Column: Versions of a 'New World Order'
By Charles Jeanes
New-world-order alternatives to the West’s post-1945 plan
“The old order changeth yielding place to new And God fulfills himself… More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” ― Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Introduction
The international liberal world order is in the news due to Israel and COP-29.
On this very topic, here is the dilemma I wrote myself into last Arc (#201) – quoting myself then:
“the failure of my imagination to foresee solutions to Western-originated problems coming from outside the West.
And, “future editions of the Arc: applying what I know of history to depict plausible unfolding of the future, with different lenses and perspectives beyond the limited ones that Western civilization has evolved.
And, “The possibilities of non-Western ways rising to the position the West has hitherto enjoyed need to be explored imaginatively.”
https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/25/2/viad006/7100556
I will include links to many online essays today; they provide deep context to my superficial sketches.
Champion of Order: The US and British exemplars
The British first drew, and the Americans inherited, a blueprint for world order allotting empires the role of Champion of Order and Policing force for Law.
( One vision, drawn in 1942, illustrates a best-case Western Allies’ blueprint: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/286-the-new-world-order-1942/ )
In 1945, these two bulwarks of the “Anglo-sphere” (together with the USSR), were redrawing the world and promulgating laws and norms and treaties to hold that world in one place. A liberal international order was the design; but communism opposed to capitalist-liberal blueprints. The aim was to do very much better than was accomplished by the victors in 1919’s Treaty.
What Came Next: wars on a manageable scale
When communism captured China, Stalin and the Cold War ended illusions that the world would be as the US and British Empire wished it to be. Their UN was fated to fail. Instead, the world witnessed a series of small “policing wars.” America possessed a hegemonic power that allowed it to police the world against communism in the Western hemisphere, in Africa, and even in Asia (Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan).
The Russians and Chinese stayed within a land boundary, vast but still hemmed by the power of the US and its dominance of global economics. Only by using Cuban troops could the USSR act in Africa.
A new world order: as approved by China
Anyone with some historical background in Chinese history knows that the country referred to itself as “the Middle Kingdom;” it regarded itself as a centre to which all other cultures and civilizations and peoples looked for education and example. Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, and Indo-chinese orbited China.
Japan and Korea copied China, China’s intelligentsia declared. When Europeans appeared, the Chinese expected the same deference to their superiority. For awhile, Europeans obliged. Then they humiliated China.
Now Xi Jinpeng has propagandized against the Century of Humiliation his people suffered at the hands of the West. Mao’s victorious Revolution ended that era, and since “communism with Chinese characteristics” have put the nation in the league of major economies, no one humiliates China, ever.
China is a lead power in the BRICS coalition ( = Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa ); that group is reaching out to other rising economic and political actors like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. China also initiated the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Belt and Road Initiative of Chinese infrastructure investment. The swift rise of China amazed Western observers.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shanghai-Cooperation-Organization
China has been making Africa a focus of its vision for leadership in the world. An Africa beholden to China for investment, development, and a fair share of world affluence, is appealing… to a point. China does not lecture other states on the internal, domestic affairs of a nation; the West assumes that right.
But — there is evidence that China does not advocate for equality in all its economic and political relations, and has a clear notion of putting Chinese interests ahead of the weaker, poorer nations it helps. “Looking out for #1” would be a fair summary of Chinese blueprints for aid to the developing world.
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2024/0702/China-world-order-Xi
https://www.clingendael.org/publication/how-china-pursuing-new-world-order-among-geopolitical-ruins
If the yuan displaces the US dollar as a global currency, China’s Communist Party dances in Tiananmen Square.
A new world order: according to Islamic principles
If one were to travel to Baghdad in the year 850, one would encounter the Arab certainty that the Muslim Caliph ruled the known world, or all that was most valuable, and all other civilizations were inferior and envied Islam’s sphere.
Again, this proud civilization, like China, was humiliated by the West after about 1850. The Ottoman Turks were victims of British imperialism (1918); the Sultan-Caliphate in Istanbul vanished into dim historical memory. The State of Israel originated as a British notion (1917), “legitimized” by the League of Nations, midwifed by the UN, and made real by wars of conquest (1948, 1967).
https://www.cfr.org/event/unsettling-settlement-1922-middle-east-peace-agreement-seen-today-0
https://www.oerproject.com/OER-Materials/OER-Media/HTML-Articles/Origins/Unit5/The-Caliphate/1060L
https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/in-search-of-the-vanished-caliphate
A new world order: following African leadership
Westerners generally undervalue Africans in the history of human civilizational forms, with the exception of the corner of Africa called Egypt. Europe colonized Africa, and enslaved Africans. The West is not loved there, with good reasons.
