian diplo-
matic activism is not without its potential perils. In Central Asia, there
are indeed possible points of friction between Russian and Chinese inter-
ests. Traditionally, China was always turned toward the east and south. A
66 B. BADIE
certain prudence with regard to Russian power prompted it to avoid any

expansionist adventures on its western borders. But nowadays Beijing
has understood that opening up to the West—the “reopening of the Silk
Road”—is an additional asset to its involvement in globalization. Thus
the focus on Xinjiang, often to the detriment of the Muslim and Turkish-
speaking Uighurs, prey to relentless repression and reduced to minor-
ity status in their own homeland. Thus also the policy of opening up to
the Central Asian Republics, which Moscow can no longer really sponsor
with the same effectiveness as before, playing to the highest bidder with
their two neighbors.
To be sure, Russia does not look too kindly on these nations shifting
to its Chinese rival, but it has to accept that it no longer has the means
to exercise exclusive control over them.
It puts up with this erosion of its influence, probably compensated by
the advantages of its integration into a non-conflictual Eastern bloc.
The European Union’s Lost Opportunities

The European Union could have taken advantage of the end of the Cold
War and bipolarity, which had closed it off in an Atlantist mindset and
given it limited leeway. For the first time in history since the dawn of
modern times, Europe was no longer the world’s battlefield. It was no
longer experiencing internal military tensions, as had been the case for so
long, from the Hundred Years War to the Second World War; it was no
longer in an adversarial situation with the Soviet bloc. And yet, not only
was it not able to seize this breath of fresh air, but it showed the world
all its weaknesses right after the fall of the Wall.
It all began with the difficult German reunification—even if its eco-
nomic dynamism succeeded in deflecting attention from the episode—
and with the botched integration of the former people’s democracies,
which finally got the better of budding European diplomacy. And yet the
latter had proven itself at the end of the last century. At several sum-
mits (Venice, Seville, Berlin), Europe had expressed itself very clearly
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it was hoped that it would play
a part in that difficult resolution. But in 2003, far from presenting a
unified front regarding the US invasion of Iraq, it was the victim of a
structural disagreement between its old and new members, between the
Franco-German alliance and a bloc composed of the former people’s
democracies—preparing to join the Union—and the countries moving in

Great Britain’s circle.
This disintegration of European diplomacy—which had barely taken
off—touches on a key point: Europe was still suffering from its inability
to find its place in the world. At first, the European adventure was in a
way “introverted.” It was intent on putting an end to its own internecine
wars, and the rest of the world was only taken into account incidentally.
With decolonization, Europe discovered the South through cooper-
ation agreements (the Lomé Peace Accord in 1975 and the Cotonou
Agreement in 2000) which perpetuated its ambiguous status: power
in the world or power whose purpose was still to dominate the world?
Similarly, Europe never succeeded in finding a constructive mode of
coexistence and cooperation with the major emerging countries, in par-
ticular BRICS.
The other failure of European construction was the result of its man-
agement of internal transformations. In the aftermath of the Second
World War, the European dynamic was governed by the very simple and
beautiful idea of avoiding any more wars and of playing the partnership
card in order to do so. It was not a matter of abandoning state sover-
eignty, but of creating a form of partnership powerful enough to make
any new conflict impossible. Since then, Europe has had to deal with the
shock of globalization. Here again, the partnership reflex has worked to
a certain extent. Indeed, Europe remains the foremost player in world
trade, in front of the United States. Yet from the moment it was no
longer simply a matter of competing advantageously in the world econ-
omy, but rather of dealing with the detrimental effects of globalization—
affecting in particular the southern Europe nations and Ireland—the
necessary transformation did not take place and the Union was not able
to move from partnership to solidarity. Europe remained entrenched in
its partnership model based on stakeholding. When it became a question
of co-managing losses beginning in 2007–2008, the national or national-
ist “every man for himself” mindset prevailed. And yet, in a highly inter-
dependent economy, the setbacks of weak or weakened nations such as
Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and perhaps France next, inevitably ran
the risk of damaging the economic balance of the Union as a whole. The
instinct for solidarity, which should have led Germany in particular to
consider that bailing out Greece made sense for its own prosperity in the
middle or long term, did not work.
68 B. BADIE
This is the European deadlock, which also has consequences for the
eternal issue of the race for status. Today, in dealing with worldwide
challenges such as the Mid-Eastern crisis, for instance, the US-Russia
diarchy is reforming, and Europe is only consulted as a matter of
form, out of an instinct for courtesy that is a bit hollow and at times
hypocritical.
The Emerging Countries’ Frustrated Expansion

Who are these much talked about “emerging” countries challenging
Europe? Intruders at first, newcomers that “emerged” when bipolar-
ity began showing signs of weakness and globalization reached cruising
speed. In the late 1970s, four Asian “dragons” emerged: Hong Kong,
Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. Later, there was a talk of the South
American “jaguars,” mainly Brazil and Mexico then, joined much later
by Argentina when it freed itself from the repeated crises it had suffered.
They truly were intruders as their status was considered quite subor-
dinate during the Cold War and they had never played a major role in
international politics. As a result, there was often an old theme of frus-
tration and humiliation as a backdrop to this emergence. This is reflected
for example in the forgotten episode that led Brazil to slam the door on
the Society of Nations in 1926 because it had been refused a seat as a
permanent member on its Council.
Beginning in the 1990s, in an atmosphere of vanished bipolarity, the
true “heavyweights” of the emerging world—China and India in particu-
lar—began to reveal their claims to this new status and the recognition
that was meant to go along with it. After them, there was a whole string
of “little guys”—relegated up to then to the “junior leagues”—force-
fully demanding the right to rise up to the “major leagues.” Thus the
huge culture shock for any Westerner with a memory. China reflects an
image of a former empire thousands of years old, humiliated in particular
by the two opium wars, by the concessions and incessant affronts to its
dignity and sovereignty, from Manchuria to the Rape of Nankin.4 India,
the jewel in the British crown, endured terrible racial and civilizational
condescendence from its colonial master. We need only remember how
Churchill quietly called Gandhi a “half-naked fakir.” And for decades
Brazil had only been spoken of regarding “soccer and samba.”
Initially, it was above all the economic indicators that caught the
attention of observers and aroused the sometimes envious interest of the
former powers, but without overly disturbing their assurance of remain-

ing hegemonic. Growth at times reaching double digits, an increasingly
dynamic and massive involvement in world trade networks, the construc-
tion of powerful and efficient financial institutions, notably through cen-
tral banks and development banks in countries such as India and Brazil,
and a capacity to invest in the very heart of the major northern countries:
all this could not fail to impress.
It soon became clear that a more nuanced picture was needed. First,
because on an economic level, emergence is almost never a phenomenon
that is national in scope, but rather local and at times even peripheral
within the countries involved. In China, for example, its coastal econ-
omy is booming, but the hinterlands remain in many ways a third-world
region. India has created some poles of modernity, such as the IT indus-
try in Bangalore, but the small farmers on the Ganges have remained in
a state of poverty. In Brazil, the bourgeoisie in São Paolo and Rio de
Janeiro considers itself European, but the Nordeste region is still very
poor and underdeveloped. Moreover, although the economies of these
countries may form assorted coalitions within the WTO, they remain
very different in nature. Brazil is above all an agricultural exporting
country, whereas India, which struggles to achieve food self-sufficiency,
is more oriented toward developing a service economy. Finally, the indef-
inite expansion of the growth curves of the emerging nations is in no
way guaranteed. Isn’t a finger being pointed specifically at Brazil today
as it slumps back into negative growth, while China is losing steam and
India’s relatively good performance has not prevented its development
from being threatened by huge infrastructural deficiencies? We should
not forget how, in the 1980s, it was believed that Japan’s economic
dynamism would sweep away everything in its path, and there was a wave
of paranoia in the United States with respect to that. We know what the
situation is today.
While it is true that the path of emerging economies in the mid- and
long-term is harder to predict than is generally believed, one cannot
deny that these nations are now on an equal footing in the international
system, no longer occupying the minor positions they were thought
to be made for. Paradoxically, the economic uncertainties more or less
encumbering some of them are now balanced by a political capacity
that can no longer be denied them. This innovation is expressed by an
increasingly active diplomacy capable of playing it both ways, since the
emerging powers’ weakness in economic development is an argument
70 B. BADIE
in itself attesting to their having one foot in the North and one in the
South. They can thus play the role of advocate in favor of their less
advanced counterparts in dealing with the powers from the North. This
is the role favored by Brazil regarding the African countries with which it
has had deep demographic and cultural ties for generations, even if they
were once disdained or unacknowledged. Similarly, there are historical
bonds between India and South Africa, as reflected more personally by
the path of Gandhi, a lawyer, and civil rights activist based in Durban for
two decades. Or again the numerous Indian tradesmen living on the east
coast of Africa for generations. China, in its relations with African coun-
tries, boasts of having experienced the same vexations at the hands of the
colonial powers in the nineteenth century as the continent of Africa. All
elements that have given rise to a South–South diplomacy that must now
be reckoned with… For the past ten or fifteen years, these South-South
affinities have taken a less flamboyant course than in the days of Bandung
or the Tricontinental,5 but doubtless more sustainable, more realistic,
and with greater economic and political consequences in the mid- and
long-term. Brazil organizes major summits between the Arab world and
South America, while former Brazilian President Lula da Silva travels fre-
quently to Western Asia. Dissenters from the Middle East, notably the
victims of Israeli oppression, are welcomed with open arms in Caracas,
La Paz, and Quito, while only yesterday former Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considered himself quite at home in the Andes
Mountains. These networks of alliances have been gradually woven in
the context of a totally disrupted international system whose new actors
know how to exploit its vacuums, shortcomings, and weaknesses.
The emerging powers, with the notable exception of China, have thus
forged friendships more out of their quest for political status than due to
their economic ascension. Better still, in the name of that status being
sought, some of these emerging countries have grouped together, as
did three of them in creating IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), uniting
three countries from three different continents since June 6, 2003. This
involved not just a tool for permanent diplomatic dialogue, but also a
body that oversees various programs for economic, social, cultural, and
educational cooperation. IBSA was soon replaced on a more vast scale by
BRICS, a group that curiously was first a category invented in 2001 by
outside observers—analysts from the American bank Goldman Sachs—
before bringing together Brazil, Russia, India, and China in one partner-
ship, later joined by South Africa (in 2011). As was mentioned earlier,
Vladimir Putin quickly figured out the political value of such an alli-
ance, enabling him to bring Russia out of isolation; and thus the famous
Ekaterinburg Summits, which he initiated politically, the first of which
took place in June 2009, then continuing annually. Although very dif-
ferent, these countries were seen to adopt common positions in dealing
with Western interventions and regional conflicts.
The building of such South-South axes—more pragmatic and less ide-
ological than in the past, but perhaps more effective and promising—is
surely one of the most striking characteristics in the evolution of inter-
national relations. However, its impact should not be overstated, as
they are liable to meet with internal and external limits. On the inter-
nal level, the inequalities of power and resources between the different
actors in the South are certain to generate friction and contradictions,
and even to prompt resistance similar to that once encountered by colo-
nial or neocolonial invaders. This is reflected in the emerging difficul-
ties experienced by China for instance in the mining sector in Africa or
in Latin America, where its presence and practices are not always distin-
guishable from those of Western multinational corporations, and where
at times they shock local social and environmental sensibilities even more
violently. We are reminded for example of the violent incidents in June
2010 that opposed Zambian miners and Chinese management at a coal
mine owned by a company in the People’s Republic.
Externally, the club of Western nations has no intention of allowing
itself to be deprived of the diplomatic initiative by “upstarts” whose ama-
teurism is often remarked upon. A forceful illustration of this in May
2010 was the fate of a shared initiative by Turkey and Brazil to solve
the nuclear issue. The draft agreement the two partners had reached was
not very different from what was ultimately agreed upon by Iran and
the group of 5 + 1 in July 2015. Yet this commendable initiative was
promptly boycotted by the traditional powers, who clearly signaled to
Ankara and Brasilia that there would be no question of their playing with
the “big boys.”
Another example was the fate of the G20. Originally created simply as
a meeting of Finance Ministers in the wake of the Asian crisis in 1997–
1998, as with the 2007 crisis it hosted heads of state from the major
emerging countries alongside the G7–G8 oligarchs. Before November
2008, Chinese, Brazilian, or Indian leaders had only been invited to the
big summit meetings “for the coffee hour” and were probably given a
few slices of cake for dessert. As of 2008, they were in full presence at the
72 B. BADIE
first G20 meetings: a new episode soon frowned upon by many Western
diplomats, who argued that the meetings were becoming “unmanagea-
ble” and “like Grand Central Station.” Thus the G20 was soon marginal-
ized and its powers stifled, only convening quietly now, after the G7.
This is an expression of contempt that goes way back and could be
very costly for the West, as these emerging powers are mediators capable
of helping the Europeans and the Americans co-manage the world’s con-
flict flashpoints in a far more effective way. Beyond the wastefulness in
this diplomatic ostracism, the danger is in seeing this mediating capacity
transformed into a pool of defiance. As the emerging states are rejected
by the international system and marginalized instead of effectively partic-
ipating in world governance, they are beginning to adopt an oppositional
attitude, a stance of systematic denunciation regarding Western interven-
tions and the doctrine of “the responsibility to protect,” attacks on sov-
ereignty and multilateral organizations “confiscated” by a little club that
is exclusive and excluding.
China: Between Discretion and Assertion

Proof of the composite nature of the category of “emerging” countries,
China stands out in various ways. First, it is not a mere emerging power
and claims the position of “tied for first place” with the United States
in world economic rankings. Some estimate its GDP today at around
15,000 billion dollars, provided the arithmetic makes sense given all the
numerous pitfalls and mirages of statistics. Continuing to refer to China
as an “emerging” country therefore would be to deem that an econ-
omy rivaling that of the United States and surpassing those of Japan,
Germany, France or Great Britain ought not be recognized as belonging
to the big boys’ club, which would be strange to say the least.
The other exception is cultural. China is not a messianic nation. With
no claim to universalism, it has built a significant part of its foreign pol-
icy, at least since it has had the means to be present in international pol-
itics, on the Taoist principle of “non-action”: the best way to position
oneself in dealing with events is through passivity, discretion, and retreat
which are far more effective and functional than full-scale activism that
aims to co-manage world affairs. One need only observe China’s posi-
tion in dealing with major current conflicts (Syria, Iraq, Israel-Palestine,
the Sahel, and even neighboring Afghanistan) to note this omnipresent
stance of retreat, prudence, and even silence.
To understand China’s foreign policy, one must keep in mind the

extraordinary combination of an economy fully engaged in globaliza-
tion, obtaining dazzling results, and effective diplomacy based on discre-
tion. Thus, in the Security Council, Beijing rarely intervenes, always with
restraint, and without using its veto power, except if its “imperial” inter-
ests are threatened. Likewise, in the 5 + 1 negotiation on Iranian nuclear
power, China was always highly unassuming, cautiously following Russia.
A rather effective division of labor can be seen between this aggressive
economic activism and its hushed diplomacy, which contrasts with the
familiar arrogance of widespread Western interventionism.
This double characteristic probably explains why China has made
great and highly productive use of globalization. It has succeeded in
becoming a part of it thanks to an economic dynamism neither compli-
cated nor checked by any thorny political pretensions. Its involvement
is all the more successful in that—as long as its regime and territo-
rial integrity are not threatened—it has succeeded in perceiving politi-
cal competition outside any political constraints, convinced that the
economic victory of some does not imply the defeat of others. The
“win-win” model, constantly dredged up, is contrasted here with the old
Schmittian obsession with the “friend-enemy” relationship to which the
Western world remains so attached. Its regional space is the only clear
exception. China cannot avoid the general and impersonal rule hold-
ing that any state claiming to have the status of a power is obliged to
assert itself around its borders as a regional power, whatever the price.
Consequently, China, so timid, so cautious and unreactive in dealing
with major world conflicts, adopts on the contrary a somewhat aggres-
sive posture with regard to its immediate surroundings. Thus the mari-
time and border conflicts pitting it against Japan, Korea, the Philippines
and Vietnam, not to mention Taiwan. Moreover, it is an issue that affects
all the emerging powers more or less intensely: Brazil with regard to the
other South American countries that accuse it at times of “sub-imperial-
ism,” Turkey in dealing with its neighbors, and South Africa toward the
other African nations.
This is a potential factor of instability for Chinese power, in addition
to other weaknesses presenting graves risks for the future. What will hap-
pen when a third of the population is over 65 in a country where social
protections are practically non-existent? What consequences might the
proliferation of social conflicts and strikes have, especially if they lead to
an organized workers’ protest movement? Lastly, how much longer can
74 B. BADIE
an open economy put up with such a closed political system founded on

one party, vertical discipline, and secrecy?
In the end these potential weaknesses, unknowns for the future,
should not distract us from a fundamental reality. If China is different,
it is also due to its deep-rooted civilization and powerful historical tra-
jectory, an aspect that tends to be overlooked or underestimated in the
West. When China is mentioned in the news, it is most often to stigma-
tize Chinese products or to aptly indict it for human rights violations.
However, we are rarely taught about China’s thousand-year-old history,
its culture, and treasures.
This disregard works both ways. On the Chinese side, it fuels a cer-
tain reverse pride mixed with incomprehension that can quickly turn into
arrogance or heightened sensitivity. Westerners, for their part, have trou-
ble understanding that the real key to the future is not in wanting to
make the Western model universal, but rather in recognizing other his-
tories that will never totally merge with ours and will always shine with
their own light.
Notes
1. Kennetz Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Mc Graw-Hill,
1979).
2. Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987).
3. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York:
Norton, 2001).
4. In December 1937, the Japanese imperial army massacred hundreds of
thousands of Chinese civilians and raped tens of thousands of women.
5. The “Conference for solidarity with the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin
America” was prepared notably by Mehdi Ben Barka, not long before his
assassination, and was held in Havana in January 1966, bringing together
over 80 delegations from the South, to proclaim its solidarity with libera-
tion movements, its support for a “world revolution,” and its hostility to
nuclear arms and imperialism.
CHAPTER 5
The Powers at Odds with History
Abstract  The world today is hostage to decolonization, marked by its

failures. The old world has been unable to accommodate the new one
within the community of so-called “civilized” nations. Yet there are
few exceptions, such as in Japan and Latin America, between 1947,
date of the independence and partitioning of India, and the last wave
of decolonization in the mid-1970s, no one knew how to open the
door to the newcomers in a suitable way. In the aftermath of the colo-
nial order, a post-colonial order was rebuilt based on trusteeship over
the recently “emancipated” states. This was the purpose of the British
Commonwealth, of the “Community” designed by General de Gaulle
in 1958, and the notorious “Françafrique.” It was overlooked that these
new states had their own histories and could not safely follow down the
Western path of nation-building… This chapter explores the concepts of
weak states and neocolonialism, how an instrumental vision of the South
developed, why the Middle East can be seen as a volcano. It also ques-
tions issues of proximity and civilizational depth, the new conflicts and
so called multi-level wars, and finally turns to the question of power, its
powerlessness, and the power of the weak.
Keywords  Neocolonialism · Weak states · Africa · Middle East

Western powers · Humiliation

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_5
76 B. BADIE
The world today is hostage to decolonization, marked by its failures.

