Old Nations, New World

Conceptions Of World Order

David Jacobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000302028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume explores key states and their changing conceptions of the international order in the post-Cold War era. Taken collectively, the contributors' analyses of the United States, the Soviet Union and its successor states, Japan, the People's Republic of China, the East Asian Little Dragons and Germany and the European Community paint a detailed portrait of the emerging world order. This multidisciplinary group of contributors utilizes a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches to confront common themes and questions: How do states reorganize the world by creating idioms and conceptions of international order? What is the state's definition of its own role and the role of others? How has the state's idiom and conception of the international order shifted from the recent past? What role does the past play in approaches to the world order–in terms of historical traditions, fears, and memories? These questions are illuminated by considering such crucial issues as the state's approach to international or supranational institutions and legal codes, particularly in the area of economy and international human rights, and the role of the state vis-à-vis other states: Does the state have hegemonic tendencies and an active role in maintaining international stability? Does it stress independence or interdependence? Isolationism or internationalism? These original essays suggest the nascent form the international order is taking in an otherwise turbulent world. Understanding how states view the post-Cold War arena is of paramount importance for comprehending the development of the new world order. In addressing these issues, this volume not only provides concrete, timely answers but offers a variety of theoretical and methodological tools for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public.

1
Introduction: The Global Present

David Jacobson

The term “world,” when it is used as metaphor (world view, New World, Old World), is both a bounded and boundless concept. It encompasses a specific vision (the Buddhist world view, the Judeo-Christian world view, the communist world view, and so on). Yet the vision, within, so to speak, its own world, captures totality, the infinite. The word world is also used to describe the boundaries between the finite and the infinite as in birth ("to bring into the world") and in death ("to pass on to the next world"). The world constitutes what is.

The advent of the term “world order” in popular discourse expresses at one and the same time both the metaphoric and the literal meaning of the term. It is significant that cross-nationally statesmen, the media and academics talk of a world order; there is broad recognition that we live in the same “world,” that the world is boundless (if not borderless) and singular in a way it never has been before. When civilizations or ideological systems clashed in the past—during western colonization or the Cold War, for example—struggles ensued over the very way the world-out-there was to be classified and defined. In the West, at least, there has been since the 19th century a tendency to conceive of the world in terms of a unified narrative, with a unified concept of time and space. By an enormous act of faith, Robert Nisbet notes, it was assumed that the chronology of western Europe is the chronology of mankind.¹ Different cultures and peoples were acknowledged, certainly, but they are perceived as all belonging to one tapestry, the same “great story.” Only now, however, can we truly think in these terms. Only now can we entertain the notion, if tentatively, that the clash of different ideologies and world views is a thing of the past, that we have reached the “End of History” and liberalism reigns triumphant. And, in the literal sense, world order refers, of course, to the whole world.

Few are certain as to the exact parameters of the emerging world order, but two principal developments contributed to the sense that we live in a shared terra cognita: firstly, the end of the divisions of the Cold War that fractured the international landscape, not only between the Warsaw Pact and NATO but in the Third World as well, and secondly, the process of “globalization."² Generally, globalization is understood to refer to the internationalization of the economy: that the manufacturing of medium and high technology products cannot be supported by any single country or region in terms of capital, research resources or markets. Thus the state is losing its sovereign control over its economy and many major corporations have become transnational. Globalization is, however, more than economics. The massive cross-national movements of migrants may be more significant than economic developments in the long term as it is eroding the cornerstone of the nation state, namely, citizenship. Ecological concerns have also taken on a transnational importance. International institutions and, in particular, international human rights codes, have assumed unprecedented salience.³

Hence the term world order implies a qualitative change in the international arena and not just another shuffling of the balance of power, as hitherto predominant theories of international relations would predict. Neorealists, who view states acting uniformly in terms of their national interests, unfettered by ideological beliefs, find the present changes a serious challenge; why did new alliances that reflect the new power balances not form?⁴ On the contrary, alliances between nations held firm (though they changed in form), or became undone, according to the ideological proclivities of the parties concerned.

