While we all have been debating whether the Russian intervention in  the Crimea warranted expelling Russia from this or that organization, a very serious wound has been inflicted on global summitry.

As identified in the Brisbanetimes there are growing concerns whether Putin will attend the November G20 Leaders Summit in Brisbane:

Organisers of the G20 summit to be held in Brisbane later this year are closely watching events in Ukraine and the possibility tensions might keep Russian President Vladimir Putin at home.

The Crimea is a serious crisis in Europe; but critically it reveals a behavioral and indeed structural wound that could harm global summitry for the foreseeable future.

To see the impact of the Ukrainian crisis – the sharp conflict between the US, EU and Russia – on global summitry, one has to revert momentarily to first principles.  Much, if not most, of international relations has been, and is still about, conflict and the management of conflict in international relations.

The majority of analysts, especially those examining international stability and the political/security dimensions of global politics have relied generally on structural analysis and realist perspectives.  From the Cold War on – even today after decades without the Cold War – such discourse has dominated our understanding of global affairs.  Here but one example:

The Realist perspective stresses the anarchic nature of the international system.  Because there is no central authority to make or enforce binding agreements, states cannot rely on each other to maintain peaceful intentions.  Each must provide for its own security because there is nothing to ensure that today’s allies will not become tomorrow’s enemies.  In such a self-help environment states find it difficult to cooperate for mutual benefits. The environment creates pressures to seek advantage over one another.  (William H. Daugherty from “System Management and the Endurance of the Concert of Europe” in Jack Snyder and Robert, eds., 1993. Coping with Complexity in the International System)

But while analyst attention pays little heed to cooperation in the international system, it is not just the world of Realists.   In the academic and analytic world of global politics other perspectives and behaviors exist.  A minority of analysts have examined in some detail collaboration and cooperation in the international system.  From diplomatic historians like Illinois’s Paul Schroeder to international relations experts like Harvard’s Richard Rosecrance and now most recently Ohio States’ s Jennifer Mitzen have all examined the efforts to ensure collectively international stability and peace and to reveal how great powers and others have overcome the collective action problems in today’s still anarchic system.  Mitzen in particular has examined concert politics and behavior and described the efforts to ensure cooperation and collaborative action in international politics.  As Mitzen argues:

I propose that among states, commitments can shape behavior when they are accompanied by forums.  Forums enable states in anarchy to do what concerting firms do a market: they can manipulate the balance of power toward shared ends. … This book discerns those effects theoretically and links them to a system-level argument about how states inject social purpose to the international political order. ( Jennifer Mitzen, 2013. Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance,)

Liberal perspectives including the liberal institutionalism work of Princeton’s John Ikenberry, for example, have focused attention on the impact of institutions, rules and norms on the behavior of states notwithstanding the anarchic world of the international system.  And it is evident from the diplomatic historians of Europe that this collective, or as Paul Schroeder called it sometime ago ‘systemic thinking’ refers us far back to the concert or collective thinking that statesmen constructed following the Napoleonic Wars:

Systemic thinking instead  calls for each state, great or small, to possess only the power necessary to support its independence and enable it to play its particular, appropriate role in an organized, planned system of general, mutual security.  It assumes that security be shared throughout the system, that all units, large and small, must be reasonably secure for any unit genuinely to be so; … (Paul Schroeder, “The Transformation of Political Thinking, 1787-1848 in Jack Snyder and Robert, eds., 1993. Coping with Complexity in the International System)

Mitzen puts it in slightly more political science language:

To illustrate this internationalist, public power approach to global governance, I reach back to its origins and tell the story of the first international public power, the Concert of Europe, which came about after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 when the five most powerful European states committed to maintain continental stability together.  Their idea was that when European stability was affected, European power must respond.  … What marks the post-Napoleonic period as the first case of states concerting their power for public purposes is the combination of their commitment to keep the peace together and their institutional innovation of states meeting in forums to manage crises.

Now this is a fair dollop of political science.  Likely far more than you ever expected, or wanted.  But the point is this.  Concert behavior emerged in the early nineteenth century and then reappeared later in the century and then even several more times in the twentieth and now the twentieth-first century. Concert behavior is collective great power action in an anarchic world.  It encourages great powers to think in collective and collaborative ways. It emphasizes restraint and it looks to great powers not to unilaterally act, especially against smaller actors, without a fair degree of collective legitimation and concurrence.

So there is the rub.  The Russian action seems not only to be outside the concert context – today, the UN and at least the G20 – but antithetical to great power concert behavior. The Russian actions that appear well outside concert behavior not only raise tensions within the concert but undermines the prospect of any collective action in and by the concert.

It is why expulsion is counter intuitive. But of even greater concern – can today’s concert work at all in facing all kinds of collective action challenges when Russian actions in the Crimea are so questioned and disapproved by the other great powers – or at least the United States, Europe, and likely others?

Image Credit:  scmp.com