The old world has been unable to accommodate the new one within the
community of so-called “civilized” nations. There are of course a few
exceptions, even if they are burdened with certain ambiguities, such as
in Japan and Latin America; but between 1947, date of the independ-
ence and partitioning of India, and the last wave of decolonization in
the mid-1970s, linked to the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal, no
one knew how to open the door to the newcomers in a suitable way.
No one succeeded in granting them status either, in other words an
acceptable place in the world arena other than as clients or even merce-
naries. Clientelization was the immediate natural instinct of the Western
powers. In the aftermath of the colonial order, a postcolonial order
was immediately rebuilt based on trusteeship over the recently “eman-
cipated” states. This was the purpose of the British Commonwealth,
of the “Community” designed by General de Gaulle in 1958, and the
notorious “Françafrique.” It was overlooked that these new states had
their own histories and could not safely follow down the Western path of
nation-building.
Thus they became bogged down in a series of conflictual dynamics.
First, those coming from a flaw in nation-building. States born out of
decolonization were superficially institutionalized, with little legitimacy
and not well accepted by the people they ruled over, who were not con-
sulted in any way about how they were being built. It was as if the phi-
losophy of a social contract—and nothing could be more universal—was
only applicable to Europe more or less. Deprived of organic support and
social bases, they then inevitably experienced authoritarian excesses. With
governments no longer capable of being real factors of unity, the only
mobilizing forces were based in ethnic and religious groups, creating
fragmented national communities even before they existed officially and
laying the foundations for a whole string of conflicts passed down to us
today. Development policies, decolonization’s last great weakness, failed
due to a shortage or lack of orientation. The inability to ensure a min-
imum of human security to the populations involved created a form of
economic and social frustration that soon turned endemic. All the seeds
of new conflicts were there.
5 THE POWERS AT ODDS WITH HISTORY 77
Weak States and Neocolonialism

These new conflicts were not so much linked to competition between
states, as in European history, but on the contrary to defective gov-
ernments, to a lack of institutions and the slow breakdown of socie-
ties. This perverse dynamic gathered momentum gradually. In Africa,
conflicts occurred one after the other at the dawn of independence in
1960, starting in the former Belgian Congo with the almost immediate
secession of several of its provinces and in particular Katanga. In 1967,
a whole region of Nigeria, Biafra, also seceded, leading to a bloody civil
war. Other devastating conflicts affected Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Angola, Mozambique, Chad, Rwanda, Burundi, the Ivory Coast,
Mali and the Central African Republic.
In the Middle East, the same deficiencies that struck at the forming
of the state were offset for a while by an extreme personalization of the
exercise of power, and even hero worship. Yet charismatic leaders soon
experienced all the difficulties arising from their charisma becoming rou-
tinized. As Nasser gradually began having trouble arousing the enthu-
siasm of the masses, his regime became increasingly authoritarian and
repressive. Nationalist dictatorships succeeded one another in Syria and
Iraq, sometimes in a collaborative fashion, before leading to a growing
monopolization of power by a single leader, Saddam Hussein in Baghdad
or Hafez al-Assad in Damas. To top off this deficient nation-building,
the supreme leader belonged to a minority, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in
Iraq. The situation in Iraq was complicated by a history of marginal-
izing the Shiites, considered “grade B” Iraqis, or even “affiliated with
Iran,” accumulating humiliation and resentments… Under these cir-
cumstances, far from becoming stronger as the state was reinforced, the
foundations of the social contract tended to crumble as the time of inde-
pendence faded into the past and the regime’s authoritarian excesses got
worse; particularly as these states did not succeed in offering their people
a minimum of human security. The Arab world stands out even in the
UNDP’s eyes as one of the regions where the human development index
has declined; furthermore, economic and social precariousness there is
exacerbated by the dizzying speed of poorly managed urbanization, cre-
ating many sources of tension. And yet, not only did the Western pow-
ers not help at all with state-building and national construction in both
Africa and the Middle East, but they often took advantage of that atro-
phy of state, nation, and civil societies. From their point of view, this
78 B. BADIE
made the clientelization of these countries all the easier. Indeed, there
was nothing simpler than to clientelize a leader deprived of his people’s
approval, and thus increasingly inclined to look outward, to rely on the
tools of power and the profits granted by his sponsors within the inter-
national system. There was something reassuring in the fragmentation of
nations being formed. The more weak and divided they were, the less
one risked seeing the emergence of collective mobilizations liable to turn
against the Western powers.
It was indeed in the name of this principle that the former colonial
powers thwarted the Pan-African projects driven by African nation-
alist leaders such as Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, and Barthélemy
Boganda. It was the same mindset applied by the United States in Iraq
starting in 2003, where they saw the divisions in Iraq between Shiites,
Sunnis and Kurds as an opportunity, to the point of pitting them against
each other the better to neutralize them. This led directly to the break-
ing up of the Iraqi nation-state and the constitution of the Islamic cali-
phate of Isis in northern Iraq as the last bastion of the Sunni population,
in turn excluded, humiliated and marginalized.
In Africa, the former colonial powers have often made it easier for
dictators by complacently closing their eyes to their wrongdoings, and
even promoting the personalization or imperialization of power (like in
the Central African Republic where the French government financed the
coronation of Emperor Bokassa I), and at times the dynamics of frag-
mentation, such as Belgium in Katanga or France in Biafra. At the time
of the Congo’s independence in June 1960, Lumumba’s Marxist and
nationalist orientation was perceived as a threat by the mining compa-
nies. These outside forces saw an advantage in supporting the secession-
ist endeavor in Katanga, the better to control underground resources
and shatter the new nation’s desire for autonomy. In Biafra, English-
speaking Nigeria seemed too big and potentially powerful not to thwart
French influence on the African continent. In both cases the secessions
opened up a long period of instability, war and under-institutionalization.
An Instrumental Vision of the South

The more painful decolonization was, the more it ran the risk of leading
to a fragile state of independence bound to fail. The nature of a war of
decolonization is to overmobilize the population around ideological ref-
erents that divert their leaders from the fundamental job of inventing a
new nation. For this reason, most of the great third world leaders have
been more warlords than state-crafters. The Algerian government, a
symptomatic one that arose out of a horrifying colonial war, was never
able to stabilize into a legitimate ruler. The civil war in the 1990s was
the almost automatic reaction to the tragedy of a war of independence.
Similarly, the tragic nature of the Congo’s decolonization was echoed in
a civil war that started on independence day and has never really stopped
since, despite a few short respites.
In order to truly support independence without falling back into neo-
colonialism and clientelization, it would have required accepting that
automatically importing the Western model of statehood could not be
a substitute for designing a new state. For political institutions to be
legitimate and functional, they must fit in with local historical trajecto-
ries to the greatest possible extent, and they must be designed as much
as possible with the people’s involvement. Yet totally exogenous models
were projected into African and Middle Eastern worlds that had no con-
nection to the political and social memory of the countries involved and
often even clashed headlong with their cultural foundations. Promoting
the “imported state”1 was done in the name of universalism, exalting a
bit too quickly the Western model of statehood as its most consummate
expression in the history of humanity. The “privileged relations” built up
with the former parent state had a rather harmful influence on the intro-
duction of the new states into the international system, giving credence
to the common idea today of the former power’s “special responsibility.”
This idea was often put forward by the French government to support its
interventions in the Ivory Coast (2010–2011), in Mali (2013) and in the
Central African Republic (2014). This way of perpetuating the excep-
tional character of its bonds has amounted to preserving the neocolonial
framework and contributed to atrophying the political development of
these societies.
It is true that this framework was somewhat overstretched by the
greater variety of protection and cooperation on offer. First at the initia-
tive of the Soviet Union and the socialist side which, making the most of
the Western powers’ misguided ways, was able to draw into its orbit for
a time countries such as Algeria, Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique. The
second wave of this “diversification of supply” was with the emerging
countries. The influence that Brazil, China, even India and now Turkey
have managed to wield in Africa has been perceived by the former
colonial powers as a challenge that threatens the perpetuation of their
80 B. BADIE
ascendancy. Thus, France today ponders over the best way to modify its
overseas development policies in order to resist China’s massive incur-
sions and “regain its market share.” Yet neocolonial trusteeship policies
die hard, and over fifty years after independence they keep on recurring.
Even beyond that persistence of the neocolonial framework, the Western
powers have held onto a highly instrumental vision of the South. The
Arab world, for example, is seen above all for its function as a provider of
oil, a controller of migration and, at times, as a quiet supplier of security
to the state of Israel. More generally, the perception of the South skirts
the most important issues. When, in a country like Niger, 70% of the
population is under thirty-five, logic would lead one to wonder about
the future perspectives of a society with such masses of young people
and so few jobs. These terrible demographic gaps that characterize so
many other African countries mean that a young Nigerian (and so many
others) has hardly any choice other than emigrating, with all the perils
and humiliations it entails, or the Kalashnikov-wielding child-soldiers
who at least are given food, clothing, and shelter, and have a sense of
importance that is as absurd as it is deadly. By continually ignoring this
continent in transformation and suffering from a huge deficit of human
security, the former powers are encouraging the seeds of a future trend
toward more conflicts with heavy consequences. In fact they are disre-
garding their own interests, since they run the risk of eventually seeing
that underlying violence catch up with them. Not only is Africa’s social
development absolutely necessary for these states to live peacefully and
harmoniously, but it also depends on a redistribution on a worldwide
scale and a rebalancing without which the Northern countries themselves
will be victims of that perpetual insecurity.
The Middle Eastern Volcano

Relations between the Western powers and the Middle East merit fur-
ther attention, as the region suffers from pathologies initially compa-
rable to those affecting Africa, increased by aggravating circumstances.
This could also be characterized as “failed decolonization,” even if most
of the countries in the Middle East did not have the official status of
colonies. Nevertheless, behind the euphemism of a so-called “mandate”
regime, the people in the region were victims of a system of trusteeship
that was equally oppressive and not conducive to building viable political
communities. The virulence of the Middle East’s specific ills can also be
explained by a series of sui generis factors that were not present elsewhere
in the world.
First, at the very moment when the colonial grip was loosening in
many countries in the region and elsewhere, it was paradoxically brought
back here through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The formation of
Israel, recognized by the United Nations, took place without consult-
ing the Arab populations concerned and, de facto, ignoring the rights of
the dispossessed Palestinian people, which was contrary to the new ideas
inspiring a budding multilateralism. Resolution 194 of the U.N. General
Assembly (acting as a decision-making body at the time) provided for a
right of return for Palestinian refugees, or at least for a right to com-
pensation. It was never enforced. Worse still, that controversial formation
generated a series of armed conflicts thanks to which Israel reaped ter-
ritorial conquests, giving rise to new occupations and new settlements,
both repressive and humiliating. At the very moment when the map of
Africa was gradually being freed from the institutional traces of colonial-
ism, the Middle East continued to have a direct experience of the colo-
nial issue that was all the more painful because its days were numbered.
Even though it was the result of a more complex story than traditional
European expansionism, it was like a wound that still wasn’t healed sev-
enty years later.
The second aggravating factor is naturally linked to oil. Two-thirds of
world reserves are located in the Middle East. Even if the situation has
evolved in recent years, in particular thanks to shale oil and the rebalanc-
ing of world markets, it remains that the region’s substratum contains
the least expensive crude to tap and the most useful to Western econ-
omies. All the Western powers’ strategic options—as well as China’s—
are thus overdetermined by this factor which digs the region even deeper
into the logic of instrumentalization described above.
The third source of exacerbation is the original malformation of
political systems. This curse has not only generated dictatorships in
the Middle East founded on a patrimonial concept of power, it has
also paved the way for overdevelopment and the continuity of ultra-re-
pressive institutions of control, the famous mukhabarat, hypertro-
phied intelligence services, a real governmental power until themselves.
Furthermore, these regimes armed to the teeth against their own citi-
zens have long been polarized into two sides, fueling a fierce game of
competition and hostility, while supposedly being united by certain val-
ues, Pan-Arab and Anti-Zionist first, then Pan-Islamic. On one side were
82 B. BADIE
the so-called “progressives” close to the Soviet Union, championing

socialist and nationalist orthodoxy and hyperbolic anti-Western rhetoric.
What’s more, this first set was violently divided between Nasserians and
Ba’athists, the latter in turn pitted against one another, depending on
whether they came under Iraqi or Syrian commandment… On the other
side were the traditional monarchies, not without their own ambiguities
since they combined a marked “Westernophilia” with the massive use of
religious referents that were to fuel the radical Islamist movements that
hate the West. Today we know the extent to which that ambiguity was
exacerbated in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, exposing the
incoherence and the dysfunctional nature of the Western powers’ strate-
gies for alliance and clientelization in the region.
Lastly, the fourth factor that has fueled the sui generis tension spe-
cific to Middle Eastern conflicts comes from the political mobilization
of the Islamic referent, no longer simply designed to serve the exer-
cise of power, as is the case in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia and in the Gulf
monarchies, but also to champion widespread dissent against all estab-
lished powers. This phenomenon, in gestation since the creation of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, has now become a key factor in
the Middle East that can be explained by the collapse and lack of legit-
imacy of the regimes in power, whether progressives (delegitimized by
their excessive authoritarianism) or conservatives (also decried for their
dynastic patrimonialism and dual nature as rigorist Muslims yet irre-
proachably pro-Western). Islamist dissent has a particularity that clearly
distinguishes it within the sphere of international relations: it is dou-
ble-barreled. Indeed, it aims simultaneously—but with variable emphasis
depending on phases and movements—at local regimes defined as tyran-
nical and corrupt, and at the West perceived as both ungodly, arrogant
and responsible for the region’s ills, both in taking its resources and in its
support for authoritarian powers and for Israel, which has focused all the
humiliation historically accumulated by the Arab world and the Muslim
world as a whole.
Unfortunately, the Western powers’ behavior in the region through-
out the twentieth century did not help to dispel that disastrous image.
It spawned a package of particularly explosive resentments championed
first by a string of dissenting organizations within the framework of
nationalist struggles like the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in
its early stages, the Palestinian Hamas, created in 1987, or the Lebanese
Hezbollah in place as of 1982. The escalation was then activated by real
“entrepreneurs of violence,” deterritorialized and transnationalized, such

as Al-Qaeda and even Isis which, beyond any administered territory, took
root in tentacular fashion in a number of countries in the region and
beyond, heralding a formidable mutation of dissent.
Proximity and Civilizational Depth

