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Normative Challenges in a Turbulent World1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

James N. Rosenau
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Abstract

Rosenau provides an overview of normative issues confronting us at the end of the twentieth century. He writes that the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the story of convergence around ever more encompassing political entities in order to preserve individual values in the context of collective needs and wants; but today the process of community building has been reversed. He concludes that today, the story is one of fragmentation, of people opting for individual and subgroup needs and wants, and neither citizens nor leaders have any experience in adapting their traditional values to the demands of subgroupism and the increasing ineffectiveness, even the breakup, of whole systems.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 6 , March 1992 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1992

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References

2 The analysis which concludes that the system's parameters are undergoing their first profound transformation since 1648 can be found in Rosenau, James N., Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. 5.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., pp. 10–11.Google Scholar For a formulation that identifies six parameters, see Zacher, Mark W., “The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian Temple: Implications for International Order and Governance,” in Rosenau, James N. and Czempiel, Ernst-Otto, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 3.Google Scholar

4 Cf. Schmidt, Vivien A., Democratizing France: The Political and Administrative History of Decentralization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 It is worth noting that the undermining of the sovereignty principle began with its redefinition in the decolonizing processes of the former European empires after World War II. In using self-determination as the sole criterion for statehood, irrespective of whether a former colony had the consensual foundations and resources to govern, a number of sovereign states were created, recognized, and admitted to the UN even though they were unable to develop their economies and manage their internal affairs without external assistance. As a result of these weaknesses, the value of sovereignty seemed less compelling once the struggle for independence was won and the tasks of governance taken on. Rather than being an obvious source of strength, sovereignty thus often seemed to be less a source of independence than an invitation to interdependence. For an extensive discussion of how the sovereignty principle got redefined—how “decolonization amounted to nothing less than an international revolution … in which traditional assumptions about the right to sovereign statehood were turned upside down”—in the processes of decolonialization, see Jackson, Robert H., Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 4 (quotation is from p. 85).Google Scholar

6 A full analysis of the diverse sources of the bifurcation of global structures can be found in Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, chaps. 10–15.Google Scholar

7 For an explanation of why the terms “sovereignty-free” and “sovereignty-bound” seem appropriate to differentiate between state and nonstate actors, see ibid., p. 36.Google Scholar

8 For a discussion of the problem of labeling the order, see the appendix to my paper, “The New Global Order: Underpinnings and Outcomes.”.Google Scholar

9 For an analysis of some of the ways in which global needs are served ahead of those of subgroups, see Rosenau, James N., The United Nations in a Turbulent World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992).Google Scholar

10 For an analysis of the similarities among these four leaders, see James N. Rosenau, “Notes on the Servicing of Triumphant Subgroupism,” a paper presented at the Conference on the Greek Diaspora in Foreign Policy, Panteois University, Athens, Greece (May 5, 1990).Google Scholar

11 For a lengthy discussion of this cyclical process, see Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, chap, 16.Google Scholar