Crisis Of World Order Research Articles

Nationalism, nations and the crisis of world order

One hundred years ago, the first Department of International Politics was established at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, with the express purpose of seeking in Arnold Toynbee’s prophetic words (uttered many years later) – of breaking decisively with the ‘habit of nationalism’. As David Davies in the founding statement put it, by moving beyond ‘insular and vested prejudices … the shattered family of nations’ could be brought back together again and a new world order established. Yet as the history of the twentieth century showed – and the new century looks to be no nearer to realizing that original dream – nationalism has throughout continued to retain its power of mobilizing peoples and setting nation against nation. How and why this happened and with what consequences is the subject of this article.

Book Review: Richard Sakwa, Russia against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order

Book Review: Richard Sakwa, <i>Russia against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order</i>

Холодная война и мир: “Россия против всех” и четыре мировых порядка Р. Саквы

The article is devoted to the key problems of Richard Sakwa’s recent book “Russia against the Rest. The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order”: cold war and cold peace phenomena and the evolution of post bipolar world. Richard Sakwa provides a fresh and audacious analysis of the end of the Cold War, calls the current geopolitical axiology under question. The end of the Cold War did not create a sustainable peace system, because none of the fundamental problems of European security were solved without any “Post-Cold War peace conference” which would fix the world’s alignment of forces, and tensions accumulated. Instead, for “inglorious three decades” a “cold peace” reflected the tension between cooperative and competitive mode. As the end of this logic the crisis exploded in open conflict, provoking what some call a “new Cold War”. Russia Against the Rest book challenges the view that this is a new edition (Cold War 2.0.) of the old pending conflict, explaining how the tensions between Russia and the Atlantic community reflect a global realignment of the international system. The world order passed from Gorby to Corby through “Gorbachev’s”, “Bush’s” and “Trump’s” models towards the new antihegemonic order. The values crisis provokes the rise of axiological dimension in controversies between Russia and Global West and their dialogue remains in different gnoseological and epistemological spaces. The new state of balanced, “comprehensive and inclusive” world order must be based on the transformation of all actors in the global politics, economic justice and the shift of global political power from West to East. That makes Russia and China promote their value-political projects as a global alternative to the Atlantic dominant rationality.

The Crisis of World Order and the Problem of International Organization in the 1980s

The symptoms became apparent one by one during the 1970s, and some people, especially those Europeans who had no great commitment to the status quo, began to link them together and speak of the crisis of capitalism. The decade began with the 'Nixon shocks.' The United States proved unable or unwilling to correct its continuing and cumulatively massive payments deficit, originating in President Lyndon Johnson's guns plus butter policies during the Vietnam War era and growing with the take-over of European businesses by United States-based multinationals. The immediate response was to obscure the weakness of the United States dollar by severing its relationship to the only other universal standard of value gold. A cosmetic job, not a fundamental corrective. Two years later came the awareness of an energy crisis with the Arab oil embargo and the success of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) in raising prices fourfold. This worked against the United States but even more dramatically against Western Europe and Japan, both much more dependent upon imported oil, and against the non-oil producers of the Third World whose international indebtedness mounted steeply. There followed a foodgrains crisis, short-lived, to be sure, but sufficient to signal that the era of subsidized surpluses was gone, to demonstrate the lopsidedness in world consumption patterns as between rich and poor, and to sound an alarm that many of the poorest countries with the vast majority of their populations in rural areas were unable to

The Crisis of World Order and the Problem of International Organization in the 1980s

The Crisis of World Order and the Problem of International Organization in the 1980s