Abstract
In his engaging Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle, Jacques Attali suggests that ‘fraternity’ will be the great utopia of the coming age.1 The end of the cold war and the advance of globalization have given a significant impetus to discussion, and speculation, about global institutions that further such collaborative interaction. Just as classical liberal concerns about democracy would appear to have received a new lease of life from the end of the cold war, so aspirations to creating international institutions and a broader sense of international responsibility have similarly been reinvigorated. As with democracy, this involves the refurbishment of ideas that have their own history. A little short of eternal life or perpetual motion, but a long way away from the mundane constraints and difficulties of actual politics, indeed there is no topic more likely to spur the imagination of thinkers or to foster projects that enthusiastically override the constraints of the present than the creation of a global or world order. Such projects have both a political and a social or cultural dimension — they aspire to internationalism, in the sense of a politics that addresses a global rather than a national interest, and to cosmopolitanism, in the sense of the creation of a community that embraces the whole world. The record of history is, however, decidedly two-sided: for all that history reinforces aspiration, it also serves to provide warnings of the difficulties, and some dangers, involved.
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Notes
Jacques Attali, Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1998, pp. 146–7).
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished. A US-UN Saga (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).
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© 2001 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (2001). Governance Beyond Frontiers. In: The World at 2000. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99427-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99427-6_9
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