The New Concert of Powers
How to Prevent Catastrophe and Promote Stability in a Multipolar World
BY RICHARD N. HAASS
AND CHARLES A. KUPCHAN
March 23, 2021
·
RICHARD N. HAASS is President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the
author of The World: A Brief Introduction.
·
CHARLES A. KUPCHAN is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown
University, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author
of Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the
World.
·
This essay emerged from the Lloyd George Study Group on World Order.
·
·
The international system is at a historical inflection point. As Asia
continues its economic ascent, two centuries of Western domination of the
world, first under Pax Britannica and then under Pax Americana, are coming to
an end. The West is losing not only its material dominance but also its
ideological sway. Around the world, democracies are falling prey to
illiberalism and populist dissension while a rising China, assisted by a
pugnacious Russia, seeks to challenge the West’s authority and republican
approaches to both domestic and international governance.
U.S. President Joe Biden is committed to
refurbishing American democracy, restoring U.S. leadership in the world, and
taming a pandemic that has had devastating human and economic consequences. But
Biden’s victory was a close call; on neither side of the Atlantic will angry
populism or illiberal temptations readily abate. Moreover, even if Western
democracies overcome polarization, beat back illiberalism, and pull off an
economic rebound, they will not forestall the arrival of a world that is both
multipolar and ideologically diverse.
History makes clear that such periods of
tumultuous change come with great peril. Indeed, great-power contests over
hierarchy and ideology regularly lead to major wars. Averting this outcome
requires soberly acknowledging that the Western-led liberal order that emerged
after World War II cannot anchor global stability in the twenty-first century.
The search is on for a viable and effective way forward.
The best vehicle for promoting stability
in the twenty-first century is a global concert of major powers. As the history
of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe demonstrated—its members were the
United Kingdom, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria—a steering group of
leading countries can curb the geopolitical and ideological competition that
usually accompanies multipolarity.
Concerts have two characteristics that
make them well suited to the emerging global landscape: political inclusivity
and procedural informality. A concert’s inclusivity means that it puts at the
table the geopolitically influential and powerful states that need to be there,
regardless of their regime type. In so doing, it largely separates ideological
differences over domestic governance from matters of international cooperation.
A concert’s informality means that it eschews binding and enforceable
procedures and agreements, clearly distinguishing it from the UN Security
Council. The UNSC serves too often as a public forum for grandstanding and is
regularly paralyzed by disputes among its veto-wielding permanent members. In
contrast, a concert offers a private venue that combines consensus building
with cajoling and jockeying—a must since major powers will have both common and
competing interests. By providing a vehicle for genuine and sustained strategic
dialogue, a global concert can realistically mute and manage inescapable
geopolitical and ideological differences.
A global concert would be a consultative,
not a decision-making, body. It would address emerging crises yet ensure that
urgent issues would not crowd out important ones, and it would deliberate on
reforms to existing norms and institutions. This steering group would help
fashion new rules of the road and build support for collective initiatives but
leave operational matters, such as deploying peacekeeping missions, delivering
pandemic relief, and concluding new climate deals, to the UN and other existing
bodies. The concert would thus tee up decisions that could then be taken and
implemented elsewhere. It would sit atop and backstop, not supplant, the
current international architecture by maintaining a dialogue that does not now
exist. The UN is too big, too bureaucratic, and too formalistic. Fly-in,
fly-out G-7 or G-20 summits can be useful but even at their best are woefully
inadequate, in part because so much effort goes toward haggling over detailed,
but often anodyne, communiqués. Phone calls between heads of state, foreign
ministers, and national security advisers are too episodic and often narrow in
scope.
Fashioning major-power consensus on the
international norms that guide statecraft, accepting both liberal and illiberal
governments as legitimate and authoritative, advancing shared approaches to
crises—the Concert of Europe relied on these important innovations to preserve
peace in a multipolar world. By drawing on lessons from its nineteenth-century
forbearer, a twenty-first-century global concert can do the same. Concerts do
lack the certitude, predictability, and enforceability of alliances and other
formalized pacts. But in designing mechanisms to preserve peace amid
geopolitical flux, policymakers should strive for the workable and the
attainable, not the desirable but impossible.
