The ‘Post-Cold War’ is now the ‘Unipolar Moment’

For the longest time we described the years after 1991 as ‘Post-Cold War’. This designation could never stick. Going forward, it will be remembered as the 'Unipolar Moment.' And that's a good thing.

Memory is a funny thing. One would think that what has been memorized is something that remains static, but the opposite is the case. Over time, memory—especially collective memory—changes a lot, and not just because of the passage of some generations and the arrival of new ones. Even within a single generation, the passage of time adds dimensions of meaning to a period just experienced. That’s happening again right now.

Just think of the way in which the occurrence of the Second World War (or the conceptualization of the mass violence at the time as such) reframed the previous periods. The Great War suddenly transformed into the First World War, and the Post-War period is now universally referred to as the Inter-War period. Subsequent events, especially violent events, tend to change the way we look at what preceded them.

I have always been uncomfortable with the designation of the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘Post-Cold War.’ It struck me as a very temporary expression to refer to the current world, since anything that is ‘post’ must necessarily be ‘ante’ something else. History never ends. In a really interesting way, it seems that most intellectuals, politicians, academics, etc., who used this term to refer to ‘our time’ implicitly agreed to the sandwiched nature of this period. Something else must be coming that will recast the current ‘post’ period, but what would that be? And in what form will it force us to rethink the ’Post-Cold War’?

For a time it seemed that the inflection point—the ‘Post Post-Cold War’—so to speak had come in 2001 with the events of 9/11 and the onset of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ that unleashed not only a war on a few Middle Eastern crime syndicates, but ultimately ended up laying waste to large parts of West Asia and Northern Africa. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and—of course—the leftovers of Palestine.

However, people continued using the term ‘Post-Cold War’ to refer also to this period. Looking at it now, it also becomes clear why. We intuitively understood that although the War on Terror was a ‘thing’ in some sense, it was not in another. Although it was an overarching goal of foreign policy—especially in the West, but supported also by Russia and China, as well as in many parts of the Global South– it was not a systemic change. It was an approach to reframe foreign policy priorities, but it did not carry with it a new way of how the globe was organized politically. It wasn’t something that shook the fundamental setup of how things run in world politics the way the great periods of the past did.

My fear over the past ten years was that one day we would be remembering the two or three decades after 1991 as something like the ‘Second Inter-War,’ if, indeed, a Third World War would be what ends the period. Some scholars like Dmitri Trenin argue that we are, in fact, already in this Third World War—albeit this time the warfare being of a different nature than the two preceding moments of global mass-violence. Others have started speaking of a ‘Second Cold War’ to refer to what we are in since the start of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine (the framing of which must be the subject of another essay). The bad news is that both conceptions might still prove themselves to be how we will remember this new period.

Whichever it will be, it seems that slowly a consensus is setting in on what this new period of global confrontation means for the bygone ‘Post-Cold War’. First, we finally have an endpoint. We can neatly wrap this 30-year period between December 1991 and February 2022. Secondly, over the past years, papers and discussions about the nature of the confrontation are converging around the interpretation that the new global order is one that is best described as ‘multipolar’ (or ‘multinodal’, as the eminent US diplomat Chas Freeman argues).

The multipolar interpretation of the new order centers our attention on the good old realist concept of power. We are now living in a world in which several centers of cultural, civilizational, technological, and military power have the possibility of not going along with the demands of the previous centers of such power (the Europeans and, later, the US).

This refocuses our attention on the changes in power configurations over time, especially the last 80 years. We can understand the world as going through transitions of the number of system-relevant power centers over the lifetime of currently living generations. From the bipolarity of the Cold War to the unipolarity of the Post-Cold War and now the new multipolarity of the current era. Hence, we also have the new name for the last 30 years: the Unipolar Moment.

Realist scholars now have their told you so moment. They emphasized for a long time that unipolar systems don’t last, because power accumulation automatically creates counter-balancing forces that will break the monopoly eventually. John J. Mearsheimer, being, of course, the preeminent scholar describing this tragic nature of Great Power politics.

Overall, I think reframing the ‘Post Cold War’ as the ‘Unipolar Moment’ is actually an optimistic take on this period since it leaves open the possibility for the new period not necessarily being one of all-out warfare. Maybe there is something beyond a Third World War or a Second Cold War. With a bit of luck, maybe what we will get is a “New Concert System” and multipolar stability. Wouldn’t it be nice?

Fingers crossed.