World Order: Structure, Mechanisms, and Patterns

Author: Pan Zhongqi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: World order has long been a significant issue of concern in the field of international political science. What is world order? What are the elements that constitute world order? What are the models of world order? How does world order develop and evolve? All these questions are attempts by scholars both domestically and internationally to answer when studying world order. In existing research, various schools of thought have primarily studied world order from the perspective of great power relations, i.e., from an external level to conduct a macroscopic study of the issue. However, there has been little research on how the internal elements of world order interact and drive its own forward development. Therefore, it can be said that current research has not adequately explained the internal mechanisms of world order development, making it difficult to effectively grasp the specific direction of world order changes and developments in practice.
The book World Order: Structure, Mechanism, and Models attempts to advance the study of world order development from the macro-external level to the micro-internal level, building upon previous academic research on the macro-external aspects of world order development. It also draws on important concepts from systems theory and cybernetics—self-organization—to treat world order as a system and view its development as the process of self-organizing movement within the world order system. Thus, it explores the internal mechanisms and general laws of world order development.
Through a review of three world order paradigms—realism, liberalism, and constructivism—the author uses the findings of philosophy, political science, international relations, and history as the basic material and systems self-organization theory as the basic methodology. Through logical analysis and historical examination, the book summarizes the general laws of world order development. The author argues that under the influence of external information and the impetus of internal fluctuations, world order evolves from ordered stability to unordered imbalance through assimilative self-organization and adaptive self-organization activities, then from unordered imbalance to a new ordered stability. This cycle repeats infinitely, with each new ordered stability representing a higher level of world order development.
Based on the study of the general laws of world order, the author proposes theoretical insights into the structure, mechanism, and models of world order. The author suggests that the fundamental structure of the future international system will not be power distribution but security distribution; the basic principles for constructing a future world order will not be power equilibrium or hegemony but multilateral coordination; and the basic model for constructing a future world order will not be unipolar hegemony, bipolar equilibrium, or multipolar equilibrium but mutual security.
This book is part of the Contemporary International Politics Series.