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On Thinking about Future World Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Robert W. Cox
Robert W. Cox
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

Three types of thought approach the question of future world order: the naturalrational, positivist-evolutionary, and historicist-dialectical. The normative criterion in the natural-rational approach has, in recent times, most commonly been bound up with the view that liberal pluralism in polities is the condition for a just world order. This view has, however, succumbed both under the critique of positivist-evolutionary political science which argues that authoritarianism is characteristic of early stages of political development, and to the manipulation of “pluralism” in poor countries by powerful external forces (investment, trade union, and intelligence). The positivist-evolutionary approach has two main currents. One is functionalism, of which the transnational and transgovernmental relations versions are currently fashionable. The other is the notion of a global ecological system. Both versions take existing structures of power and social relations as implicit givens from which future trends are extrapolated; they provide no basis for considering the possibility of changes in these structures. The historicist-dialectical approach offers the possibility of understanding change in these basic structures of power and social relations by searching out points of emerging conflict and the alternative conceptions of order which the forces in conflict express.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , January 1976 , pp. 175 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1976

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References

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2 The Decline of the West, trans, by Atkinson, C. F. (New York: Knopf, I, 1926; II, 1928Google Scholar). The original two-volume edition, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, was published in Munich in 1918 and 1922.

3 A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1933–1961). This work was published in twelve volumes between 1933 (first three volumes) and 1961 (XII, Reconsiderations).

4 Recall particularly the preface, dated January 1936, to Fisher, H. A. L., A History of Europe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1936Google Scholar), in which history is seen as ”only one emergency following upon another.” Fisher is unwilling to abandon the notion of progress, but warns that progress is not a law of nature and the ”ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.”

5 An Introduction to Contemporary History (London: Penguin Books 1967Google Scholar); first published by C. A. Watts, 1964.

6 Using sometimes a form of expert opinion survey genially named the Delphi method.

7 Cochrane, C. N., Christianity and Classical Culture (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1944Google Scholar) deals with the duality of ”virtue” and ”fortune,” and the subjective and objective in classical political thought. See esp. pp. 99ff. and 122ff.

8 Giambatdsta Vico, in his criticism of Descartes, distinguished understanding from perception. R. G. Collingwood summarizes his argument thus: ”[T]he condition of being able to know anything truly, to understand it as opposed to merely perceiving it, is that the knower himself should have made it. … It follows from the verumfactum principle that history, which is emphatically something made by the human mind, is especially adapted to be an object of human knowledge.” The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press 1946), 64–65Google Scholar.

9 For a criticism of the logical foundations of functionalism, see Runciman, W. C., Social Science and Political Theory (London: Cambridge University Press 1963Google Scholar), chap. 6.

10 Two illustrations of the manner in which the dominant ideology of a contemporary society has been imported into a functionalist model of historical process are provided by Talcott Parsons, and by Clark Kerr and his co-authors.

Parsons, in his article, ”Evolutionary Universals in Society,” American Sociological Review, xxix, No. 3 (June 1964Google Scholar), includes among the ”evolutionary universals” which provide societies with adaptive advantages over those that do not possess them, both ”money and markets” (which could be roughly equated with free enterprise) and democratic association with elective leadership and fully enfranchised membership. He adds: ”I realize that to take this position I must maintain that communist totalitarian organization will probably not fully match 'democracy' in political and integrative capacity in the long run” (p. 356).

Kerr and his co-authors project an ultimate convergence of all societies, which begin from different points of departure under different industrializing elites, toward a single ultimate type called ”pluralistic industrialism”—that which is best able to solve the functional problems of industrialism. Not surprisingly, the type looks familiar. (”The elites all wear grey flannel suits.”) Kerr, Clark, Dunlop, J. T., Harbison, F. H., and Myers, C. A., Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1960Google Scholar).

11 Donella H. Meadows and others, The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books 1972Google Scholar). The system-dynamics model was devised by Forrester, Jay W. and described in World Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press 1971Google Scholar).

12 ”The most a historian can do is to take the particular processes of the historical world which he is supposed to elucidate, and let these events be seen in the light of higher and more general forces which are present behind and develop these events; his task is to show the concrete sub specie aeterni. But he is not in a position to determine the essence of this higher and eternal force itself, or to determine the relationship it bears to concrete reality. Thus he can only say that in historical life he beholds a world which, though unified, is bipolar: a world which needs both poles to be as it appears to us. Physical nature and intellect, causality according to law and creative spontaneity, are these two poles, which stand in such sharp and apparently irreconcilable opposition. But historical life, as it unfolds between them, is always influenced simultaneously by both, even if not always by both to the same degree.” Meinecke, Friedrich, Machiavellism. The Doctrine of Raison d'fctat and Its Place in Modern History, trans, by Scott, Douglas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1957), 8Google Scholar. The original German, Die Idee der Staatsrdson, was published in Munich in 1924. For Meinecke, the implications of moral relativism were a torturing problem (pp. 9, 424ff.). Collingwood states the matter in somewhat simpler terms: ”The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event, I mean that in which it can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar's defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other. He is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions, and an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event … his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent.” This re-enactment of past thought, Collingwood continues, ”is not a passive surrender to the spell of another's mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical thinking. … This criticism of the thought whose history he traces is not something secondary to tracing the history of it. It is an indispensable condition of the historical knowledge itself.” Collingwood (fn. 8) 213–15.

