After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the 21st Century

1. THEORY OF GLOBAL POLITICS

1 1❖ THEORY OF GLOBAL POLITICS The nation-state is in trouble. It is under siege by contradictory forces of its own making and its leaders have no idea how to proceed. Paradoxically , these forces are grounded in the end of the Cold War as well as the broadly held goals of economic growth and the extension of democracy and open markets throughout the world, the very things that are supposed to foster peace and stability. Why should this be so? As states open up to the world economy, they begin to lose one of the raison d’êtres for which they first came into being: defense of the sovereign nation. Political change and economic globalization enhance the position of some groups and classes and erode that of others. Liberalization and structural reform reduce the welfare role of the state and cast citizens out on their own. As the state loses interest in the well-being of its citizens, its citizens lose interest in the wellbeing of the state. They look elsewhere for sources of identity and focuses for their loyalty. Some build new linkages within and across borders; others organize into groups determined to resist economic penetration or to eliminate political competitors. The state loses control in some realms and tries to exercise greater control in others. Military force is of little utility under such circumstances. While it 2 Chapter 1 remains the reserve currency of international relations, it is of limited use in changing the minds of people. Instead, police power and discipline , both domestic and foreign, are applied more and more. Even these don’t really work, as any cop on the beat can attest. Order is under siege; disorder is on the rise; authority is crumbling. These are hardly new arguments. The search for a unifying theory of international politics and world order has been underway for centuries , if not longer. Such ideas were offered by classical and premodern theorists of politics, such as Thucydides, Hobbes, Kant, List, and various geopoliticians, beginning with Admiral Mahan in the final decade of the 1800s, continuing with Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman during the middle of the twentieth century, and ending with Colin Gray in the 1990s. After World War II, new theories were offered by Morgenthau, Aron, Waltz, and others. Most recently, in the wake of the Cold War’s end, these theories have been restated, albeit in a different form, by Samuel Huntington (1996), Benjamin Barber (1995), and Robert Kaplan (1994, 1996). So why another book on the subject of war, peace, and global politics? One reason is that most of the others have it wrong. That the world is changing is doubted by only a few; how and why it is changing, and what is its trajectory, is hardly clear to anyone. The approach of the millennium has further enflamed the collective imagination, both popular and scholarly, adding fuel to the fire. But most books and films—The Coming Conflict with China (Bernstein and Munro, 1997), Independence Day and Armageddon, and the “Y2K” furor come to mind here—offer the reader (and the policymaker) a biblical dichotomy: the choice between order and chaos, light and darkness, civilization and barbarity. Order draws for its inspiration on both the recent (and antedeluvian) pasts (Noble, 1997), suggesting that a world of well-defined nation-states, under American rule and discipline , still offers the best hope for reducing the risks of war and enhancing the possibilities for teleological human improvement. Chaos reaches even farther back, to the authors of the Bible, as well as the writings of Hobbes, Rousseau, and others, who warned that, in the absence of government, there is only a “State of Nature,” the “war of every one against every one.” The reality (and here, I wish to avoid debates over what is “real” and what “real” means; see Kubálková, Onuf, and Kowert, 1998) is more likely to be found somewhere in Theory of Global Politics 3 between these two poles or even elsewhere. It is always difficult to ascertain the trajectories of change when one stands in the midst of that change. In a prescient 1991 inaugural lecture at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, site of the world’s first department of International Relations, Ken Booth put his finger on the central point. He argued that sovereignty is disintegrating. States are less able to perform their traditional...