Book chapter
The new world order: what role for critical realism?
Engaging with the World Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations
02 Apr 2013
Abstract
The world is simultaneously coming together and coming apart. In the twentieth century, for the first time in human history, the world became self-consciously organized at a global level, first with the League of Nations and then, more successfully, with the United Nations. There followed a string of international conventions and accords that ushered in something of a global consciousness on the subject of human rights and international law. Simultaneously, the forces inherent in capitalism, always implicitly global, became further integrated worldwide at the accelerated pace we call globalization. Somewhat prophetically, as the twentieth century closed, Benjamin Barber (1996) wrote a book entitled Jihad versus McWorld. In a sense, Barber was making the same point, that there are counterpoised in the world today both centripetal and centrifugal forces and that in neither direction are those forces uniformly positive. On the one hand, rippling out from America is the culturally homogenizing and leveling effect of international commercialization that sociologist George Ritzer (2010) called the McDonaldization of society. Arrayed against it, Barber argued, and on behalf of more traditional and localized values, are the forces of fundamentalist religion, which Barber termed Jihad. Barber’s vision of the current world order found vindication in the opening year of the new millennium with the Jihadist attack on the twin towers symbolizing McWorld. Overlaid on this alleged ‘clash of civilizations’ (see Huntington 1998) that we now call ‘the War on Terror’ was yet another development with profound implications for the world order. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as the world’s only superpower, a superpower whose military might exceeded that of all the rest of the world combined. This uncontested dominance of the United States was a new relational property of the world, of which the United States took note and sought to take advantage. Within the halls of American power, there was conceived the Project for a New American Century. The idea behind the Project for a New American Century was for America to act quickly and decisively to consolidate permanently its current world hegemony, to make sure that American power long remained unrivaled both globally and even locally in any region that mattered – such as the Middle East. The initial version, authored in 1992 principally by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby and leaked to the New York Times, caused uproar. A first excerpt certainly sounds like preparation, years in advance of 11 September 2001, to deal with the likes of Saddam Hussein:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. . . . [W]e must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
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Details
- Title
- The new world order: what role for critical realism?
- Creators
- Douglas Vincent Porpora - Communication
- Publication Details
- Engaging with the World Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Number of pages
- 15
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Communication
- Other Identifier
- 991019173649004721