International Political Order

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ORDER

INTRODUCTION :

The term international political order to community and change in domestic and international political relations. There are several approaches to study the international political order. In this chapter only two major approaches are focused.

They are.

1.     Historical approach and

2.     Institutional approach.

HISTORICAL APPROACH :

When international political order is studied with reference to its past, it is known as historical approach. The historical approach to the study of international political order emphasizes the following :

1.     Domestic and international political order is not static but dynamic in nature.

2.     Historical background of every nation is important in analyzing the present international political order.

INSTITUTIONAL APPORACH

This chapter is about the international political components that one has to understand from both historical and institutional perspectives. For a better understanding, the chapter is divided into two major parts. The first part explains the term international political order from both historical and institutional framework.

In the second part, international and regional organizations are explained in detail to illustrate how far they were successful in maintaining international political order.

Students of political science must remember that international political order is not a static one but dynamic in nature. In the context of present globalized economic order and communication revolutions we live in a different world of political order.

The history of international political order is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step in the direction of understanding such continuity and change, this chapter explores some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of organized and formalized efforts in order to bring the desired political order at regional and international level. Students of political science try to understand how and when international political order are created, maintained, changed, and abandoned.

Many of the key question belong to a wider class of difficult questions about the dynamics of social order and development. How can order develop out of anarchy? What stabilizes an order? When and how does a stables order fall apart? How does peaceful change occur? Why do peaceful relations sometimes find themselves drawn into less peaceful confrontations? How is the search for order among collectivities linked to the search for order within them?

This chapter explains such questions. It considers a few distinctive ways of thinking about the history and existing international and regional political organizations and elaborates some of them as an example, the League of Nations, UNO, NAM and SAARC, which could be called an institutional approach to such thinking.

CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN INTERNATIONAL ORDER :

At some period in some area, political life has been rather well organized around well - defined boundaries, common rules and practices, shared causal and normative understandings, and resources adequate for collective action. At other times and places the system has been relatively anarchic. Relations have been less orderly; boundaries less well defined, institutions less common, less adequately supported, and less involved. As political institutions experience their histories, political life achieves or loses structures, and the nature of order changes.

Since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) several changes have taken place in the world order of nations. In 1917 the Union of soviet Socialist Republic came in to existence which challenged the supremacy of the United States. However it did not last long and the USSR itself disappeared and with that the challenge to the supremacy of U.S.A. has ended.

WORLD ORDER TODAY :

The disintegration of the Soviet Union has brought an end to the bipolar world order. The bipolar world order in fact dominated international politics since the Second World war. Today the world order is dominated by one 'super power' i.e. USA. Political Scientists call such one nation domination as 'unipolar' world order.

EMERGENCE OF UNIPOLAR WORLD :