World order

The concept of "world order" refers to the prevailing international system of governance, power dynamics, and global relations, which in the 21st century is shifting towards a multipolar structure with significant implications for global stability and governance.

Congress of Vienna (1815 - 1914)

After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reconstituted order in Europe by reintegrating [[France] into its councils of governance. The so-called Concert of Europe established a balance of power system that prevented any single power from dominating the European subcontinent. But as the 19th century proceeded, outside Europe, Britain emerged as the undisputed global hegemon.

A British viceroy ruled India. Europeans divided the rest of the world between them. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia sliced China into spheres of influence.

Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain apportioned Africa between them, leaving only Ethiopia and Liberia independent.

In West Asia, only the Arabian Peninsula, and in East Asia, only Japan remained completely independent. Japan soon emulated Europe’s imperialist powers by building its own overseas empire, seizing the Chinese province of Taiwan in 1895, subjugating the Empire of Korea in 1905, and annexing it in 1910.

Treaty of Versailles

See also: Treaty of Versailles

The 1919 peace conference in Paris that followed the armistice with Germany in the First World War marked international recognition of the United States as a leading Atlantic and global power. At the conference, President Woodrow Wilson advocated a distinctly American vision of world order based on self-determination – if only for the white nations of Europe – and the replacement of international power politics with a version of the rule of law under a new "League of Nations." His support for self-determination reflected both popular American reverence for the U.S. Declaration of Independence and his own sympathy for the right of secession espoused by his native Virginia and childhood residence in Georgia, both unreconciled members of the ill-fated Confederate States of America. Wilson's idealistic vision of a new world order based on agreed norms and regulatory institutions gained lip service at the conference, but little else. Translated into ethno-linguistic terms relevant to Europe and West Asia, "self-determination" furnished the justification for the dismantling and partition of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

America's core ideology had long been the rule of law. The proposal for a "League of Nations" represented a projection of this ideology into international affairs. The subsequent refusal of the United States to join the League incapacitated it, but the idea of a rule-bound order continued to find expression in idealistic projects like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, whose signatories sanctimoniously renounced the use of war to settle international disputes.

The First World War had crippled Germany, gutted and impoverished Britain and France, and catalyzed the dissolution and rebirth of the Russian Empire as the Soviet Union. The victors, including the United States, excluded both Germany and the Soviet Union from any role in a renewed European system of governance or balance of power. This miscarriage of statecraft ensured instability and laid the basis for a renewed violent struggle for hegemony in Europe two decades later.

Meanwhile, the world war of 1914 – 1918 had propelled the United States to global economic, financial, and cultural preeminence. The dollar became a major international medium of exchange, and American music, literature, and consumer products achieved worldwide acclaim. But with the United States self-isolated, the great powers of Europe weakened, and agitation for independence in their overseas empires mounting, the world was in a state of increasing disorder – in transition to something yet unknown.

Cold War (1947 – 1989)

By 1947, rival blocs led by Soviet and American overlords had begun to confront each other over both geopolitical and ideological issues. Both sources of contention were evident in the 1947 Truman Doctrine's support for Greece and Turkey against Soviet pressure, the 1948 -1949 Berlin Airlift, and the appallingly bloody Korean War of 1950 – 1953. These events put in place a quasi-feudal bipolar world order that lasted until 1989, when the Soviet Union's eastern European empire disintegrated, and it ceased to contend for Eurasian or global hegemony.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the relationship – or lack of relationship – of nation states with one or the other superpower determined their geopolitical positions, freedom of maneuver, level of access to public goods, and degree of immunity from foreign-instigated regime change operations. Meanwhile, the contending superpowers came to expect automatic followership from those aligned with them for their positions on each and every aspect of world affairs.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union took care to prevent states in their respective spheres of influence from slipping away or defecting to the other, but both were conscious of the danger of mutual annihilation in a nuclear exchange, and neither was prepared to risk this by engaging in direct combat with the other. Both saw newly independent states that attempted to remain nonaligned – separate from either bloc – as weak-minded and up for grabs, and each sought to sustain or expand its sphere of influence through proxy wars, regime change operations, the manipulation of elections, and economic blandishments and deprivations.

Ideology was a much more prominent feature of the Cold War than it had been in previous world orders. The US-led bloc – the so-called "free world" – was politically heterogeneous. It was composed of a mixture of democracies, dictatorships, monarchies, and imperial outposts with little in common other than a desire to remain unsubjugated by godless communism and to derive material benefits through alignment with the United States. Its member states practiced multiple versions of capitalism, social democracy, and religious faith.

The members of the Soviet bloc, by contrast, were relatively homogeneous. They modeled their politics on Marxism-Leninism, the ruthless elitist dictatorship, atheist ideology, and statist political economic system championed by Moscow.

Diplomacy in the Cold War resembled nothing so much as trench warfare. Its object was less to rollback the spheres of influence of the other side than to avoid giving the other a reason to attack it. Despite the efforts of each side to subvert the other, the two blocs remained remarkably stable over the course of their four-decade-long confrontation. Both superpowers kept garrisons on the territories of those members of their blocs they termed "allies," by which each meant subordinate states they had committed to secure against attack or ideological conversion by the other. Each restrained such "allies" from actions against the other that might escalate into bilateral warfare between them. The end of the Cold War order removed Soviet constraints on countries like Iraq, which then felt free to launch a war of expansion in Arabia it would never have dared to risk when subject to Soviet supervision.

The greatest shock to the boring stability of the Cold War order was the 1971 – 1979 U.S. enlistment of China in the containment of the Soviet Union. China's shift to the so-called "free world" rebalanced but did not alter the fundamental nature of the world order of the time. This remained defined by adversarial interactions of the United States and its bloc and the Soviet Union and its satrapies. Aside from the U.S. entente with China and an earlier shift to neutrality by Yugoslavia, there were few defections from either bloc. Only one — Cuba's turn to Soviet protection – catalyzed the near-death experience of a nuclear standoff between the two superpowers. Deft diplomacy kept disaster at bay.