Among the Atlantic community there is much greater attention to the type of internal governance of states than to the effectiveness of internal governance, irrespective of type. The influence of 'international opinion' (which really means Atlantic community opinion) carries great weight in the domestic politics of the Atlantic states. It was the influence of Atlantic community opinion, for instance, that dissuaded Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo from contesting an unconstitutional third term in 2007.

Colonial and Cold War ties remain strong influences on the cohesion and common purpose of the Atlantic community. It has three spear-carriers: the US, France, and the UK. These three countries, collectively or separately, are looked to for leadership in times of crisis, such as civil war or genocide in West Africa. Leadership by any other country, such as South Africa or Brazil, is looked at askance in the Atlantic community.

The Atlantic community tends to focus on problems that threaten either its security or its ideals. The uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East challenge both: by threatening to disrupt Middle Eastern and Atlantic basin energy flows, by raising the prospect of large refugee movements, and by highlighting the forces of democracy and illiberalism in the Arab world.

Iran's nuclear ambitions similarly challenge the integrity of a global norm and the strategic stability of the Middle East. The crisis of the euro likewise has become all-consuming, challenging both the dream of regionalism and the reality of Europe's continuing influence and prosperity.

Stay tuned – parts 2 and 3 of 'Back to Bipolarity?' will follow.

In Asia there is a pragmatic approach to internal governance; as long as the regime is effective in maintaining a stable country, regime type makes little difference. Witness the disgust of many regional leaders when Thailand's constitutional crisis disrupted the December 2008 East Asia Summit meeting. Their consternation was not directed towards the prospects of democracy in Thailand, but towards the ineptness of the then government in dealing with the protests. Even those Asian states that many outside Asia look to as future champions of democracy – such as India and Indonesia – have been silent on regime type in other countries.

Colonial and Cold War ties are meaningless in Asia. Vietnam rarely looks to France for anything other than assistance in restoring grand colonial architecture, and its burgeoning strategic relationship with the US shows how weakly Cold War memories influence current policy. Consequently, there are no natural and accepted leaders in Asia. Each of its powerful states would arouse suspicion and resistance were it to propose leading a coalition of countries; in this situation, collective action is often most effective when proposed by smaller countries.

The focus of Asian states is on pressing contemporary issues in their region. The overarching strategic picture is dominated by responses to China's rising power, as the second-tier states surrounding it build closer ties with the US.

Meanwhile China is working assiduously at countering any ability or willingness to contain it. Simmering disputes in the East and South China Seas are, on the one hand, problems needing immediate management, and on the other, confrontations that will shape the future of the region's maritime trading order. The Arab uprisings seem very far away, while the issue of Iran's aspirations sees non-proliferation concerns tempered by pragmatic considerations on access to and the price of West Asian energy.

Don't touch that dial – part 3 of 'Back to Bipolarity' will be along soon.

Photo by Flickr user Old Sarge.

With his reference to a 'teleological belief in the steady improvement of international relations', Michael implies that, to be an internationalist, one must believe in progress in international politics. He associates internationalism with the liberal humanist notion that, over time, humankind will learn to banish its warlike impulses and perhaps even its irrational attachment to the nation, allowing for the global formation of a post-sovereign entity like the EU.

There is certainly a stain of such utopianism in European thinking, but it's worth remembering that an altogether different version of internationalism held sway in Europe in the 19th century: the Concert of Europe. This was an international institution designed not to further some utopian ideal but to manage the existing order and stifle radical change.

After World War II, we saw the rise of a new generation of international institutions, very different to the European Concert but also lacking the progressive character that Michael ascribes to 'internationalism'. Yes, the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions were built on high-minded ideals, but they evolved into procedural bodies, designed not to transform the world but just to make it run a little smoother and relieve tensions.

In fact, many of the commonplace aspects of internationalism we take for granted today — trade, the coordination of air traffic, international postal delivery, patents — are proceduralist by nature; they set the rules of the road, but sovereign states still determine their own direction of travel. As such, these bodies don't impinge on national sovereignty; rather, they make the exercise of sovereignty practicable in an anarchical environment.

I'm not sure I buy Michael's division of Asian and Atlantic spheres, but his characterisation of Asia sounds about right. This region is simply not suited to European-style supra-nationalism; Hobbes and Thucydides are better guides here than Kant. So Michael is right that idealists will struggle to find common ground with Asia, given its realist mindset. To find such common ground, interlocutors will have to draw on the third intellectual tradition I have briefly described above, which I would call 'conservative internationalism'.