A GLOBAL CONCERT FOR
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
A global concert would have six members:
China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States.
Democracies and nondemocracies would have equal standing, and inclusion would
be a function of power and influence, not values or regime type. The concert’s
members would collectively represent roughly 70 percent of both global GDP and
global military spending. Including these six heavyweights in the concert’s
ranks would give it geopolitical clout while preventing it from becoming an
unwieldy talk shop.
Members would send permanent
representatives of the highest diplomatic rank to the global concert’s standing
headquarters. Although they would not be formal members of the concert, four
regional organizations—the African Union, Arab League, Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Organization of American States (OAS)—would maintain
permanent delegations at the concert’s headquarters. These organizations would
provide their regions with representation and the ability to help shape the
concert’s agenda. When discussing issues affecting these regions, concert
members would invite delegates from these bodies as well as select member
states to join meetings. For example, were concert members to address a dispute
in the Middle East, they could request the participation of the Arab League,
its relevant members, and other involved parties, such as Iran, Israel, and
Turkey.
A global concert would shun codified
rules, instead relying on dialogue to build consensus. Like the Concert of
Europe, it would privilege the territorial status quo and a view of sovereignty
that precludes, except in the case of international consensus, using military
force or other coercive tools to alter existing borders or topple regimes. This
relatively conservative baseline would encourage buy-in from all members. At
the same time, the concert would provide an ideal venue for discussing
globalization’s impact on sovereignty and the potential need to deny sovereign
immunity to nations that engage in certain egregious activities. Those
activities might include committing genocide, harboring or sponsoring
terrorists, or severely exacerbating climate change by destroying rainforests.
A global concert would thus put a premium
on dialogue and consensus. The steering group would also acknowledge, however,
that great powers in a multipolar world will be driven by realist concerns
about hierarchy, security, and regime continuity, making discord inescapable.
Members would reserve the right to take unilateral action, alone or through
coalitions, when they deem their vital interests to be at stake. Direct
strategic dialogue would, though, make surprise moves less common and, ideally,
unilateral action less frequent. Regular and open consultation between Moscow
and Washington, for example, might have produced less friction over NATO
enlargement. China and the United States are better off directly communicating
with each other over Taiwan than sidestepping the issue and risking a military
mishap in the Taiwan Strait or provocations that could escalate tensions.
A global concert could also make
unilateral moves less disruptive. Conflicts of interest would hardly disappear,
but a new vehicle devoted exclusively to great-power diplomacy would help make
those conflicts more manageable. Although members would, in principle, endorse
a norm-governed international order, they would also embrace realistic
expectations about the limits of cooperation and compartmentalize their
differences. During the nineteenth-century concert, its members frequently
confronted stubborn disagreements over, for instance, how to respond to liberal
revolts in Greece, Naples, and Spain. But they kept their differences at bay
through dialogue and compromise, returning to the battlefield in the Crimean
War in 1853 only after the revolutions of 1848 spawned destabilizing currents
of nationalism.
A global concert would give its members
wide leeway when it comes to domestic governance. They would effectively agree
to disagree on questions of democracy and political rights, ensuring that such
differences do not hinder international cooperation. The United States and its
democratic allies would not cease criticizing illiberalism in China, Russia, or
anywhere else, and neither would they abandon their effort to spread democratic
values and practices. On the contrary, they would continue to raise their
voices and wield their influence to defend universal political and human
rights. At the same time, China and Russia would be free to criticize the
domestic policies of the concert’s democratic members and publicly promote
their own vision of governance. But the concert would also work toward a shared
understanding of what constitutes unacceptable interference in other countries’
domestic affairs and, as a result, are to be avoided.
OUR BEST HOPE
Establishing a global concert would
admittedly constitute a setback to the liberalizing project launched by the
world’s democracies after World War II. The proposed steering group’s
aspirations set a modest bar compared with the West’s long-standing aim of
spreading republican governance and globalizing a liberal international order.