Lastly, there is a double aspect that overdetermines all these factors
and explains why not only the Muslim world, but more specifically the
Middle East takes on the effects of humiliation more painfully. First there
is an effect of proximity. One of the Middle East’s main features is being
located on the border of Europe and the Western world. This is not
the case with China, for instance, which has also experienced its share
of equally hurtful colonial vexations, but continues to think of itself as
the “Middle Kingdom,” relatively protected by a totally different geo-
graphical configuration. It is always more stinging to be humiliated by
one’s immediate neighbor than by one farther away. Despite past mor-
tifications, China has not experienced the same accumulation of frustra-
tions and failures, since all in all it succeeded in its state-building (during
the Maoist period), its nation-building (in the republican era, with—
then against—Japan and the West; in the post-Maoist era, under Neo-
Confucianist pressure) and its social construction (economic takeoff and
development), even if it was at the price of acute violence, flouted human
rights, ill-treated national minorities, and worse. It is easier to forget
humiliation when it hasn’t involved a political and social breakdown.
In the Middle East, however, not only was that humiliation sharp-
ened by the four factors mentioned above, but it also reached a fever
pitch from the effect of that proximity—as offensive as it was tempt-
ing—and a reality entailing a memory Westerners tend at times to for-
get: the past grandeur of the Muslim world and the persistence of its
messianic and universalist aspirations. The Middle East also sees itself as
the thousand-year-old site of three caliphates: Damascus, corresponding
to the Umayyad period, Baghdad with the Abbasids, and Cairo during
the Fatimid period. It is also a place of holy sites in Saudi Arabia, not
to mention those of the Shiite tradition, in particular Najaf and Kerbala
in Iraq, and the marks of its eschatology, with the idea of the return
of the hidden imam. This involves a mixture of imperial nostalgia and
messianic density that probably cannot be found anywhere else in the
world. Thus the particularly powerful resonance in the theme of a “clash
84 B. BADIE
of civilizations” for radical Islamists, one of whose favorite writers is

Samuel Huntington, even if they interpret it differently from his Western
followers.
New Conflicts and “Multi-level Wars”

Imperfect and unfinished policies, the atrophy of civil society, an insti-
tutional deficit and lack of legitimacy of the existing powers, a failure of
nation-building and the absence of a true social contract, pathologies
linked to deficiencies in human and social development, and a feeling of
collective humiliation… Put end to end, all these factors have shaped a
new kind of conflict that has taken the Old World by surprise. While the
West is still bogged down in a concept of conflict that dates back to the
War of the League of Augsburg or the War of the Spanish Succession, it
has been turned upside down by the shock wave of these new antago-
nisms it cannot understand and doesn’t know how to analyze. Far worse,
while they are emerging on battlefields far from its borders and as a
result of immediate endogenous causes, in addition these conflicts have
taken root with lightning speed in the heart of the Western world and
have infected its own social spheres.
It is worth repeating forcefully: these new conflicts are no longer an
expression of power, but the exact opposite. For the first time, war is no
longer the result of competing powers but proceeds entirely from weak-
ness, breakdowns, and defects. They are not like wars between nations.
The states involved are very weak, even non-existent, or in a total break-
down, like the Syrian government today, and in Iraq just before that, the
Afghan state even earlier, the Somalian government in the late 1980s,
the Congolese, Liberian and Central African governments, and even the
Malian government, a hostage of the divisions between North and South
that were not communicating and still aren’t.
To the extent that all these conflicts are no longer matters of state but
essentially matters of society, they are often “layered” or stratified and
follow superimposed rationales. They are like “multi-level wars” made of
internecine rivalries between groups belonging to the same unfinished or
failed nation-state drawn into military competition due to the disintegra-
tion of the social contract: Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq, for exam-
ple, or mixed-race Sierra Leoneans from the coast and populations native
to the interior, who live on extremely rich land from which they do not
profit. Conflicts have also been observed in which the belligerents are
targeting at the same time their immediate adversaries on the ground,

the surrounding regional powers and the West as a whole, such as in
Syria, Iraq and Mali. There is a continuity and a complex intertwining
between immediate causes that entail local considerations and deeper
causes involving the dynamics of globalization. It is clear that these con-
flicts cannot be handled by using the traditional “Clausewitzian hand-
book” and glossing over fundamental differences that contrast what is
occurring in Mali with what took place on the Marne or at Verdun at the
start of the First World War.
One of the major sources of excesses and contamination in these new
conflicts naturally comes from the dynamics of globalization, and in
particular from the lightning-fast mobility of people, images, and ideas.
Today, a conflict cannot develop anywhere without everyone knowing it.
If the receiver has affinities and feelings of solidarity for those fighting
elsewhere, it is enough to promote a powerful broadening of the field
of conflict, as can be seen for instance in the extension of the jihadist
phenomenon to Europe, transiting through active, globalized mindsets.
We know that national and cultural solidarity cannot explain everything,
since an increasingly large fraction of jihadists from France are “native-
born” French converted to a radical Islam cobbled together from dispa-
rate sources and influences, usually through social networks and bonding
among peers. The jihadist imagination has thus become more complex,
acting as an attraction for individuals who see themselves as marginal-
ized, excluded or rejected by society. Each person’s social subjectivity
is then substituted for yesterday’s impeccable citizen allegiance. It also
remains that the persistent stigmatization of people of North African ori-
gin—whom the converts, generally from modest backgrounds, often fre-
quent on a daily basis—has become an echo chamber for the turbulent
passions unfolding across the Mediterranean. Even if, luckily, there are
few of these fragilized individuals liable to act out and propagate them
through violence on European soil.
The Powerlessness of Power and the Power of the Weak

Although the Western powers continue to embrace their desire for
hegemony, or simply to defend their safety zone at odds with history,
they are however not in control of this new conflictual world where
power has become powerless, while weakness has given rise to power
to the point of destabilizing the agenda of the strongest. None of the
86 B. BADIE
new wars led by a northern power has resulted in a conclusive victory.

In these conflicts, the most powerful one does not succeed in winning,
in imposing his rules and objectives. One need only enumerate the cases
one by one, going from East to West: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia,
Libya, Central African Republic, Mali. The infinitely superior forces
from the Western countries have never truly managed to resolve these
conflicts.
There is a lesson here to think about: a cannon can destroy a can-
non, but it has no hold over societies, and even less over tatters. Cannon
diplomacy still made sense in the nineteenth century in dealing with
rebel gangs that could only carry out fleeting raids. But today’s “gangs”
are far better organized, using the know-how of entrepreneurs of vio-
lence that have real social support and solid transnational networks. In
taking on these entrepreneurs, one risks touching and activating the
nerve of that social support, itself complex, made up of dire poverty,
frustration and humiliation, but also of identifications cobbled together
and the mere effect of proximity. The Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Isis have
made the most of it. No one can forget Max Weber’s lesson: an entrepre-
neur lives for achieving his objectives; and the above live from the vio-
lence they promote.
This checkmating of power is a sharp break with the history of inter-
national relations. It remains to be seen if this relative powerlessness of
power is matched by an increased capacity of the weakest. One must be
cautious: contrary to many classic nationalist anticolonial guerillas, rarely
have models of rebellion managed to establish a lasting order or alterna-
tive governance. But is that really the goal of these new entrepreneurs
of violence? Is their objective really to succeed in forming a state or pro-
to-state? It has been said—perhaps a bit—that Isis acts like a state. This
is not entirely true. Even if Isis, contrary to Al-Qaeda, draws on many
attributes of statehood, its stated purpose remains the “caliphate,” which
is defined in reference to the entire community of believers and beyond,
but certainly not to building a territorialized state confined within bor-
ders that would be the indelible mark of its sovereignty. We must devise
new, more complex and more fluid political finalities, more concerned
with transnational mobilization than with a territorial and national para-
digm. We must get used to these forms of conflict with multiple spatial-
ization, delocalized with regard to an area of confrontation too quickly
circumscribed.
On the other hand, there is one aspect in which the power of the
weak is expressed in a more traditional way in the field of international
relations. It involves the increased ability of these “entrepreneurs of vio-
lence” to control the international agenda. The true power of the weak is
in being able to force the more powerful to remain reactive, while estab-
lishing themselves as the only truly proactive element. One need only ask
who has determined the international agenda over the past fifteen years.
Osama bin Laden during the first decade of the new century, and Abou
Bakr al-Baghdadi in the second, have probably had a more powerful
effect of change than world governments. In launching the attack against
the Twin Towers, Bin Laden shaped nearly ten years of history: almost
everything that happened then led back to strategic choices of an aging
bearded individual. This is true from a strictly political and diplomatic
point of view, and probably also in the economic arena.
It is too soon to know what the effects of al-Baghdadi’s strategy will
be, but Isis appears totally capable of defining a good part of what will be
the Western diplomatic agenda in upcoming years. In less than a week,
it has already empowered a reconciliation between the West and Putin,
while in the previous months it contributed indirectly to settling the
Iranian issue.
Note
1. Bertrand Badie, The Imported State (Stanford University Press, 2000).
CHAPTER 6
Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism,
Neonationalism
Abstract  The sharp break that began with contemporary globalization

followed the double defeat of colonization and of hegemony. The
demise of bipolarity led to the end of a protective mechanism that ena-
bled the old powers to hold onto their illusions, their privileges and
an outmoded superiority, as they still held sway over the international
agenda through the cold war and detente. Defeat on one side, disen-
gagement on the other: the new relationship to the other was becom-
ing an issue. There were three reactions to these challenges, all three
expressed through an evolving American foreign policy, grappling more
than any of the others with the uncertainties of power. These responses
were formed over the course of the last successive presidencies: con-
trolling the entire world, governing it from afar, or withdrawing into the
domain of its national interests. George W. Bush was thus the champion
of neoconservatism, Barack Obama that of neoliberalism, and Donald
Trump of neonationalism. The other powers would align themselves in
their own way with these urgently devised inventions.
Keywords  Neoconservatism · Neoliberalism · Neonationalism

United States · Foreign policy · Enemy

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_6
90 B. BADIE
Suddenly going from being alone on your home turf surrounded by

your own kind to discovering and having to deal with a diverse world
is not easy. There is probably no equivalent to that powerful transition
in world history. Most of the time history has developed in an unchang-
ing spatial framework, or nearly. The exception that comes to mind is
the opening up to the oceans during the Renaissance, which initiated a
long period of discovery and reconfiguration of space, but did not cause
a break with the past. On the contrary, the European powers could then
give free rein to their old lust for empire, first Spain and Portugal, then
England and France. The era of domination was uninterrupted, and even
expanded through a kind of continuity, revived by the certainty that the
great oceanic explorations would allow them to better control the world,
subjecting the “new” to the old, while abolishing all the conquered civi-
lizations, such as the Native Americans.
The sharp break that began with contemporary globalization is in a
totally different category. It followed the double defeat: of colonization,
which was coming to an end and collapsing in an atmosphere of resent-
ment and desire for revenge; and of hegemony, once exercised over frag-
ile worlds such as China and Brazil, but now abolished by the narrative
of emergence. The demise of bipolarity led to the end of a protective
mechanism that enabled the old powers to hold onto their illusions,
their privileges and an outmoded superiority, as they still held sway over
the international agenda through the cold war and detente. Defeat on
one side, disengagement on the other: the new relationship to the other
was becoming an issue. There were three reactions to these challenges,
all three expressed through an evolving American foreign policy, grap-
pling more than any of the others with the uncertainties of power. These
responses were formed over the course of the last successive presiden-
cies: controlling the entire world, governing it from afar, or withdrawing
into the domain of its national interests. George W. Bush was thus the
champion of neoconservatism, Barack Obama that of neoliberalism, and
Donald Trump of neonationalism. The other powers would align them-
selves in their own way with these urgently devised inventions.
The Era of Neoconservatism

Before being a policy, neoconservatism was presented as a doctrine,
probably even an ideology as it claimed to foster more than others a
total vision of the world and its history. The counterculture, championed
6 NEOCONSERVATISM, NEOLIBERALISM, NEONATIONALISM 91
by Theodore Roszack in the United States starting in the late sixties,1

meshed perfectly with the themes of cultural relativism that were blos-
soming under the effect of decolonization and globalization. The
ensuing debate quickly pitted these new visions against the comfort of
conservatism in the narrowest sense: faced with the plurality that threat-
ened to prevail, it was necessary to be assertive and proclaim loud and
clear the “eternal truth” of Western values, and thus their supremacy.
Léo Strauss2 was back in the spotlight: the first attack against globaliza-
tion was thus already underway… Its first propagator was the sociolo-
gist Irving Kristol,3 who interestingly was first involved with the left and
the Trotskyist movement, but became alarmed by the budding theme of
the counterculture which he perceived as a threat to American democ-
racy and to the values of individual effort and engagement. Seeking an
alliance between messianic Christianity and Zionism, he already fore-
saw a key point for rallying a new American foreign policy. Bipolarity
had blazed the trail. Ronald Reagan had denounced the USSR as the
Evil Empire, in other words as a subversive challenge to the American
Revolution and its values of freedom and democracy. The aim was thus
to get back to it, to reboot the old revolution and prevail over the grow-
ing Islamism, as Reagan had prevailed over Moscow.
The conversion to a reactive foreign policy was self-evident and easy.
As of 1996, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, Irving’s son, published
a noteworthy article clearly entitled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy”.4 The idea was simple. The new American policy would natu-
rally combine moral aims and national interests, mutually supportive
since they had both grown out of the American Revolution. The con-
text was favorable. The shores of unipolar illusion had already been left
behind, the American hegemon had been defied in Iraq, in Iran, in the
whole Muslim world, as well as in China and all the emerging coun-
tries, while Europe was distancing itself from the Atlantic. George H.
W. Bush had lost by continuing to think that the old realism would
triumph alone, and Bill Clinton was not succeeding at embodying the
“new world order” threatening to slip from Uncle Sam’s grasp. The idea
struck home in Washington’s diplomatic circles. It had already won over
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat turned Republican, and Reagan’s
ambassador to the United Nations, but it soon impacted the Democratic
side too, including Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s ambassador to the UN
before being appointed his Secretary of State.
92 B. BADIE
The method was simple and would become a milestone. Its defensive
purpose was hidden behind offensive resolve: far from being a handicap,
globalization was a stroke of luck for the United States in universalizing
its own values and fulfilling its biblical messianism. Although no longer
alone in the world, it possessed precisely the kind of exceptional means to
finalize its natural role as a benign leader, as described by Robert Gilpin.5
Globalization was no longer a threat but appeared henceforth as provi-
dence, with its usual secular extension: military intervention had become
the pivotal accomplishment that would lead to the true end of history
and a conclusive triumph over rival powers. Defending Western values
implied as much breaking with regimes that did not share the same con-
stitutional philosophy as backing those that practiced it, Israel first and
foremost, in the face of the Arab and Muslim world. The rest was seen
as a minefield: compromises, realpolitik, multilateralism were part of the
culpable diplomacy that had failed with Carter and his successors. The
old idea of a “vital center,” forged at the beginning of the Cold War by
Arthur Schlesinger,6 came back in force as the inevitable thought forever
rooting the United States and its ideal of freedom at the center of the
world: losing was not an option!
In fact, the 9/11 attacks rebuilt that philosophy in a stance that was
more defensive than offensive at first. The new enemy was no longer the
Evil Empire, which had to be contained, then defeated. Now it was a
known force of evil—profoundly different and asymmetrical—which
for the first time in history had attacked America on its own territory,
on its sacred ground. It was therefore necessary to defend oneself and,
along with this defensive drive, to denounce a vision of the world from
elsewhere, from outside the European and Christian wellspring that was
still that of old Russia made over in the colors of atheistic Marxism, but
of Western extraction. This could only lead to a forced radicalization
enhanced by an even more religious discourse, since the target was an
opposing religion. Israel embodied the heart of this struggle even more
so since the biblical messianism of the Protestant faith found its natural
path in turning back to a Jerusalem that had to be reconquered.
Globalization was thus beginning to take the shape of a military obli-
gation. The main dogma of neoconservatism was as if providentially val-
idated. The universalization of American values was bound up with the
most basic American national interests, since only a world made in the
image of the United States creed could guarantee the safety of those
interests. Alterity was more dangerous than ever. It was like reliving the
story that told the distant origins of neoconservative philosophy. The

