Is the Global Reset Still Possible?
Wars cannot substitute for good outlooks on almost anything and global economies driven by interdependence will always be called to work on making sure that the global space for economy is sound.
I can still remember the first time I sat in my political science class and the teacher dissecting the term interdependence and what it meant to the political landscapes where global economies were being united by institutions and also by trade linkages of some sorts. This theory, made famous academically by Joseph S. Nye and Robert Keohane in the late 1970s should sound very familiar to anyone that have studied international affairs. Almost two decades later, a neglected part of that famous book has come back to my analysis in the last two months and that is power. In fact, the complete title of Nye and Keohane’s work is Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition.
Writing an essay on the book is not my goal so we can skip that as I am offering my own point of view after weighing it to push forward a debate here and there. Two years into the pandemic here we are and the world is crumbling piece by piece. In the last two years: first it came a global pandemic on COVID-19 that is still with us and multiplying, then the War in Ukraine that has touched the global food supply and pushing it closer to a food security crisis on grains. What it is about power that I said seems to be neglected is that power, in my opinion is the sole thing that has the characteristic of changing the absolute landscape of anything that has been institutionalized and creating deeper fragmentations to agreements that hold those institutions together.
What do I mean by that? Well, in order for the global reset to happen when the world was first confronted by COVID-19, global pharmaceuticals companies were able to create effective vaccines that could get people vaccinated quickly in order for governments to start reopening borders again. The power to do so was not just for one government but multiple governments and firms relying on each others through interdependence on many trades products to coordinate. Power and Interdependence as Nye and Keohane wrote still matter today as it was then, Nye and Keohane observed that
multinational firms and banks affect both domestic and interstate relations — the participation of large and dynamic organizations, not controlled entirely by governments, has become a normal part of foreign as well as domestic relations. These actors are important not only because of their activities in pursuit of their own interests, but also because they act as transmission belts, making government policies in various countries more sensitive to one another (Nye and Keohane, p. 26).
The global reset with the context of the military conflict in Ukraine as complex as it was when it first started, going from a geopolitical conflict until it became an energy and food security of global scale is almost the same. Power is altering that reset because dominant states can change agendas and also can make a reset impossible but yet possible as the world did breathe a fresh air on the announcement of agreement to start the global supply of grains by Russia, Ukraine and Turkiye playing a central coordinating role. Already, Nye and Keohane did a good analysis for us to rely on when they wrote,
In the realist world, military security will be the dominant goal of states. It will even affect issues that are not directly involved with military power or territorial defense. Nonmilitary problems will not only be subordinated to military ones; they will be studied for their politico-military implications” (Nye and Keohane, p.30)
In summing, with the world that has been trying to get people to observe the global environmental agendas and adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is worth noting that paying attention to what issues that threaten the global reset be brought up in the forefront. As much as the global community would welcome a world that is pre-COVID-19 or post COVID-19, a reset is possible through cooperation and security initiatives that change the perceptions on how major powers can show their involvements in conflicts that are regionals. The perceptions that one conflict favoring others will plague the world for years to come and affirm certain points that the world is still in transition four decades later after Nye and Keohane’s book.
Source:
Keohane, R. O., & Nye, J. S. (1977). Power and interdependence: World politics in transition. Boston: Little, Brown.
