Leon Hadar: No World Order
[Leon Hadar is a Cato Institute research fellow in foreign-policy studies and author, most recently, of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.]
Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) USSR, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance — or imbalance — of power.
Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the “paradigm shift” in international relations would take. What would replace the obsolete bipolar international system and the strategic and ideological forces that had driven it?
From Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” assuming a stable unipolar system under which the process of economic globalization and the spread of democratic and liberal values would widen to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” forecasting a challenge to American power and values from the Muslim world and other civilizational blocs, and through other complementing and competing big and small ideas warning of (or hailing) the formation of rival trading blocs, the collapse of the nation-state, the New World Order, the Coming Anarchy, or the rise of a world government, we have been bombarded with a few useful and a lot of useless foreign-policy paradigms....
In a way, even under the best-case scenario of a speedy economic recovery, the rising tide of nationalism — economic and military — is going to become the default option of the powerful and less powerful nation-states worried about growing threats to their security and prosperity. Nationalism has and could prove to be the most effective way for political leaders to win support and legitimacy from their people, a process that could even affect the pacifist nations of Germany and Japan that would drive nations to form partnerships based on interests and not on “civilizational” and other values. This new and messy world would not conform to any of the fashionable and neat paradigms of the last twenty years. But not to worry: An entrepreneurial intellectual would eventually come up with a new theory to explain why all of what is happening in the real world makes a lot of sense, theoretically speaking.
Read entire article at American Conservative
Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) USSR, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance — or imbalance — of power.
Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the “paradigm shift” in international relations would take. What would replace the obsolete bipolar international system and the strategic and ideological forces that had driven it?
From Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” assuming a stable unipolar system under which the process of economic globalization and the spread of democratic and liberal values would widen to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” forecasting a challenge to American power and values from the Muslim world and other civilizational blocs, and through other complementing and competing big and small ideas warning of (or hailing) the formation of rival trading blocs, the collapse of the nation-state, the New World Order, the Coming Anarchy, or the rise of a world government, we have been bombarded with a few useful and a lot of useless foreign-policy paradigms....
In a way, even under the best-case scenario of a speedy economic recovery, the rising tide of nationalism — economic and military — is going to become the default option of the powerful and less powerful nation-states worried about growing threats to their security and prosperity. Nationalism has and could prove to be the most effective way for political leaders to win support and legitimacy from their people, a process that could even affect the pacifist nations of Germany and Japan that would drive nations to form partnerships based on interests and not on “civilizational” and other values. This new and messy world would not conform to any of the fashionable and neat paradigms of the last twenty years. But not to worry: An entrepreneurial intellectual would eventually come up with a new theory to explain why all of what is happening in the real world makes a lot of sense, theoretically speaking.