Nonetheless, this scaling back of expectations is unavoidable given the
twenty-first century’s geopolitical realities.
The international system, for one, will
exhibit characteristics of both bipolarity and multipolarity. There will be two
peer competitors—the United States and China. Unlike during the Cold War,
however, ideological and geopolitical competition between them will not
encompass the world. On the contrary, the EU, Russia, and India, as well as
other large states such as Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, and South
Africa, will likely play the two superpowers off each other and seek to
preserve a significant measure of autonomy. Both China and the United States
will also likely limit their involvement in unstable zones of less strategic
interest, leaving it to others—or no one—to manage potential conflicts. China
has long been smart enough to keep its political distance from far-off conflict
zones, while the United States, which is currently pulling back from the Middle
East and Africa, has learned that the hard way.
The international system of the
twenty-first century will therefore resemble that of nineteenth-century Europe,
which had two major powers—the United Kingdom and Russia—and three powers of
lesser rank—France, Prussia, and Austria. The Concert of Europe’s primary
objective was to preserve peace among its members through a mutual commitment
to upholding the territorial settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna in
1815. The pact rested on good faith and a shared sense of obligation, not
contractual agreement. Any actions required to enforce their mutual
commitments, according to a British memorandum, “have been deliberately left to
arise out of the circumstances of the time and of the case.” Concert members
recognized their competing interests, especially when it came to Europe’s
periphery, but sought to manage their differences and prevent them from jeopardizing
group solidarity. The United Kingdom, for example, opposed Austria’s proposed
intervention to reverse a liberal revolt that took place in Naples in 1820.
Nonetheless, British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh eventually assented to
Austria’s plans provided that “they were ready to give every reasonable
assurance that their views were not directed to purposes of aggrandizement
subversive of the Territorial System of Europe.”
A global concert, like the Concert of
Europe, is well suited to promoting stability amid multipolarity. Concerts
limit their membership to a manageable size. Their informality allows them to
adapt to changing circumstances and prevents them from scaring off powers
averse to binding commitments. Under conditions of rising populism and
nationalism, widespread during the nineteenth century and again today, powerful
countries prefer looser groupings and diplomatic flexibility to fixed formats
and obligations. It is no accident that major states have already been turning
to concert-like groupings or so-called contact groups to tackle tough
challenges; examples include the six-party talks that addressed North Korea’s
nuclear program, the P5+1 coalition that negotiated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal,
and the Normandy grouping that has been seeking a diplomatic resolution to the
conflict in eastern Ukraine. The concert can be understood as a standing
contact group with a global purview.
Separately, the twenty-first century will
be politically and ideologically diverse. Depending on the trajectory of the
populist revolts afflicting the West, liberal democracies may well be able to
hold their own. But so too will illiberal regimes. Moscow and Beijing are
tightening their grip at home, not opening up. Stable democracy is hard to find
in the Middle East and Africa. Indeed, democracy is receding, not advancing,
worldwide—a trend that could well continue. The international order that comes
next must make room for ideological diversity. A concert has the necessary
informality and flexibility to do so; it separates issues of domestic rule from
those of international teamwork. During the nineteenth century, it was
precisely this hands-off approach to regime type that enabled two liberalizing
powers—the United Kingdom and France—to work with Russia, Prussia, and Austria,
three countries determined to defend absolute monarchy.
Finally, the inadequacies of the current
international architecture underscore the need for a global concert. The
rivalry between the United States and China is heating up fast, the world is
suffering through a devastating pandemic, climate change is advancing, and the
evolution of cyberspace poses new threats. These and other challenges mean that
clinging to the status quo and banking on existing international norms and
institutions would be dangerously naive. The Concert of Europe was formed in
1815 owing to the years of devastation wrought by the Napoleonic Wars. But the
lack of great-power war today should not be cause for complacency. And even
though the world has passed through previous eras of multipolarity, the advance
of globalization increases the demand for and importance of new approaches to
global governance. Globalization unfolded during Pax Britannica, with London
overseeing it until World War I. After a dark interwar hiatus, the United
States took up the mantle of global leadership from World War II into the
twenty-first century.
