Journal article analysis and academic reference

International Institutions and Order

In his seminal treatise on global power structures and the institutions that preserve order, entitled After Victory: Institutions, Strategic restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars, Princeton University political professor John Ikenberry differentiates between the variety of forms that order has been established. According to Ikenberry, political order is formed when autonomous states enter into governing arrangements, either with their own citizens or with fellow members of the international community, and these arrangements can be classified as either balance of power, hegemonic, and constitutional order structures (21). Throughout his exhaustive and authoritative text, Ikenberry reviews the major historical junctures that have provided societies with the collective opportunity to reorder their existing power structures, pointing to the conclusion of the Cold War in 1989 as the most recent instance, while also covering the reformations that occurred following great wars in 1648, 1713, 1815, 1919, and 1945. The author's emphasis of wartime as the launching point for the creation and maintenance of new systems of order forms the fundamental premise of his work, as Ikenberry asserts early in the book's first chapter that "the great moments of international order building have tended to come after major wars, as winning states have undertaken to reconstruct the postwar world ... (and) at these junctures, newly powerful states have been given extraordinary opportunities to shape world politics" (3).

When a prolonged period of hostilities occurs, it is inevitable that certain societal institutions will be destabilized to the point of deterioration, from the delivery of medical care from hospitals to the supply of electricity and water from public utilities, and Ikenberry devotes much of his study of order to the importance of institutions in creating and maintaining order. According to Ikenberry, "beginning with the 1815 settlement and increasingly after 1919 and 1945, the leading state has resorted to institutional strategies as mechanisms to establish restraints on indiscriminate and arbitrary state power and 'lock in' a favorable and durable postwar order" (3), and it is precisely this power of institutions, to preserve existing order structures, up which he focuses the majority of the text. Ikenberry returns repeatedly to the end of the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as an example of institutionalism's ability to preserve order, observing how "Soviet leaders appreciated that the institutional aspects of political order in the West made it less likely that these states would take advantage of the Soviets as they pursued reform and integration" (5). An institution reflects its associated system of order by reinforcing the rules, regulations, and requirements that an individual, and society on a collective level, are expected to adhere to. As Ikenberry points out in his book's first chapter, institutions play different roles depending on the order structure currently in place, with hegemonic systems of governance relying on institutions to consolidate power and destabilize potential sources of opposition, and constitutional systems employing institutions to empower the citizenry and provide "checks and balances" to governmental authority (15).

Any comprehensive analysis of international order must also address the issue of disorder, and Ikenberry covers this aspect of the issue by examining historical instances of anarchistic rule. For as long as human beings have transformed naturally ethnic and cultural factions into organized nation states, the politically charged process of dividing the planet's limited territory has left certain groups without native land to call their own. The phenomenon of these so-called stateless nations has been produced by a confluence of geopolitical circumstances, but in all areas of the world there are cultural groups who refuse to recognize their preordained national identities (Ikenberry, 272). Ancient and competitive claims of ownership on the same holy ground have left the Palestinian people with an ever shrinking sliver of soil on which to stand, while the interventionist policies of international governance redrew historical borders, with the unfortunate Kurds becoming the odd men out in a post-World War I restructuring of the Middle East map. In Spain, where economic instability has spawned widespread social upheaval, citizens of both the Basque region and the Catalan islands have been inspired to form politically active separatist movements. Stateless nations are by no means restricted to the European continent, and in the industrialized, modern society of Canada a divisive debate has continually raged between the residents of Quebec, who are fiercely defensive of their French language and heritage, and the predominately Anglo national government (Ikenberry, 242). In each case, distributions of power and institutionalized systems of order devised many centuries ago have proven to have lasting ramifications on the relations of neighboring civilizations, and only by studying the tragic state of collective purgatory endured by stateless nations can one begin to understand how entire cultures can be abandoned by the global structure of order. As Ikenberry states conclusively, "even when alternative institutions might be more efficient or accord more closely with the interests of powerful states, the gains for the new institutions must be overwhelmingly greater before they overcome the sunk costs of the existing institutions" (70), which is why existing nations have demonstrated such extreme resistance to the reordering that would occur when so-called stateless nations are granted autonomy as sovereign states.