method was obvious. Saddam Hussein had to be beaten, not only for
the good of his people and the flourishing of freedom and democracy,
but also to protect the security of the United States and, incidentally, of
the free world. If linking the two ideas was not credible enough, then a
vial of anthrax was invented and waved in front of the Security Council
to prove the reality of the Iraqi dictator’s chemical weapons program. In
this way, a creed was laid out that would be hard to erase: the rhetori-
cal—although it was seen as indisputable—association between protect-
ing values and protecting the national security of the old powers. Nicolas
Sarkozy and his successors in the Elysée Palace would again take up this
axiom as the only possible validation of a strategy whose neoconservative
paternity was now clear (see the following chapter).
However, the strategic debate soon raged. The implications were as
obvious as they were questionable. The world had to be remade through
“regime change” and “transformational diplomacy,” the starting point
had to be the “Greater Middle East” since it was the crater of the world
(as the Sahel would be later for France), the use of force was necessary
since national security was involved, and it would be carried out through
military intervention, Israel’s defense being an extension both morally
and strategically of those choices, whatever the (temporal, not biblical)
rights of the Palestinians. Two lines of criticism were honed in the face
of these theories. On the one hand, that of the realists, and on the other,
critical thinking. The former started from a correct observation that had
escaped the neoconservatives: the danger was no longer coming from an
enemy state, but on the contrary from the decline of state institutions.
That vision, dear to Henry Kissinger, as well as to John Mearsheimer,7
therefore had to lead to dealing with states, even authoritarian ones,
in order to rebuild the balance of power, which remained the realists’
constant objective. Thus their severe criticism of the American interven-
tion in Iraq in 2003, then of the one in 2011 in Libya. Critical thinking
went beyond that. Starting from a sociological vision of globalization,
it rejected the idea that, in a plural world, collective security could be
conceived solely from the forced projection of the old powers’ rep-
resentation of their national security. Adopting the idea of human secu-
rity developed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
seemed more compelling and rejected the idea of the use of force as a
cure-all.
94 B. BADIE
And yet neoconservatism was a success. Its appeal for the elites run-
ning the regimes that came out of the Soviet bloc is easy to understand,
as they saw the lack of transformational diplomacy as something they
had suffered from during the Cold War. The others that rallied to the
cause were more uncertain. Tony Blair took decisive steps toward neo-
conservatism very early on, before George W. Bush was even president.
The British Prime Minister’s speech in Chicago on April 22, 1999 high-
lighted in particular the new emphasis that had to be put on “values”
and “principles,” even beyond national interests. At the same time, the
whole debate following his alignment with Bush during the Iraq War
revolved around the lies he had drummed into the British people to con-
ceal his motives for regime change, which he didn’t dare utter, behind
arguments about the United Kingdom’s national interests. This una-
vowed neoconservatism could perhaps also be seen in the Spaniard Jose-
Maria Aznar, although he denied it, provocatively claiming that he had
never been a leftist during his youth, contrary to the almost required
step it was for many American neocons.8 It remains that the latter read-
ily aligned themselves with the Spanish People’s Party’s foreign policy
and that Falangist and Christian references from the head of the Spanish
government could only help things. On the other hand, with regard to
politicians like Berlusconi in Italy and Barroso in Portugal, it is more
appropriate to look for Atlantist and diplomatically opportunist motives
rather than labeling them with a neoconservative vocation they never
had.
In fact it was in Stephen Harper’s Canada, and especially in France
(see the following chapter) that the neoconservative movement gained
ground. Paradoxically, it was after it had failed in the United States that
it began to succeed elsewhere … When Barack Obama came to power
in the November 2008 elections, it opened up a new perspective, the
opposite of the other one, a very different response to the old Manifest
Destiny.
A Time for Neoliberalism
Barack Obama’s election reflected a clear rejection of neoconserv-
ative politics by American voters. The Iraq campaign proved costly
and appeared to be a failure, the source of new woes and deadlocks.
The Democratic candidate was emblematic from that standpoint, as he
had always been opposed to intervention, at a time when many other
Democratic elected officials thought they should exercise caution, or

even blind conformity, like Hillary Clinton herself. The new president
was not a theorist, even though he clearly had a vision of the world that
took into account transformations that had occurred. Although he could
not say so too loudly, he knew that the time for leadership—benign or
not—was past, not only for the United States but for anyone seeking
hegemony, which was not in tune with globalization.
His option of a renewed liberalism seemed a default choice, inevitable
when power—more precisely hard power—no longer worked. After the
“jackboot Wilsonianism” described by Pierre Hassner, there was a desire
to “recivilize” Woodrow Wilson.9 One could even see a return to the
founding virtues, as they had been much in the light, although updated.
There was a hint of Grotius and John Stuart Mill in the idea of rebuild-
ing alterity, but the Cairo speech (June 2009) went about it in a univer-
sal way this time, bringing the non-Western sphere into this new world
of plurality.
I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and
Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual
respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not
exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share
common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the
dignity of all human beings.10
In diametrical opposition to the neocons’ messianic and fundamental-

ist Christian postulates, this liberal pluralism explicitly integrated Islam,
a new approach for an American President. But liberal logic went even
further, putting soft power before a weakened hard power. The latter was
already doomed in favor of the former in the aftermath of the defeat
in Vietnam (April 30, 1975), but at the initiative of the liberal intellec-
tual Joseph Nye: this time it was the head of the American executive
branch speaking, echoing an updated expression of that shift, delivered
by Suzanne Nossel, a figure who later on made a significant switch to
humanitarian aid, for Human Rights Watch and who coined the concept
of “smart power”: a power must use force when necessary, but it should
favor influence and voluntary consent.
On the ground, there was indeed a totally new policy. No longer
being alone in the world meant less military intervention, more diplo-
macy, and resorting to compromise, even if it involved negotiating with
96 B. BADIE
governments that did not correspond to the American ideal. Obama thus
began secret negotiations with Iran in Oman starting in 2013, while
Mahmoud Ahmadinejâd was still in power in Teheran. He made a deal
with Russia in the summer of 2013, agreeing to negotiate on chemical
disarmament in Syria, even though he had declared that the use of chem-
ical weapons would trigger an immediate American reprisal. He showed
restraint regarding the North Korean nuclear tests in the spring of 2013.
He halfheartedly agreed to take part in a coalition intervening in Libya,
but only after a mandate given by the Security Council (UNSCR 1973,
March 2011). Moreover, he quickly distanced himself from it, even crit-
icizing it openly in the famous interview in The Atlantic in April 2016.11
Repeating at the time that, “he was proud of not striking Assad,” Obama
was offering a lesson in neoliberal foreign policy and even more. He was
presenting aspects of a liberal response to globalization. The use of force
did not go away, but it was now carried out more quietly, outside the
codes of traditional hegemony. There were drones for that. While there
was still leadership, it was relatively low-key, through the intermedi-
ary of local powers (leadership from behind) without imposing regime
change (light footprints). Neoliberalism was more concerned with advo-
cating pluralism and alterity than the universalization of Western values.
This was the exact same hesitancy expressed by John Stuart Mill when
faced with the contradictions inherent in any foreign intervention, which
might be responding to humanitarian needs but were often equally
reductive of others’ freedoms.12
These options inevitably brought things back to the economy and the
search for a form of hegemony founded on it. This type of soft power
was in fact hidden behind the updated dogma of free trade, already
very much present in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Officially, it
was going back to the old liberal Ricardian principle according to which
any reinforcing of trade will be to everyone’s benefit. There can be little
doubt however that it was also a peaceful way of strengthening the fal-
tering preeminence of the United States and was unquestionably a deci-
sive element in Barack Obama’s neoliberal strategy. This was reflected in
the President’s efforts in that direction as soon as he was in the White
House, promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) start-
ing in 2008. The agreement was meant to activate trade between several
countries on both sides of the Pacific and to be the cornerstone of the
United States’ strategic reorientation toward East Asia. One could see
the TPP first of all as the means chosen by Washington to stem China’s
rising capability, but also to establish America’s corporations as all-pow-

erful in dealing with the region’s other nations. The treaty was ultimately
signed in February 2016 at the very end of Obama’s term, then impor-
tantly was revoked by Donald Trump two days after his inauguration.
The latter had no qualms about referring to the treaty as a “violation”
and strongly condemning the risk of outsourcing to Asia and the loss of
jobs in the United States. It was liberalism versus nationalism.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) fol-
lowed the same equation. Although the draft agreement was initiated
by George W. Bush at the end of his second term, it was actively and
firmly supported by Barack Obama throughout his presidency with a real
chance of succeeding, despite the strong backlash that developed on the
Old Continent. Interestingly, the Democratic side was divided within
itself about the agreement, and Hillary Clinton was not sparing in her
criticism of it throughout her unfortunate electoral campaign, echoing
Donald Trump in that stance. A sort of triangular game then began to
take shape between Obama’s liberalism, Trump’s nationalism and the
Democratic candidate’s different sensibility that was actually closer to the
neoconservative choices than to the outgoing President’s liberal audac-
ity. The Republican—on the verge of winning—was clear in his oppo-
sition. To his resolute nationalism he added an avowed preference for
bilateral accords and shelving multilateralism. No longer being alone in the
world would not involve institutionalizing an international community,
but rather containing one by one the newcomers on the world scene by
using the asymmetrical subtleties of reactivated bilateralism.
Obama’s “civilized Wilsonianism” was indeed meant to mark
American diplomacy’s renewed emphasis on multilateralism, but also the
government’s fast-track conversion to taking on duties that were becom-
ing more economic than military, such as had been suggested in Philip
Cerny’s analyses of the “competition State” paving the way for a new
post-hegemonic model for neoliberal governance,13 and even the “mar-
ket State” already heralded by Philip Bobbitt. These remarkable conver-
sions, understood as a reaction to a crisis of hegemony, were intended
to sanction a real break if taken to their logical conclusion. Nonetheless,
it is not certain that they provided a complete response to the challenge
posed by a world in which the powerful were no longer alone nor merely
among their own kind. Relinquishing hard power and recognizing a plu-
ral world were responses to this observation: liberalism’s economic gam-
ble was already less compelling.
98 B. BADIE
But the setbacks incurred by Barack Obama stemmed from a com-

pletely different facet. Few of his allies followed him in a forthright
manner down that path. As we will see, successive French Presidents
preferred a return to neoconservatism. Great Britain, turning its back
on the latter after its Iraqi disappointments, did however embark on the
Libyan operation, while following Obama in his cautious stance regard-
ing the Syrian conflict. Above all, it opted for a neonationalist reaction
in endorsing Brexit in 2016, to Donald Trump’s great satisfaction, even
though it faint-heartedly banked on a “Global Great Britain” that soon
proved to be short-lived. Most of the countries in Central and Eastern
Europe, while remaining clearly pro-European according to opinion
polls, were perfectly comfortable with the same neonationalist rheto-
ric. Perhaps only Germany, which had deliberately chosen the economic
option and abandoned any—still taboo—military desires, seemed to con-
tinue riding on Obama’s coattails.
A Time for Neonationalism
Donald Trump’s election in November 2016 openly displayed a third
response to this expanding world, based this time on a neonationalist sys-
tem already firmly established in several countries on the Old Continent.
First, in the form of a political movement that challenged the powers
that be more than replacing them. The Austrian FPO (Freedom Party
of Austria) had a brief experience working with the government in 2002,
and certain groups with similar origins became part of the government in
several Scandinavian countries, but neither the French “National Front,”
the Dutch “Party for Freedom” (PVV), nor the Italian “Five Star”
movement was able to win the elections, beyond their ability to vocif-
erously coordinate their movement. On the other hand, the latter was
quicker to make headway in Central and Eastern Europe. Fidesz came
to power in Hungary on a clearly neonationalist orientation starting in
2010, while “Law and Justice” followed suit in Poland in 2015. This
neonationalism even spread outside the Old World, following somewhat
different doctrinal orientations there. Consider Vladimir Putin in Russia,
Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recip Tayyep Erdogan in Turkey,
and Narendra Modi in India.
The themes developed by Donald Trump give an idea of this politi-
cal and strategic orientation and its stance vis-a-vis the world and oth-
ers. The central idea was a return to national interests. Globalization
was only acceptable if it contributed to American interests, and the latter

shaped the conditions under which the United States would engage in
globalism. It was not a matter of isolationism, because foreign actions
could prove beneficial and in any event help foster America’s pres-
tige and power; but neither did it involve neoconservatism, because it
was no longer a matter of converting the world into one’s image, nor
of neoliberalism, for economic globalization tended all too often to sub-
vert American interests in favor of “upstart” economies. It was a com-
bination of wanting to rule the world for one’s own uses, and to protest
against its excesses in order ultimately to thwart even some overly liberal
orientations.
This manipulative—quite cynical and clearly selfish—vision of glo-
balization was endorsed by a large portion of the American electorate,
which probably decided Trump’s victory by rejecting intervention-
ism as too costly, while dreaming of remaining the world’s number one
power; and by campaigning for US world supremacy while thinking that
an overly open economy was harmful to the little guy and the middle
class, particularly to the American heartland, to its aging industries and
traditional working class. That America, sensitive to and worried about
decadence theories, was quick to give into “poor white” fantasies about
immigrants and, increasingly, “dechristianization,” naturally driven by
Islam, while China remained the active agent in a newly dangerous and
perhaps adverse free trade. Thus the superpower reversed course. After
promoting globalization, it became somewhat of a force of protest
against it, building a rampart that viewed globalization suspiciously, with
a protectionist intent and a desire to separate what was in the interests
of the United States from what on the contrary had to be fought and
contained.
In other words, the nationalism that was emerging and spreading
virtually everywhere was not a carbon copy of the old nationalism that
surfaced in the late eighteenth century and was achieved in the follow-
ing century. That nationalism was first of all triumphant and granted
rights. Its history in Europe was associated with the challenge to absolut-
ism and the invention of “national sovereignty” fostered by the French
Revolution. It was also brought up to date through the struggle against
imperial hegemonism, in America and in Europe where the “principle of
nationality” clearly signified emancipation and liberation. The final phase
of that same orientation occurred when nationalism became anticolonial,
giving birth to new nations. The neonationalism taking shape here was
100 B. BADIE
a complete break with this practice of obtaining rights. On the contrary,

it readily deprived people of their rights: migrants, foreigners, and eth-
nic, religious and sexual minorities. It was a form of isolation, of closing
oneself off, that preferred walls, barbed wire, and borders; it reconnected
with supremacism, highlighting “roots,” “descent,” and “being in one’s
own country.” From this perspective, no longer being alone in the world
meant first and foremost protecting oneself from others, locking one’s
door, and not trying to understand alterity.
At the same time, the old nationalism that provided rights is not dead,
but its mutation has not occurred in a uniform manner. It is still there,
wherever emancipation has not run its course, like the Palestinian people
who remain one of the last vestiges of an anticolonial struggle that is not
completely over. This historical nationalism has even been reincarnated
through globalization, triggering new pro-independence urges in those it
disconnected from their original country of allegiance, such as Scotland
or Catalonia. It is no longer a question of anticolonialism, but rather of
redesigning social contracts, of searching for a new liberal equilibrium
between the local and national, a new way of engaging in globalization,
highlighting the direct link between the worldwide and the local and dis-
tancing oneself from the state-centric.
Faced with this emancipation-driven nationalism, a protection-driven
neonationalism has also surfaced, common within political systems that
have been subjected to various forms of domination and are using their
emerging abilities toward active containment of any attempt to reduce
their acquired or restored sovereignty. Generally speaking, this type of
nationalism is frequent in formerly colonized states, but it can be seen
above all as the banner of foreign policy for the emerging powers such
as China, Brazil, and India who are trying in this way to combine an
unconcealed openness toward globalization with a strict reaffirmation of
their sovereignty.14 In dealing with others, they therefore fully acknowl-
edge their identity, with messianist intentions aimed at converting those
outside their own country to their vision of the world.
Concurrently, there is a growing revenge-driven neonationalism within
this globalized sphere that is quick to check the narrative of hegemony
while turning humiliation into a nearly everyday diplomatic practice.15
In this sort of arrangement, rank often counts for more than an uncer-
tain power, and relegation has created a strategic desire for revenge.
What emerged in Germany following the Versailles Peace Treaty, to
which Berlin was not even invited, has now become common diplomatic
currency. Relations with others have thus become articulated through a

complex game of induced humiliation and humiliation suffered, which
standard categories in international relations theory—growing directly
out of a narrow vision of power politics—are unable to take into
account. In terms of established alterity, the result is naturally negative.
The revanchism it inspires is a dangerous way to respond to an open
world.
Russia’s position in the international system was considerably weak-
ened by the combined effect of the demise of bipolarity, from which
it had greatly benefited, and globalization, which marginalized it. The
Western side, its existence thus preserved, chose to use that advantage to
further marginalize Russia during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. They thus
ran the risk of fostering a desire—if not of revenge, of a return to the
past anyway—both within Russian public opinion and among former
cadres from the once omnipresent USSR. Vladimir Putin epitomized this
stance, already foreshadowed by a figure like Yevgeny Primakov who had
preceded him as head of the Russian government and, two years prior
to that, had replaced the pro-Western Andrei Kozyrev as foreign minis-
ter. Primakov represented a transition. Less willing to give into the West,
he picked up the thread of Russian dreams of empire, particularly in the
Middle East, but at the same time remained attached to multilateralism
as a means of reviving Russian power. As for Putin, he would exemplify
revenge-driven nationalism. More indifferent than hostile toward glo-
balization—not his main focus—he has tended to respond to transforma-
tions in the world with a highly conservative revanchism. Ukraine, Syria
and the Caucasus remain pawns on a chessboard that has emerged intact
from the remnants of the Vienna Congress.
This temptation is shared by all who fear they are regressing. It is the
case for most of the old Western powers, even if they are driven more
by a desire to return to the past than by revenge, which the West does
not really see the relevance of. The desire to “get back in the game” of
successive French governments, piqued when France was not included
in the handling of the Syrian drama, comes under this category. It surely
won’t help anyone emulating it to become more engaged in a complex
world—where partnership is more important than presence, and the
need for acknowledgement of local actors should take precedence over
that of asserting one’s own ascendancy.
Yet it is unquestionably inward-looking and closed neonationalism that
is predominant and is weighing most heavily on the evolution of the
102 B. BADIE
international system. Reflecting an otherness conceived as completely