It is paradoxical, however, that references to the world order are made, with the implication that a “single” global community is on the horizon, at least in the northern tier of countries, just when it is evident that many new conflicts have erupted. Bloody fighting in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union come to mind but, on a lesser scale, internal dissension in Western Europe is a case in point as well. Indeed, the international arena appears to have few defining parameters and demonstrates a certain turbulence. Ironically, the Cold War united the world as much as it divided it, providing a framework for different states to “locate” themselves in the global game, and rules by which to conduct themselves.⁵ Even among the Cold War rivals, there were explicit and tacit rules of understanding, about spheres of influence and acceptable forms of conduct. That framework is gone.

The end of the Cold War has also revealed the intricate linkage between the international order and domestic institutions. The Cold War was a defining element for many countries, defining not only their role in the world but their sense of self. In the wake of the Cold War, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, many countries question not only their role in the new world order but what their domestic raison is. With unification, for example, Germany has to grapple with issues of national identity and purpose. The United States has lost its anti-communism cause that gave it moral direction. Japan finds that it cannot rely on the American umbrella to the same degree and that it may have to emerge from its traditional insularity. The states of the former Soviet Union seek national self-determination and sovereignty while seeking acceptance and the help of regional and international organizations that are less wedded to traditional state-centrism (like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe).

The pulling apart of the Iron Curtain has revealed a quilt—a quilt of nation states, regional organizations and sub-national groups competing for dominance. Old and new nations were brought into focus; a variety of historical, cultural, political and economic forces now demanded attention.

Seeking Order in Disorder

In what sense, then, can we refer to a world order, given the apparently disorganized international picture? This is a problem not only in terms of describing the international arena itself but is an epistemological problem for the researcher as well. How does the scholarly search for “order” in international politics guide study at this historical moment?

We seek what James N. Rosenau calls “the order in disorder.” Generally, social scientists assume that nothing is random, that there is a cause for every effect. However, there is another approach to order:

Variable as people can be, neither individuals nor groups have a boundless repertoire of behaviors on which they can draw [when responding] to situations. The number of responses is limited by culture, by environmental constraints, by role expectations, by historical memories, and by situational determinants…. Few, if any, patterns are universal… but taken together, the clusters of motives, attitudes, actions, interactions, and relationships form the fundamental arrangements which order the course of events during any historical period.⁶

Such a world order is not necessarily coordinated. The agents themselves, be they individuals, groups, international organizations or states act in terms of discrete repertoires. Since these agents are reacting to similar global events, and since the world is increasingly interdependent, overall patterns can result from the acts of uncoordinated individuals or other agents.⁷ Thus in this volume we seek the order in disorder. As the overall framework of international relations is “disorderly” now that the Cold War is over, we shift our focus to the perceptions and idioms of the actors—national and regional. By noting how these actors react to similar global events, and by analyzing their approach to international and regional institutions, the process of deducing overall global patterns can begin.

Origins of the World Order

The globalization of social and political relations has occured over two broad historical periods. The states system was instituted in Europe, it is generally accepted, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The states system spread to the rest of the world through western colonization from about the mid-19th century. However, colonization presages deep fissures in the international order, with competing ideological systems. We are now experiencing, it appears, a third phase, which is the focus of this volume.

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 marks the beginning of the states system in a number of respects. The settlement of the Thirty Years War ended the Holy Roman Empire as an effective institution. It provided the legal basis for the states system. There was a virtual recognition of the independent status of the parties at Westphalia, The Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation were formally admitted to the family of nations. Westphalia is also the first multilateral agreement among independent states. The balance of power system begins.⁸ Cuius regio, euius religio ("to each region, its own religion") becomes the enunciated principle following Westphalia, anticipating the principles of sovereignty and national self-determination.

