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The of World Politics Will It Resemble the Past? Robert Jervis I History usually makes a mockery of our hopes or our expectations. The events of 1989, perhaps more welcomed than those of any year since 1945, were unforeseen. Much of what analysts anticipate for the 1990s is unpleasant. Nevertheless, it is clear that we are entering a new world, and I present three lines of argument about it. First, I discuss why prediction is so difficultin world politics. Among the reasons: multiple factors are usually at work, actors learn, small events can affect the course of history and, most importantly in this context, many well-established generalizations about world politics may no longer hold. This leads to the second question of the ways and areas in which the future is likely to resemble the past and the sources, areas, and implications of change. It appears that while international politics in much of the world will follow patterns that are familiar in outline although unpredictable in detail, among the developed states we are likely to see new forms of relations. In this new context, my third argument goes, the United States will face an extraordinarily wide range of policy choices and must therefore address fundamental questions that were submerged during the Cold War. Freed from previous constraints, the United States has many goals it can seek, but there are more conflicts among them than are sometimes realized. Why Prediction Is So Difficult We all know that it is difficult to predict the course of international politics.' Nevertheless, it is useful to note eight reasons why this is SO.^ First, social Robert Jervis is Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations at Columbia University and a member of its Institute of War and Peace Studies. His most recent book is The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1989),for which he received the Grawemeyer Award. A preliminary version of this paper was delivered as the Grawemeyer Award Lecture at the University of Louisville. I would like to thank students and colleagues there, at the University of Pittsburgh, and at MIT for suggestions and John Mueller for extensive comments. 1. The literature on this subject is very large. See the summary in Nazli Choucri and Thomas Robinson, eds., Forecasting in Znternational Relations (San Francisco: Freeman, 1978). 2. This is not to imply that prediction rather than understanding is the goal of social science: see Stephen Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding:An ZnquiryZnto the Aims of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). lnternattonal Security, Winter 1991192 (Vol. 16, No. 3) 0 1991by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 39 lnternational Security 16:3 I 40 scientists have only a limited stock of knowledge to rely on and there are few laws whose validity is uncontested. Take, for example, the polarity of the international system, which different scholars define differently (for some, pre-World War I Europe was bipolar, in the eyes of others it was multipolar). Following Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer argues that bipolar systems are more stable than multipolar ones; this provides the foundation for his pessimistic predictions about the future of E ~ r o p e . ~ But the logic of Waltz's position is open to dispute (indeed, it suffers from internal contradiction ~).~ Furthermore, even if the arguments for or against this position were more compelling, they might not be true. Politics has the nasty habit of not always behaving as even the most plausible and rigorous theories suggest it should. Second, only rarely does a single factor determine the way politics will work out. Even the best propositions are couched in terms of conditions and probabilities. Thus, I doubt that we would ever learn that either bipolarity or multipolarity is always more stable than the other. So even if multipolar systems usually are less stable than bipolar ones, this does not mean that the future will be less stable than the past. Other factors could cancel out this effect or interact with polarity in a way that makes an overall judgment about the influence of the latter impossible. The most obvious factor, as Mearsheimer and Waltz note, is the presence of...

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