Great Powers in Two Eras of Globalization

Europe’s response to the challenges that it faces from migration and populism is profoundly shaped by the system of international relations developed over the last half century, a system now facing a new multi-polar set of great power confrontations. Since 1945, Europe’s international relations system has been internationalist, hegemonic, and institutional. How this system developed is crucial to understanding how it is being challenged and what its future might be. Europe’s post-World War II international relations developed in reaction to the world wars and depression of 1914 to 1945. The post-1945 international relations system evolved as an attempt to re-capture the benefits of the internationally open pre-1914 world, but to put institutional structures in place of informal relationships and to rely on the U.S. as a hegemon, rather than Britain or a continental European power. In place of conferences, two-party alliances, inter-bank cooperation, and free trade, the U.S. and its European allies created the UN, a multi-lateral NATO, IMF, GATT and European unity. Two crucial trade-offs built public support for this structure: rejecting open migration and laissez-faire markets, both of which had been fundamental to pre-1914 globalization. Migration since 1914 has never been as free as it was then; social welfare has depended on tightly controlled governmental structures. With the U.S. weakened by crises in the Mideast and East Asia, Europe now faces a resurgent Russia and a combined crisis of migration and social welfare in an unstable, multi-polar world reminiscent of 1914.