World Order: Study Notes

Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger's "World Order" explores the historical development and present-day challenges to the concept of world order, analyzing different regions and their approaches.

Introduction: The Question of World Order

In 1961, Harry S. Truman expressed pride in defeating enemies and reintegrating them into the community of nations, reflecting American values.
American presidents have promoted a cooperative world order based on common rules, liberal economics, national sovereignty, and democratic governance.
This "rules-based" system faces challenges due to differing interpretations of fairness and validity outside the Western world.
The "international community" lacks a shared definition of goals, methods, and limits as new technologies and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction threaten stability.

Varieties of World Order

No global world order has existed; the current system originated in Western Europe with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, excluding most other continents.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) led to a practical accommodation among political units, refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and maintaining a balance of power.
The Westphalian peace established sovereign states, acknowledging each other’s structures and religions, setting rulers’ ambitions in counterpoise ( $(y = mx + b)$ ).
Division and multiplicity became hallmarks of international order, favoring the practical and ecumenical.
Russia, China, and Islam had different universal concepts of order. China centered its order on the Emperor's reach over "All Under Heaven", while Islam sought a single divinely sanctioned governance.
In the "New World," America aimed for peace through the spread of democratic principles, viewing foreign policy as cultivating shared values rather than pursuing American interests.
Westphalian principles are the basis of world order, spreading globally as European nations expanded and were adopted by colonies demanding independence.
The contemporary system strives to curtail anarchy with international legal and organizational structures, but faces challenges from Europe's pooled sovereignty, Middle Eastern jihadists, and Asian rivalries.
The United States alternates between defending and criticizing the Westphalian system, asserting the universal relevance of its values while struggling to define its role.

Legitimacy and Power

World order is based on commonly accepted rules and a balance of power that enforces restraint.
Legitimacy helps ensure adjustments within the existing order rather than fundamental challenges.
The balance between legitimacy and power is complex, requiring a global world order to prevent conflict among unrelated entities.
The quest for world order involves relating perceptions of societies with self-contained realities, overcoming divergent experiences and values to achieve a common order.

Europe: The Pluralistic International Order

Medieval Europe's concept accommodated the Pope, Emperor, and feudal rulers, lacking a universal order with a single reign. Charles V's rule briefly envisioned a single reign and unifying principles.
The age of discovery, printing, and the Protestant Reformation fragmented the medieval order.
The Protestant Reformation split Christianity, leading to wars and the collapse of a world order sustained by papacy and empire.

The Thirty Years’ War: What Is Legitimacy?

A century of wars culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), triggered by religious and political disputes.
Cardinal Richelieu of France introduced the concept of the state as an abstract entity with its own interests, leading to a new approach to international order.
Richelieu centralized authority, modernized the state, and supported Protestant coalitions to check Habsburg preeminence, prioritizing national interests over religious unity.

The Peace of Westphalia

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the state as the building block of European order, affirming sovereignty and the right to choose domestic structures and religious orientation. It also shaped a system of international relations based on avoiding total war
The war shattered pretensions to universality or confessional solidarity, parties invoked sectarian alignments for solidarity, exhaustion Cynicism transformed the practical means of ending a war into general concepts of world order
The Treaty of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established.

Limited wars over calculable issues would replace the era of contending universalisms, with its forced expulsions and conversion, general war consuming civilian populations.
Limited wars over calculable issues would replace the era of contending universalisms, with its forced expulsions and conversions and general war consuming civilian populations.

The operation of the Westphalian System with the Treaty of Westphalia confined the papacy to ecclesiastical functions. Religion and politics never merged into a single construct. Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, Voltaire pointed our that the Holy Roman Empire was Neither Holy Nor Roman Nor an Empire. Hobbes provided a theory for secular political order, imagining a "state of nature" where the absence of authority produced a "war of all against all". Hobbes analysis did not apply beyond the borders of states, for no supranational sovereign existed to impose order. Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another, which are comprehended in that law which is commonly called the law of nations, I need not say anything in this place, because the law of nations and the law of nature is the same thing.
Russia, remote and mysterious, for the first time entered a contest over the European balance of power.

The challenge to balance of power

The balance of power can be challenged in at least two ways: The first is if a major country augments its strength to a point where it threatens to achieve hegemony. The second occurs when a heretofore-secondary state seeks to enter the ranks of the major powers and sets off a series of compensating adjustments by the other powers until a new equilibrium is established or a general conflagration takes place. The Westphalian system met both tests in the eighteenth century, first by thwarting the thrust for hegemony by France’s Louis XIV, then by adjusting the system to the insistence of Prussia’s Frederick the Great for equal status.
*Louis sought what amounted to hegemony in the name of the glory of France. He was defeated by a Europe that sought its order in diversity. The first half of the eighteenth century was dominated by the quest to contain France; the second was shaped by Prussia’s effort to find a place for itself among the major powers.