exterior and calling for a total walling off to protect oneself, this stance
is thus contrary to history. It reacts to a world shaped by the technology
of exchange by closing off; it responds to a mobile world by champi-
oning a sedentary attitude; it answers an international system more than
ever made up of plurality with “roots,” identity, and “ethnic purity.”
The Western world’s inability to see immigration in a positive light is
emblematic. When world governance of human mobility is called for, the
Western powers are stuck in a cycle of repression as costly as it is deathly.
They even pride themselves on it, as can be seen in an edifying photo-
graph of the Danish immigration minister posing in front of a huge cake
celebrating the fiftieth measure taken by her government against the
unfortunate immigrants.16
Behind this neonationalism promoting withdrawal and isolation from
the world, exalting identity remains the only possible narrative, imper-
ceptibly transforming that option into an ethnonationalism no longer
full of rights but rather depriving people of them. The reactivation of
borders is its necessary corollary, those outside Schengen, but increas-
ingly also those inside it; or again the border between the United
States and Mexico, or those that herd the Palestinians into reservations
that are even more cramped than the Territories they were granted.
Protectionism, national preference, exclusion of citizens from countries
that are suspect due to being Muslim: the list would be even longer if it
included all the measures taken or envisaged. “We are no longer alone in
the world, so let’s close ourselves off” is the infinitely risky, war-foment-
ing stance that emerges.
Of these three developments, the first has shown that it produced
no successes and was one of the costliest, while the third clearly goes
against history. More oppositional to change than truly programmatic, it
offers no solutions to the challenges posed by the scope and urgency of
properly managing humanity’s shared resources. Quite to the contrary,
Donald Trump’s attitude toward the issue of global warming proves
neonationalism’s inability to accomplish the agenda of world governance.
The same is true for human security, as well as everything dealing with
the regulation of the world economy.
Is neoliberalism therefore the only path left? Its successes are long
overdue, both in terms of economic regulation and development. It has
the advantage over the other two options of not denying world transfor-
mations and of offering an analysis of them that is more lucid, although
often partial and not updated often enough. As with the other two, its
main limit is remaining deaf to intersociality and to globalization’s pow-
erful quality of freeing up the dynamics of societies, taking stock of the
oppressive and dangerous social inequality in the world, as well as human
insecurity, of creating new social expectations that are now supportive of
a globalized mindscape driving everyone.17 That is the new challenge of
a story that is endlessly beginning.
Notes
1. Theodore Roszack, The Making of a Counter Culture. Reflections on the
Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (University of California
Press, 1969).
2. Robert B. Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” Political Theory
20, no. 3 (August 1992): 448–472.
3. Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York:
Free Press, 1995).
4. See William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 1996, available at: https://www.for-
eignaffairs.com/articles/1996-07-01/toward-neo-reaganite-foreign-policy.
5. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981).
6. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
7. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY:
W.W. Norton, 2001).
8. Niels Lachmann, “Présence neo-conservatrice en Espagne: la fin d’une
influence?,” Critique internationale, no. 43 (2009): 133–150.
9. Pierre Hassner, Les Etats-Unis: l’empire de la force ou la force de l’empire?
(Paris: Les Cahiers de Chaillot, 2002).
10. “Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo,” available at: http://www.nytimes.
com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html (accessed January
11, 2018).
11. See Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine. The U.S. President Talks
Through His Hardest Decisions about America’s Role in the World,”
The Atlantic, April 2016, available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/
magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/.
12. John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-intervention,” in Essays on
Equality, Law and Education, ed. J.S. Mill (London: Routledge, 1984).
104 B. BADIE
13. Philip Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of

Political Globalization,” Government and Opposition 32, no. 2 (April
1997): 251–274.
14. Delphine Allès and Bertrand Badie, “Sovereigntism in the International
System: From Change to Split,” European Review of International Studies
2, no. 3 (2016): 5–20.
15. Bertrand Badie, Humiliation in International Relations, A Pathology of
Contemporary International Systems (Oxford: Hart Publisher; Portland:
Bloomsbury, 2017).
16. The picture is available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/
europe/danish-integration-minister-inger-st-jberg-furious-backlash-cele-
brating-tougher-immigration-laws-a7632161.html.
17. Bertrand Badie, “When History Begins,” European Review of
International Studies 2 (Summer 2014): 3–16.
CHAPTER 7
France, from Thwarted Ambitions to the

Challenges of Alterity
Abstract  France was a great power, but that assertion should be

explained through a story that must be grasped in all its complexity.
First, France was a power at a time when that notion was still imbued
with its full meaning. There is a certain synchrony between the central
role played by this country since the end of the Middle Ages and the
rise of the notion of power as an organizing principle of the international
system. It is clear, however, that at the end of the First World War there
was a break in France’s international relations and its place in the con-
cert of nations. This final chapter will discuss the notions of power and
grandeur, European leadership, Gaullism, postcolonialism and the dilem-
mas and options of a mid-level power. The author then explores France’s
turnaround and neoconservatism, before questioning the country’s
capacity to step outside of itself and look beyond November 13th.
Keywords  France · Power · Leadership · Europe · Postcolonialism

Gaullism
France was a great power, but that assertion should be explained through
a story that must be grasped in all its complexity. First, France was a
power at a time when that notion was still imbued with its full mean-
ing. There is a certain synchrony between the central role played by this
country since the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of the notion

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_7
106 B. BADIE
of power as an organizing principle of the international system. Thus,

there is nothing surprising about the idea of power in the international
relations arena still being associated in an emblematic way with names
such as Louis XIV and Napoleon. It is clear, however, that at the end of
the First World War there was a break in France’s international relations
and its place in the concert of nations. Until then, it was as if imper-
meable to the effects of defeat. And yet it had lost several wars in the
modern era, and the Napoleonic saga had ended in the major rout at
Waterloo, a name that has remained proverbial. However, even the col-
lapse of the First Empire had no irremediable consequences on France’s
role throughout the nineteenth century. To be sure, the outcome of
the Napoleonic wars mainly benefited Great Britain, but the latter drew
its power above all from its control of the seas, of European and world
trade; it had managed to convert policies that were initially quite pro-
tectionist into free trade, from which it profited at least until 1914. If
British hegemony was never absolute in the nineteenth century, it is
among other things because its neighbor across the Channel had indeed
retained a good deal of its power.
From Power to “Grandeur”

Things began to change right after the First World War. Naturally
because France emerged from it exhausted, but also because it gradu-
ally underwent the first shocks of the globalization process which it was
never really able to control and which coincided with the first instances
of its colonial empire being destabilized. France, too marked by univer-
salism and republican messianism, was not able to deal with the demands
of the alterity emerging from other parts of the world.
The most serious blow was of course dealt by the Second World War.
General de Gaulle was prescient about it. He quickly understood that a
defeated France was no longer a first-rate power, and he also foretold
that this break was occurring at a time when the very notion of power
had a new meaning. Perceiving these changes, de Gaulle tried to con-
vert that weakened power into a “grandeur” that would be expressed
more on a qualitative than on a quantitative level. The foreign policy he
inaugurated with the Fifth Republic is very significant with regard to this
new intention. Its major symbols were the conspicuous reinforcement
of national sovereignty, the choice of displaying an independent foreign
7 FRANCE, FROM THWARTED AMBITIONS TO THE CHALLENGES OF ALTERITY 107
policy, notably regarding security and defense, and distancing itself from
the two blocs, in particular its American big brother.
This new orientation was also evident in the reorientation of a for-
eign policy henceforth in search of new sources of prestige and influ-
ence. The Fifth Republic’s international positioning starting in 1959
was therefore based on a triple strategy: recovering its status in part by
building a policy of influence and cooperation with the South, aiming
at the diplomatic leadership of a budding Europe, developing its own
rights through multilateralism. It is remarkable to observe how General
de Gaulle was the first to understand that the future of international rela-
tions was no longer to be found in the relative immobilism of East-West
relations but in the rich and fluctuating uncertainties of North–South
relations. His vision of the little Europe that was being built was also that
of an intensifier of grandeur: France was the only possible candidate to
develop a global foreign policy for a Europe of the Six. Neither Germany
nor Italy, defeated in a conflict that had just ended, were eligible. The
Fouchet Plan (November 1961–January 1962) attests to Gaullist hopes
for a measured political construction of the new European ensemble.
The third axe had to fit into the framework of diplomatic multilateral-
ism. It had trouble getting established due to the colonial issue blocking
France’s actions in the United Nations at the start of the Fifth Republic.
Later, that vision gained momentum. France no longer had the critical
size to act alone, but was ambitious enough to be a top player among
those intending to impose their weight together. The idea turned out to
be a tenacious one.
The following is a brief overview of these three orientations. The issue
of relations with the South expressed a certain Gaullist intuition that was
betting over time on the collapse of bipolarity. It involved a string of new
orientations. First, the need to accelerate decolonization by putting an
end to the Algerian War and ushering in the independence of its African
colonies in a new grouping, the “Community,” intended to preserve
“French grandeur” after independence no longer as a colonial power
but as a guardian of the French-speaking world. Three more initiatives
followed. First, a reconciliation with the Arab world from which France
had been separated, notably since the Suez adventure (1956) and the
Algerian War. It was promoted by a noticeable evolution in French poli-
cies with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, implemented in particular by
the highly critical positions with respect to Israel taken by de Gaulle at
the time of the Six Day War in 1967. In its aftermath there was a whole
108 B. BADIE
series of official visits, contacts, and rapprochements with the region’s

leaders. We know now that de Gaulle was planning to meet with Nasser,
who was France’s former sworn enemy, but whose individual preferences
and certain of his political and ideological orientations would not leave
the head of the French government indifferent: nationalism, anti-Amer-
icanism, projecting charismatic leadership both inside his own country
and in the international diplomatic arena.
In its second remarkable initiative, Paris recognized the People’s
Republic of China in 1964 and broke off relations with Taiwan. Here
was a new sign of demarcation with regard to the United States, but
above all an opening toward Asia and a country that General de Gaulle
sensed was destined to play an important role on the world stage.
Lastly, from September 21 to October 16, 1964, the president of the
Fifth Republic went on a three-week trip that took him successively to
ten South American countries. It was both an indirect challenge to the
United States and an acknowledgment of the actors from the new South
whom he believed was destined to occupy a rank that would have to be
reckoned with. De Gaulle thus anticipated the emergence of the most
important of those countries, notably Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, the
latter having been particularly highlighted by the French head of state
on another trip six months earlier where he had proclaimed in Spanish:
“Marchamos la mano en la mano” (“We are marching hand in hand”).
France was the first Western country to have resolutely “Southern” poli-
cies. It was a powerful inspiration: after early hesitations, alterity seemed
to have been understood.
In Search of European Leadership

The European question was of course totally different in nature.
On a cultural level, de Gaulle was a nationalist not very inclined to
take any interest in phenomena involving supranational integration.
His Europeanism was therefore essentially pragmatic. Contrary to
Clemenceau’s option in 1919 of dangerously advocating a total break-off
with Germany, which it had to severely punished, de Gaulle knew that
Franco-German reconciliation was doubly necessary on the level of peace
and of Europe’s economic reconstruction which could not happen, in his
mind, without German coal.
This “little Europe” could be the basis for French leadership upon
two conditions. On the one hand, it had to avoid going too far in
conceding sovereignty, thus the General’s hostility to the European

Defense Community proposed in 1950 by René Pleven, ready to be
signed two years later, supported by the United States, but rejected by
the French Parliament on August 30, 1954, at the initiative notably of
the Gaullists and Communists. In constructing Europe as a “pool of sov-
ereignties” remaining largely intact,1 France could hope to enjoy a sub-
stantial advantage over its five partners and have decisive influence over
most issues, as long as Atlantic pressure would decrease. But, in order to
reach that goal, it was important for Great Britain not to enter Europe
too soon, given that its integration risked interfering with and weaken-
ing French leadership. General de Gaulle’s calculation made sense. One
may indeed consider that, in terms of foreign policy, France gradually
imposed its leadership on Europe as detente was established, practically
until its enlargement in 2004.
There remained the issue of multilateralism. France had a difficult
time in 1945 obtaining a seat as a permanent member of the Security
Council, where it could exercise its veto power. That privileged position
too within multilateral organizations could serve as the basis for estab-
lishing a foreign policy that was independent and concerned with its
grandeur. But de Gaulle never really accepted or assimilated the operative
logic of what he condescendingly called that “thing.” Furthermore, he
was highly irritated by the United Nations General Assembly’s aggressive
positions on the colonial question—aimed among others at the French
Empire—and he understood full well that in the climate of the Cold War
that organization was dominated, and in any case constrained by the
American-Soviet dyarchy. However, we know today that near the end of
his second term as president, he came to a more nuanced position. Some
even claimed that he had thought for the first time about pronounc-
ing a major speech in front of the United Nations General Assembly in
September 1969.
Toward Gaullism Without de Gaulle

In summary, the Fifth Republic’s foreign policy clearly exhibited three
fundamental postulates. First, France was now too weak to go it alone
in the international arena, but too strong to step aside and occupy a
subordinate position: an ordinary dilemma for any middle-sized power.
The three cards—multilateral, European, and “southern”—were thus
designed to ensure the status and influence to which its leaders aspired.
110 B. BADIE
Second, these kinds of associations only made sense in de Gaulle’s mind

