Emerging World Order Research Articles

UN overstretch: A German perspective

The role of the UN in the emergent world order is a matter of considerable controversy. This article offers a perspective, reflecting research largely on German press and academic sources, of the danger of UN overstretch stemming from the interplay of new challenges, limited structural resources, high expectations and structural restraints. It is argued that the danger of overstretch is manageable if political discernment and realism prevail. The UN is needed in the world‐ordering business and there is perhaps a chance that the UN could evolve into a limited enforcement organization. But the exaggerated hopes for the world‐ordering functions of the UN, reflected in the German literature in the wake of the evaporation of east‐west confrontation, should be set against the UN's historical, structural, organizational, financial and cultural limits.

Passing judgement: Credit rating processes as regulatory mechanisms of governance in the emerging world order

Abstract This article argues that certain knowledge‐producing institutions located in the American financial industry‐ debt security or bond rating agencies ‐are significant forces in the creation and extension of the new, open global political economy and therefore deserve the attention of international political economists as mechanisms of ‘governance without government’. Rating agencies are hypothesized to possess leverage, based on their unique gate‐keeping role with regard to investment funds sought by corporations and governments. The article examines trends in capital markets, the processes leading to bond rating judgements, assesses the form and extent of the agencies' governance powers, and contemplates the implications of these judgements for further extension of the global political economy and the form of the emerging world order.

Forgetting the Gulf War POW

On the evening of 16 January 1991, retired Navy Vice Admiral William Lawrence stepped up to the podium in Eisenhower Hall auditorium at West Point. Lawrence had been asked to address the Corps of Cadets. His authority for such a task was unarguable. He had a fantastic service career: he was the first man to fly twice the speed of sound, he had been superintendent of the United States Naval Academy and he had served as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations. But his introduction to the Corps of Cadets highlighted his other distinction: had spent six years as a POW in Hanoi. officer who introduced Lawrence quoted an Army colonel and fellow-POW to confirm Lawrence's authority.Although Lawrence said nothing about captivity during his 40-minute speech on the Emerging World Order, the first two questions from eager cadets quizzed him on his POW experience. cadets jumped through his other career accomplishments and the subject of his speech to mine his crucial experience as a Vietnam POW. They wanted to know how Admiral Lawrence had survived; what he had learned about religion, the family, America, the Code of Conduct, literature and the self while sitting in a closet-size cell in Hanoi. On the same night that Lawrence was describing his POW experience to an eager audience, more Americans were becoming POWs in Iraq. It appeared that West Point would be assured an ample supply of guest speakers for years to come.Initial speculation about the POWs of the Gulf War made headlines Iraqi Television released film footage of captured pilots. media distributed and read these images in a variety of different ways. Most often the images were shown as justification for the war. A host of former Vietnam POWs including Charles Plumb, Fred Cherry, John McCain and Jim Stockdale saw the signs of physical torture on the faces of the despondent POWs: we had positive evidence of Iraqi mistreatment of American POWs. President Bush, a former Navy aviator who had been shot down himself, vowed that Sadam would never get away with it. interpretations of these initial images drew heavily on our memory of the Vietnam POW whose forced confession and years of torture at the hands of a demonic, inscrutable and racially distinct enemy had become legend.The Americans held in Iraq seemed to be making statements against the war effort that went beyond the name, rank, date of birth and serial number descried in the Code of Conduct. In fact, the POWs were answering all the questions their captors asked on the tape. Surely after hearing the stories of POWs who resisted debilitating episodes of torture to keep from making such statements during the Vietnam War, these POWs must have been coerced in some horrible way.Former POWs were quite explicit about how Americans should interpret propaganda concerning future POWs. Just describing such a confession made former Vietnam POW Ralph Gaither ill: Even now, my heart screams out in protest and my insides churn in anger. My ears ring with humiliation and my mind almost overwhelms me. He makes the lesson explicit for his readers: when other wars are fought, other men are prisoners, other statements like this one [confessions of criminality; admissions that the war was wrong] come out of prison camps, to know, to know, to know, never to forge that those statements are brought about by the worst kind of torture. (1) apparent distress and physical condition of the captured men on the screen confirmed our worst fears. cover of the 4 February 1991 issue of Newsweek featured an unusually large, full face close-up of Jeffrey Zaun. headline read, The POWs: Torture and Torment.General H. Norman Schwarzkopf told the media after he greeted the first returned POWs: They're all heroes. Because Schwarzkopf probably had little detailed information on POW treatment or conduct at the time, his statement seemed a little premature. But few in the media questioned this stance. …

