Sistema De Poder Multipolar Y La Establidad Internacional

Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability

First of all this critique would introduce their main concepts: the polarity and the stability. Then the rest would be about four sections: (1) talking about the independent, dependent and intervening variables; (2) the degree of attention that the interaction opportunity creates in a international system; (3) the Richardson modelexemplified with bipolarity and multipolarity, and (4) how the time determines the power in the models above.

To introduce the first concept is necessary to explain what is the difference between a bipolar system and a multipolar one. The first one is the power divided on two countries; one example is the time of the Cold War. The second one could be exemplified as the actual power that since the pointof view of realism United States, United Kindom, France, China and Rusia are the superpowers because of they military power. 1

Then it will describe what stability is; basically is the probability that the system maintain it principal characteristics, no single nation becomes dominant, the most of its members continue to survive, and the large-scale war doesn’t occur.

L. F. Richardsonstability referred as any condition over the system could return to the equilibrium state, so instability for him is any state affairs that cannot return to the original relation state but rather would continue to change until reaching some limit or breakdown point of the system. Richardson use this concept in the growth of arms expenditures, where if a bipolar system is competing for the militarypower none of them would quit from this competition until the other cede (prisoners´ dilemma) and if not, the other side will increase its amount of army in average at 10 percent but if the system turns on a multipolar one, this percentage will diminish depending on the number of the independent actors as participants.

The “interaction opportunity” is the relation of the independent actors andthe stability of the system. When it exist an increase in the number of independent actors the possibility of generate pairs or dyads is bigger, at the same time when these exist in an international system there is more chances that the interaction opportunity increase.

The pairs or dyads could be called as alliances between 2 countries that have the same or very similar interests, goals orcharacteristics, but here the pluralism model take place, where even the dyad exist, there will be discrepancies that could take to a limit where the interests clash and might be that one of them look for an alternative partner. So if the number of independent actors increase is more probable to reach stability because of the number and diversity of trade-offs available to the total system. We canuse the example of what happened on February 4th 2012 with the russian-chinese veto on UN resolution of Syria´s case, where two different ways to act or two points of view that could be interpreted as a dyad could destabilize the entire system (in terms of security).

Using the same example of Syria, we will talk about the attention received by all the independent actors to each other on a system;in the Security Council there are 15 members, 5 permanents and 10 no-permanents, with the last action of Russia and China, all the attention are for them, received primarily by the United States, United Kindom and France that are the rest permanent members. This occurs when is a little group generating a nucleus. But in the other hand if the group is bigger and all the system still as usual, theattention would stay on an average, they all share the attention of others, bringing again stability.

Taking again Richardson model of the arms race, he suggest that the motivation of gat armed is generated by the state itself, there is an opposite point of view given by Machiavelli, Adam Smith and Darwin (the survival of the fittest). The de-escalation in the Richardson model are evidently...