In Europe and the US in particular, we have actually been discussing our differences in this respect at least since the end of the Cold War. Europeans and Americans share basic democratic and liberal values (as do many other societies in the world), but all the debates about European multilateralism vs. American exceptionalism, the legitimacy of the use of force, the importance of international rules and regimes, or simply Mars vs Venus all show that there certainly are different 'international affairs cultures' at work on both sides of the Atlantic.

As the transatlantic community is tied together by values and strong interests, NATO, or the US and the EU, have for the most part been able to deal with such differences. But they always do better when they acknowledge them. Maybe this is what makes a Euro-Atlantic culture.

I am not sure that Africa and Latin America really fit in here, at least for the time being. Michael cites different countries' attitudes to the Responsibility-to-Protect norm. But generally, Latin American and African states are much more 'sovereignistic' here than, particularly, the Europeans, and at least as sceptical of international interventions as India or other Asian nations.

Rather than constructing a new bipolarity in international affairs, we could perhaps try to identify a number of different international-affairs cultures. Aside from an (EU-dominated) European and a (US-dominated) American one, this could include an ASEAN-led and probably an emerging-powers approach. And all these cultures seem prone to adapt and change over time, particularly where states and their economies grow, societies become more affluent and more tied into global networks.

China is more interested in maintaining international norms and institutions today than it was under Mao. I wouldn't exclude, though, that, with time, it develops a strategic culture which is much closer to that of today's US than to either the European one or that of its smaller south East Asian neighbours.

States like Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and India are developing a stronger interest in international regimes and rules as they become more active participants in a globalised world. Given their democratic nature, they may see advantages in a European-type of multilateralism once they have reached a certain level of prosperity. But this may be just another of these European ideas about how things work in the world.

Photo by Flicr user batintherain.

By the same token, we will see whether Europe is really as idealist as it appears, or simply enjoys the luxury today of not showing its realist side, when it faces a real strategic challenge, for example from Russia. We are all idealists when the sun shines, but turn realist when clouds gather.

Second, and more fundamentally, I think we need to look elsewhere for the driver of increasing division that Michael identifies between the Asian and Atlantic worlds. I think it's a division between increasingly separate strategic systems. My hunch is that we are seeing the end of a long era in which strategic and political affairs have been primarily global, and are seeing instead the re-emergence of a series of discrete regional orders which do not interconnect much with one another.

This re-regionalisation of the globe is primarily a matter of economics. Before the great divergence, no country could project strategically significant power far from its own region. But this changed from the mid-18th century when Europeans grew richer than countries in other parts of the world.  In the 19th century, with America, the North Atlantic countries brought the whole world into their strategic system. This reached its height in the Cold War and the brief moment of American unipolarity that followed.

But now that we are moving back towards a more even, more historically 'normal', distribution of economic power around the globe, we are also moving back towards old divisions between strategic systems. As Asia grows richer, non-Asian powers will become less and less able to project strategically decisive power into Asia, but equally China and other major Asian powers will find it impossible to project serious strategic weight into the Atlantic. (And no, I haven't forgotten about ICBMs, but they don't give you much strategic influence when others have them too.)

What follows, if this is right? First, Asia and the Atlantic are not two opposing poles in a single system, but two separate systems – which I think is what Michael was getting at when he wrote of 'non-competing poles'. Second, as Michael suggests, the biggest implications are for America, because after the Cold War it emerged as the only remaining global power, and one aiming to sustain global primacy. It is precisely the shift in relative economic weight that makes this aim now unsustainable – not just in Asia, I suspect, but in Europe too. But that's a whole different post.

Photo by Flickr user elycefeliz.

The results are pretty clear. I averaged the contributions made to the UN budget as a proportion of GDP for African, Asian, European, and Latin American states. Despite having an average per capita GDP three times as big as Africa's, Asian states' contribution to the UN budget as a proportion of GDP is less than 50% bigger than African states'. And although Asia's average per capita GDP is slightly higher than Latin America's, Asia's contribution to the UN budget is only four-fifths the size of Latin America's.

So African and Latin American countries are much more committed than Asian states to funding the UN, irrespective of their own wealth – an attribute that brings them closer to Europe than Asia.

As for arms spending, according to SIPRI, between 2000 and 2011 Asia's arms spending doubled; compare that to Africa's 55% rise, Europe's 21% increase, and Latin America's 58% growth. In other words, Asian states are arming at nearly twice the rates of Africans and Latin Americans, and five times the rate of Europeans.

In my next post, I look at why all this matters.

Photo by Flickr user michaels photo album.

Since the mid-1980s in Europe, the early 1990s in Latin America, and the late 1990s in Africa, whole groups of states have transformed the way they interact within their regions. In each of these groupings, there has been a steady transformation from Westphalian prerogatives, reasonably weak intergovernmental institutions, and an avoidance of domestic interference and criticism towards collective commitments to human rights, democracy and the rule of law, the integration of public opinion and civil society interests into regional institutions, and the strengthening of regional peace and stability mechanisms.