Market Censorship Revisited: Press Freedom, Journalistic Practices, and the Emerging World Order

This essay undertakes a wide-ranging assessment of the ways current transformations in global political formations are being configured within Western news discourses. Inspired by but not modeled after Raymond Williams’s (1976) Keywords, this analysis identifies some of the structures, conditions, and theoretical issues that need to be addressed to construct a vocabulary of key terms in the current interpretive crises. Situated within the assumptions of media-critical theory, it examines the relevance of recent feminist and philosophical approaches to metaphor, how terms become naturalized in political discourse, key terms in post-cold war political linguistics, and their implications for democracy and the critical spirit.

Kitáb-i-Aqdas

This article is an initial attempt to understand the Kitáb-i-Aqdas from the perspective of contemporary secular national and international law. First, it analyzes and classifies the laws and institution-building provisions of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, demonstrating its character as a constitution or “Charter” of future world civilization. The social laws are further analyzed to show how they, together with expressed principles, form the nucleus for a fully developed legal system. Second, the article investigates the relationship between law and principle, the “warp and woof” of the institutions of Bahá’u’lláh’s World Order. How a particular code of laws actually functions in a society depends heavily on the background of shared principles. Characteristic legal and social principles are identified, principles which together distinguish the Bahá’í system of law and government from others. The final section describes current thinking about the concept of legitimacy and the transformation of international law through human rights standards from a system that serves only states into one which serves humanity on the basis of emerging World Order principles.

Bypassing the Gateways: International News on CNN World report

International news flow has been shown to produce a significant effect on individuals’ perceptions of foreign countries and distant events. This phenomenon carries substantial implications for the role of news flow between and among differing economic and political blocs in the emerging world order. As most in‐country news dissemination organizations involve, at some point, a gate‐keeper function, it has heretofore been difficult to study the nature of international news flow where gate‐keeping was either minimized or absent. Cable News Network's weekly program series, CNN WORLD REPORT, represents a news‐flow arrangement in which virtually all gate‐keeping is absent. In a study preliminary to a more detailed investigation, two hundred programs of the series, containing over 7,000 news packages were analyzed to determine their news‐topic patterns. Analysis was made to detect differences in news topics in the program series as compared to previous U.S. network news‐topic studies. Military and defense coverage was shown to be significanlty reduced, as were diplomacy, crime and disaster coverage. A significant increase was noted in topics of economics and business, art, culture, religion, and sports.

Developing a Prosocial Orientation in Children: A Proactive Prescription for Perestroika

In addressing the psychological rights of children, it is recommended that thoughtful consideration be given to the newly emerging world order, with its different political and ideological boundari...

India and the Post-Cold War World: Opportunities and Challenges

For nearly 30 years, India has been on the receiving end of international strategic, political, and economic transformations. Earlier, during the first decade of its independence, India tried to mobilize Afro-Asian countries in order to influence the then emerging global political and strategic order. Its objective was to secure greater democratization in international relations and free access to available economic resources and opportunities for the politically weak and economically poor countries of the Third World. Accordingly, Afro-Asian countries became the principal arena for India's policy and diplomacy during the 1950s. But such Indian endeavor did not go very far and had to be almost abandoned by the beginning of the 1960s. India was unable to sustain its efforts not only because it suffered military humiliation at the hands of China in the 1962 border conflict, but also because Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of India's foreign policy and an authentic spokesman for the Third World's aspirations and hopes for a just world order, died in 1964. But even if these two developments had not taken place, India's role would have remained marginal to the emerging world order of that time, and perhaps subsequently. The forces at work at the global level-the superpowers and the intensifying cold war between them-were all too powerful and determined to shape the world in a way that suited their interests. Against them, countries such as India, which stood for an alternative order responsive to the aspirations of the weak and the underprivileged, were too weak themselves and too disorganized to make their

