This course is designed as an introduction to major issues relating to the creation, preservation, and breakdown of global order. After World War I and World War II, the major victorious powers attempted to establish stable world orders. These served the interests of the world powers, to be sure, but they also aspired to provide a normative order that would have broader appeal and legitimacy than simply the great powers ruling the world. After the end of the Cold War (with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), there was no comparable attempt to redefine world order, though new ideas began to emerge. Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, the U.S. may have tried to bring about a new world order, but one that is more unilateral than any in history. This attempt to create a new American-based world order has been and is being challenged (almost from its inception) by a variety of factors and developments. Consequently, the future of world order is far from clear.
Why does world order matter? The breakdown of world order has historically been related to major wars. However, over the last 200 years, the scope of conscious attempts to create global orders has increasingly expanded beyond issues of war and peace to incorporate areas like economic management and development, and in the last 30 years (arguably) human rights and human security. While the scope of global order has broadened, the range of issues confronting humanity as a whole has grown even faster: global environmental issues, new problems related to human health, the rapid spread of new technologies that can have both beneficial and negative effects, and so on. Moreover, it is far from clear that older institutions of global order are capable of meeting existing challenges, much less future ones. Today, it is possible that the breakdown of global order will not lead to major war (from an American perspective). But breakdown of global economic order could lead to dramatic declines in living standards for almost everyone in the world. New public health crises, such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Bird Flu pose the threat of great human catastrophes. Global warming and other environmental dangers may fundamentally alter the way we currently inhabit the earth. More than a billion people on the earth live in extreme poverty.
Thus, at the heart of this course are issues related to the creation, preservation, and breakdown of world order: When and under what circumstances are world orders created? Who participates in the process of world order creation, and how are they decided upon? What issues and actors are privileged in the attempts to create a world order? Why do they persist or breakdown? What consequences follow from the breakdown of world order? What can and should be done about the challenges facing the global order today?