The international system in the new millennium

 What kind of world order is now emerging? This is Georg Sorensen inquiry through a contemporary attempt to explain debate confusion depicting a new world order. He argues that any comprehensive analysis of order must address four major aspects or dimensions of the phenomena. They include (a) the realist concern of the politico-military balance of war; (b) the liberal concern of the make-up of international institutions and emergence of global governance; (c) the constructivist concern of the realm of ideas and ideology, with a focus on the existence or otherwise of common values on a global scale; and (d) the IPE (International Political Economy) concern of the economic realm of production, finance and distribution. He defines the new balance as an ‘interregnum’ since a stable order has not been established but significant elements of the old order stay in place. Sorensen goes on to discuss the consequences of the new situation by briefly looking into the four aspects.

Looking at order during the cold war, he observes that “order during the cold war was a discernible pattern”, characterized by bipolarity foundation, military competition between the two superpowers and their respective allies including a ‘west-west and a north-south order. The western order, based on the American hegemony and the Breton woods system’. The south-north order is also based on the process of decolonization and entry of the newly independent states into the system of the UN organization.

Sorensen defines world order as, “a governing arrangement among states, meeting the current demand for order in major areas of concern” from this definition he First focuses on world order in a generic sense, in contrast to the use of the term by some politicians, who use it as a description or justification for certain policies they want to promote. Some scholars use the concept to describe the specific foreign policies of certain government administrations. Visions of order, including the foreign policies based on such visions, have shown inputs to the debate about the proper world order; they are not in themselves  order substance.

Second, not every governing arrangement among states can qualify as a world order according to the definition. To qualify, such an arrangement needs to meet the current demand for order in major areas. In that sense, the analysis of world order has a normative aspect: does the governing arrangement that exists meet the aspirations about order expressed by states? Third, the focus is on world order, that is, on the global level. Many governing arrangements are sub global, and concern a region or even smaller groups of states. Such arrangements, such as the European Union (EU), together with the domestic arrangements of states, are not unimportant for world order, but they are conditions for world order and not world order as such.

.