But Pax Americana is now running on fumes.
The United States and its traditional democratic partners have neither the
capability nor the will to anchor an interdependent international system and
universalize the liberal order that they erected after World War II. The
absence of U.S. leadership during the covid-19 crisis was striking; each
country was on its own. President Biden is guiding the United States back to
being a team player, but the nation’s pressing domestic priorities and the
onset of multipolarity will deny Washington the outsize influence it once
enjoyed. Allowing the world to slide toward regional blocs or a two-bloc
structure similar to that of the Cold War is a nonstarter. The United States,
China, and the rest of the globe cannot fully uncouple when national economies,
financial markets, and supply chains are irreversibly tethered together. A
great-power steering group is the best option for managing an integrated world
no longer overseen by a hegemon. A global concert fits the bill.
NO FALLBACKS
The alternatives to a global concert all
have disqualifying weaknesses. Although the UN will remain an essential global
forum, its track record illuminates the body’s limitations. Veto-producing
disagreements often render the Security Council helpless. Its permanent members
reflect the world of 1945, not the world today. Expanding the membership of the
UNSC might succeed in adapting it to a new distribution of power, but doing so
would also make the body even more unwieldy and less effective than it already
is. The UN should continue to fulfill its many useful functions, including
providing humanitarian relief and peacekeeping, but it cannot and will not
anchor global stability in the twenty-first century.
It is no longer realistic to aim for the
globalization of the Western order and the emergence of a world populated
primarily by democracies committed to upholding a liberal, rules-based international
system. The unipolar moment is over, and in hindsight, talk of the “end of
history” was triumphalist, even if sophisticated, nonsense. Indeed, the
political coherence of the West can by no means be taken for granted. Even if
Western democracies reclaim their commitments to republican ideals and to one
another, they simply will not have the material strength or political
wherewithal to universalize the liberal international order.
A U.S.-Chinese condominium—in effect a G-2
in which Washington and Beijing would together oversee a mutually acceptable
international order—offers a similarly flawed alternative. Even if these two
peer competitors could find a way to dampen their intensifying rivalry, much of
the world will remain outside of their direct purview. Moreover, predicating
global stability on cooperation between Washington and Beijing is hardly a safe
bet. They will have enough trouble managing their relationship in the
Asia-Pacific region. Farther afield, they will need considerable buy-in and support
from others. A U.S.-Chinese condominium also smacks of a world of spheres of
influence—one in which Washington and Beijing agree to divide their sway along
geographic lines, perhaps apportioning rights and responsibilities to
second-tier powers in their respective regions. To give China, Russia, or other
powers a free hand in their neighborhoods, however, is to encourage
expansionist tendencies and to either reduce nearby countries’ autonomy or
prompt them to push back, resulting in more arms proliferation and regional
conflict. Indeed, the precise purpose of thinking through how to provide order
in the twenty-first century is to avoid a world more prone to coercion,
rivalry, and economic division.
Pax Sinica is also a nonstarter. For the
foreseeable future, China will have neither the capability nor the ambition to
anchor a global order. At least for now, its primary geopolitical ambitions are
confined to the Asia-Pacific. China is markedly expanding its commercial reach,
in particular through the Belt and Road Initiative, a move that will
significantly enhance its economic and political clout. But Beijing has not yet
demonstrated a robust willingness to provide global public goods, instead
taking a largely mercantilist approach to engagement in most quarters of the
globe. Nor has it sought to export its views on domestic governance to others
or to push out a new set of norms to anchor global stability. In addition, the
United States, even if it continues down a path of strategic retrenchment, will
remain a power of the first rank for decades to come. An illiberal and
mercantilist Pax Sinica would hardly be acceptable to Americans or to many
other peoples around the world still aspiring to uphold liberal principles.
When it comes to improving the current
international architecture, a global concert wins not because of its perfection
but rather by default; it is the most promising alternative. Other options are
ineffective, unworkable, or unattainable. Should a great-power steering group
fail to materialize, an unruly world managed by no one would lie ahead.