All three regions have inaugurated comprehensive democracy, human rights and rule of law charters, and rules of exclusion for those states falling short. All three have established or strengthened regional judiciaries, regional parliaments, and regional peace and security intervention instruments. And all three (unlike ASEAN, which included a declaration on democracy and human rights in its 2007 charter but has not acted on it) have demonstrated a rising willingness and expectation that they will enforce their collective commitments.

This is what brings Africa, Europe and Latin America together into an Atlantic community, despite their great differences in culture, wealth and history. And it's what divides the Atlantic community from the states of Asia.

The key difference between the Atlantic and Asia is that Atlantic states are much more willing to negotiate and uphold rules and institutions – internally through democracy, rights and the rule of law, and externally through 'thick' institutions of regional governance relating to trade and investment, and instability and crisis management. For Asian countries, state effectiveness is more important than internal or external rules. What's important is not the form of internal governance but its efficiency. Externally, Asia's institutions remain 'thin' too, in order to place as few constraints as possible on the state's prerogatives.

Volker Perthes suggested I'm just re-hashing Robert Kagan's Mars-Venus divide. Far from it: in my next post, I argue that Kagan's distinction doesn't fit, and try to explain why these Atlantic vs Asian differences have arisen.

Photo by Flickr user Kirill Levin.

Institutions have, if anything, an even more important role in Asia than they do in Europe. As Michael well knows, there is not just a proliferation, but an overload of multilateral institutions in Asia, with an estimated 700 multilateral meetings a year being held. Asian institutions however, operate in a different manner to Atlantic ones. They are often regionally defined (ie. Asian countries are more concerned with neighbourhood challenges than global ones), and they follow different rules about the institutional footprint, decision making styles, and a preference for process and long term socialisation via dealing with common challenges, than seeking speedy majority rulings about hard security issues.

These are important difference of style, but in terms of 'distinguish(ing) the Atlantic from the Asian outlook', both regions share a strong preference for using institutions as the means for avoiding conflict and dispute resolution. Both pledge to work on human rights and advance democracy, but along different timelines. I'm not sure the different approaches and norms that shape their behaviour within institutions should be seen as more important than their common support of institutions.

Likewise, I can't help but note the different economic disparities between the regions when comparing spending on weaponry. Over the period discussed (2000-2011), Asia has witnessed significant economic growth, with many countries moving into middle income status and seeking the modern military capacities that come with it. We should expect a quickly growing region that is emerging from developing into developed status to spend more than poorer and less institutionally capable regions (Africa), and wealthier but already established regions (Europe).

Yet there is little evidence that this purchasing is being undertaken in response to the capability of other states (otherwise known as an 'arms race'). If Asia was gearing for war, we'd see diplomatic moves to match the defence spending, yet these are hard to identify. One explanation for the increased spending is that states, like people, often buy items for status, spending at a level they think is fitting with their income, as much as they purchase based on need or demand. To analogise, the person who orders the biggest TV in the store is not necessarily a couch potato; they might simply have received a big promotion. Asian states are spending more now, in part because they can.

Like all readers, I've really enjoyed Michael's thought provoking posts, but I haven't responded before because I'm not quite sure what the very real differences he is identifying mean.

The Atlantic and Asian regions have long been very different. Globalisation has brought them much closer together and maybe they will drift away again, but given they share common economic systems, largely common political systems (save China), and an increasing cultural overlap, the fundamentals for cohesion are strong. Add to that a mutual embrace of multilateralism as the proper forum for peaceful dispute resolution and I'm not sure what the many differences between these areas imply for how the world will work in the future.

But Asian states don't have anything like the power lead over Atlantic states that would render Kagan's parable more broadly applicable. Yes, Asia's giants may be racking up year-on-year high growth and buying up big in the global arms bazaar, but their own internal feelings of fragility and weakness make the man-with-a-gun analogy a long way from apt.

I think the difference between the Atlantic and Asia is psychological, but it's not related to power differentials. I think it arises from differences in how countries in these two regions interpret their own histories. To the Atlantic states – Africa, Europe, Latin America – modern history reads as a tale of disappointment. For Europe, the last century has charted a trajectory of decline from the glory days when imperial Europe created the modern world. For Africa and Latin America, there is a widespread feeling of having failed to live up to the possibilities presented by their vast, bounteous continents. For each of these three regions, the responsibility lies within – volatile and venal domestic politics that leads to war and economic under-performance.

