With a new month starting, a new topic is being introduced on this blog: security.
The kind of security that we will be looking at here is, however, not national security, which is usually seen as the ability of the state to defend its citizens from external threats, but rather international security. International security focuses on a global scale, as it looks at how states can cooperate with one another to ensure that same protection.
The importance of global security as a topic emerged after the end of the Cold War. Indeed, with the bipolar order, there was no cooperation, as the two superpowers were ensuring the protection of citizens in their own sphere of influence while competing with each other.
However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the scenario changed drastically: the United States became the only superpower in what some assumed would have been a unipolar world.
Author F. Fukuyama called this historic caesura the end of history because the absence of an opponent to the US at an international level would have meant, according to his ideas, the end of a dynamic evolution of history as well. This idea can also be found in philosophers like Hegel or even Marx, who viewed history as a vital opposition between two different forces.
Nonetheless, in reality, we have witnessed over the past 30 years the build-up of a different structure: a multipolar world. The rise of powers like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as well as the evolution of the integration process in the EU, led to a current global situation that is far from being dominated by one single actor.
For this reason, now more than ever, international security is a relevant topic and, I think, it will become even more crucial in the upcoming years. For example, we already see how difficult the situation is at the doors of Europe - though, in this post, I am not going to state my position on such a situation as I already did in 2020 in my research on sanctions against Russia, which you can view here in the "Research" section of this website.
Not only discussing international security but also strengthening the fora for cooperation will be a major point in the near future. In this sense, I would be happy to see in the next years the introduction of diplomacy as a core subject in schools, as the world will be faced with more and more challenges posed by the new multipolar order and will need young leaders to tackle them.
Sadly, I think that a very telling example of how cooperation is seen nowadays can be found exactly in schools: kids are often taught history by learning about wars and the bravery of the soldiers who fought them, while diplomatic negotiations and peace treaties are often mere names learned by kids by heart.
The underlying idea behind this approach is similar to the dichotomy proposed by Hegel and Marx: that there are two forces fighting in history, and one loses and one wins. This mentality was proven to be false by the advent of a multipolar world and needs to be changed in order to overcome the crises - like Ukraine - that this new global order is posing.
A global order requires a global effort, hence, cooperation, and leaves no space for a winner-loser mentality.
Among the simulations of diplomacy for students, the main one is the National Model United Nations in New York, where I was a delegate to the Economic Commission for Africa in 2015
Love,
Elena
Resources:
https://www.nmun.org/
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