13 Popper, Karl R., in his well-known critique, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1957Google Scholar), includes under the rubric of ”historicism” attempts at a positivist sociology of history as well as the approach characteristic of Meinecke and Collingwood discussed here. Popper's criticism would have fallen on the efforts of Parsons and Kerr mentioned in fn. 10. On this point, see Goldthorpe, John H., ”Theories of Industrial Society: Reflections on the Recrudescence of Historicism and the Future of Futurology,” Archives europeennes de sociologie, xii (November 1971), 263CrossRefGoogle Scholar–88.

14 Reinhard Bendix calls them ”limited applicability concepts” and ”contrast concepts.” See his essay, ”The Comparative Analysis of Historical Change,” in Michael Argyle and others, Social Theory and Economic Change (London: Tavistock Publications 1967Google Scholar).

15 Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 1965), 125Google Scholar. Original German edition published in 1957.

16 That is, of course, especially true of Marxists in the Hegelian and historicist tradition, most notably Lukacs, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, trans, by Livingston, Rodney (Cambridge: MIT Press 1971Google Scholar). Meinecke's conservative enquiry into the history of the doctrine of raison d'etat (fn. 12) concludes also with a consideration of the problems of consciousness and action: in this case the moral dilemma between a sterile idealism which is totally ineffective as a limitation on state action, and a relativism which sees some merit or justification in every action. Positivist writers do not bother themselves with such problems.

17 For instance, at a conference on conditions of world order held in 1965 at the Villa Serbelloni—a site which certifies the intellectual respectability of the event—Raymond Aron introduced the discussions by considering various meanings of the term world order. Two were purely descriptive: order as any arrangement of reality, order as the relations between the parts. Two were part descriptive, part normative: order as the minimum conditions for existence, order as the minimum conditions for coexistence. A further meaning was purely normative: order as the conditions for the good life. This last meaning was ruled ”out of order” at the start as likely to lead discussion in too many divergent directions. The conference agreed to concentrate on the issue of coexistence, thereby implicitly accepting that existing polities were ”givens,” and ruling out the idea that the internal aspects of a polity might have to be adjusted to a desirable world order. See Hoffmann, Stanley, ed., Conditions of World Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1968Google Scholar).

18 De Monarchia, trans, by Schneider, Herbert W. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 9–10Google Scholar.

19 In this interpretation of Machiavelli, I lean upon the writings of Federico Chabod and Antonio Gramsci. See Chabod, , Machiavelli and the Renaissance, trans, by Moore, David, with an introduction by A. P. d'Entreves (London: Bowes and Bowes 1958Google Scholar); Gramsci, , Quaderni del carcere (Torino: Guilio Einaudi 1975Google Scholar).

20 Friedrich, C. J., Inevitable Peace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1948CrossRefGoogle Scholar), includes a new translation of Kant's essay. See also Hinsley, F. H., Power and the Pursuit of Peace (London: Cambridge University Press 1963Google Scholar), chap. 4.

21 For example, Claude, Inis L. Jr., ”Economic Development Aid and International Political Stability,” in Cox, R. W., ed., The Politics of International Organization (New York: Praeger 1970Google Scholar); also, Banfield, Edward C., in Goldwin, Robert A., ed., Why Foreign Aid? (Chicago: Rand McNally 1963Google Scholar).

22 The point that political development doctrines were always more rhetoric than substance in the administration of U.S. aid programs was made by Packenham, Robert A., ”Approaches to the Study of Political Development,” World Politics, xvii (October 1964), 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar–20.

23 President Johnson in his first State of the Union message to Congress, January 1964. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–64, I (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office 1965), 116Google Scholar.

24 Harold Jacobson and I went through the exercise of classifying 154 countries in the world political system as to their economic level an d type of polity—using three types: competitive, mobilizing, and authoritarian—at five-year intervals between 1950 and 1970. The trend toward authoritarianism in the Third World countries was marked in the 1960's. It came from two sources: (1) most newly independent countries came into the system with authoritarian regimes, and (2) of those independent countries that experienced changes of regime, the largest number moved in the direction of authoritarian polities, usually as a consequence of military coups. Both sources of change were concentrated in countries at the lower economic levels.

25 The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1965), 416Google Scholar.

26 Kerr (fn. 10).

27 International action in support of autonomous labor unions has been carried out through international trade union organizations and by the International Labour Or-ganisation. Issues within the I.L.O. concerning the goal of promoting pluralism were analyzed in N. M., ”International Labor in Crisis,” Foreign Affairs, xlix (April 1971Google Scholar). The far-flung activities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency using ”autonomous” labor organizations as cover for political penetration in other countries, long a well-known story to people active in international trade union affairs, are described in some detail in Philip Agee, Inside the Company, CIA Diary (London: Penguin Books 1975Google Scholar).

