The Return Of Great Power Conflicts
Donetsk Oblast in Eastern Ukraine. The two provinces just north of Donetsk and the one
to the south-west also have large ethnic Russian minorities. Crimea is in the extreme south
to the south-west also have large ethnic Russian minorities. Crimea is in the extreme south
Prof. Kumar David
The Cold War ended rather abruptly and we thought we were in a one-superpower world led by America, but this was not quite true since the global hegemony of American capitalism sort of crashed in 2008. At the same time globalisation, global supply-chains, and new technologies made the earth pretty flat for everybody. So the jargon changed; the world was declared multipolar with no one in pole position. But China was rising to economic superpower numero uno; hence the argot had to be modified again and even Lee Kwan Yue remarked in a TV interview that the principal issues of the Twenty-First Century were climate change and managing the Sino-US relationship. Thus again, there was confusion, was it a bi-polar or multipolar? Or maybe tri-polar since the European Union, taken as one unit, is the world’s largest economy. Then quite unexpectedly the last two months saw a fourth kid, militarily powerful enough to match America’s nuclear arsenal, pushing and shoving his way into the party.
In military muscle there are four big global players now, rather like before the Great War when there were five; the British Empire, the German Reich and Austro-Hungarian Empire, France (Third Republic), Imperial Russia and across the pond, the United States. The similarity is more remarkable than just numbers. The Cold War divided the world into two camps, but they were two great ideological camps. In the old pre-WW1 days it was nations and empires; the age of imperialism when great powers carved up the world, colonial territory and natural resource wealth. The struggle in the days before the Cold war was not for ideological hegemony by this or that –ism, it was just power, plunder and glory. Now in a matter of months, if not weeks and days, we seem to have returned to something similar to the old world; nationalism and Great Power politics, instead of ideology. Read More
