Author: Coral Bell

The new landscape of international politics is at the moment appearing before our eyes. It is being shaped by a vast redistribution of power, away from what might be called the North Atlantic world, of the US and Europe, towards particularly China and India, so it can be seen as the end of the Vasco da Gama era.

Indian scholars have long regarded the advent of the great European navigators, like da Gama , as the beginning of five hundred years of the ascendancy of the West over the non-Western world.

The power-redistribution now most evident is in the economic sphere, but it also extends into the diplomatic sphere, and will increasingly extend also into the strategic sphere. In contrast to the second half of the 20th century, which was bipolar during the 43 years of the Cold War, then marked by unchallenged US primacy during the ten years of the “unipolar moment”, the global landscape of the 21st century will be multipolar.

Six great powers [the US, China, India, Russia , Japan and the EU] will constitute either a central balance of power, or with luck and good management, a concert of powers. However, the overall redistribution of power extends for beyond that grouping, to middle powers like Australia and even minor powers. The new prominence of the G20 is an early sign of this tendency, and the two global issues of the moment {the economic crisis and climate change] both tend to encourage concert rather than balance as the most viable pattern.

The full paper can be found here.

Dr Coral Bell AO is Visiting Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, at the Australian National University.