Yet there is no consensus among the major actors about the rules and limits guiding this process, or its ultimate destination. Every region participates in questions of high policy in every other, often instantaneously. Now international affairs take place on a global basis, and these historical concepts of world order are meeting. The United States was born of a conviction about the universal applicability of democracy-a conviction that has guided its policies ever since. Islam, in its early centuries, considered itself the world’s sole legitimate political unit, destined to expand indefinitely until the world was brought into harmony by religious principles.
In Europe, Rome imagined itself surrounded by barbarians when Rome fragmented, European peoples refined a concept of an equilibrium of sovereign states and sought to export it across the world. China conceived of a global cultural hierarchy with the Emperor at its pinnacle. Each considered itself the center of the world and envisioned its distinct principles as universally relevant.
For most of history, civilizations defined their own concepts of order. There has never been a true “world order,” Kissinger observes. Drawing on his experience as one of the foremost statesmen of the modern era-advising presidents, traveling the world, observing and shaping the central foreign policy events of recent decades-Kissinger now reveals his analysis of the ultimate challenge for the twenty-first century: how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historical perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism. Henry Kissinger offers in World Order a deep meditation on the roots of international harmony and global disorder.
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