28 A detailed study of the consequences of trade union penetration from a developed to a less developed country is in Harrod, Jeffrey, Trade Union Foreign Policy (New York: Doubleday 1972CrossRefGoogle Scholar). A pessimistic evaluation of the consequences in Latin America of promoting cooperative organizations on the autonomous models evolved in European countries was made by Borda, Orlando Fals in International Institute for Labour Studies Bulletin, No. 7 (Geneva 1970Google Scholar).

29 London: Royal Institute of International Affairs 1943.

30 This argument was cogently presented in Myrdal, Gunnar, Beyond the Welfare State (New Haven: Yale University Press 1960Google Scholar).

31 The most systematic statement is in Haas, Ernst B., Beyond the Nation-State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 1964Google Scholar).

32 A significant revision within the neofunctionalist school was in Lindberg, Leon N. and Scheingold, Stuart A., Europe's Would-Be Polity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1970Google Scholar).

33 Among the abundant literature hailing the MN C as the wave of the world's future, the following are particularly interesting in defining aspects of an ideology which this paragraph tries to summarize: Ball, George W., ”Multinational Corporations and Nation States,” Atlantic Community Quarterly, v (Summer 1967Google Scholar), and ”Cosmo-corp: Th e Importance of Being Stateless,” Atlantic Community Quarterly, vi (Summer 1968Google Scholar); Tannenbaum, Frank, ”The Survival of the Fittest,” Columbia Journal of World Business, 111 (March-April 1968Google Scholar); Perlmutter, Howard, ”The Tortuous Evolution of the Multinational Corporation,” Columbia Journal of World Business, iv (January-February 1969Google Scholar).

34 ”The Struggle for the World Product,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 52 (April 1974Google Scholar).

35 The transgovernmental approach was foreshadowed by Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S. in the introductory section of their edited book, Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1972CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and presented more explicitly by them in a paper prepared for the 1974 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, subsequently published as ”Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations,” World Politics, xxvii (October 1974), 39–62Google Scholar. I do not wish to imply that these authors have presented the transgovernmental approach as a contribution to futurology. They offer it primarily as a framework for analysis of current affairs. Nor do they assume that transgovernmental relations are all-determining. They take account of the possibility that the lower-level bureaucrats who are the object of their attention may at times be brought under control by top political leadership. The criticisms of the transgovernmental relations approach in the following paragraphs are not directed at the careful formulation of the concept by Keohane and Nye (which has the merit of delineating a relatively neglected area of political activity), but are directed rather at the consequences this formulation may have for research priorities from the standpoint of the usefulness of research as an aid to thinking about the future.

36 Barraclough (fn. 5), 16.

37 This new concept of the role of international organization is presented in de Seynes, Philippe, ”Prospects for a Future Whole World,” International Organization, xxvi (Winter 1972Google Scholar). Strong, Maurice F., Foreign Affairs, Vol. 51 (July 1973), 702CrossRefGoogle Scholar–7, wrote of ”the need to develop at the national and international levels the kinds of structures and institutions required for societal management.” He added that ”the environment cannot be sectoralized. It is a system of interacting relationships that extend through all sectors of activity, and to manage these relationships requires an integrative approach for which present institutional structures were not designed.” Not surprisingly, he foresaw the central role in this concept of global management for the United Nations and the Environment Program that he heads.

38 ”Counterintuitive Nature of Social Systems,” Technology Review, Vol. 73 (1971), 53Google Scholar.

39 See Green, Wade, ”Triage: Wh o Shall Be Fed? Who Shall Starve?” New York Times Magazine (January 5, 1975Google Scholar). A counter-model to that used by the MIT-Club of Rome group is reported on by King, Alexander, ”The Club of Rome—Setting the Record Straight,” The Center Magazine, vii (September-October 1974), 15–24Google Scholar. Constructed by Latin American social scientists, it has different distributionist assumptions, and its predictions do not bear out the contention that population growth is catastrophic.

40 The quotation marks are required on ”world” because it can well be argued that only the present system, emerging sometime after World War II, is truly global. Previous historical systems referred to more limited areas, more or less sealed off from external influences, which were the relevant ”worlds” for the people in them, e.g., Roman, Chinese, Indian, and European systems.

41 An impressive effort to discover the conditions for change in the societal parameters of polity is Moore, Barrington Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (London: Penguin Press 1967Google Scholar). Although his work is confined to the national level, it is illustrative of the approach I attempt to outline here.

42 A masterly historical work incorporating the synchronic and diachronic dimensions is Braudel, Fernand, Civilisation materielle et capitalisme (Paris: Armand Colin 1967Google Scholar). Although it is much more narrowly ”political,” Palmer, R. R., The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press; Vol. I: 1959Google Scholar, Vol. II: 1964), also adopts the synchronic-diachronic approach.