Word of the Week: Bipolarity

Perhaps bipolarity is more complex than cartoons such as this one, depicting Khrushchev and Kennedy at the height of Cold War tensions, tend to suggest. 

Bipolarity is generally used as a shorthand for a bipolar balance of power: the relative stability achieved when two states, or coalitions of states, have equivalent economic or military might. A system might be bipolar if states are polarised into two coalitions of states. And a system might possess a balance of power if the two coalitions have equivalent powers. Thus a bipolar balance of power promotes stability and, to some degree, peace. If two states, or coalitions of states, have equivalent powers, then they are less likely to challenge one another militarily, since this would risk large-scale retaliation. In this way, a bipolar balance, as structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz claim, makes pre-emptive strikes unlikely. This, in turn, makes war unlikely.

However, there is more than one type of balance of power. In his Theory of International Politics, Waltz claimed that the history of international relations could be divided into two halves. In the first half, up to 1945, the international system was multipolar. There were many centres of power, many opposing coalitions of states, and many individual states which had the capability of forming coalitions. From the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the defining value of international politics was state sovereignty. This was demonstrated by the maxim ‘cuius regio eius religio’, first coined at the Peace of Ausburg (1555) and approximately meaning ‘to each prince, his own religion. Therefore, no state ought to become so powerful that it could influence the ‘religio’ or sovereignty of other states. This means that a multipolar balance of power defined the world up to 1945, since states made sure that any potential hegemon – or dominant power – was counterbalanced by a coalition of other states committed to the balance of power.

In contrast, during the Cold War, according to Waltz, there was a bipolar balance of power. This is what made the Cold War unique. Whereas after the First World War no two states were vastly more powerful than all the others, after the second there was an approximate balance of power forming between the Soviet Union and the USA. So the USA and the USSR formed opposing coalitions which divided the world in two. These coalitions, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, succeeded in giving each power the military capability to deter the other from launching a first strike. This system of deterrence prevented any one centre of power from challenging the other, thus ensuring a continuation of the balance of power. This is exemplified by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which says that ‘an armed attack against one or more of [the parties] shall be considered an attack against them all’. The bipolar balance between the USA and the USSR thus contributed to the polarisation which characterised the Cold War. But it also led to stability by reducing the incentive for launching a first, or pre-emptive, strike.

However, on balance it does not seem that the Cold War provided a perfect balance of power. Firstly, the balance of power was assymetrical, and thus was not a true ‘balance’ at all. The economic might of the USA outweighed that of the USSR, but, conversely, the USSR was on the verge of establishing hegemony over Europe. The USSR, in other words, was geopolitically secure, and was able to defend its 13 international borders partly by the threat of nuclear deterrence. The USA, on the other hand, was economically and militarily secure. As R. Harrison Wagner notes in ‘What Was Bipolarity?’, the balance of power during the Cold War is difficult to define, as the Cold War was different in practice from what it was meant to be in structural realist theory. A particular reason for this ambiguity was the asymmetrical distribution of power in practice.

Secondly, bipolarity suggests that only two states mattered during the Cold War. But it is clear that even the weaker states had a degree of freedom, making the system perhaps vaguely resemble a multipolar one. Even if the Cold War was bipolar, perhaps it was only weakly bipolar. However, Arthur Lee Burns suggests that the Cold War was characterised by bipolar tensions at the nuclear level, since only the USA and the USSR had enough nuclear weapons to each act as a ‘global-deterrent power’. By being able to deter military action against themselves through the threat of nuclear weapons, Burns suggests that the system was strongly bipolar, as only the USA and the USSR mattered in a nuclearized world. Nevertheless, Burns and Waltz, as well as other supporters of the bipolar view, fail to notice that even weak states without nuclear weapons mattered. After all, the Korean and Vietnam wars were fought for the sake of allies – namely, Korea and Vietnam – by both the USSR and the USA, who supported opposite proxies in the wars. Thus Stephen Walt says that the Cold War was a ‘competition for allies’. The Cold War, in other words, was not perfectly bipolar – even the weak states mattered. Rather, the Cold War was weakly bipolar, as peace, although made vastly more probable by the new balance of power, was never guaranteed.

The Cold War provided a bipolar balance of power in more ways than one. Nevertheless, the system in reality was more nuanced and multifaceted that structural realists make it out to be. Perhaps even the Cold War, one of the few examples in world history of a (weakly) bipolar system, may not be completely unique.