Evolutionary Paradigm for Global Politics

Abstract

The evolutionary paradigm for global politics here presented consists of four key propositions: (1) The global political system is a population of policies or strategies; (2) global politics constitutes a complex system that evolves in specifiable conditions; (3) accounting for global political evolution is a four-phased learning process whose key operators are variation (innovation), cooperation, selection, and reinforcement; and (4) global politics coevolves with global economics, community, and opinion et cetera. The evolutionary paradigm sheds light on two processes in particular: the formation of institutions at the global level, and the rise and decline of world powers (the long cycle). Two propositions are central to this article: 1. The institutions of world politics evolve, that is, they undergo change subject to identifiable evolutionary processes; and 2. The rise and decline of world powers (the long cycle) is a mechanism of global political evolution. By institutions of world politics we mean constitutive and widely accepted arrangements in respect to war and peace, nation-states, alliances, and international organization, and to global leadership and international law. If we consider these arrangements in a sufficiently long perspective, say, over the span of the past millennium, we cannot but help noticing significant changes that have occurred in relation to these, that continue to affect them, and that therefore need to be understood and explained. We need a structural-historical theory of world politics. The rise and decline of world powers, which has been the lead story over the past few centuries of world politics, also needs to be understood in a wider framework. It is not the case of some eternal struggle for power but rather that of a mechanism that in the recent past has mediated major changes in world political and social organization. We need to see the long cycle not in isolation but as a feature of world institutional growth. That is why, to better understand world politics in its time dimension in particular, we require an evolutionary framework. What might be the salient features of such a paradigm?