The Real New World Order
Anne-Marie Slaughter

From Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1997

Article preview: first 500 of 4,623 words total.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article Tools
Purchase a PDF of this article Email to a Colleague Print Article
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Summary: The state is not disappearing; it is unbundling into its separate, functionally distinct parts. These courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and legislatures are then networking with their counterparts abroad, creating a new, transgovernmental order. While lacking the drama of high politics, transnational government networks are a reality for the internationalists of the 1990s -- bankers, lawyers, activists, and criminals. And they may hold the answer to many of the most pressing international challenges of the 21st century.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of Related InterestTopics:
Political Systems
International Organizations
Globalization

Governance in a Globalizing World
Edited by Joseph S. Nye and John D. Donahue. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2000.

Toward Global Parliament
By Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss

Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE STATE STRIKES BACK

Many thought that the new world order proclaimed by George Bush was the promise of 1945 fulfilled, a world in which international institutions, led by the United Nations, guaranteed international peace and security with the active support of the world's major powers. That world order is a chimera. Even as a liberal internationalist ideal, it is infeasible at best and dangerous at worst. It requires a centralized rule-making authority, a hierarchy of institutions, and universal membership. Equally to the point, efforts to create such an order have failed. The United Nations cannot function effectively independent of the major powers that compose it, nor will those nations cede their power and sovereignty to an international institution. Efforts to expand supranational authority, whether by the U.N. secretary-general's office, the European Commission, or the World Trade Organization (WTO), have consistently produced a backlash among member states.

The leading alternative to liberal internationalism is "the new medievalism," a back-to-the-future model of the 21st century. Where liberal internationalists see a need for international rules and institutions to solve states' problems, the new medievalists proclaim the end of the nation-state. Less hyperbolically, in her article, "Power Shift," in the January/February 1997 Foreign Affairs, Jessica T. Mathews describes a shift away from the state -- up, down, and sideways -- to supra-state, sub-state, and, above all, nonstate actors. These new players have multiple allegiances and global reach.

Mathews attributes this power shift to a change in the structure of organizations: from hierarchies to networks, from centralized compulsion to voluntary association. The engine of this transformation is the information technology revolution, a radically expanded communications capacity that empowers individuals and groups while diminishing traditional authority. The result is not world government, but global governance. If government denotes the formal exercise of power by established institutions, governance denotes cooperative problem-solving by a changing and often uncertain cast. The result is a world order in which global governance networks link Microsoft, the Roman Catholic Church, and Amnesty International to the European Union, the United Nations, and Catalonia.

The new medievalists miss two central points. First, private power is still no substitute for state power. Consumer boycotts of transnational corporations destroying rain forests or exploiting child labor may have an impact on the margin, but most environmentalists or labor activists would prefer national legislation mandating control of foreign subsidiaries. Second, the power shift is not a zero-sum game. A gain in power by nonstate actors does not necessarily translate into a loss of power for the state. On the contrary, many of these nongovernmental organizations (ngos) network with their foreign counterparts to apply additional pressure on the traditional levers of domestic politics.

A new world order is emerging, with less fanfare but more substance than either the liberal internationalist or new medievalist visions. The state is not disappearing, it is disaggregating into its separate, functionally distinct parts. These parts -- courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures -- are networking with their counterparts abroad, creating ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,623 words total.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19970901f ... order.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------