PUTTING IT IN
MOTION
A global concert would promote
international stability through sustained consultation and negotiation. Concert
members’ permanent representatives would meet regularly, supported by their
staffs and a small but highly qualified secretariat. Members would dispatch
their most accomplished diplomats as permanent representatives, who would be
equal in rank, if not senior, to UN ambassadors. The concert would encourage
the African Union, Arab League, ASEAN, and OAS to send equally authoritative
figures. Concert summits would occur on a regular schedule. They would also
take place as needed to address crises; one of the Concert of Europe’s most
effective practices was to gather leaders on short notice to manage emerging
disputes. When relevant issues are under discussion, the heads of the African
Union, Arab League, ASEAN, and OAS, along with the leaders of states involved
in the matter, would attend concert summits. The global concert’s chair would
rotate annually among its six members. The body’s headquarters would not be
located in any of its member states. Possible venues include Geneva and
Singapore.
In contrast with the UNSC, where
showboating often crowds out substantive initiative, the permanent members of
the concert would not wield vetoes, take formal votes, or commit to binding
agreements or obligations. Diplomacy would take place behind closed doors and
aim to forge consensus. Members who break rank and act unilaterally would do so
only after exploring alternative courses of action. If a member were to defect
from consensus, other concert members would then coordinate their
response.
This proposal presumes that none of the
concert’s members would be a revisionist power bent on aggression and conquest.
The Concert of Europe functioned effectively in no small part because its
members were, broadly speaking, satisfied powers seeking to preserve, not
overturn, the territorial status quo. In today’s world, Russian land grabs in
Georgia and Ukraine are worrying developments, revealing the Kremlin’s
readiness to violate the territorial integrity of its neighbors. So are China’s
ongoing efforts to lay claim to and build military facilities on disputed
islands in the South China Sea and Beijing’s violation of its pledges to
respect Hong Kong’s autonomy. Nonetheless, neither Russia nor China has yet to
become an implacably aggressive state committed to wholesale territorial
expansion. A global concert also makes that outcome less likely by establishing
a forum in which its members can make transparent their core security interests
and strategic “redlines.” Nonetheless, if an aggressor state that routinely
threatened other members’ interests were to emerge, it would be expelled from
the group, and the remaining members of the concert would rally against it.
To advance great-power solidarity, the
concert should focus on two priorities. One would be to encourage respect for
existing borders and resist territorial changes through coercion or force. It
would be prejudiced against claims of self-determination—but concert members
would retain the option of recognizing new countries as they see fit. Although
it would give all nations broad latitude on issues of domestic governance, the
concert would deal on a case-by-case basis with failing states or those that
systematically violate basic human rights and broadly accepted provisions of
international law.
The concert’s second priority would be to
generate collective responses to global challenges. At times of crisis, the
concert would advance diplomacy and galvanize joint initiative, then hand off
implementation to the appropriate body—such as the UN for peacekeeping, the
International Monetary Fund for emergency credit, or the World Health
Organization (who) for public health. The concert would also invest in a
longer-term effort to adapt existing norms and institutions to global change.
Even while defending traditional sovereignty to reduce interstate conflict, it
would also discuss how best to adjust international rules and practices to an
interconnected world. When national policies have negative international
consequences, those policies become the concert’s business.
In this regard, the concert could help
counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and address nuclear
programs in North Korea and Iran. When it comes to diplomacy with Pyongyang and
Tehran, enforcing sanctions against both regimes, and responding to potential
provocations, the concert would have the right parties in the room. Indeed, as
a standing body, the concert would significantly improve on the six-party and
P5+1 formats that have historically handled negotiations with North Korea and
Iran.
The concert could also serve as a venue
for addressing climate change. The top greenhouse gas emitters are China, the
United States, the EU, India, Russia, and Japan. Together, they produce roughly
65 percent of global emissions. With the world’s leading emitters all around
the table, the concert could help set new targets for reducing greenhouse gases
and new standards for green development, before handing off implementation to
other forums. Similarly, the covid-19 pandemic exposed the who’s inadequacies,
and the concert would be the right place to fashion a consensus on reform.