The states system has deeper political and cultural roots, however, in Christendom and, in particular, in Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation broke down the role of the medieval Church in mediating salvation and in regulating social relations more generally. The Protestants emphasized the individual and collective sharing of grace, in place of the hierarchic distribution of grace in the Catholic Church.⁹ Through this process the universality of the Church was dissolved. The hierarchical conception of society was undermined. In its place, diversity and equality became the rule. The “people” became sovereign: absolute political authority would rest in the community The concept of the “self” becomes a socially distinct category.¹⁰ Equally important, the term self-determination takes on a social resonance. The idea of self-determination was the converse of church mediation: it was the aspiration to determine one’s own destiny, and not to be ruled by others. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary the use of the word self as a prefix, as in “self-determination” or in “self-realization,” first appears in English in the 16th century, and multiplies rapidly in use in the 17th century. Self-determination as a specific term first appears in the 17th century.) By the late 19th century the states system was secularized and non-Christian states are formally recognized as sovereign states. However, the ultimately European character of the states system informed global conflicts thereafter.

Since the beginning of the states system there was an inseparable and interdependent linkage between the form of domestic politics and society and the structure of the international order.¹¹ Martin Wight notes that the principles that prevailed within a majority of the states in international society are also the principles that prevailed between them. He terms “international legitimacy” as the “collective judgement of international society about rightful membership of the family of nations.” Until the French Revolution the principle was dynastic. Afterward, the basis of international legitimacy was popular. The dynastic marriage, source of alliances and territorial acquisition, gave way to popular rule (in its liberal and authoritarian versions). Hierarchy was supplanted by equality, and patrimonial rules were replaced by national self-determination.¹²

A conception of the state as a public realm—a notion that would have a dramatic impact on the international order—arose in the 17th century, following the Reformation. Indeed, the emergence of a public realm, of a civic polity, is said to mark the transition from a medieval to a modern Europe.¹³ Res publica is the bond of association, of shared beliefs and mutual commitment, of a “people,” and of a polity, as opposed to the bonds of family and friends.¹⁴ “The public,” writes Barrington Moore, “is a generalized self in the form of the other. Its existence presupposes shared moral standards and a sense of moral community."¹⁵

Civic politics involved a radical restructuring of assumptions regarding the nature of authority, a redefinition of the status of subjects (to that of citizens), and a fundamental shift in the focus of loyalties. Loyalties, once local and familial, were now directed to the state. The patrimonial state itself became more impersonal, finally becoming the self-conscious political embodiment of the nation.¹⁶ (The degree and rate of change from patrimonial to nation state differed greatly from country to country).

The concept of the public realm, of civic politics, is at the heart of inter-national relations. The nation, as a “generalized self in the form of the other,” is an expression of the public in the world-at-large. A nation, writes C.A.W. Manning, is a notion of the social whole. It is “numberless individuals nursing the images, experiencing the sentiments, thinking the thoughts, reacting to the symbols, and using the terminology of nationhood.” The nation is the prevalence of an image.¹⁷

The emergence of a distinct public realm, of a polity, is essential for inter-societal relations. The public realm, as a manifestation of a society’s shared self-image, takes on a “personality."¹⁸ International relations are, in one sense, relations between different publics. Manning notes how international relations are conceived of as being between persons.¹⁹ Historically international relations were predicated on the theory of corporate legal personality. Such a theory allowed for similar rights and obligations to be demanded of states that had been demanded of individuals.²⁰

While the nation is the outward expression of the public realm, the state is the public’s representative mechanism. The state in modern times ceases to belong to a specific group or prince. Rather, it becomes the mechanism with which the nation advances its interests. The state thus expresses the “will of the community.” No factual communal will, as such, exists. Institutional processes (elections, consultations, and so on) ascertain a notional “people’s will,” which is real in effect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Introduction: The Global Present
• 2 Japanese Views of the Great Powers in the New World Order
• 3 Chinese Perspectives on World Order
• 4 The Changing World Order and the East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries
• 5 Nationalism, Economic Cooperation and Supranationalism in Western Europe: The Role of a United Germany
• 6 U.S. Discourse and Strategies in the New World Order
• 7 Soviet and Post-Soviet Approaches to World Order
• 8 Conclusion: The Global Future
• About the Editor and Contributors
• About the Book
• Index