There are two big power shifts going on in the 21st century. One is among countries, from West to East, and the other is from governments to nongovernmental actors, regardless of whether it is East or West.
I call the first of these shifts “power transition” and the second, “power diffusion.” The issue of power transition is sometimes called the rise of Asia, but it should more properly be called the recovery of Asia. If one looked at the world in 1750, one would see that Asia had more than half of the world’s population, and represented more than half of the world’s products. By 1900, Asia still had more than half of the world’s population, but it had declined to only 20 percent of the world’s products. What we have been seeing, and what we will see in the 21st century, is the recovery of Asia to its normal proportions, with more than half of the world’s population and more than half of the world’s products. This started, of course, with Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, and it continued with smaller countries like Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and so forth. Now the trend has spread to China, but it is also going to include India. India now has growth rates of 8 to 9 percent a year. During the course of the century, we should see Asia as a whole recovering to about what one would think would be normal proportions. And that is power transition.
Let me say a word about what I mean by power diffusion. That is best understood in terms of the way technologies, and particularly information technologies, are affecting the costs of participating in international affairs. The price of computing power declined a thousand-fold from 1970 to 2000. That is an extraordinary number, so big that it is hard to know what it means. The best way to think of this would be that if the price of an automobile had declined as rapidly as the price of computing power, you should be able to buy an automobile today, for, let’s say, 10,000 yen. It is just an extraordinary change. When the price of something declines that much, it removes the barriers to entry. Now others can do what previously was reserved for governments or big corporations. If you wanted to communicate instantaneously from Tokyo to New York to London to Johannesburg in 1970, you could do that. Technologically you could do it, but it was very, very expensive. Now, anybody can do it and it is virtually free. If you have Skype, it is free.
So that means that things that were previously restricted to very large organizations like governments or corporations are now available to anyone. And this has a significant impact on world politics. It does not mean that governments are being replaced or that the nation-state is obsolete. What it does mean is that the stage on which governments act is now crowded with many more, smaller actors. Some of those smaller actors are good—let’s take Oxfam International, an NPO which serves to relieve poverty—and some of them are bad—let’s take Al Qaeda, which is obviously trying to kill people. But the main point is that it is a new type of international politics and we have not yet come to terms with how to think about this. The ability to tell an effective story is crucial. So, for example, we need to realize that in an age in which information technology is so powerful and important, it may often be the case that it is not only whose army wins, but whose story wins.
If you think of the problem of terrorism, terrorists have very little military power, but they have a lot of “soft power”—the ability to attract and persuade people. So, Bin Laden did not point a gun at the head of the people who flew into the World Trade Center. He did not pay them. He attracted them by his narrative of “Islam under threat” and the need to purify Islam. That is interesting because it means that as we then try to cope with this, we may make the mistake of thinking that we can solve this by military or economic power alone. If power means the ability to get the outcomes you want, you could do this through coercion, threats, so-called “sticks.” You could do it with payments you might call “carrots.” Or you could do it with attraction and persuasion. And in an information age, the role of soft power is increasing in its importance. Now that means that what we need is a new way of thinking about power. The famous British historian A.J.P. Taylor, who wrote a book about the struggle for mastery of Europe in the 19th century, defined a great power as a country that was able to prevail in war. But we have to go beyond that limited way of thinking about what power means in the 21st century, and see it as much more three-dimensional, as including not only military power but also economic power and also soft power.
It is very important to have accurate perceptions about the transition of power. And the reason is that when people are too worried about power, they may overreact or follow strategies that are dangerous. When you look back in history, there is the famous case of the Peloponnesian War, in which the Greek city-state system tore itself apart. Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, said the reason for this war was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. Similarly, if you look at World War I, which destroyed the centrality of the European state system in the world, it is often said it was caused by the rise in power of Germany and the fear that it created in Britain.
It is equally important not to be too fearful of the diffusion of power. What we are seeing is that both China and the United States, and of course Japan and Europe and others, will be facing a new set of transnational challenges, including climate change, transnational terrorism, cyber insecurity, and pandemics. All these issues, which are going to be increasing in the future, are going to require cooperation. They cannot be solved by any one country alone. Many of these new transnational issues that we face are areas where we have to get away from just thinking about power over others and think about power with others.
The American president Franklin Roosevelt at the time of the Great Depression said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Perhaps as we turn to the 21st century, we should say one of the most worrisome things is fear itself. If we can keep a balanced assessment of the overall distribution of power, and figure out ways to deal with these common challenges that we face—we, meaning the United States, Japan, China, Europe and others we can indeed have a win-win situation.
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