if they came with a solid policy of independence and sovereignty, even if
it was essentially declaratory. The speed with which the General endowed
France with nuclear weapons is its clearest expression. The initiative
embodied that desire for independence all the more because, contrary
to Great Britain, France had built its nuclear arsenal alone, without help
from the United States. The choice was more symbolic than realistic, but
with respect to grandeur, a symbol counts for something and is at the
least a language and a type of embodiment of status. In this new world,
status was indeed beginning to prevail over power, the clear sign of a
new era.
Finally, as a logical consequence of the first two postulates, this policy
became the counterpoint to the bipolarity de Gaulle was trying to get
free of, within the limits allowed him by the very nature of the “side-tak-
ing” system. Thus his exit from the NATO integrated command struc-
ture in March 1966, but also the policy of dialogue and opening up to
the Soviet Union, which de Gaulle continued to call “Russia” to high-
light its continuity with a much older history. To which one may add
a series of positions at odds with the established order, whether it was
the famous speech in Phnom Penh on the Vietnam War (September 1,
1966), or the “Québec libre” speech (Montreal, July 24, 1967), the sol-
idarity exhibited for Biafra, and his refusal to participate in the United
Nations intervention in the Congo. Whenever possible, de Gaulle
marked his differences, even though in situations of direct East-West
confrontations (tensions around Berlin, the Cuban crisis) he returned
to channels of Atlantic and Western solidarity. It was on the basis of
that Gaullist legacy that France was long able to preserve its image in
the world, particularly in countries in the South, as a country from the
North that was different from the others. Although it was only symbolic,
that approach in all likelihood marked a strong break with its very recent
past.
This legacy was so strong that de Gaulle’s successors seemed paralyzed
by it. Each of them had good reason to want to abandon that foreign
policy model, but they all ended up complying, with a few compro-
mises. Georges Pompidou, far more “moderate” in this regard than his
predecessor, perpetuated de Gaulle’s foreign policy while bending it a
bit in a more European direction, in particular by opening the door to
Great Britain. But at the time of the Arab-Israeli War in October 1973,
France’s posture showed itself to be exactly the same as in 1967. Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing did not belong strictly speaking to the Gaullist move-
ment. His image was more that of a liberal conservative, more open to
the Atlantic world, while also being far closer to Israel, which he had
supported, marking his difference with de Gaulle in 1967. And yet,
he championed a foreign policy that was almost the same. On Israeli-
Palestinian affairs his positions soon disappointed Tel Aviv, notably when
he climbed Mount Nebo to look at the occupied territories through bin-
oculars from Jordan and thus show France’s support for the Arab world
and more particularly the Palestinians.
In 1981, François Mitterrand, an old enemy of de Gaulle, came to
power. The socialist leader had once voted against France’s withdrawal
from the integrated command structure of NATO. As a political figure
he was very tied to the Atlantist sensibility of the 4th Republic. He was
known to be a friend of Israel and had constantly taken positions for the
state of Israel against its enemies. Yet he in turn aligned himself with the
Gaullist legacy, perhaps in part under pressure from certain figures in his
entourage occupying key diplomatic posts. Thus, Claude Cheysson, his
first foreign minister, then his successor Roland Dumas were both close
to the Arab world, highly interested in the question of the South and
suspicious of the United States. However, the bulk of diplomatic deci-
sions continued to be made at the Élysée Palace. It is understood that
Mitterrand came to power at a time when the major Western allies were
in the middle of a neoliberal shift, with Margaret Thatcher in Great
Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. In 1982, the Christian
Democrats returned to power in Germany, guided by Helmut Kohl.
In the G7 of the time, the French president, the only leftist leader, and
who intended to remain so, was an exception. Perhaps it was tactical, to
demonstrate his originality, that the man was eager to show his diplo-
matic differences with a movement that was already a foreshadowing of
neoconservatism.
With Jacques Chirac, it was once again a Gaullist occupying the Élysée
Palace. One could therefore expect continuity to be a given. This was
indeed true until 2003, and that stability was reflected notably in very
firm positions on Palestinian affairs. Everyone remembers the famous trip
to Jerusalem in 1996 during which Jacques Chirac jeered at the Israeli
police. In the same vein, the desire for independence led him to express
reservations about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty when it was
signed on September 24, 1996. There was above all his militant hostility
against the war in Iraq, which was a defining moment.
112 B. BADIE
Postcolonial Contradictions
However, one must take a careful look at the limits of this Gaullist leg-
acy and in particular its policy of opening to the “South,” which has
remained marked by the weight of a contradiction going far back in
time. France—with its sovereignist foreign policy, yet no longer a colo-
nial power—has seemed to present itself as a potential leader of all these
states, and even of their people, striving to free themselves of all kinds
of old and new forms of imperialism. But this state with a sudden desire
to be a rebel is also marked by a very long imperial past going back to
the origins of the Western world, all the way back to Charlemagne.
Napoleon, who embodied that tradition better than anyone, explic-
itly aligned himself with that first Carolingian, who was recalled by all
when the building of Europe got underway… Louis XIV also had impe-
rial dreams, while on July 14, 1790 at the Fête de la Fédération, some
thought about offering Louis XVI the title “emperor of the French.”
In the Gaullist desire to assume European leadership there is of course
something that remains of this imperial DNA. France’s European part-
ners have always suspected it, and have often been annoyed by its pre-
tensions, sometimes qualified as hegemonic. This is particularly true
for countries that have had fewer resources with which to resist, the
Netherlands or Denmark for example; while the Germans adapted better
as their economic power increased, knowing quite well they were strong
enough to protect themselves. The Franco-German couple was built on
the idea that neither of the two could dominate the other, while the cou-
ple could perhaps dominate all the others.
The other facet of this French imperial dream was naturally to be
found in the colonial empire itself, then after African independence in
the 1960s in the formidable ambiguity that presided over the failed
sustainability of the Community. The nations involved were enrolled
in a system of clientelization controlled by the old model (called
“Françafrique”). That system was based on special ties created with
neo-patrimonial regimes supportive of independence and run by auto-
crats that France rarely if ever hesitated to rescue when their power was
threatened. This is how the French army managed to keep in power
the Gabonese Léon Mba in 1964, like Chadian President François
Tombalbaye in 1968, and several of their successors; similarly, it pro-
tected the Eyadema dictatorship in Togo and, even today, figures as
“dubious” as the Congolese Denis Sassou Nguesso or the Chadian
Idriss Déby. The Zairian dictator Joseph Désiré Mobutu was not out-
done when the Franco-Belgian operation on Kolwezi saved him in
March 1978 from a threat from the south of the country. Conversely,
the French secret services knew implicitly or explicitly how to “get rid
of” embarrassing heads of state, such as the Central African David Dacko
in favor of Jean-Bedel Bokassa in December 1965; of the latter in favor
of his predecessor, back in the good graces of the French in September
1979; not to mention the destitution—in the same country—of Ange
Patassé in 2003 to the advantage of General François Bozizé. As for the
Burkinabé Thomas Sankara, some see a French hand in his assassination
in 1987, during the coalition government between François Mitterrand
and Jacques Chirac.
From that standpoint, all of France’s policies in Africa since 1960 have
played a big part in paving the way for the conflicts we know today. They
maintained corrupt authoritarian regimes, trampling human rights, and
were cut off from their own societies, while the cooperation policies pro-
moted by Paris only benefited a small superficial elite.
Algeria deserves special attention in the tragedy of France’s postco-
lonial relations, first because the scar is much deeper: eight years of war
(1954–1962), but in reality seventeen years of violence, racial, ethnic,
and religious clashes against a backdrop of proximity and social interac-
tions between French and Algerians. It also involves the violence at close
quarters propagated by the Algerian population with a strong presence
in France and by the close intermingling of the two countries’ histories.
One should keep in mind that the first president of the independent
Algerian Republic, Ahmed Ben Bella, was a non-commissioned officer in
the French army who had played in military soccer clubs in Marseille,
even considering an athletic career in France at one time.
That closeness was paradoxically the perfect catalyst for lasting incom-
prehension. De Gaulle set himself the goal of creating new relations in
a very proactive way, thus the nomination of high-ranking figures in
the Fifth Republic as the first ambassadors to Algiers. This technique
never really worked. The Algerian system gone adrift shares part of the
responsibility. The FLN’s motivational ideology, nationalism tinged with
Arab socialism, was soon turned into ordinary bureaucratic and military
authoritarianism, undermining the government’s legitimacy in the eyes
of the people, who soon turned toward other horizons. Algeria was thus
the first country in the Arab world to get “Islamist fever,” resulting in a
horrendous civil war in the 1990s.
114 B. BADIE
Thus, significantly, it was on this side that France’s overtures to the

South came up against particularly fierce competition. Among the newly
independent nations, some intended to favor South-South alliances
rather than relations with the former parent state or the North in gen-
eral. The spirit of Bandung was moving in the opposite direction from
the Gaullist plan, with leaders like Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea, and
even Modibo Keita in Mali; but it was above all Algeria that took on the
leadership of this movement of mistrust, its position at the crossroads of
Africa and the Arab world, the extreme weight of its colonial past and
its oil resources giving it both the inspiration and the means for it. The
Algiers Summit Conference in 1973 made the city for a time the capi-
tal of the non-aligned countries and of those contesting the international
system, placing Algerian diplomacy in a situation of direct competition
with French diplomacy. Which, we should note, never prevented vari-
ous forms of cooperation between the two countries, notably the police
and in managing the flow of migrants. This points to an ordinary law of
international relations: there is always some involvement between states
to the extent that they continue to have shared interests.
Dilemmas and Options of a “Mid-level Power”

How was this politics of “grandeur”—with the contradictions and aggra-
vations it came up against nearly everywhere—received by its American
ally? That Washington was irritated by Gaullist resolve is undeniable.
Bilateral relations were often marked by a certain coolness. De Gaulle
and Kennedy never understood one another, and there was a mutual
ignorance between the General and Lyndon Johnson due to distance
and incompatibility. Richard Nixon was more accommodating, and
above all his term in office corresponded to a notable weakening of the
United States’ hegemonic capability. But the issue of relations between
Washington and Paris goes far beyond such episodes of knee-jerk irrita-
tion. There is even a deep issue at stake, hidden behind these diplomatic
squabbles: what does it really mean to be a mid-level power in interna-
tional politics? And furthermore, are there really mid-level powers?
The question has rarely been asked as such. In the days of the
European concert it made no sense, because the powers in the club
acknowledged their parity. During the First World War, there were no
mid-level powers among the main belligerents, merely powers in keen
competition. The conclusion of the Second World War consecrated
another geopolitical figure, henceforth referred to as “superpowers,”

linking the USSR and the United States for better or worse, devaluing
all the more the idea of “mid-level powers.” Great Britain, once nearly
hegemonic, was reduced to playing the part of brilliant second fiddle and
faithful Atlantic partner of the United States.
In the context of bipolarity and the new “side-taking,” such status,
as uncertain as it was, could mean two different realities, and neither of
them was a pleasant thing for the superpowers to hear. It could translate
the idea that certain countries enjoyed an exceptional right to a some-
what oppositional autonomy, which the Soviets had to suffer in a painful
way through the Moscow-Beijing schism. But it could also involve the
existence of the right to co-manage their side, which is exactly what de
Gaulle was seeking, initially at least. As of 1958, when he was still only
the head of government (Président du Conseil), the General had sent
his Western partners a brief memorandum proposing to create a NATO
board of directors granting France and Great Britain the right to review
all major political, diplomatic and strategic decisions. For Washington,
such a proposition was unacceptable. Eisenhower turned him down flat
and his successor, John Kennedy, would have none of it either. This is
why Charles de Gaulle came to choose a different option, that of auton-
omy, and thus of leaving the NATO integrated command structure. In
both cases, it was the whole rationale of bipolar politics that was being
challenged, or shaken up at any rate. Thirty years later when George H.
W. Bush defended the idea of perpetuating NATO right after the wall
had fallen, it was precisely because he feared that the lack of a Soviet
threat might create such a desire for autonomy among some of the
Western allies. The “side-taking” effects of bipolarity had to be main-
tained beyond bipolarity, as the sudden self-assertion of hypothetical
mid-level powers was becoming a diplomatic nightmare.
The Great Turnaround

Naturally it remained to be seen if these powers were true powers, and
how far their capacity for autonomy would go. In asking that question,
one may begin to understand the great turnaround initiated in France in
2003, marking the end of Gaullist foreign policy.
At first glance, the break seems very mysterious. As we have seen,
Jacques Chirac took a clear position against the war in Iraq in 2003,
and events proved him doubly right. Not only were no weapons of mass
116 B. BADIE
destruction found on site, but his position was also broadly supported by
international public opinion, which rightly sensed all the risks involved.
On February 15, as Dominique de Villepin was giving his famous speech
before the Security Council, there were nearly 15 million people all over
the world marching to protest the war, an absolute record in terms of
transnational mobilization. And yet, the second half of 2003 was marked
by a deep and surprising turnaround in French foreign policy. A new
policy was then put in place in France, which had nothing to do with
the one forged at the beginning of the Fifth Republic and soon deprived
France of all the advantages it had “capitalized on” over nearly fifty years.
What’s more, it now found itself in a position of weakness, instability,
and contradictions from which it could no longer extricate itself. For
Jacques Chirac’s turnaround was endorsed and noticeably reinforced by
his two successors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, despite their
presumed ideological differences.
It is possible to identify the successive phases in this change of direc-
tion. The first episode occurred during the G8 summit held at Évian
from June 1–3, 2003. Things got off to a bad start. According to cer-
tain rumors, George W. Bush did not wish to attend, in order to punish
France. In fact, not only did the American president go to Évian, but
Chirac moved perceptibly closer to his choices, initiating a policy of rec-
onciliation with the United States materialized by a series of resolutions
voted in by the Security Council. Successively, resolutions 1483 (already
voted in on May 22, 2003 despite some lingering tensions), 1511 (taken
on October 16, 2003), then 1546 (June 8, 2004) recognizing ex post
the “transitional authority of the coalition” and legitimizing the occupa-
tion of Iraq by the American army and its allies. These votes were indeed
unanimous, or nearly unanimous (Syria abstained), but France proved
to be active in this new construction, and all the arguments once used
against the American operation were abruptly forgotten. A new era was
undeniably underway.
One could surmise that Jacques Chirac had acquired the convic-
tion that France did not have the means to sustain such a major quar-
rel with its “big brother,” nor to remain relevant for long outside the
Western camp. It was a way of admitting that the notion of being a
mid-level power was not tenable. But this turnaround went far beyond
a mere patchwork approach. Indeed, there was in the United States at
the time a daunting atmosphere of French bashing. Bottles of French
wine were poured into the gutter, French fries were renamed “liberty
fries” and the rare public figures who spoke French, like the unfortunate
John Kerry, were stigmatized. That still does not explain the magnitude
of this realignment of French diplomacy. Consider this: shortly thereaf-
ter, on September 2, 2004, France co-sponsored with the United States
the famous resolution 1559 narrowly approved despite the abstention
notably of Russia, China, Brazil and Algeria, and to the great surprise
of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. The two
Western powers—more tutelary than ever—recalled Lebanon’s right to
sovereignty and condemned Syria’s presence in the land of Cedars. They
called out Hezbollah, demanding its dissolution and disarmament with-
out ever naming it explicitly. And finally—a new development in French
conventions—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was no longer mentioned. It
was the first time since 1945 that Paris and Washington made a joint ini-
tiative in the Middle East, and an alignment was taking shape between
the two capitals on how to handle an emblematic region that had sepa-
rated them for nearly forty years.
In July 2005, Ariel Sharon was received in Paris with all the honors.
A very noticeable evolution in French rhetoric toward Israel could be
seen at the time. The assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic
Hariri a few months earlier led to an even more marked deterioration
in Franco-Syrian relations, while in Iran there was a new president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom France did not consider an acceptable
partner. Despite Chirac’s efforts, immediately countered by Sarkozy,
relations with Turkey also took a sharp turn for the worse. France was
absent from Iraq, it had fallen out with Syria and was losing nearly all
its connections not only in the Arab world, but in the greater Middle
East. The contrast with the situation that still held sway in the 1970s and
1980s was striking.
The European Union’s enlargement acted without a doubt as an
accelerator of that loss of international identity. The year 2004 marked
the entrance of new countries into the Union, most of them former
people’s democracies. These new members were not at all prepared to
identify with the idea of any French diplomatic leadership. As a result,
without it ever being officialized, things went quietly from a Europe
diplomatically dominated by France to a Europe where France was rele-
gated to the status of an ordinary member among others. Paris was now
impeded in its diplomatic initiatives from the moment discussions were
held in Brussels.
118 B. BADIE
The final aspect of this silent mutation was the evolution of French
diplomatic personnel. Until then, the Quai d’Orsay had been run by an
elite that either came directly out of the Second World War for the older
ones, or had been socialized in the context of foreign policy of Gaullist
inspiration for the younger ones. From the moment those civil servants
withdrew, a new generation of diplomats took over running the Quai
d’Orsay’s major departments who not only had not experienced war,
but were unfamiliar with the concepts and reflexes acquired during the
Gaullist period. This new mindset was gradually emerging, more influ-
enced by the predominance of the American model than in France’s
Gaullist and sovereignist past.
French-Style Neoconservatism
The beginnings of French-style neoconservatism were thus taking
shape, which the Quai d’Orsay was not the main source of, but which
had a strong influence on France’s actions in the world. The phenom-
enon was born in the United States at the turn of the century and had
greatly inspired George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Drawn notably
from the philosophy of Leo Strauss, the doctrine proclaimed the absolute
superiority of the values derived from Western history over any consid-
erations of opportunity. It developed through an intransigent messian-
ism that sought to help in universalizing a model superior to all others.
The rhetoric was pleasing to conservatives who saw it as a defense of
enshrined values; and a certain left was not indifferent to it, finding in
it a hint of emancipation for people dominated by political models that
had deprived them of their freedom. Through its intransigence, however,
this approach annoyed the realists who did not accept this presumptuous
abandonment of the balance of powers dogma; and it was equally shock-
ing to those who considered a respect for alterity as the indispensable
basis for the new globalization.
In France, the phenomenon first reached intellectual spheres and
quickly established itself as the main embodiment of those once known
as the “new philosophers.” The most media savvy of them, Bernard-
Henri Lévy, was soon reveling in his role of de facto Minister of Foreign
Affairs for Nicolas Sarkozy, urging him to intervene militarily in Libya.
These ideologues delivered a new message in which the United States
was no longer seen as a hegemon to be fought or contained at least, while
the defense of Israel became a priority that far overshadowed any support
for the Palestinian cause, often simply overlooked. More globally, the ref-
erence to a Western model, even to Western identity, became the matrix
for a new foreign policy. Not only did alterity no longer hold any mean-
ing, but it had to be refocused by subjecting it to the universalization of
a model presented as superior to others. The following argument made
its perilous appearance: “We are being attacked because we’re the best.”
The theory was conspicuously silent: about Western history, whose
bloody upheavals in the twentieth century deprived it of any claim to
sainthood; about the West’s huge responsibility in the propagation of the
authoritarianism and violence that have struck the South and have been
justly condemned; about the strange mutation of the world which, after
the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism, robbed the West not only of its
once pious unity, but also of the main counterpoint creating its identity.
Thus the tricky recourse to denominational or ethnic criteria designed to
restore meaning to the idea of Westernness and dangerously banalizing
rhetoric about the “war of civilizations.”
While these new “organic intellectuals” were operative especially in
the media, the political class was also undergoing transformations that
contributed to the neoconservative turn in French diplomacy. The near
disappearance of the Communist Party accelerated the Socialist Party’s
shift toward the right-wing tendencies of European social democracy,
personified by Blairism in Great Britain and by Gerhard Schröder in
Germany. Not only was the liberal model becoming attractive and syn-
onymous with modernity, but it had also become popular to recon-
nect with the Atlantism cultivated by the old SFIO2 during the Fourth
Republic. Guy Mollet was rising from the ashes… On the right, gen-
erational estrangement from the Gaullist legacy favored the rise of the
French equivalent of the “Chicago boys” and a new neoliberal common
sense better personified by Nicolas Sarkozy than by his rivals. As soon as
his presidential campaign began, he went to Washington to be endorsed
by a rather beleaguered George W. Bush. Indeed, paradoxically, French-
style neoconservatism took off just when that ideology was going on
the decline in the United States. Naturally, without the means to pro-
mote the same crusades as American power in the early 2000s, it was first
embodied in rhetoric, in particular in the soon obsessive references to
the “Western family” highlighted in Nicolas Sarkozy’s political speeches.
This evolution took shape through three new orientations, the effects
of which soon led to consequences and challenges. The first was the
break with the sovereignist tradition. In 2009, France was reintegrated
120 B. BADIE
into the integrated command structure of NATO. All the symbols of