Forging rules of the road for managing technological innovation—digital
regulation and taxation, cybersecurity, 5G networks, social media, virtual
currencies, artificial intelligence—would also be on the concert’s agenda.
These important matters often fall between the institutional cracks, and the
concert could provide a useful vehicle for international oversight.
Drawing on its nineteenth-century
forbearer’s experiences, a global concert should also recognize that
great-power solidarity often entails inaction, neutrality, and restraint rather
than intervention. The Concert of Europe relied on buffer zones, demilitarized
areas, and neutral zones to dampen rivalries and head off potential conflicts.
Concert members objecting to initiatives backed by others simply opted out of
participation rather than breaking rank and blocking the undertaking. The
United Kingdom, for instance, opposed interventions to put down liberal
rebellions in Naples and Spain in the 1820s but decided to sit out rather than
prevent military action by other members. France did the same in 1839 and 1840
when other members intervened in Egypt to suppress a challenge to Ottoman rule.
How might a global concert usefully
implement such measures today? In Syria, for example, a concert could have
either coordinated a joint intervention to stop the civil war that erupted
there in 2011 or worked to keep all the major powers out. More recently, it
could have provided a venue for the diplomacy needed to introduce a buffer zone
or demilitarized zone in Syria’s north, averting the fighting and humanitarian
suffering that followed the abrupt U.S. withdrawal and the regime’s
increasingly intense attacks on Idlib Province. Proxy wars in places such as
Yemen, Libya, and Darfur might become less frequent and violent if a global
concert were to succeed in fashioning a common stance among the major powers.
Had a great-power steering group taken shape at the close of the Cold War, it
might have been able to avert, or at least make far less bloody, the civil wars
in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. A global concert would guarantee none of these
outcomes—but it would make them all more likely.
MORE TROUBLE THAN
IT’S WORTH?
This proposal to establish a global
concert runs up against a number of objections. One involves the envisaged membership.
Why not include Europe’s most powerful states rather than the European Union,
which is governed in an unwieldy and collective fashion by its commission and
council? The answer is that Europe’s geopolitical weight comes from its
aggregate strength, not that of its individual member states. Germany’s GDP is
around $4 trillion, and its defense budget is around $40 billion, while the
EU’s collective GDP is roughly $19 trillion and its aggregate defense spending
is close to $300 billion. Europe’s most important leaders, moreover, need not
be excluded from concert meetings. The heads of the EU—the presidents of the
commission and council—could bring German, French, and other member states’
leaders to concert summits. And even though the United Kingdom has quit the EU,
it is still working out its future relationship with the union.
EU membership in a global concert would give both the United Kingdom and
the EU a strong incentive to stay lashed together when it comes to foreign and
security policies.
Some might question the inclusion of
Russia, whose GDP is not even in the top ten and is behind those of Brazil and
Canada. But Russia is a major nuclear power and punches well above its weight
on the global stage. Russia’s relationships with China, its EU neighbors, and
the United States will have a major impact on twenty-first-century geopolitics.
Moscow has also begun reasserting its influence in the Middle East and Africa.
The Kremlin deserves a seat at the table.
Major portions of the world—Africa, the
Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America—would be represented by their
main regional organizations, which would have regular input through their
permanent presence at the concert’s headquarters. Nonetheless, the diplomats
representing these bodies, along with select leaders from their regions, would
join meetings of concert members only when issues of direct relevance are under
discussion. This format admittedly reinforces hierarchy and inequity in the
international system. But the concert aims to facilitate cooperation by
restricting membership to the most important and influential actors; it
deliberately sacrifices broad representation in favor of efficacy. Other
institutions provide wider access that the concert would not. Countries not
included in the concert would still be able to wield their influence in the UN
and other existing international forums. And the concert would have the
flexibility to change its membership over time if there was a consensus to do
so.
