IRAN: HOW TO BREAK THE DEADLOCK ?
As the Vienna meeting is drawing near, the Iranian issue is now, more than ever, a clear symptom of post-bipolar stalemates. First, because it questions the NPT as a relevant remnant of the former bipolar system: even if the treaty was never purely efficient before 1989, it derived its main strength from the two superpowers’ patronage. Even though criticized as such, it is less and less accepted in a world which is currently more and more fragmented, made of autonomous and self –minded units.
Secondly, the Iranian dispute stresses all the ambiguities of a club diplomacy when it takes over from multilateralism and globalization. Nuclear powers have set up an exclusive club; rising to it is now as challenging as moving from a second division to a first league division. The things are made worse when the contention was handled by another club constituted by the P5 and Germany which aimed at putting the deviant on the right track. In a global world, club diplomacy is a very uncertain way of regulation, as it triggers resentment among those who are excluded and promptly converts the picture of a fragile international cooperation into a vision of connivance among power holders.
Through such a process, nationalism is actively fuelling the Iranian game. An unbalanced world is more and more able to generate a new kind of nationalism which is both shaping a new foreign policy and strengthening the linkage between domestic policy and diplomacy. Inside a new pattern of unbalanced international powers and asymmetric relationships, populist diplomacy becomes a way of mobilizing new social supports and a fruitful method for facing the hegemony. The trick is politically efficient, but bears really fearsome consequences. The more the Iranian radical wing is tackled by international powers, the more it will be consolidated in front of its opposition: the more it will be beaten, the more it will be able to muzzle its challengers. Musavi and his partisans are virtually hampered by the heightening of the international pressures.
Sanctions do not fit to a global world neither to an interdependent one. They were partly efficient when the international system was put in order according to organized cleavages and a hierarchical bipolarity. They do not properly operate in a fragmented system, in which protest is currently able to shape attractive diplomacies. Power is probably becoming nowadays more and more powerless.
These new trends are real opportunities for rebuilding an inclusive multilateralism. Pressures on Iran would be definitely more efficient and productive if they were clearly separated from power and coercion, if they were not in position to be retrained for fuelling a populist diplomacy. Rising powers like Brazil and Turkey played this card on May 2010 with an undeniable dexterity, and probably as a preview of their future diplomatic capabilities.
Europe has a niche to find in this new game. As a Union, she is much more able to show up her capacity to influence and to make new proposals. As she is constituted only by middle range powers apart from any superpowers, she would be more accepted and less suspected to push ahead her power. But these new dynamics cannot be promoted only from one part of the global world, as it is actually by the G5 + 1. The solution is to be found through an active cooperation with the new rising powers. Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa with whom the Old Continent does not properly know how to play without losing caste!
Is Europe ready to accept the break? We hardly find among the current European governments those who would be keen to take this risk. We could even observe an increasing tension when the French President Nicolas Sarkozy clearly designated Iran as a direct threat on Europe during the NATO Summit which was held in Lisbonon November 19-20th.
Presently rooted into a soft neo conservatism, European leaders do not seem ready to take up the gauntlet. The Old Continent is trapped by a strange paradox: the more its power is decreasing, the more it clings to the illusions of power, while it has however stronger diplomatic assets to play and new kinds of cooperation to promote.
Bertrand BADIE is a French political scientist and international relations specialist. He is a professor at Sciences Po and researcher associated with the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI).
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