autonomy in French defense policies vanished at the very moment when
the doubtful notion of a “Western family” was taking on a meaning that
was ambiguous to say the least. Deprived of its Soviet enemy despite it
being connected to the same culture, the West no longer existed out-
side its opposition to the non-West, which is to say everything that today
constitutes the South, from Islam to East Asia and Africa… They were
not only going into globalization the wrong way, but also into the inclu-
sion of the emerging Chinese, Brazilians, Indians, and thus of history. In
short, they were regenerating by creating their own fundamentalism.
The second orientation was a growing interventionism, generalized to
nearly all crises. French neoconservatism resembled its American coun-
terpart in this respect, to the point of appearing to copy it. Overseas mil-
itary operations were on the increase. In April 2011 in the Ivory Coast,
the French army imposed Alassane Ouattara, whose election as president
against his rival Laurent Gbagbo was never established. In Afghanistan,
French troops were reinforced. Paris intervened in Libya in 2011, then
in Mali in 2013, and operation Barkhane soon spread to neighboring
countries. In December 2013, operation Sangaris was mounted in the
Central African Republic. In August 2013, France signaled its inten-
tion—somewhat naively since it went against Washington’s options—to
intervene in Syria against the regime of Bachar al-Assad. They had gone
from “regime change” to a “changement de régime,” in French this time.
The last reorientation aimed to build a “diplomacy of punishment”
certainly coherent with neoconservative and interventionist options, but
in contradiction with what was required by international politics and
what diplomacy stands for. France was at war almost everywhere, but
it no longer involved conflicts pitting it against its enemies. It spoke of
acting against “criminals,” in the framework of “just wars,” a term long
dormant but now restored to favor. This punitive diplomacy also broke
with the tradition of the Fifth Republic’s beginnings. It came with sanc-
tions handed out like bad marks, and the excluding of “troublemakers”:
a blacklist was drawn up of all those with whom one would no longer
communicate. It was out of the question to talk to Bachar al-Assad, to
Hezbollah, Hamas, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or to Omar al-Bachir
in Sudan. For a very long time it was out of the question to talk with
Teheran, or with the Belorussian Lukashenko. Figures from the politi-
cal world were thus displayed in a “blue book of virtues,” where each
one’s standing fluctuated according to circumstances, but also, as it
happens, to highly realistic arguments. Confirmed dictators in Africa and

the Middle East were being courted at the same time. It was hard for
the uninitiated to make head or tail of it with such a diplomatic muddle,
where it was clear that the system of banishment followed rules of pro-
priety that were variable rather than coherent ethical principles.
The last straw came when this rationale of exclusion was applied to
Russia. It occurred at the height of the Ukrainian crisis, when there
was no longer any discussion with Moscow, which was even expelled
from the G8. Meetings were canceled and Russian notables forbidden
from going to Paris. Some went anyway, claiming they had meetings at
Unesco, protected by its status as an international organization… The
incoherence of this approach was obvious. It led to the situation that
prevailed in late 2015, where a few weeks after refusing to sell ships to
Russia that had been built for it, France launched an operation in the
eastern Mediterranean in which the aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle was
cooperating with the Russian navy. At that stage, it was the very idea of
diplomacy that was being attacked, an art defined precisely as handling
separations and disputes rather than bringing together friends.3
All told, was France’s foreign policy more ambitious than its means
permitted? On an economic level, the question made sense. Resources
couldn’t keep up with the military intentions manifested. But interven-
tionism was marked by an even deeper contradiction. These neoconserv-
ative crusades conducted on various fronts overseas, in particular in the
Middle East, were only possible if they had the support of American mil-
itary logistics. As a result, to assert itself as a mid-level power with regard
to Germany, which outranked it economically, France stepped up its mil-
itary operations, leading it at some point to beg the American colossus to
come to its rescue. Behind that vicious circle was again the very idea of
a “mid-level power” that was at stake. This point affected the upper ech-
elons of diplomacy. The French president’s tour of the capitals of major
powers right after the tragedy of November 13, 2015 seemed trivial
compared to the negotiations between the Russians and Americans that
were going on at the same time.
This fragile French-style neoconservatism, which in a few years had
canceled out forty-five years of independent foreign policy, appeared to
meet with a broad consensus within the French political class. Initiated
without really being thought of as such by a neo-Gaullist, this ideolog-
ical change of direction was further developed by a liberal conservative
and was then perpetuated by a social democrat. This consensus could be
122 B. BADIE
seen throughout parliamentary votes and party positions, where only the
rare ecologists and from time to time communist elected officials took
a different stance. It was all the more disturbing in that the other facet
of this near-unanimity was reflected in migratory policies and refugee
crisis management as it was forged during the summer of 2015, itself
closely linked to the new parameters of globalization. The same neocon-
servative reactions could be seen in this area that pandered to Western
identity even while explicitly or implicitly serving as a justification for a
policy of retreat and fear striving at all costs to stem the tide of migrants.
When, in fact, the latter is the world’s inevitable future that could offer
aging European countries a chance for regeneration, provided it is not
repressed but appropriately managed.
How to explain this fateful obstinacy in dealing with globalization,
which they failed to understand? It was first a sign of failure and faint-
heartedness with regard to others and an opening up to wider perspec-
tives. It was France’s economic weakness in its one-on-one talks with
Germany that drove it toward this interventionist radicalism tinged
with strong identity politics. Moreover, this “overcompensation” effect
fit conveniently into an old tradition that purported to be republican
while remaining colonial and imperial. This is not far from Jules Ferry
explaining at the time of the Tonkin conquest that France had a “mis-
sion to educate the inferior races.” It also shows the constant obsession
with “status” that one feared losing, the never-ending fixation that could
already be seen in the feverish Congress of Berlin (1885) dealing with
the dividing up of Africa among European powers. The French delegate,
Baron Alphonse de Courcel, sent the following—highly topical—note to
his minister seeking to justify his team’s diplomatic activism: “Show our
steadfastness, our vigorous determination, and we will regain our rank
in the esteem of other nations; a new show of weakness and we will end
up demoting ourselves to the rank of Spain.”4 The fear of losing, of no
longer being someone after having once been… The unfortunate and
deep-seated idea that status is won back at the expense of others rather
than with them.
This incompetence and lack of imagination were also that of a French
political class paralyzed by the populist rhetoric of the Front national.
The opposing rhetoric often took up and integrated those categories
in barely euphemized versions, such as the stigmatization of dual citi-
zens. Identity politics very logically infiltrated and affected the interna-
tional arena, stifling any attempts to develop alterity. Among Western
democracies, France is one of the most highly exposed to the influence

of the far right, which has had an impact on its diplomatic orientations
and foreign policy.
Stepping Outside Oneself

If France had not dilapidated its diplomatic capital in this way, it would
have been well placed to negotiate the emerging dynamics developing
within the international system. For that, it would have had to accept
that it was no longer alone in the world and that the mere universal-
ization of the model derived from the French Revolution was not on
the agenda anymore. Starting to establish alterity, living with the flow
of populations, ideas and beliefs that were not familiar, taking others’
contributions into account, even being able to make them a part of our
shared heritage: this was the challenge. The quintessential symptom of
this narrow-mindedness and conservatism was expressed in the difficulty
of even taking the new powers into consideration.
From a Gaullist perspective, it would have been possible to adopt pro-
active policies toward them, whether it be China, Brazil, India, South
Africa, Turkey or Iran, some of the nations poised to “rise up to the big
leagues.” One can only imagine the “coups” France could have pulled
off in partnership with Brazilian, Turkish, and other statesmen. More
engaged in local conflicts, these countries are often more empathetic
toward the downtrodden populations weighing increasingly on the inter-
national agenda; they can play into the role of “natural mediators.” But
you can’t deal with Brazil by contenting yourself with organizing a year
of Brazil in France or a year of France in Brazil. Paris would have a lot
more to gain in the long run from putting together a diplomatic synergy
with Brasilia than with London or even Berlin, too close, too routinely
steeped in ambiguous nostalgia for the European concert, made of exces-
sive closeness and very old mistrust. But that type of option wasn’t even
considered.
The strictly intellectual aspect of this narrow-mindedness and igno-
rance should not be overlooked. Even though French research in politics
and international relations—drawing on history, sociology, anthropol-
ogy, political science, and economics—has an original perspective,
shaped by its special trajectory, it is threatened by repeated attacks from
an ultra-dominant Anglo-Saxon model and from the neoconservatives’
media and political activism. There has been a collapse in the ability to
124 B. BADIE
interpret the world that is linked to a decline of the progressive intelli-

gentsia. Left-wing intellectuals have in a way been paralyzed by the East-
West conflict, which took away part of its credibility, while its options in
favor of the South have often resulted in a somewhat naïve third-world-
ism. At the very moment when an opening up to the world was needed,
the new right-wing intellectuals began recycling old ideas about the
superiority of the West that had deeply harmful effects. It is astonishing
to see how in developing the history syllabus for French high schools,
it was not deemed useful to explain to young people, in addition to the
history of France, the four thousand years of Chinese history, the Muslim
empires or pre-colonial African kingdoms. And what of the absurd con-
troversies about teaching Arabic, where the specter of “communitarian-
ism” erased all discussion about the need to open up to the world. At a
time when globalization has proven to be the dominant issue, everything
possible has been done to reduce the intelligibility of other cultures and
the ability to establish empathy toward them. In terms of nation-build-
ing, it had finally sunk in at the end of the nineteenth century and during
a good deal of the twentieth century that it was necessary to create social
ties and assimilate the working class. But the only way to face globali-
zation and lower the threshold of violence consists precisely in creating
social ties on a worldwide scale, in promoting a greater understanding of
non-Western cultures and putting an end to the hidden hierarchy of civi-
lizations that continues to weigh on international politics.
After November 13th

If the French government chooses to respond to the unspeakable
attacks on November 13, 2015 by intensifying the diplomatic features
described above, it risks getting stuck for a long time in a vicious circle.
By using inappropriate military instruments, it will perpetuate situations
of growing and increasingly intractable violence. French society, for its
part, has a double responsibility. In the daily management of events, by
not giving into fear, stereotypes, hatred, and oversimplification. But, as
always during periods of failure and decline, society is also a potential
source for regeneration. It is from deep within it—rather than in gov-
ernmental spheres—that the seeds of a new French foreign policy will
undoubtedly grow. One should keep in mind that Gaullist foreign policy
grew out of the wreckage of a totally failed Fourth Republic. It was the
response to a very grave crisis linked to the agony of decolonization and
the emergence of a new world in which France had a hard time finding
its place.
It is important that French society today identify with the dynamic
of globalization in facing the risk of identitarian “closing off.” It has
to learn to reap the same benefits from opening up to the world that
other less “advanced” societies have profited from. China has taken
greater advantage of globalization because it settled into it immediately.
The same is true for most of the emerging countries. Admittedly, none
of them had any choice and were forced to become involved in globali-
zation to survive. But the situation is not so different with regard to
France. The human insecurity affecting countries in the South is France’s
human insecurity tomorrow, just as the creative energy thriving in other
countries can play an innovative role later on the old continent.
If we do not put the human element back at the core of everything,
above profit, competitiveness, production, uncontrolled identity politics,
promoting this or that ideology or model, if we do not put man back
at the center of life, we run the risk of being consumed by these con-
servative, ignorant, obscurantist, conventional, and conformist surges.
International diplomatic reflection must integrate these humanist values
if it is to avoid foundering under the catastrophic effects of politics from
another age.
Notes
1. Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-States (London:
Routledge, 1992).
2. Ancestor of the French Socialist Party, until May 1969.
3. Paul Sharp, Diplomatic Theory of International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
4. Quoted in Jean-Baptiste Michel, “Main basse sur l’Afrique,” Géohistoire 24
(December 2015): 45–47. Quote translated into English by William Snow.
CHAPTER 8
Conclusion
Abstract  The world has changed, and denial is the reaction to these

upheavals most frequently observed by historians. Blocking out reality is
a convenient way to handle fears and uncertainties and to have a short
but costly respite. Some are nostalgic for the Cold War, others look to
bursts of American leadership, while there are many who cling desper-
ately to the idea of the West personifying the world’s nobility. Yet this
scant interest in the global and pronounced penchant for reproducing
the past continues to aggravate the problems. A proliferation of interna-
tional violence that is fragmented and less and less controllable, grow-
ing inequalities, enormous social and ecological challenges that have not
been dealt with, collapsing states and our shared resources perishing. In
fact, it all comes down to asking questions about “globalization.” And
yet the complexity of the phenomenon deserves better. Behaving cor-
rectly in a world that is no longer on the scale of adjacent countries but
of the entire planet calls for at least an effort to adapt. It should also lead
to a minimum stocktaking of our established categories. When the pro-
ject changes that much in size, yesterday’s tools may not be as relevant as
they once were.
Keywords  Globalization · Violence · Diplomacy · Alterity · Stability

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5_8
128 B. BADIE
The world has changed, and denial is the reaction to these upheavals
most frequently observed by historians. Blocking out reality is a conven-
ient way to handle fears and uncertainties and to have a short but costly
respite. Some are nostalgic for the Cold War, others look to bursts of
American leadership, while there are many who cling desperately to the
idea of the West personifying the world’s nobility.
There is nothing new about this pathetic appeal to the past. After
having a good scare, European dynasts entered the post-Napoleonic era
celebrating the virtues of restored legitimism. In preparing the post-war
world, the main actors in the first world conflict remained deeply marked
by what had come before them. Clemenceau delighted in revenge on
Germany; the British Prime Minister Lloyd George and his Under-
Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, Lord Robert Cecil, designed
the future League of Nations in accordance with their memory of the
Congress of Vienna, with its alliances, its club, and its balance of power.
Are international relations profoundly conservative? Probably. For want
of a world government, international life could only be conceived of
as the sum of more or less cooperative sovereignties, and it is accepted
that the status quo is indeed the best possible compromise among them.
Moreover, as national interests—or at least our concept of them—sell
well on the “electoral market,” it is better to direct all one’s efforts
toward preserving a formerly acquired status than toward protecting
shared wealth, which the planet now needs to survive and which could
turn out to be costly and not very profitable in the short term.
Yet this lack of inventiveness, this assiduous and methodical blindness,
this scant interest in the global and pronounced penchant for repro-
ducing the past continues to aggravate the problems. A proliferation of
international violence that is fragmented and less and less controllable,
growing inequalities, enormous social and ecological challenges that have
not been dealt with, collapsing states and our shared resources perish-
ing. In fact, it all comes down to asking questions about “globalization,”
a term used all the time, but more as invective or as a screen than as
the starting point for reflection. And yet the complexity of the phenom-
enon deserves better. Behaving correctly in a world that is no longer on
the scale of adjacent countries but of the entire planet calls for at least
an effort to adapt. It should also lead to a minimum stocktaking of our
established categories. When the project changes that much in size, yes-
terday’s tools may not be as relevant as they once were. “Territory,”
“border,” “sovereignty,” “national security” have lost a meaning dating
8 CONCLUSION 129
back several centuries. Nor does it mean that globalization will neces-
sarily lead us to capitulate before an arrogant neoliberalism that played
cleverly off the defeat of the “socialist side” and the abusive equivalence
between an inclusive world and a full market-driven economy. Economic
liberalism is not the only possible context for implementing pervasive
interdependence!
The origin of the current torment lies partly in a kind of curse, with
no evidence that it is inevitable. The world has never succeeded in revo-
lutionizing international politics other than through war, perhaps hand-
ing Hobbes one of his greatest posthumous victories. President Wilson’s
work only resurfaced in “jackboot” form, while no one today refers to
Léon Bourgeois anymore or to his resolutely modern vision of interna-
tional solidarity that would go beyond acts of war. For that, he was called
a “utopian” and shut out of the discussions. Multilateralism, meant to
help usher in the shift to peace, was amended from its inception so that
a pocket of power could be reconstituted within it, enabling the major
nations to remain on the edges of the new international legality; the pro-
ject of a U.N. army capable of intervening in everyone’s name, rather
than in the name of power, also came to naught. It would be illusory to
think that this order is easily reformable, because any intention of that
kind is constantly held hostage by the veto power of the strongest.
To break this sterile and dangerous cycle—this fatality of war that is
only alleged—the priority lies in championing and reforming diplomacy.
By getting it “back on track,” by talking to everyone, by understating it
not as an instrument for punishment, self-promotion and vociferation,
but for crisis management. It is an emergency technique not intended
to comply with a rationale other than one aimed at acting in order to
reduce tensions. It is also meant to keep negotiations alive, as they are
withering over time, such that it was surprising to see them revived
thanks to the July 14, 2015 agreement on Iranian nuclear power. As a
technique it must be distinguished from international politics, which
today has in fact turned into world politics. The latter is meant to foster
a vision of the world that no longer exists, except in a feeble way when
taken from the “museums of thought.” As globalization becomes more
and more pressing, this sort of politics is less and less present, reasoned,
thought out and debated. As the business of citizens, touching on soci-
ety’s most profound issues, it must be open to controversy and become
the focus once again of our monitored and debated electoral campaigns.
130 B. BADIE
It must be updated and not merely used to constantly reproduce options

