The French Multipolarity Discourse
In the French foreign policy discourse multipolarity is used to describe the post-Cold War. American unipolarity in terms of material capabilities will not last or is already over. Moreover it is negatively evaluated as contrary to stability. By contrast,
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The French Multipolarity Discourse
INTRODUCTION: BALANCE OF POWER AND POLARITY, PAST AND PRESENT In June 2010, José Manuel Barroso, at that time President of the European Commission, gave a lecture in Firenze on the EU and multilateral global governance. He started by stating that multilateralism is the appropriate mechanism for building order and governance in a multipolar world. Perhaps impressed by the historic location, he explained how, ever since the Renaissance, authors have praised the merits of a multipolar world. In particular he cited one eighteenth-century definition of multipolarity as ‘an equal distribution of power among the Princes of Europe as makes it impractical for the one to disturb the repose of the other’ (Barroso 2010: 1). The citation surprised and even worried me because I was firmly convinced that the use of polarity terminology in international relations, has no further historic roots than 1945. Was I wrong? No I wasn’t: when I looked up the original text, it became clear that the anonymous eighteenth-century author Barroso used was not defining ‘multipolarity’ but the ‘balance of power’ (see Sheehan 1996: 21). So Barroso mixed up the two. Neorealist International Relations theorists would be upset by such an unclear use. Polarity and balance of power have a central but clearly distinct role in their theory and the two concepts should not be mixed up. To keep it simple, it is the polarity configuration that defines how the balance of power is established. But Barroso is not an academic but a politician,
© The Author(s) 2017 G. De Keersmaeker, Polarity, Balance of Power and International Relations Theory, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42652-5_6
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and politicians, just like political commentators and ordinary people, use terms in a much more loose, complex and multi-layered way than academics are supposed to do. As we have already mentioned, ever since the 1990s, many politicians and commentators, primarily outside the USA, have used the term ‘multipolar’ to describe the new post-Cold War situation. It is used in the Chinese and Russian foreign policy discourse, and from time to time shows up in texts by the EU institutions and in summit statements by the BRICs countries. For example, in April 1997 China and Russia issued a joined declaration on a multipolar world in which we find the following: In a spirit of partnership, the Parties shall strive to promote the multipolarization of the world and the establishment of a new international order… The Parties believe that profound changes in international relations have taken place at the end of the twentieth century. The cold war is over. The bipolar system has vanished. A positive trend towards a multipolar world is gaining momentum, and relations between major States, including former cold-war adversaries, are changing. (‘Russian-Chinese Joint…’ 1997: 7)
The declaration further referred to the political and economic rise of nonaligned countries and their importance for the promotion of a new multipolar international
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