The Great Powers in an Age of Global Governance: Are They Still Great?

Abstract

In the past century, as throughout history, mankind has witnessed the rise and fall of great powers and the dissolution of empires. The twenty-first century is the first without empires or colonies. The great powers negotiate rules, which constrain all of them, and they grope toward defining a new system of global governance. They don’t seize each other’s land. They pursue their interests with each other in international organisations rather than in gunboats. They have all signed treaties affirming a single set of human rights principles. They focus more on gaining access to markets than on securing resources. They spend more for social security than for weapons. They coax warring ethnic groups to make peace. The three European powers seek unity and harmony with each other rather than alliances and war against each other. All these changes arise from the fact that the great powers pursue different goals at the beginning of the twenty-first century than they did in the twentieth, and the new goals reflect a different world.