BUILDING THE MIDDLE-POWER WORLD ORDER / PROJECT SYNDICATE

Building the Middle-Power World Order

If Canada and other "middle powers" are serious about building a different kind of global order based on "institutions and agreements that function as described," the time to start planning is now. Only with a clear vision can they hope to make a difference when the next big crisis forces a search for alternatives.

Anne-Marie Slaughter and Stephen B. Heintz

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, DC – Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did not just warn of a “rupture” in the international order during his speech in Davos this January. 

He also sketched a possible alternative, and not a moment too soon. 

The United States has now followed Russia by launching an aggressive war in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter. 

The very country that led the creation of the current order is now actively attacking it.

Could this rupture provide the impetus for a systemic transformation? 

Carney argued that “middle powers” (like Canada) can “build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.”

But what might this entail? 

The first step is to offer an honest assessment of the current order’s failings and hypocrisies. 

Only then can we “build [sic] what we claim to believe in” and create “institutions and agreements that function as described.”

Some may doubt that a group of middle powers could ever be strong enough to stop the US, Russia, Israel, and potentially China and North Korea from using force whenever and however they like. 

But we already know many of the principles that make multilateralism effective: a clear mission and sufficient resources to accomplish it, weighted majority voting, and rules that apply equally to all members.

Of course, a clear and compelling mission requires a vision of the world we want and could attain. 

As management theorist Peter Drucker observed in 1980, the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but the impulse to follow yesterday’s logic. 

Rather than continuing to operate with outmoded assumptions, goals, and strategies, we need a “new logic” of global politics to reduce violent conflict, generate more equitably shared prosperity, and achieve planetary sustainability this century.

A logic for the future must recognize the twin realities of global interdependence and multipolar pluralism. 

It must abandon anthropocentrism for a fuller appreciation of all life on our planet. 

It would recognize the benefits of a more equitable distribution of power and collaborative sovereignty. 

It would favor positive-sum solutions and advance an economics of human and planetary wellbeing. 

And it would emphasize strategic empathy over strategic narcissism.

Such a vision would attract support from people around the world, and it would certainly benefit the middle powers. 

After all, scholars, diplomats, foreign-policy experts, and activists have been calling for some kind of middle-power action for years. 

Yet to bring it about, or even to begin planning, we need to know who exactly the “middle powers” are.

Wikipedia lists 53 countries that experts have identified as “middle powers” in the post-Cold War era. 

Eurasia Group’s Cliff Kupchan defines middle powers as countries other than the US and China that have significant leverage in geopolitics, but he focuses specifically on six “swing states”: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey. 

And at the Montaigne Institute, former French diplomat Michel Duclos focuses on “uninhibited middle powers,” including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and India (a “super middle power”).

Strikingly, many of these analyses focus more on emerging powers than on advanced-industrial democracies. 

That is likely because European or Asian middle powers have traditionally been considered part of the European Union, NATO, or “NATO plus.” 

Moreover, the United Kingdom and France may be no match for China or the US, but they do claim major-power status as nuclear-weapon states with permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council.

In any case, from Carney’s Canadian perspective, most EU members, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, and Australia could all qualify as middle powers for some purposes. 

Moreover, the EU is likely to see itself as an anchor of a middle-power order, at least in military terms.

But organizing initiatives is always harder than drawing up lists. 

Unless a small group of like-minded leaders commits fully, the current “middle-power moment” will be lost. 

Perhaps the best approach would be to create a credo drawing on the new logic and devise an aligned institutional ecosystem suited to this century’s global challenges. 

Other countries could then decide whether they are prepared to sign on.

The stakes are high. Middle powers now account for a growing share of global GDP. 

They control important natural resources. 

They have proven to be skillful negotiators in multilateral institutions dominated by a handful of major powers, often finding themselves on the frontlines of the consequences of turbulence caused by climate disasters, geoeconomic volatility, and forced migration.

But is there the political will and capacity for genuinely transformative action? 

The US drove the creation of the UN, together with the UK, the Soviet Union, and China. 

A group of middle-power leaders cannot hope to do the same. 

But what they can do is start planning and preparing for a crisis big enough to jolt the world into a different political orbit.

That crisis is coming. 

For the first time since World War II, high-intensity hybrid wars are raging in two theaters. 

High-risk great-power competition threatens to trigger a more direct great-power confrontation. A new nuclear-arms race is underway. 

Climate change is taking a heavy toll on lives and livelihoods around the world, fueling widespread displacement and migration. 

Hyper-disruptive technologies are advancing at a pace too fast even for their inventors to understand, much less control.

The planning that led to the creation of the UN started in 1941, after US President Franklin Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter. 

These were the darkest days of a world war that the US had not yet even formally joined. 

There was no clear path to victory or institution-building, only a vision and the determination that a better, safer world could emerge from the chaos. 

The same opportunity is available today to Carney and any of his fellow middle-power leaders who are willing to seize it.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department, is CEO of the think tank New America, Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the author of Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Stephen B. Heintz is President and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.