Abstract
Today, the global society encompasses all continents. The challenges vary from region to region. The specific features of plurality find manifold expressions, and also diverse challenges. A global order which embraces the key principles of the open society which Popper had in mind is an order based on the acceptance of common rules among conditions of grave empirical and, at times, ideological contradictions. The world is currently far away from achieving such an objective. To the contrary, the failure of the nation-state and ideological radicalization of Islamic extremism has generated new forms of warfare, individualized concepts of fighting actors and a situation which can be labeled “Third World War”. And yet some experiences have not lost their relevance: a liberal domestic order remains the most predictable base for countries to jointly advance a global open society. The interdependencies between the local and the global as well as the complexity of ideational factors and new actors—influenced by much more than just competing Western philosophies—define the parameters of the world in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Pope Francis cited in: Rellandini (2014).
- 2.
AFP (2015).
- 3.
UNHCR (2016). The study found that three countries produce half the world’s refugees. Syria at 4.9 million, Afghanistan at 2.7 million and Somalia at 1.1 million together accounted for more than half the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate worldwide. Colombia at 6.9 million, Syria at 6.6 million and Iraq at 4.4 million had the largest numbers of internally displaced people…n all, 86% of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate in 2015 were in low- and middle-income countries close to situations of conflict. Worldwide, Turkey was the biggest host country, with 2.5 million refugees. With nearly one refugee for every five citizens, Lebanon hosted more refugees compared to its population than any other country. Distressingly, children made up an astonishing 51% of the world’s refugees in 2015, according to the data UNHCR was able to gather; see also: United Nations Population Fund (2015).
- 4.
See Watson (2016).
- 5.
See Stern and Berger (2015).
- 6.
- 7.
United Nations (1945), UN Charter, Article 51.
- 8.
Naji (2004).
- 9.
Cf. Reuter (2015).
- 10.
Fernandez (2015).
- 11.
See Erlanger (2016).
- 12.
Fukuyama (1992).
- 13.
World War, in: Oxford English Dictionary, online at: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/230279?redirectedFrom=world+war& Accessed January 31, 2017.
- 14.
Repington (1920).
- 15.
Time Magazine (1939).
- 16.
Kristeligt Dagblad (1939).
- 17.
de Gaulle (1941).
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
- 20.
Cooper (2003).
- 21.
Weber (1946).
- 22.
European Union (2016).
- 23.
See Kühnhardt (2014).
- 24.
- 25.
AFP (2015).
- 26.
For an insightful analysis with stunning graphs see: Clark (2007).
- 27.
See Zakaria (2011).
- 28.
Hobbes (1994) (first edition 1640).
- 29.
McCurdy (2016).
- 30.
Herf (1984).
- 31.
For an early assessment of this thesis see Kühnhardt (1994).
- 32.
See Kühnhardt (2003).
- 33.
Grotius (1925) (original 1625).
- 34.
See Tooze (2015).
- 35.
See Macmillan (2001).
- 36.
See Kühnhardt (1996).
- 37.
- 38.
See Shlaes (2016). Some figures are particularly worrisome: while 140 million Americans work fulltime, 106 million receive some form of social subsidies; 45 million citizens receive 130 dollars per month in order to have enough food to eat. The US share in the global economic production shrank from 27% in 2005 to 16% in 2015. US high tech exports were reduced from 180 billion dollars in 1999 to 160 billion dollars in 2015 while at the same time Chinese high-tech exports increased from 30 to 360 billion dollars: see Heinsohn (2016).
- 39.
BBC (2005).
- 40.
- 41.
Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis (1993).
- 42.
Bob, the builder, online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P2-Nmk1uFQ Accessed January 31, 2017.
- 43.
The Guardian (2015).
- 44.
John Paul II (1978).
- 45.
Schmitt (1996) (original German edition 1927).
- 46.
Prodi (2002).
- 47.
See Tuchman (1988).
- 48.
On the domestic dimension of trust see Fukuyama (1995).
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Kühnhardt, L. (2017). Third World War: The Enemies of the Global Society. In: The Global Society and Its Enemies. Global Power Shift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55904-9_2
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