Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has said that the concept of order that has underpinned the modern era is in crisis. In an article published by The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Kissinger explained that the current crises across the world have changed the order. “Libya is in civil war, fundamentalist armies are building a self-declared caliphate across Syria and Iraq and Afghanistans young democracy is on the verge of paralysis,” he wrote in the article, “The Assembly of a New World Order.” “To these troubles are added a resurgence of tensions with Russia and a relationship with China divided between pledges of cooperation and public recrimination. The concept of order that has underpinned the modern era is in crisis.” Kissinger also noted that the search for world order has long been defined almost exclusively by the concepts of Western societies. “But vast regions of the world have never shared and only acquiesced in the Western concept of order. These reservations are now becoming explicit, for example, in the Ukraine crisis and the South China Sea. The order established and proclaimed by the West stands at a turning point,” he said. He also argued that another reason for the failing of the current world order is “the absence of an effective mechanism for the great powers to consult and possibly cooperate on the most consequential issues.” “The penalty for failing will be not so much a major war between states (though in some regions this remains possible) as an evolution into spheres of influence identified with particular domestic structures and forms of governance. At its edges, each sphere would be tempted to test its strength against other entities deemed illegitimate. A struggle between regions could be even more debilitating than the struggle between nations has been,” according to Kissinger. He also said that the contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another. The article was adapted from Kissinger’s book World Order, which will be published Sept. 9.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 05:23:57 +0000
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