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The World Order Models Project and its Critics: A Reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Richard Falk
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Review Essays
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International Organization , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Spring 1978 , pp. 531 - 545
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Copyright © The IO Foundation 1978

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References

1 Lem, , The Futurological Congress (N.Y., Avon), p. 118 (1976)Google Scholar.

2 Farer's essay includes gratuitous slurs that are somewhat surprising to find on the pages of a scholarly journal. Farer's introductory phantasy suggesting that WOMP is a typical product of sumptuous conference settings is not only meanspirited, it is untrue. In fact, WOMP meetings have been relatively austere and exceedingly hard-working by comparison with my sampling of international conference fare. If I were so inclined, I could initiate a response to Farer's piece with a similarly unfair phantasy. “Imagine, a paunchy scholar clad in pinstriped pyjamas, yawning over his second Bloody Mary, sleepless one more night because the phone call from Washington has still not come. Imagine such an aspiring advisor to the prince relishing the prospect of exhibiting his qualifications to serve by heaping scorn on those who would question the credentials of the present political leadership…” As I have said, such a line of speculation, whether or not off the mark, is no way to discuss issues of scholarly substance, but it does illustrate the force of ad hominem attempts at mood control, rendering an audience receptive.

I am mildly puzzled by why Farer chose to concentrate almost all his fire on Saul Mendlovitz's On The Creation of a Just World Order, a collection of essays deliberately designed to convey the range and variety of WOMP work, but not at all calculated to achieve coherence or depth. It is especially puzzling that Farer should so proceed after acknowledging, as he does (p. 131), that reading my essay rather than my book is comparable to assessing a human torso in “a fun-house mirror.” Presumably, the determined critic, intent mainly on “the bottom line,” is not easily thrown off course.

3 See, especially, Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977)Google Scholar.

4 Among the efforts to do this the following are notable: Commoner, Barry, The Closing Circle (N.Y, Knopf, 1971)Google Scholar; Goldsmith, Edward et al. , Blueprint for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974)Google Scholar; Heilbroner, Robert, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (N.Y., Norton, 1974)Google Scholar; Meadows, Donella et al. , The Limits to Growth, (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Association, 1972)Google Scholar. My argument along these lines is contained in This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival N.Y.: Random House, 1971)Google Scholar.

5 See, especially, several novels by Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Four-Gated City, and Memoirs of a Survivor.

6 E.g., Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.

7 Farer tends to treat WOMP as a Utopian venture, ignoring without analysis the attempt to react against utopianism that is at the core of WOMP motivation (e.g., pp. 139–42, 146–47). Indeed, WOMP writings are often so preoccupied with instituting a process of beneficial change that they devote only mechanical or marginal attention to preferred outcomes. For instance, the essay on Chinese development strategy by Paul Lin that troubles Farer by its presence in the volume has such a character. Of course, Farer could argue (but doesn't) that WOMP's proposals for change in the transition period are so naive or irrelevant as to be tantamount to neglect of the transition process.

8 Hence, when Farer proposes that WOMP authors “out of respect for their own ends… have a responsibility to present a coherent, carefully elaborated vision of the possible, one constructed out of demonstrable fact and plausible extrapolation,” (p. 130), he is misconstruing both the state of the art and the nature of the enterprise. It is a demand for specification beyond the limits of the mind to know political reality. Further, it is a “reactionary” demand to the extent it is selectively directed at advocates of change. Mainstream policy makers and analysts, those with the awesome power of decision in the White House or the Kremlin, do not and could not live up to such demands. It is true that there are ways to present arguments—based on numbers, graphs, jargon, computer printout, and formulae—that disguise “the openness” of history, but the predictive and explanatory content of such “social science” is much less evident than is its ideological value in securing acquiescence from a bewildered public. Let me acknowledge at the same time that the work of WOMP could be improved, that not allrelevant knowledge is used or effectively presented, and that some techniques of modern social science (modeling, statistical assessments, systems analysis) could be used to advantage. However, such an acknowledgement needs to be sharply distinguished from Farer's insistence that the future must be known to sustain an argument that the present should be abandoned. The discussion in this note reflects the influence of Fouad Ajami, a colleague in WOMP and at Princeton.

9 In effect, the perception of world order priorities is a function of time and place. Place is understood as context, including geographical site, cultural tradition, ideological setting, and historical experience. There is no “truth” to be confirmed, except with regard to data (population, arms trends, trading patterns); “appeals,” “preferences,” and “proposals” are relevant. World order studies can, in this sense, be disciplined, but not scientific; it is an emergent “normative discipline.”

10 It is difficult without detailed discussion to consider whether specific elites warrant the designation “progressive” as used here. Do the ruling elites in China? In Sweden? In Jamaica? From what I have said, my criteria for endorsement would involve an orientation associated with humanistic and democratic forms of socialism. Such an orientation might also characterize the elites of international institutions and non-governmental transnational organizations, e.g., Amnesty International, the General Assembly of the United Nations, and the World Health Organization. Also some governmental or institutional elites are progressive on a single issue, but lack any general orientation toward change.

