The nation-state is back, or rather, it never really went away. In the context of the G8 and G20 summits, sovereign states have now clearly resurfaced in a new form, with numerous complex groupings and linkages among states. The International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization will continue to furnish particular services, but large, unwieldy, all-inclusive multilateral bodies on the United Nations model will not be the way forward.
It was notable at the Toronto summit, for example, that the United States and South Korea strengthened their bilateral trade and military relationships, and that Canada and India entered into a nuclear agreement. By contrast, the schedule for the completion of the international Doha Round trade negotiation was left open-ended.
In the past two decades, many commentators said that the age of the nation-state, a period that had began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which closed the era of the wars of religion in Europe), had ended. Truly sovereign states, they said, were withering away, with increasing trade liberalization, as well as humanitarian and counterterrorist interventionism.
Nonetheless, sovereign states are still making the essential decisions. They are not trying to close themselves off. They recognize that most of their economies depend on cross-border supply chains, but these vital connections in particular clusters of countries do not necessarily require a uniform trade code for the world.
The WTO will continue to provide dispute resolution and adjudication, but it cannot push its members toward ever-freer trade.
Likewise, the IMF will continue to furnish experienced technical supervision for countries that are at risk of insolvency, or actually insolvent. Moreover, the G20, which has no staff or research facility of its own, commissioned the IMF to carry out a simulation exercise, showing the relationship among growth, deficit reduction in developed countries and increased consumption in emerging economies.
In this phase of history, specific-purposes groupings, such as the quartet that attempts to mediate the Middle East conflict and the sextet that is trying to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear program, are likely to become quite common – more like the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which was convened to sort out how to handle the decline of the Ottoman Empire, than the United Nations, which was designed to be permanent, working toward the perpetual peace conceived by Immanuel Kant.
In these circumstances, Canada can be an effective middle power. Even as part of a North American trade group, it can alter the balance of economic power, by negotiating other bilateral agreements, for example, with Colombia and (a work in progress) the European Union. Canada's trade pact with Colombia may well induce the United States to stop dragging its feet on freer trade with that country.
The middle-power theory of Canada was a concept of the comparatively idealistic Pearsonian period. But it may apply even better in the more perplexing multipolar world in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shown some deftness in positioning Canada.