Democratising, internationalising, and globalising: A collage of blurred images

Abstract

Getting a Grip on 'Reality' The ending of the Cold War both ended an era of ideological rivalry and stripped away the illusion of consensus about the shape and direction of world order. Beyond the domain of Cold War truisms that had prevailed between 1945 and 1989, there were increasingly evident analytic and explanatory difficulties. First, how to take conceptual account of the globalisation of capital and communications. Second, whether to treat the porousness of state boundaries with regard to drugs, illegal immigration, environmental degradation, unwanted ideas and threats, financial flows and banking operations as posing a fundamentally new series of questions about the nature and effectiveness of sovereignty as the basic approach to the distribution of authority on a global basis. And third, the extent to which generalised descriptive narratives about the economic/political/legal conditions of the peoples of the world homogenised crucial differences or illuminated vital affinities. The position taken here is that the end of the Cold War has made it easier to focus on structural trends and counter-trends in international life and to set forth a normative critique, but that these challenges would have manifested themselves in any event. With the end of the Cold War there has emerged an irresistible disposition to debate and reflect upon the future of world order. For this reason alone George Bush's advocacy of 'a new world order' during the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91 captured headlines that sent pundits of all persuasion rushing off to their PCs. On the one side were those who welcomed this American project as a necessary step in the direction of 'hegemonic stability', giving leadership and cohesion during a turbulent time of growing geoeconomic tensions. On other side were those who worried about a new exploitative, imperial order, sometimes sloganised as Pax Americana II, and what this might mean for specific regions, such as Africa, the Pacific, and Europe. And then there were those who now expected a shift of policy emphasis from geopolitics to environmental protection. As Lester Brown put it: 'The cold war that dominated international affairs for four decades and led to an unprecedented militarization of the world economy is over. With its end comes an end to the world order it spawned.' Brown argues that the only foundation for hope about the future is to allow the struggle 'to reverse the degradation of the