To Asian states, modern history reads very differently. It is a history of decline from former glory, but the crucial difference is that the decline coincides with (and is interpreted as having been caused by) a period of external colonial domination. Asian states read domination as both external (unequal treaties, direct imperial control) and internal (Western critiques of local customs, replacement of traditional social and political structures, complete reorientation of Asian economies). Most importantly, the ending of colonial domination has led, with a bit of a lag, to the resurgence of Asian societies.

Their different readings of history have made Atlantic societies more fatalistic, and Asian societies more volitional. Atlantic societies' bitter histories have given them an overwhelming desire to curb the irrational internal and external forces that have caused decline and under-performance. Democracy, the rule of law, and rights internally, plus 'thick' institutions externally are the way they try to eliminate these forces. These institutions also provide a psychologically important symbol of being modern and progressing towards a better world.

Asian societies want none of these fetters. For them, whether democratic or not, the command power of the state is the expression and instrument of their resurgence. They are societies on the make which refuse to be constrained by others' expectations, and see no reason why anyone else should be either. They are convinced they are the future, and don't need institutional symbols to convince themselves.

Photo by Flickr user Princess-Lodges.

Each failed, though it should not be forgotten how many Indians not to mention Australians and Canadians fought under the Union Jack and saw themselves as fighting for 'King and Country' (or equivalent) in the first and, in Australia's case, even the second World War. And how many Senegalese or Moroccans etc fought under the Tricolor.

I wonder whether the patterns you suggest might not, for all the evident differences, echo these earlier examples. Smaller African states and most Latin American ones may well have become impressed with how little weight they carry internationally, and how vulnerable they are, in comparison to the great powers of the US, China etc and even, in trade and financial matters, the EU. If so, perhaps the institutionalisation that you detect is, in each case, a somewhat similarly defensive manoeuvre. Whether such motivations would be more likely to strengthen or to undermine effective unity in the longer term I leave to you.

Europe also has formalised its commitment to democracy through the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which amends Article 309 of the Treaty of Rome to allow the suspension of membership for any EU state that breaches the principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

In Africa, the Organisation of African Unity's commitments to sovereign equality and territorial integrity, non-interference in domestic affairs and non-violability of borders have been replaced by the African Union's principles promoting the ability to intervene in genocide or crimes against humanity and to restore peace and security. The AU has also set out clearly through the Durban Declaration a clear framework governing democratic elections, while Article 30 of the AU Charter provides for the suspension of any member government that comes to power unconstitutionally. 

The Atlantic states go beyond just making commitments: they act on them. No government that has come to power by coup in Africa since 1997 has been allowed to participate in the African Union's ministerial or summit meetings. At various times Comoros, Cote d'Ivoire, Madagascar and Niger have been excluded. The AU has intervened to promote peace in the Sudan, just as the Economic Community Of West African States has in Liberia. 

In the Americas, the OAS convened a high level mission which determined that Peru's 2000 elections were illegitimate, leading to a suspension of its membership. Panama's membership has also been temporarily suspended.

Beginning with the Contadora Support Group, Latin America's states have become actively involved in resolving insurgencies in Central America, and an active suite of joint exercises, strategic dialogues and disarmament and arms control measures is well under way. NATO of course intervened in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo.

Asian institutions missing in action

Here is a record that is starkly different from Asia's. While the 2007 ASEAN Charter makes repeated references to democracy, good government, the rule of law and human rights, there is no evidence that the grouping takes these commitments seriously. A coup and serious ongoing instability in Thailand didn't raise even a murmur of concern from the other members. That the Shanghai Cooperation Organization did nothing during Kyrgyzstan's bloody unrest surprises no-one.

On regional peace and security, Asia's institutions are also missing in action. While Africa's efforts in Darfur and Europe's in the former Yugoslavia are hardly paragons of success, at least they acted. Asia's institutions are not even allowed to discuss points of tension; I recently heard two Singaporean academics call the ARF 'Avoid Regional Flashpoints'. With Thailand and Cambodia shooting at each other over a border dispute last year, the failure of Asia's institutions couldn't be starker.

In a nutshell, the Atlantic takes its institutions seriously. Asia's institutions are a kabuki play, all movement and colourful shirts, while its states are free to arm, compete and conduct their affairs as they see fit.

Asia, on the other hand, is a region of bursting optimism and self-belief (to use Dominique Moisi's fascinating framework, the 'geopolitics of emotion'). Its states, at least the big agenda-setting ones, have no need for solidarity and rules that promote stability. They want to be left alone to make their own luck.

But there's a downside to conservative internationalism, as we observe Europe's travails over Greece. In this case, the commitment to institutions — repeated elections that solve nothing; the desperation to save the eurozone — has led to mounting crisis. Perhaps what Europe needs right now is a dash of Asia's cavalier attitude towards institutions and a heap of Asia's determination to make things work, whatever institutional commitments might say.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.