(George Hegel, Philosopher of History, a significant force on world politics because his system shaped Marxism, declared that Africa was “unhistorical, undeveloped Spirit” — and deserved to be ignored! https://pansapansa.org/2019/09/12/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel-why-africa-is-still-misrepresented-2/ )
Africans defy old European racist ideology. And the intelligentsia of African nations demand a better world order. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/africa/global-south-un-order-oppression
https://panafricanreview.com/challenging-the-global-order-africas-role-in-crafting-a-new-future/
An African-led new world order would focus very sharply indeed on rectification of and restitution for what European colonialism did to Africa. Why is this vast rich continent “developing” but not developed, improving — but so very impoverished, with not one state being counted among rich nations?
If any part of the world deserves a re-ordering of geopolitics and economics, it is the African continent. The injustice, unfairness, and inequality of the order set up in 1945, could hardly be any worse than what happened to Africa.
But – Africans dislike their continent being spoken of as One when there are so many states of varied power. (The re-released song Don’t they know it’s Christmas? ignited a storm of protest this year.
A new world order: designed by India
India itself once had systems of inter-state geopolitics when it was divided by Muslim-Hindu and ethnic pluralisms, before the British Raj put an end to that. India has an official history of itself as a suffering victim of modern history, for it was violently taken over by the British since 1757, until 1947. Indians have a vision for a world order wherein its size, talents, and history get the respect it deserves.
India has a claim to be a cradle of human civilization; India, like China, nurses historical grievances against the West, due to British imperialism, and is now trying to assert regional influence in south Asia – but with small success because Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Israel can exert rival power over weaker regional states.
An Indian-designed new world order would likely astound most of us. Reviving Hindu identity will not materially aid India toward hegemony. But India is indisputably a major Asian presence.
International-Criminal-Court Arrest Warrants for War Criminals
The ICC has just issued warrants for two Israeli leaders – B. Netanyahu and Y. Gallant – for war crimes in the Gaza War. Vladimir Putin is another on the ICC list for crimes committed in war. This situation reveals there is no global order.
Not one American leader of either party praised the Court for its warrant against Israel – and many are reacting with anger — but plenty were pleased when Putin was put on the list.
No world order truly exists when Powers – the US, Russia, China, India, Israel, among others – refuse to recognize the Court (created by a Treaty in 1998) has any jurisdiction. Canada, the U.K. and France, are party to this treaty.
https://asp.icc-cpi.int/states-parties
The failure of any kind of international courts and laws is a very solid piece of evidence against the opinion that there truly is an order in the world recognized by international institutions with real effect on events.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157286
One more piece of evidence that the liberal order of the West works badly for poor weak states: nations at COP-29, the climate change conference just concluded in Azerbaijan, demanded the rich world pay for climate-change damage. The rich demurred, and a feeble compromise sum emerged.
(In these talks, China and India still pose as not part of the rich world, but as developing nations).
Conclusion: the West said it stood for Human Rights, Morality, and Law
So, do any of the alternatives to the West’s world order appeal to my readers? I must ask.
A world order lacking some immaterial cohesion derived from a set of shared moral and ethical norms, would not be an operable order, if history is any indicator of how such inter-state order operates among human societies.
Europe had Latin papal Christianity, east Asia had Chinese cultural standards – as the Roman Empire likewise had a cultural foundation – and India and Islam possessed religious commonalities, to cement inter-state systems of order in the past. Religion and culture have proven durable foundations.
But religion as a foundational plank in any new world order is not feasible. The world has moved past religion; it functioned well-enough for Europe’s Christian geopolitics before the modern era, but cannot do so any longer. Even in Islam, religion does not provide a basis for regional systems: several sects fracture it in pieces; Israel and Muslim neighbor-states are not aided toward peace by religion. Since 1945, the modern secular mind has risen to dominate Earth.
The West had such technical, scientific, military, and economic primacy after 1945 that the values of the UN Charter could have an appearance of global consensus — for a short while; but the illusory unity of geopolitical culture was fated to fade when the West no longer had primacy in all those spheres.
What does the West believe it stands for? As I said in Arc #201, one must start by reading a foundation document of the United Nations (UN) from 1948.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
If any of the alternative world orders is capable of being a substitute for the West’s post-1945 structure of law, institutions, and treaties, it will have to be as clear about its meaning as it is about economics and military balances.
It will, in a word, have to sell itself on the merits of non-material-values and ideology too. Liberalism and human rights were the idea in 1948. Religion is simply not potent over the West, China, Russia, or Japan. It seems to me unimaginable that our world will again cohere around the hegemony of a single religion or cultural norm.
What other all-encompassing ideas can harmonize the 200 or so countries in the world in one institution such as the United Nations still aspires to be?
https://www.worldometers.info/geography/how-many-countries-are-there-in-the-world/
Anyone with an idea for this, should write a song. Oh wait, John Lennon did!
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Ah
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
Source: LyricFind. Songwriter: John Winston Lennon
Appendix, for entertainment.
The American view of geo-politics and domestic issues, in cartoons, 1940 – 1963
https://www.archives.gov/files/legislative/resources/ebooks/a-visual-history-1940-1963.pdf
Just for your amusement and some lessons in US history… copy and paste the above into your URL.
