The Coming Entropy Of Our World Order

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Interesting essay, fwiw - dyodd.

The Coming Entropy Of Our World Order​

How do we reconcile an increasingly fractured order with an increasingly planetary reality?

Model UN veterans and lefty academic nostalgists may fondly remember the acronym WOMP, which stands for World Order Models Project. Like the Pugwash Conferences — which were founded in the 1950s by the renowned philosopher and physicist Bertrand Russell and Joseph Rotblat (with Albert Einstein as a prominent signatory) to promote the abolition of nuclear weapons — WOMP was a big tent academic movement of the 1970s and ‘80s whose members spanned North, South, East and West.

This pluralistic gaggle, spearheaded by Princeton University’s Richard Falk and Rutgers University’s Saul Mendlovitz, produced a heavy corpus of impassioned treatises arguing for “feasible utopias” based on principles of international law and centered on multilateral institutions. WOMP adherents envisioned their roadmap toward a just world order being implemented in the 1990s. Needless to say, their utopia is behind schedule. If anything, nationalism, rivalry and fragmentation are the order of the day.

An obvious lesson is that the grander the vision, the further it likely lies from reality. Theories that inaccurately observe the present will inevitably fall short in predicting the future. This goes both for proponents of American hegemony as well as those aping the “return of great power rivalry” meme. Even as mainstream Western scholars belatedly accept the emergence of a multipolar world, it would be a mistake to allow their parsimonious frameworks such as neorealism to guide our thinking.

These top-down approaches neither capture the shifting global and regional dynamics among more than a dozen primary and secondary powers, nor the deeper systemic change by which a wide range of actors contest authority and shape global society in an irrevocably decentralized direction.

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