Shivshankar Menon
The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.
— Antonio Gramsci, at the end of WWI
What explains the persistent attraction of the idea of world order, even before technology and globalization made a truly global order possible in the late nineteenth century, and even now, when signs of its absence proliferate?
I speak here of a world order in both senses: as an attempt to order the known world, and as an ordering of international affairs on a global scale. The dictionary definition of world order is even more ambitious: “a system controlling events in the world, especially a set of arrangements established internationally for preserving global political stability.” A less lofty and more practical definition of the international order would be: the interconnected set of rules, norms, and institutions established by the great powers for managing conflict and cooperation.1 When that definition applies to the entire known world, such an order becomes a world order.
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