Grosvenor on Hansen & Heurlin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The New World Order: Contrasting Theories Peter Grosvenor Birthe Hansen & Bertel Heurlin, The New World Order: Contrasting Theories (Basingstoke: Macmillan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) The end of the Cold War, and the emergence of a so-called New World Order (NWO), have presented the contending paradigms of international relations theory with serious theoretical challenges, all of which relate to polarity — a central concept in international systems analysis. Contributor Ronald Deibert writes that, “the study of world order is... above all the study of the organization of political space — the architecture of political authority — at a world level” (p18). A polar actor is an actor so significant in this architecture that its removal would fundamentally alter the global distribution of power. The Cold War was widely interpreted as a bi-polar system in which two dominant actors imposed stability and peace through a balance of power of both a nuclear and conventional kind. This was, of course, a northern hemispherical perspective because, as Fred Halliday has demonstrated in his Cold War, Third World (Hutchinson Radius, London 1989), the superpowers clashed by proxy in the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Yet the implosion of the Soviet Union as a polar actor spectacularly reconfigured world politics and ushered in an era of comparative uncertainty. This volume of nine essays, edited by two Danish political scientists from the University of Copenhagen, details the responses of contending schools of international relations theory to the post-Cold War world. The term “New World Order” is of political, not academic, coinage. It was used by the Bush administration in the early 1990s to denote a new global situation in which the United States would head multi-lateral efforts to resolve long-standing intra-regional conflicts, to spread liberal democracy, and to liberalize the world economy. The American leadership of a Gulf War coalition comprising such disparate powers as Bangladesh, Denmark, Morocco, Syria, Egypt and France was presented by Bush as an example of the NWO in practice. To the neo-realist school, which treats power asymmetries as the necessary determinants of order and disorder in an anarchical international system, the NWO is simply a uni-polarity in which the power of the United States cannot be effectively challenged by another actor, or group of actors. But uni-polar systems are inherently unstable: in the absence of restraint, the dominant power over-reaches itself, and other powers gradually coalesce to form a countervailing power bloc. In his contribution to this volume K.N. Waltz argues that American uni-polarity is already giving way to a multi-polarity as Russia and China move closer together, and smaller states, stripped of the protection of their Cold War superpower sponsors, seek to build up their own autonomous defense capacities, including in some cases the quest for nuclear credibility. Liberal theoreticians, on the other hand, find encouragement in the NWO for their essentially rationalist project to improve the relations between states through diplomacy, international law, the spread of democracy, and the strengthening of international institutions. The essays collected here are arbitrarily dismissive of the “liberal-convergence” theory elucidated in Francis Fukuyama’s neo-Hegelian The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin, London 1992), but the burgeoning “democratic peace” literature is subjected to rigorous logical and empirical analysis. In contrast to both neo-realist and liberals, Marxists identify important continuities between the Cold War system and the NWO, as Michael Cox shows in his lucid survey of radical international relations theory. Wallerstein’s world systems theory always dealt in an alternative bi-polarity of North-South and substantially ignored the Cold War. Similarly, in his World Orders Old and New (Pluto Press, London 1994), Chomsky sees the end of the Cold War as nothing more than the completion of a world capitalist system under American hegemony. Cox credits Marxism with having tracked the development of international capitalism since The Communist Manifesto and suggests that it will continue to have a role in exposing the contradictions and iniquities of contemporary globalization. At the same time, he concedes that Marxism’s principal theoretical weakness is its inability to formulate practical systemic alternatives to...