outstripped by social changes.
With regard to globalization, it must articulate, reform and target.
Articulating the equality of human destinies, an equal right for all to
participate in world governance. The iron rule of international oligarchy
must be surpassed, as it once was on the scale of nations, putting the
actors involved back at the center of international deliberation. Saying it
loud and clear, breaking publicly with this oligarchic pact would already
be significant progress toward peace and mutual trust. Reforming a
world social order that suffers from socioeconomic discrepancies that
are increasingly visible, intolerable and thus dangerous. Redistribution
on a worldwide level has become the foremost and most urgent task
pertaining to this new politics, the number one consideration for col-
lective security. It is unacceptable that government aid for development
continues to be cut in France when military expenditures for the South
continue to grow. Also reforming the political defect that countries in
crisis are suffering from, eroding them, and turning them into warlike
societies. Until now this reconstruction of politics in the South has been
carefully avoided by local dictators and the tutelary powers which jointly
bet on the appeal of the opposite stance. Targeting common economic,
social and environmental resources which the survival of the planet is
dependent on, and which are thwarted by national selfishness reinvented
under the pleasant name of “the defense of sovereign interests.” The one
launching the boldest sovereignist attacks is bound to win at that game!
The politics of alterity the world needs is neither utopian nor a mat-
ter of charity. It is not utopian because it results in concrete acts capa-
ble of bringing about change within a backward-looking international
order. This requires first redefining and regenerating sovereignty, which
in a time of globalization can no longer be combined with closing off
and retreating, but must be embodied in an endorsement of each state’s
right to contribute equally to the concept of globalization. It involves
the extinction of all forms of unilateral intervention that would danger-
ously confuse an act of regulation with an act of power. It must reinstate
local actors and social and political stakeholders, who must exercise their
full right to participate in handling the crises they are undergoing. It
requires activating social conflict management, faced with these new wars
growing out of social and institutional breakdowns more than from rival
powers, in which traditional military instruments are powerless.
8 CONCLUSION 131
Alterity is not a matter of charity because in the final analysis it is

based on the notion of utility. It should be heard all the more by politi-
cal actors because it provides them with an economy of means and lim-
its their costs, those hundreds of billions of dollars spent since the end
of the Cold War to sustain interventions of power that have resulted in
nothing. It also provides a guarantee for facing the risks looming in the
future, for more effectively containing the violence of tomorrow, and for
living on a manageable planet. Only by proceeding thus can world sta-
bility be ensured. Security today is the exact opposite of what national
security was in Hobbes’ writings. Rather than fitting into a framework of
competition, it is now expressed through a global approach. Each one’s
security now depends on that of all the others, and it has become delu-
sive to reason in terms of ramparts and fortresses. In working toward
the security of others, we are working toward our own security. But the
security of others is only achievable through the respect shown and the
self-effacement granted to them. The world can only be at peace glob-
ally in total recognition of others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty understood
this when he reminded us: “Our relationship to truth is through others.
Either we move toward the truth with them, or else we’re not moving
toward the truth.”1
Note
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Northwestern University
Press, 1968).
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Index
A Bourgeois, Léon, 129

Afghanistan, 22, 26, 43, 58, 65, 72, Brezhnev, Leonid, 23, 28
86, 120 BRICS, 15, 65, 67, 70
Algeria, Algerian war, 107 Bull, Hedley, xiii
Al Qaeda, 34, 83, 86 Bush, George H.W., 31, 33, 59, 91
Anderson, Benedict, 51 Bush, George W., 7, 34, 57, 90, 94,
Apolarity, 34 97, 115, 116, 118, 119
Arab Spring, 58
Assad, Bachar al, 65, 120
Assad, Hafez al, 27, 28, 30, 31, 77 C
Aznar, Jose-Maria, 94 Ceausescu, Nicolaï, 24
China, 7, 11–13, 15, 24, 25, 28,
31, 45, 46, 54, 59, 61, 62, 65,
B 68–74, 79–81, 83, 90, 91, 96,
Balance of power, 4, 40, 59, 93, 128 99, 100, 108, 117, 123, 125
Balkans (crisis), 5, 6 Chirac, Jacques, 27, 111, 113, 115,
Bipolarity, 18, 19, 21–25, 29, 30, 38, 116
48, 54–56, 64, 66, 68, 90, 91, Clausewitz, Carl von, 30, 43, 57, 85
101, 107, 110, 115 Clinton, Bill, 32, 35, 91
Bismarck, Otto von, 4, 5 Communication (in a global world),
Blair, Tony, 94 31
Bobbitt, Philip, 97 Cuba, 60
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 137

under exclusive licence to Springer International Publishing AG,
part of Springer Nature 2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94286-5
138 Index
D Great Britain. See England

Decolonization, 7, 8, 25–27, 30, 31, Grotius, Hugo, 95
40, 47, 62, 67, 76, 78–80, 91,
107, 124
De Gaulle, Charles, 20, 115 H
Diarchy (international), 30, 54 Habermas, Jürgen, 50
Dissenting diplomacy, 29 Hassner, Pierre, 95, 103
Durkheim, Emile, 10, 50 Hegemonic stability, 34
Hegemony, 4, 12, 18, 30, 33–35, 56,
61, 62, 85, 90, 95–97, 100, 106
E Hierarchy (in International relations),
Emerging countries (powers), 15, 35, 8
65, 67, 68, 70–72, 79 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 129, 131
England, 4, 5, 90 Human development, 39, 42, 43, 51,
Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 56, 98 77
European Union, 63, 66, 117 Humiliation (in IR), 40, 50, 86, 100,
101
Huntington, Samuel, 40, 84
F Hussein, Saddam, 27, 28, 30, 31, 54,
Ford, Gerald, 35 55, 77, 93
France, 3–5, 21, 25, 27, 47, 55, 56,
63, 67, 72, 78, 80, 85, 90, 93,
94, 101, 105–125, 130 I
India, 14, 15, 23, 24, 26, 28, 65,
68–70, 76, 79, 98, 100, 123
G “International community”, 54
G7, G8, 5, 71 International order, 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 15,
G20, 5, 35, 71, 72 31, 34, 46, 130
Geopolitics, 26, 37, 58 Intersocial relations, 39
Germany, 4, 14, 18, 56, 67, 72, 98, Interventions (foreign), 71, 72
100, 107, 108, 111, 119, 121, Iran, 27, 30, 59, 60, 65, 71, 77, 91,
122, 128 96, 117, 123
Gilpin, Robert, 74, 92, 103 Iraq, 27, 28, 30, 49, 55, 58, 66, 72,
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 35, 110 77, 78, 83–86, 91, 93, 94, 111,
Globalization, 9, 31, 38–40, 43–47, 115–117
54–56, 62, 66–68, 73, 85, 90–93, Israel, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 59, 72,
95, 96, 98–101, 103, 104, 80–82, 92, 93, 107, 111, 117,
106, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 118
128–130 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 28, 58, 59,
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 31 66, 81, 117
Governance (global), 45 Ivory Coast (crisis), 44, 77, 79, 120
Grandeur (policy), 106, 107, 110
Index 139
J N
Japan, 11, 12, 46, 63, 69, 72, 73, 76, Nationalism, 20, 21, 42, 51, 97,
83 99–102, 108, 113
Johnson, Lyndon, 114 NATO, 21, 32, 33, 54–56, 63, 64,
110, 111, 115, 120
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 12, 14, 24
K Neocolonialism, 77, 79
Kagan, Robert, 91, 103 Neoconservatism, 35, 58, 103, 111,
Kant, Immanuel, 9, 10 118
Kennedy, John F., 114, 115 Neoconservatism (French), 119–121
Khrushchev, Nikita, 20 Neoliberalism, 49, 62, 129
Kindleberger, Charles, 36 Neonationalism, 90, 98–102
Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 91 New international conflicts, 25
Kissinger, Henry, 93 NGO, 40, 45, 48
Korea(s), 25, 46, 68, 73 Nixon, Richard, 114
Kosygin, Alexis, 23 Non-alignment, 24, 29
Kristol, Irving, 91, 103 Nossel, Suzanne, 95
Kristol, William, 91, 103 NPT (Non Proliferation Treaty), 8,
Kuwait (crisis), 31, 54, 55 23, 28
Nuclear weapons, 29, 35, 110
L
League of Nations, 14, 128 O
Lebow, Ned, 51 Obama, Barack, 35, 57–59, 90, 94,
Libya (crisis), 30, 86, 93, 96, 118, 120 96–98
Oligarchic governance, 5, 6, 15, 30,
35
M
Marx, Karl, 50
Mearsheimer, John, 55, 74, 93 P
Metternich, Klemens, Lothar, 6 Pakistan, 23, 24, 28, 34, 65
Middle East conflicts, 55, 56 Pippin, Robert, 103
Mid-level powers, 114, 115 Polarity, 18, 35
Militarization, 8, 9 Polarization, 18, 20, 23
Mill, John Stuart, 95, 96, 103 Post-colonialism, 47, 76, 112
Mitterrand, François, 33, 111, 113 Power in IR, 4, 48, 87, 106, 128
Multilateralism, 54, 58, 81, 92, 97, Power politics, 42, 48, 55, 74, 101,
101, 107, 109, 129 103
Multipolarity, 18 Protectionism, 102
Mussolini, Benito, 10 Putin, Vladimir, 14, 59, 71, 98, 101
140 Index
R United Kingdom. See England

Reagan, Ronald, 91, 111 United Nations, 26, 54, 55, 63, 81,
Regional integration, 66–68, 108–109 91, 93, 107, 109, 110, 117
Recognition (international), 7 USA, 3–5, 7, 24, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35,
Revanchism, 101 54, 56, 58, 61–64, 69, 72, 78,
Rosenau, James, 46, 51 91, 92, 94–97, 99, 102, 108,
Roszack, Theodore, 91, 103 109, 111, 114, 116–118
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 10 USSR, 14, 19–23, 25, 26, 31, 56, 62,
91, 101, 115
S
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 93, 116, 118, 119 V
Schlesinger, Arthur, 92, 103 Values (in IR), 28, 125
Schmitt, Carl, 73 Vienna Congress, 101
September 11th, 33 Vietnam (war), 25, 62, 110
Sharp, Paul, 125
Skocpol, Theda, 15
Smart power, 95 W
Sociology (international relations), Waltz, Kenneth, 28, 35, 55
48, 50 War, 2, 4–6, 8–11, 13–15, 18, 20–22,
Soft power, 42, 54, 57, 60–62, 95, 96 25–27, 30–34, 40, 41, 43, 48,
South (countries in IR), 24, 27, 29, 33 49, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65–68,
Sovereignty, 2–4, 7, 8, 24, 38, 43, 45, 77–79, 84, 85, 90, 92, 94, 102,
56, 67, 68, 72, 86, 99, 100, 106, 103, 106, 107, 109–111, 113–
109, 110, 117, 128, 130 116, 118–120, 128, 129, 131
Spinoza, Baruch, 65 Warsaw Pact, 33
Strauss, Leo, 103, 118 Weber, Max, 86
Sukarno, Ahmed, 24 Western world, 4, 14, 63, 73, 83, 84,
102, 112
Westphalian system, 8, 13, 23, 38, 40,
T 41, 43
Taliban, 34, 86 Wilson, Woodrow, 95, 96
Tilly, Charles, 9, 15
TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), 96
Trump, Donald, 90, 97, 98, 102 Z
TTIP (Transatlantic Treaty on Zionism, 91
Investment and Partnership), 97
U
Ukraine, 14, 33, 63, 64, 101
Unipolarity, 18, 30, 32

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THE SCIENCES PO SERIES IN

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND

More information about this series at

Translated by William Snow

The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945191

Cover illustration: © Andrew Taylor/Flickr

Printed on acid-free paper

Consequently, few in the field of science or of action saw the change

Paris, France Bertrand Badie

1 The Old Order: From the “Balance of Power”

2 Bipolarity, Unipolarity, Multipolarity 17

3 Societies and Their Diplomacy 37

4 Exploring the New World 53

5 The Powers at Odds with History 75

6 Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, Neonationalism 89

7 France, from Thwarted Ambitions to the Challenges

The “international order?” The expression is used every day in circles of

The Old Order: From the “Balance

Abstract To understand the confused evolution or the indignities of

Keywords Balance of power · Oligarchy · Sovereignty · Territoriality

One cannot understand the confused evolution or the indignities of the

© The Author(s) 2019 1

These innovations would weigh heavily on the future, explaining the

Sovereignty, Competition and Power

contradictory nature of emerging legal thinking. On the one hand, there

of alliances, such as the “alliance of the three emperors” uniting Berlin

Strengths and Weaknesses of Oligarchic Governance

On the other hand, the oligarchy’s strongpoints lay in two fundamen-

who are the victims of that distinction? These uncertainties emerged in

The Weakness of International Law and Over-

the basis of the German philosopher’s reading of peace was to consider

The Emergence of a “Second Rank in the International

This example raises the crucial question of the emergence of dissent-

of dissent regarding Western hegemony. Sun Yat-sen could have con-

The Soviet Exception and Its Repercussions

Bipolarity, Unipolarity, Multipolarity

Abstract In talking about the Cold War, the term “bipolarity” is

Keywords Bipolarity · Unipolarity · Multipolarity · Nuclear power

© The Author(s) 2019 17

Nuclear Reality and Ideological Antagonism

Previously, the logic of protection between strong and less strong

From Antagonism to Diarchy

Stirrings in the South: The Flaws of Bipolarity

Bipolarity Undermined by “Peripheral” Conflicts

Syria and Iraq—had to coexist in a complex relationship with other states

The Limits of Joint Rule

believed that the possible multiplication of nuclear actors in the South

The Contentious Legacy of Non-alignment

The most extreme, although not the most frequent, examples of

The Fleeting Illusion of Unipolarity

supplied them with additional arguments strengthening their claims for

of maintaining the existence of NATO, a way of entering the promised

The American reaction gave free rein to a messianic exacerbation of the

The Return of the Oligarchic Club

with little enthusiasm that it reluctantly joined the G6 formed in 1975 at

3. Roland Dumas, et al., La Diplomatie sur le vif (Paris: Presses de Sciences

Societies and Their Diplomacy

Abstract Understanding the nature of international relations today by

Keywords Diplomacy · Communications revolution · Intersociality

One cannot understand the nature of international relations today only

© The Author(s) 2019 37

the multimedia, audiovisual and telecommunications sectors, in other

in the comfort of a conceptual universe that encouraged it to minimize

Abstract  To understand the confused evolution or the indignities of

Keywords  Balance of power · Oligarchy · Sovereignty · Territoriality

Sovereignty, Competition and Power

Strengths and Weaknesses of Oligarchic Governance

The Weakness of International Law and Over-

The Emergence of a “Second Rank in the International

The Soviet Exception and Its Repercussions

Abstract  In talking about the Cold War, the term “bipolarity” is

Keywords  Bipolarity · Unipolarity · Multipolarity · Nuclear power

Nuclear Reality and Ideological Antagonism

From Antagonism to Diarchy

Stirrings in the South: The Flaws of Bipolarity

Bipolarity Undermined by “Peripheral” Conflicts

The Limits of Joint Rule

The Contentious Legacy of Non-alignment

The Fleeting Illusion of Unipolarity

The Return of the Oligarchic Club

3. Roland Dumas, et al., La Diplomatie sur le vif (Paris: Presses de Sciences

Societies and Their Diplomacy

Abstract  Understanding the nature of international relations today by

Keywords  Diplomacy · Communications revolution · Intersociality

The Invisible Revolution of Societies and Nation-States

The Two Globalizations and the Revenge of the Local

Toward a New Sociology of International Relations

3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and

Abstract  The international arena is inseparable from social actors, their

Keywords  Globalization · United States · Barack Obama · Russia

Illusions and Setbacks of Hegemonic Power

The Three Stages of the American Reaction

The Appeal and Limits of Soft Power

China: Between Discretion and Assertion

The Powers at Odds with History

Abstract  The world today is hostage to decolonization, marked by its

Keywords  Neocolonialism · Weak states · Africa · Middle East

Weak States and Neocolonialism

An Instrumental Vision of the South

Proximity and Civilizational Depth

New Conflicts and “Multi-level Wars”

The Powerlessness of Power and the Power of the Weak

Abstract  The sharp break that began with contemporary globalization

Keywords  Neoconservatism · Neoliberalism · Neonationalism

The Era of Neoconservatism

13. Philip Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of

France, from Thwarted Ambitions to the

Abstract  France was a great power, but that assertion should be

Keywords  France · Power · Leadership · Europe · Postcolonialism

From Power to “Grandeur”