ABSTRACT
International relations scholars are interested in debates about globalization and governance partly because of a deeper concern about change versus continuity in the international system. One important focus of theorizing in international relations in recent years has been to set the beginning and end points of the anarchic international order identified by realists and neorealists as the basic building blocks. There is a tendency for realists to claim that anarchy is universal across time and space (Waltz, 1979; Grieco, 1988). Critics of realism, in contrast, argue that the anarchic international system may have been a useful way of thinking about the world for the relatively short period in history dating from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until some time in the recent past, but that it may be losing its value. Kobrin's essay (Chapter 6) builds on this theme to argue both that there is now a new world order, and that it may be more like the world order that prevailed in the Middle Ages than the one that existed between 1648 and the recent past. He argues that economic globalization, made possible by the wider availability of computers and fast telecommunications systems, is the main reason for this change. Similarly, Cerny in Chapter 7 argues that the dominant actors of the realist's anarchic system, the governments of nation-states, are not as dominant as they once were and that the system is evolving in the direction of greater complexity. Globalization is one of the reasons for this in Cerny's view, but there are other factors as well. For example, Cerny sees factors like the rise of the “competition state” and the “hollowing out” of the Keynesian welfare state via privatization of state functions as also contributing to changes in governance, independently of globalization. Both Kobrin and Cerny question the applicability of realist models in the contemporary world, but for somewhat different reasons.
