Introduction

Abstract

Here, Barrie Smart is touching on some of the guiding issues and main themes of Supranationalism in the New World Order, our research and writing project which continues beyond this particular publication. Our project is about the post-Cold War new world order; about the simultaneous presence and pursuit of orderliness, on the one hand, and the pervasive, practical and political ‘problem’ of disorderliness,¹ on the other, within Europe and the world — and so, within the global system (Axford, 1995); about the management of orderliness — or, that is, about the interventions, means and mechanisms employed in the process of managing disorderliness in the pursuit of orderliness; and about not just the simultaneous, and perhaps contradictory, pursuit of global order(liness) in the face of constant (constantly regenerated) global disorder(liness), but also the simultaneous, and noncontradictory, presence and use within pertinent discourses and debates, studies and analyses, interpretations and theories of two alternative notions of ‘order’ — one of which is reflected in the phrase new world order, the other of which is reflected in the distinction drawn between orderliness and disorderliness.

The relatively sudden and unanticipated end of the Cold War that chilled Europe for over forty years appears to be turning into an ever more complicated peace. Moreover, one of the seemingly most liberal and peaceful of the former ‘societies of actually existing socialism’, Yugoslavia, has subsequently provided the setting for an increasingly complicated war, the first ‘hot’ war since 1945 in Europe [see Meštrović, 1994]. One possible implication […] is the emergence of a ‘new world order’, but not quite the order American President George Bush seemed to have in mind when he articulated his 1990 vision of a post-Cold War world. The idea and implied possibility of an orderly world is a familiar feature of modernity as an accomplished form of social life, a form of life bound up with the growth of Enlightenment. However, it is clear that the emerging ‘new order’ is paralleled by manifestations of extensive and intensive forms of disorder. Not for the first time the promise of modernity to cultivate orderliness in the world simultaneously precipitates an awareness of forms of disorder, not so much as symptoms of failure, incompletion or lack of realisation, but rather as necessarily corollaries of the pursuit of order itself. The idea of order as a task, as a practice, as a condition to be reflected upon, preserved and nurtured is intrinsic to modernity. The modern quest for order constitutes ‘the least possible among the impossible and the least disposable among the indispensable; indeed [it is] the archetype for all other tasks, [the] one that renders all other tasks mere metaphors of itself [Bauman, 1991a, p. 4]. Order and disorder are inextricably connected, they are simultaneously constituted and spiral in a double-helix like fashion around the axis of modernity. Hence the perpetual preoccupation with the elimination or reduction of forms of disorder through the engineering and management of orderliness in modern forms of life. A preoccupation which is regenerated and reconstituted through the realisation that ordering interventions seem to promote other disorders, to precipitate effects or ‘unintended consequences’ of disorder. (Smart, 1993, pp. 40–2)