Global Order

Global order refers to those governing arrangements that exist within the international system as a whole. It is based on the idea of social order, which is often understood in terms of the governing arrangements or the ordering principles that reflect how the different parts of a social system are arranged, how they relate to each other, and how they are the result of the various mechanisms that provide an ordered society. Global order is associated with the levels of conflict and cooperation that exist among major states but is increasingly understood in terms of a wide range of different forms of governance involving a multiplicity of different actors.

Order can never be taken for granted. Particularly for those who see the world from a broadly Hobbesian perspective, social life is always potentially subject to disruption and conflict and effective coordinated action is a collective achievement. The dangers of disorder are particularly pressing at the international level because of the weakness of international institutions above the state and because of the sheer range and diversity of values that exist across the world. In addition to capturing shared interests, states and societies in the global system must find ways of managing unequal power and of mediating between conflicting values and cultural understandings. The analysis of order often begins with a basic distinction. On the one hand, order can be understood in the sense of stable and regular patterns of human behavior. In this depiction, it is contrasted with chaos, instability, or lack of predictability. On the other hand, social order requires the existence of a particular kind of purposive or conscious pattern of behavior, one that human beings have infused with meaning, that involves a particular set of goals, objectives, and values, and that is designed to lead to a particular outcome or a particular conception of order, secular or religious.

The academic field of international relations has tended to consider the question of order in terms of the degree of conflict and cooperation that exists between and among the major states in the international system. The major powers matter most, not because they control everything that happens in international life but because war and conflict between them constitutes one of the most obvious examples of “disorder” and of disorder that is potentially highly dangerous and immensely destructive. What constitutes an acceptable level of order is variable and contested. For example, some [Page 710]see no problem of talking about a “Cold War order”—because the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union reflected patterned behavior and involved some shared norms and institutions, for example, in relation to arms control. For others, the ever-present dangers of nuclear conflict and the high levels of superpower-related conflict in the developing world make it nonsensical to talk of any kind of “order.” This underscores the point that the language of “global order” is never politically neutral. Indeed a capacity to produce and project proposals, conceptions, and theories of order is a central part of the practice of power.

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