From Empire to Community
A New Approach to International Relations
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Whether one favors the U.S. global projection of force or is horrified by it, the question stands - where do we go from here? What ought to be the new global architecture? Amitai Etzioni follows a third way, drawing on both neoconservative and liberal ideas, in this bold new look at international relations. He argues that a "clash of civilizations" can be avoided and that the new world order need not look like America. Eastern values, including spirituality and moderate Islam, have a legitimate place in the evolving global public philosophy.
Nation-states, Etzioni argues, can no longer attend to rising transnational problems, from SARS to trade in sex slaves to cybercrime. Global civil society does help, but without some kind of global authority, transnational problems will overwhelm us. The building blocks of this new order can be found in the war against terrorism, multilateral attempts at deproliferation, humanitarian interventions and new supranational institutions (e.g., the governance of the Internet). Basic safety, human rights, and global social issues, such as environmental protection, are best solved cooperatively, and Etzioni explores ways of creating global authorities robust enough to handle these issues as he outlines the journey from "empire to community."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arguing against both what he casts as Francis Fukuyama's liberal triumphalism and Samuel Huntington's"clash of civilizations" pessimism, communitarian Etzioni sees the world edging toward a"chemical fusion" of Western individualism and Eastern social authoritarianism. This movement duly demands a transformation of an American"semi-empire" based on military coercion into a world community based on a"new global architecture" of transnational institutions that rely less on force and more on shared interests and values. Etzioni's turgid disquisitions on such topics as"monofunctional transnational government networks" remain somewhat vague about what the new global regime actually entails. It would definitely not look like the invasion of Iraq, a"Vietnamesque" disaster that he feels has aroused intense worldwide opposition and squandered America's credibility. But it might look something like the international police and intelligence effort against terrorism and nuclear proliferation, a de facto Global Safety Authority that could be a model for other Authorities governing other world issues like environmental degradation, poverty, sex trafficking and"cybercrime." True to his communitarian instincts, Etzioni insists that the transnational community requires informal but"thick" bonds of shared values and mores; moderate religion will play a leading role, especially a nascent"soft" Islam, which will drive out hard fundamentalist Islam and foster the growth of civil society in the Muslim world. Unfortunately, apart from perfunctory talk of international"moral dialogues," he is vague about how the"global normative synthesis" is to come about. Etzioni's communitarian formula--not too hawkish, not too dovish, with not too much individualism, not too much social coercion and lots of moral consensus--seems even more nebulous and pat when translated from domestic politics to international relations.