The French Revolution and Its Aftermath

Revolutions erupt when resentments merge to assault an unsuspecting regime and The broader the revolutionary coalition. human order was the reflection neither the divine plan of the medieval world, nor the intermeshing of grand dynastic interests of the eighteenth century.
The Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent coexistence between countries of different religious or political conceptions of truth, and the transformation of international affairs into a global contest of ideologies to be fought by any available means and by mobilizing all elements of society.

The subtle quilibrium

The subtle equilibrium of the Congress of Vienna system began to fray in the middle of the nineteenth century under the impact of three events: the rise of nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, and the Crimean War. After the end of the Napoleonic period, another Czar, Alexander, proceeded to prescribe Europe’s future.

The Russian Enigma

Russia’s position in and toward Europe had long been ambiguous. As Charlemagne’s empire had fractured in the ninth century into what would become the modern nations of France and Germany, Slavic tribes more than a thousand miles to their east had coalesced in a confederation based around the city of Kiev (now the capital and geographic center of the state of Ukraine, though perceived almost universally by Russians as simultaneously an inextricable part of their own patrimony). This “land of the Rus” stood at the fraught intersections of civilizations and trade routes. With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south, and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating temptations and fears.

The Congress of Vienna

At Vienna, Talleyrand’s contribution was to achieve for France a peace that preserved the “ancient frontiers,” which existed when it had started its foreign adventures. And within less than three years—in 1818—he managed France’s entry into the Quadruple Alliance. The vanquished enemy would become an ally in the preservation of the European order in an alliance originally designed to contain it.
The Statesman who assembled in Vienna in 1814 were radically in different situation from their predecessors who drafted the Peace of Westphalia. A century and a half earlier, a series of settlements of the various wars that made up the Thirty Years’ War was conjoined with a set of principles for the general conduct of foreign policy.

Metternich and Bismarck

Both have been viewed as archetypal conservatives. Both have been recorded as master manipulators of the balance of power, which they were. But their fundamental concepts of international order were nearly opposite, and they manipulated the balance of power to vastly different ends and with significantly contrasting implications for the peace of Europe and the world.
With his appointment as Prussian Minister-President in 1862, Bismarck set about to implement his principles and to transform the European order. With the conservative monarchies of the East divided in the aftermath of the Crimean War, France isolated on the Continent because of the memories evoked by its ruler, and Austria wavering between its national and its European roles, Bismarck saw an opportunity to bring about a German national state for the first time in history.

World War I

World War I broke out because political leaders lost control over their own tactics. For nearly a month after the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in June 1914 by a Serbian nationalist, diplomacy was conducted on the dilatory model of many other crises surmounted in recent decades.After the era the European order marked as well as a pohtheosis of the Enlightenment.

Chapter 3 Title: Islamism and the Middle East

The Early organization of the Middle East and North Africa developed from a succession of empires. Each considered itself the center of civilized life; each arose around unifying geographic features and then expanded into the unincorporated zones between them. In the third millennium B.C., Egypt expanded its influence along the Nile and into present-day Sudan. Beginning in the same period, the empires of Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Babylon consolidated their rule among peoples along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
The areas Islam had conquered or where it held sway over tribute-paying non- Muslims were conceived as a single political unit dar al-Islam, the “House of Islam,” or the realm of peace. It would be governed by the caliphate, an institution defined by rightful succession to the earthly political authority that the Prophet had exercised. The lands beyond were dar al-harb, the realm of war; Islam’s mission was to incorporate these regions into its own world order and thereby bring universal peace:
In this view, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale
The early Islamic Empire expanded Islam’s periods of expansion would in fact exit Muslim political control, including Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy, the Balkans (now a patchwork of Muslim and mainly Orthodox Christian enclaves), Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Israel, India, southern Russia, and parts of western China
The battle of Tipplers marked out the high point of Ottoman expansion.
While most of his contemporaries recoiled from the violent methods he advocated, a core of committed followers—like the vanguard he had envisioned—began to form. To a globalized, largely secular world judging itself to have transcended the ideological clashes of “History,” Qutb and his followers’ views long appeared so extreme as to merit no serious attention.
Most of all, the abrupt end of the Cold War weakened their bargaining position and made them more politically dispensable. They had not learned how, in the absence of a foreign enemy or international crisis, to mobilize populations that increasingly regarded the state not as an end in itself but as having an obligation to improve their well-being
The Arab Spring started as a new generation’s uprising for liberal democracy. It was soon shouldered aside, disrupted, or crushed. Exhilaration turned into paralysis.
Amidst all these upheavals in the Middle East, a peace process has been going on-sometimes fitfully, occasionally intensely-to bring about an end to the Arab- Israeli Conflict.
Though far from being the most geopolitically astute or diplomatically skillful American foreign policy figure of the twentieth century, he consistently ranks amonythe " greatest ", Presidents in contemporary poll.
From the late 1950s to the early to, 1970s, the Soviet Union with the main support and diplomatic advocate for the Nationalist Arab states, which turn generally supported Soviet international objectives.

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About the Book:
World Order is the name we give to concept achieved among the great power that prevents them being engaged in the war among themselves.Henry Kissinger analyzes the different international relationships and their approaches.