Another potential objection is that the
global concert would effectively produce a world of great-power spheres of
influence. After all, the Concert of Europe did grant its members a droit de
regard—a right of overwatch—in their respective neighborhoods. A concert for
the twenty-first century, however, would not encourage or sanction spheres of
influence. On the contrary, it would promote regional integration and look to
existing regional bodies to encourage restraint. Across regions, the body would
foster great-power consultation on and joint management of contentious regional
issues. The goal would be to facilitate global coordination while recognizing
the authority and responsibility of regional bodies.
Critics might claim that the concert is
too state-centric for today’s world. The Concert of Europe may have been a good
fit for the sovereign and authoritative nation-states of the nineteenth
century. But social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
corporations, cities, and other nonstate actors now have considerable political
power and need to have seats at the table; empowering these social agents makes
good sense. Nonetheless, states are still the main and most capable actors in
the international system. Indeed, globalization and the populist backlash it
has triggered, along with the covid-19 pandemic, are strengthening sovereignty
and compelling national governments to claw back power. Moreover, the concert
could and should bring NGOs, corporations, and other nonstate actors into its
deliberations when appropriate—for example, including the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation and big pharmaceutical firms when discussing global health or
Google when addressing digital governance. A great-power steering group would
complement, not replace, nonstate actors’ contributions to global governance.
Finally, if the appeal and efficacy of a
global concert stem from its flexibility and informality, then critics could
justifiably ask why it should be institutionalized. Why not let ad hoc
groupings of relevant states, such as the six-party talks and the P5+1, come
and go as needed? Doesn’t the existence of the G-7 and the G-20 make a global
concert superfluous?
Establishing a concert headquarters and
secretariat would endow it with greater standing and efficacy than other
groupings that gather sporadically. Regular meetings among the concert’s six
representatives, the daily work of the secretariat, the presence of delegations
from all major regions, scheduled as well as emergency summits—these defining
features would give the global concert permanence, authority, and legitimacy.
The continuous and sustained dialogue, personal relationships, and peer
pressure that come with face-to-face diplomacy facilitate cooperation. Daily
interaction is far preferable to episodic engagement.
The permanent secretariat would be
particularly important in providing the expertise, sustained dialogue, and
long-term perspective needed to address nontraditional issues such as
cybersecurity and global health. A standing body also offers a ready vehicle
for responding to unforeseen crises. The covid-19 pandemic might have been
better contained had the concert been able to help coordinate a global response
from day one. The dissemination of critical information from China occurred too
slowly, and it was not until the middle of March 2020—months into the
crisis—that G-7 leaders held a video call to discuss the rapidly spreading
disease.
The concert thus has the potential to
supplant both the G-7 and the G-20. The United States, the EU, and Japan would
likely focus their energies on the new body, possibly leaving the G-7 to
atrophy. A better case can be made for preserving the G-20, given its broader
membership. Countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa,
and Turkey would resent the loss of voice and stature should the G-20 wither
away. Nonetheless, should a global concert fulfill its potential and emerge as
the leading venue for policy coordination, both the G-7 and the G-20 may well
lose their raisons d’être.
NO PANACEA, BUT
NO ALTERNATIVE
Establishing a global concert would not be
a panacea. Bringing the world’s heavyweights to the table hardly ensures a
consensus among them. Indeed, although the Concert of Europe preserved peace
for decades after it was formed, France and the United Kingdom ultimately faced
off with Russia in the Crimean War. Russia is again at loggerheads with its
European neighbors over the Crimean region, underscoring the elusive nature of
great-power solidarity. A concert-like format—the Normandy grouping of France,
Germany, Russia, and Ukraine—has so far failed to resolve the standoff over
Crimea and the Donbas.
Nonetheless, a global concert offers the
best and most realistic way to advance great-power coordination, maintain
international stability, and promote a rules-based order. The United States and
its democratic partners have every reason to revive the solidarity of the West.
But they should stop pretending that the global triumph of the order they
backed since World War II is within reach. They should also soberly confront
the reality that abdicating leadership would likely lead to the return of a
global system marred by disorder and unfettered competition. A global concert
represents a pragmatic middle ground between idealistic but unrealistic aspirations
and dangerous alternatives.
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