Philippine scholars believe that "middle powers" will shape the new world order

The UAE's "National" website published an article on May 7 saying that "middle powers" will shape the new world order. The author is Richard Jawad Heydarian, academic leader in the field of geopolitics at the Philippine Institute of Technology. The full text is excerpted below:

With the end of the Cold War, major thinkers scrambled to define a new global order. Most famously, Francis Fukuyama triumphantly predicted the "end of history." Soon after, Samuel Huntington predicted a global "clash of civilizations." But Zbignev Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security adviser and longtime scholar of U.S.-China issues, has received a lot of attention about the idea that the "two blocs" of China and the United States will jointly dominate the world.

On closer examination, however, the geopolitics of the 21st century is becoming so complex, controversial, and unpredictable that no superpower or two can dominate the world. Instead, the future of the world will be largely defined by the so-called "middle powers." These countries not only have the capacity to defend their interests, but can also constructively shape a new global order. In the coming decades, sustained cooperation among the middle powers will be critical to meeting the current challenges posed by the acceleration of climate change, technological disruption and intensified confrontation among superpowers.

Traditionally, the world has been divided into great powers and other countries. The Greek historian Thucydides once lamented: "The strong do whatever they want, and the weak go against the grain." But this binary description of the world is both simplistic and misleading. The view of the ancient Chinese sage Mencius is more appropriate. He believed that medium-sized kingdoms in the East could play a key role in curbing the expansion of powerful princely states, sometimes even preventing atrocities against smaller kingdoms.

Since the end of the Second World War, countries such as Canada and Australia have fully embraced their status as "middle powers", demonstrating their ability to shape the global agenda on key issues such as economic integration and disarmament;

More recently, indonesia, Singapore, south Korea and the United Arab Emirates have also been described as middle powers because of their growing role in shaping the geopolitics of their respective regions and for contributing to global initiatives in conflict resolution, cultural development and scientific and technological progress.

Larger or richer countries such as Japan, India, Brazil, and Germany are often referred to as middle powers or "emerging superpowers."

The "middle powers" of different sizes have in common, namely, their self-defense and power projection capabilities, alliance-building and constructive contribution to international peace and development, and their reliability and creativity in diplomacy and soft power.

In the 21st century, cooperation among the middle powers is indispensable for maintaining global peace and prosperity. As veteran diplomat and prominent geopolitical thinker Naym Moises points out, we live in a world where "(too many) participants have enough power to thwart the initiatives of everyone else, but no one has the power to impose their preferred course of action."

There are three challenges that allow the middle powers to have a huge impact on strategic forward-looking and institutionalized cooperation.

The first area is the so-called "new Cold War" brewing between the United States and China. Given their relatively strong relationship with the opposing sides and their commitment to international law and globalization, the middle powers, from Germany to Indonesia, can and should play a key role in preventing the outbreak of a full-blown conflict and in moving the two powers towards dialogue and engagement.

The second area of concern is technological disruption, especially with the advent of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, where machine learning and artificial intelligence even threaten white-collar jobs such as accountants, lawyers and journalism. New technologies often create new jobs, but developing countries and less educated populations are particularly vulnerable. The middle powers can contribute to the creation of alternative digital economy platforms, cognitive augmentation technologies, and global rules that mitigate massive disruption in the labor market, protect individual privacy, and prevent outright monopolies by large tech companies.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the middle powers should be proactive in contributing to the effective implementation of the necessary global mechanisms, including the Paris Agreement.

Rather than clinging to outdated mindsets or looking at the world only from the perspective of U.S.-China competition, it is more important to recognize that a range of increasingly important global players ( the often overlooked but flexible middle powers ) need new forms of cooperation.

Source: Reference News Network