The Post-Cold-War World Order and the Gulf Crisis

In a real sense, the Persian Gulf crisis, which erupted with Iraq's 2 August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and ended with Iraq's defeat in a war with U.S.-led forces, has to be understood within the context of the emergent world order following the end of the cold war. Likewise, a workable solution for regional peace in the Middle East must also be sought within the context of the new world conditions. Yet the significance of the new order is only now beginning to sink into our subconscious; it has yet to be systemat

Marketing in the Emerging World Order

The world order is changing. Marketing is touched by these changes in many different ways. This paper presents a brief review of the changes occurring in the world order in several economic dimensions such as investments, trade, aid, and technology. It is argued that these changes would alter the nature of marketing in the Western world, particularly in the United States. Potential and needed changes in marketing are explored under three categories: marketing as a system of institutions, marketing as a system of actions, and marketing as a system of ideas.

The Oil Crisis and the Emerging World Order

The paper outlines a conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing the structuring of an institutional order. Particular attention is given to developments which make institution restructuring likely – for instance power shifts which favor actors with a different vision or model of an appropriate institutional order. The framework is applied in a brief historical study of the development of post-World War II international economic institutions and current developments associated with the ‘oil crisis’. This conceptual framework and historical investigation provides a basis on which to formulate propositions indicating potential sources of conflict and cooperation and certain ambiguities and dynamics of current institution restructuring in the international system. The paper concludes by outlining several action guidelines for structuring new global cultural forces and institutional forms related to bringing about a New International Economic Order.

After the Seventh Special General Assembly Session: Africa and the New Emerging World Order

After the Seventh Special General Assembly Session: Africa and the New Emerging World Order

Steering the New Global Forces: United States Views of an Emergent World Order

Steering the New Global Forces: United States Views of an Emergent World Order

Steering the New Global Forces: United States Views of an Emergent World Order

Steering the New Global Forces: United States Views of an Emergent World Order

Peacekeeping: Perspectives and Progress

SOVIET deployment of its armed forces is now virtually global and it thus effectively overlays that of the United States. The result of this is that geographically based spheres of interest have no obvious physical limit to those who aspire either to control or to usurp them as used to be the case, for example, in the halcyon days of the Monroe Doctrine. The political limitations of such spheres of influence were long ago sha,ttered so that from the super-Powers' point of view a new world has been created. While sphere-of-interest policing may still occur, as in the Dominican Republic or Czechoslovakia, it is proving increasingly costly. As the spheres of interest break up politically and geographically such operations become ever more anachronistic and dangerous. They are anachronistic because conventional military force frequently proves inadequate in achieving anything more than the short-term reduction of organised overt violence or because it is unacceptably costly to attempt (vainly) to coerce most of the people most of the time. Sphere-of-influence policing is dangerous because it runs the risk of escalation. In the past the super-Powers each sought to preserve their sphere of influence against perceived or real threats of disruption from within or without. They did this in a competitive atmosphere, but one in which the rules of the competition were generally known and broadly accepted. Moreover, the risks and effects of escalation were still bearable. This is no longer the case. From the point of view of the super-Powers there are no longer two competing partial systems of world order but an emergent world order. The two super-Powers can compete to control this new world order, but the risks are considerable. They can attempt to control it together, but they have not yet enough mutual confidence to do this. Finally, they can attempt to control it by proxy. It is this possibility that has lent a sense of purpose to the negotiations between the super-Powers and other interested states which seek to develop ground rules for UN peacekeeping. The super-Powers are clearly aware of and concerned over the tremendous demands for change emanating from the tiers monde, demands which explicitly or implicitly call for a response from the super-Powers. While the ' instabilities ' of the tiers monde are a sore temptation to