Freshthink on international affairs

It is time, high time, perhaps compelling time for new thinking on international affairs. The academic literature on international politics happens to be almost

entirely American. Indeed,

international politics as a discipline started to be taught at graduate level not

before the 1960s. Harry Truman who beca,e president after the death of

Frankling Delano Roosevent in 1944, or more precisely, his secretary of state,

Dean Acheson, a high profile attorney, crafted the grammer of international

politics borrowing helpings from European thoughts and practices. However,

balance of power, the template of interstate relations determined by the

Europeans, who also happened to be the modern empire builders, did not suit

the American crafters of a U.S.-dominated praxis of world politics. In the decades of the cold war, the United States became the unconstested leader of

the 'free' world in its all-round confrontation with the Soviet bloc which was

created by Soviet military power that liberated Eastern Europe

and part of the Balkans from Nazi Germany.

At the height of the cold war, China and India jointly authored the Five

Principles of Peaceful Co-existence, of Panchshill, as bedrock of relations between the two newly liberated Asian giants. In a fatal pursuit of hubris,

the Five Principles were grafted on the India-China agreement on Tibet. Panchshil collapsed on the undefined border between India and Tibet soon after the forceful integration of Tibet in the People's Republic of China. Panchshill died on the rugged, mostly barren borders of the two Asian giants with hardly any tears shed. Clashing territorial claims have since been the causus bellum

of scores of wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Intervention, unilateral or multilateral, by either the United States or the

Soviet Union dominated world politics during the cold war. In the U.S.-framed

prose of world politics, America did not invade but merely intervened in the

affairs of a third world country. It was only more than a decade after the

end of the cold war following the collapse of the USSR that president George

Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in traumatic affirmation of a unipolar

world order. The sole superpower went to war in the third world as leader of

a 'coalition of the willing' parters drawn from mostly fram Europe.

After the end of the cold war---or end of history as seen by America---, the 'third world' as a geopolitical concept was quietly allowed to die.Western scholars and analysts divided third world nations into two economic categories

---emerging and developing nations, or, preferably, economies. China, India,

Russia, Brazil and South Africa formed the core group of emerging economies

while the large crowd of sovereign countries inhabiting the planet were grouped

together to form a geo-economic abstraction termed as the'developing

economies'.

and ambiguous. There was no attempt to recreate a Bandung or its

predecessor, the Asian Relations meet. Americans defined international

relations, and took the lead in its application to relations among nations.

The bipolar world became a unipolar universe in U.S. strategic thinking.

From that to the 'preemptive unipolarity' of the Bush presidency was but

a short, natural step forward.

Now, in 2009, American superpower has started melting down. For the first

time in history, Europe has ceased to be the world's primary theatre of war.

It mothered the two world wars of the 20th century and liberated itself

from that sad yoke. More than a hundred wars have been fought since

World War II. They are named as 'conflicts' or 'local wars'. They have been

fought in Asia, Africa and Latin America.