11 Such clarity obviously need not (and should not) extend to issues where the focus of a progressive position is obscure or controversial. But it must seek clear positions on such critical issues of substance as those bearing on national security, global energy, new international economic order, and human rights.

12 ln this passage Farer uses “system reform” to refer to the scale of change that WOMP envisions. He is pessimistic about the capacity of the elites to undertake change on this scale, but he is more optimistic about their receptivity and capability than he is about any alternative coalition of social forces. As I read Farer, then, he is arguing that to look elsewhere than to the elites for the realization of WOMP values is to neglect the one realistic possibility (although even here he is not hopeful about the outcome).

13 Note here the issue of linkage is present. Does de-development of the rich societies facilitate or inhibit development by the poor? This complicated, controversial issue needs to be considered in specific contexts—what kinds of de-development? With what effects?

14 See Section III for further discussion on this.

15 Even this degree of generalization is not accurate. Mendlovitz has not emphasized an anti-growth position and I have significantly modified my indictment of the state and my prediction that it is being rapidly superseded by other political forms.

16 Such is the case with respect to the treatment of authority structures, what Mendlovitz calls “theformal constitutive order of the world community.” As Mendlovitz explains, although he remains “convinced of the value” of the kind of approach taken by Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn in World Peace Through World Law, such a view ”has been resisted, revised, and ignored by the WOMP groups.” The same observation would pertain to Mendlovitz's oft-quoted (including Farer, p. 133) and as often misunderstood prediction that world government of some form will come into being by the year2000. See Mendlovitz, , “Introduction,” to Mendlovitz, , ed., On the Creation of a Just World Order, pp. XV–XVIGoogle Scholar. Farer fails to distinguish adequately between Mendlovitz's direction of the project and the product produced, but more serious in some ways, he misinterprets Mendlovitz's own views, depicting him as a naive Utopian who is waiting around for world government. On the contrary, Mendlovitz believes, as the passage on the emergence of world government makes plain, when world government comes, its form will most probably be as a dysutopia, as a kind of totalitarian extension of the state system. Hence, Mendlovitz's view of the future is a much more complicated one than that attributed to him by Farer. All this is significant because WOMP is seeking to evolve a perspective on the future that is neither Utopian nor dysutopian, one that assesses trends and possibilities and then offers policy recommendations. For this reason, it is particularly discouraging to be characterized as “Utopian” so as to be dismissed as “irrelevant.” If we are indeed irrelevant, then it seems reasonable to expect a critic to repudiate our claim of relevance.

17 At the same time, I think all WOMP directors would join me in hailing Saul Mendlovitz's intellectual and organizational leadership. Without his energy and commitment WOMP would never have been conceived, initiated, and sustained. It is a measure of Mendlovitz's strength that he has gathered in WOMP a group of strong-willed intellectuals who take a variety of positions on the major issues of world order analysis. From the outset, scholarly creativity and rigor has counted for more in WOMP than ideological allegiance.

18 This attitude also extends to a repudiation of Hobbesian, Lorenzian perspectives on the inevitability of human aggressiveness and of war as a social institution. WOMP adopts a more agnostic view of human behavior that can be reconciled with evolutionary positions of human development, including that of Teilhard de Chardin. 1 am indebted to Professor Samuel Kim of Monmouth College for this point.

19 For one notable effort to discriminate in this spirit see Roszak, Theodore, The Unfinished Animal (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1974)Google Scholar.

20 I use WOMP II as a shorthand to refer to future work by WOMP. It happens also to be the formal designation adopted by the project to describe the next phase of its activities.

21 Farer's argument on this is spelled out more fully in a provocative article “The United States and the Third World: A Basis for Accommodation,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 54 (1975): 79–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article is an unusually candid appeal to Western elites, suggesting that they can hold onto their privileged position without much sacrifice if they handle Third World demands in a shrewd accommodationist fashion. It is a cynical appeal, advocating the admission of principal Third World states (e.g., Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brazil) to the dominant structure, thereby shattering Third World solidarity and largely nullifying its threat.

22 See the Trilateral Commission study with its Preface by Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Crozier, Michael, Huntington, Samuel P., and Watanuki, Joji, The Crisis of Democracy (N.Y.: New York University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

23 Elsewhere Farer, has written, “What must be defended in the large is an economic system whichrewards the capitalist virtues in investment, innovation, hard work, and sensitivity to the shifting needs and preferences of consumers.” See article cited, note 21, at p. 93Google Scholar.

24 I have emplasized this point repeatedly. See, e.g., A Study of Future Worlds (N.Y.: Free Press, 1975), pp. 156–57Google Scholar.

25 1955 Preface, Miller, Henry, The Time of the Assassins (N.Y.: New Directions edition, 1956), p. XGoogle Scholar.