A World In Disarray

This first chapter covers the concept of world order from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the end of World War II in 1945. World order, he explains, is simply the state of international relations—good, bad, or neutral. It has also been termed the “international system” by academic Hedley Bull. In contrast, Bull uses “international society” to describe a world order in which nations (also called “states”) both respect other sovereign nations’ behavior within their own borders and accept the existence of other nations. They thus work to avoid war under normal circumstances.

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger has also written extensively about world order, noting that two aspects are necessary for keeping order from becoming disorder. One is legitimacy, or agreement between states on what constitutes international arrangements and how they are to be achieved. The other is power, namely “physical safeguards against aggression” (22).

Haass picks the Treaty of Westphalia as a starting point to discuss world order because of its significance as a turning point. Before its signing, raw power ruled the day, and states with the ability to meddle in the internal affairs of other states often did. After Westphalia, the sovereignty of all nations became established regardless of their size or power. In the wake of Napoleon’s wars across Europe, the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815 reestablished a balance of power and respect for sovereignty. This only broke down when Kissinger’s two requirements ceased to exist later in the century.

World War I was fought despite it not making sense for any of the countries involved; it erupted more by “happenstance,” says Haass. Neither economic interdependence nor the conventional “rules” for going to war were able to prevent it. The Second World War was fought for very different reasons. Both Germany and Japan had adopted an aggressive stance that could not be maintained in a peaceful system. Moreover, the treaty to end World War I was too severe toward Germany, and the democratic powers were either weak or disengaged from international affairs. The treaty to end World War II was nearly the opposite of that from the previous war. Instead of punishing the vanquished, the victors rebuilt them and made them allies.

This chapter covers the end of World War II to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the years characterized by the Cold War. After two world wars, there was no guarantee that the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union would remain “cold.” That the balance of power was spread throughout two strong alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) helped to keep it so. Each side was willing to use limited military action to maintain this balance, as was the case in Berlin after the war, in Korea during the 1950s, and in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Another major factor in maintaining the balance of power was the existence of nuclear weapons. The fact that so much damage and an untold number of deaths could be unleashed so easily held the leaders of each side in check as no political goal was worth risking such an outcome. This became known as “mutually assured destruction”: a nuclear strike by one side would lead to the destruction of both. Diplomacy only strengthened this deterrence through arms control. For example, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 denied both sides the use of defense systems that might protect themselves from nuclear missiles. The idea was to ensure the ability of both sides to destroy each other—thus making deterrence a bedrock principle.

Balance was also easier to maintain throughout the Cold War because there were only two major actors, each with a complete diplomatic framework for working out conflict. A Westphalian focus on only foreign relations was also upheld. Neither side tried to greatly influence what took place within the other’s borders. Despite internal resistance to the Soviet system in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), for instance, the United States stood by and did not interfere.

The “other order” referred to in the title of Chapter 3 is the liberal democratic order, which Haass explains here. There were economic, diplomatic, strategic, political, and legal aspects to it. The first, economic, was a main pillar of this order. The idea was to promote trade as a means both to the development of nations and to peace and stability. The Bretton Woods system, initiated by a meeting of Western powers in 1944, helped provide the framework for this aspect with its standardized system of exchange rates and institutions like the World Bank.

The diplomatic dimension was dominated by the creation of the United Nations in 1945. Its aim was to effectively deal with international disputes in order to avoid war, and the focus was on the sovereignty of member states—again, very Westphalian. The strategic aspect included the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), designed to limit the threat from nuclear weapons by barring states that did not already have them from acquiring them. It was agreed that more states having such weapons not only increased the likelihood of governments using them but also created the risk of nonstate actors (such as terrorists) gaining control of them. A similar accord was reached regarding biological weapons.

Political measures taken included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, both adopted by the United Nations. Finally, legal aspects were the glue that helped facilitate all the international interaction between nations and people, including travel and communication. Overall, Haass rates this order modestly in terms of success in these areas. The greatest success came in Europe, where the decades-long clash between France and Germany was quashed. In general, “the post-World War II order was predicated on familiar, traditional approaches to international relations, as state sovereignty was for the most part at its core” (72).