The World Order Approach

Abstract

In 1984 George Orwell pictured a world divided between three rival totalitarian powers — Eastasia, Oceania, and Eurasia. It was a condition of perpetual war and total mobilization, in which two of the powers were always fighting the third. Orwell took his names for these three powers from the three geographical centres of the struggle for territory and resources during the Second World War. Fifty years later, the same three areas featured once again in predictions that the world order was dividing territorially and was heading towards conflict. The nature of this conflict was widely assumed to be a zero-sum game in which each state competed to improve its relative share of territory, resources, and wealth within a global total which was fixed. In this neorealist perspective regionalism simplified and intensified this conflict by combining the most important states into more or less cohesive groups under the leadership of the dominant state in each region. The pressure on a region to become cohesive increased in relation to the success of other regions in unifying themselves. As each regional power sought to maximize its wealth and extend its territory, the risk of economic wars rose, because in a zero-sum world each regional power was assumed to calculate that conflict would yield more benefit than would cooperation.

This chapter draws heavily on and synthesizes the introduction and the conclusion in our edited collection, Regionalism and World Order (Gamble and Payne, 1996).