Free Download New World Order: Part 1

Over 20 goals comprise the "new world order" the United Nations will focus on as part of its "Agenda 21/2030 Mission Goals," according to the claim. Items on the agenda include one world government; a single cashless currency; government-owned and controlled schools, colleges and universities and an end to single-family homes.

All this is clear now, but it was far from clear at the time it occurred. It caught most of the participants unaware. This is true of the leadership within the Soviet Union, but even more true of the leadership in the West. Gorbachev and his team were conscious that their internal reforms would change the world order; indeed, they were looking to a fundamental change

Even today, the collapse of the Soviet empire is not properly understood. This is not just the normal delay in registering change. There is a fundamental lack of understanding which comes from working with false premises. The State Department is concerned with the relationship between states. That was appropriate during the Cold War, when the world map was well defined and kept in place by the rivalry between the two superpowers. But it is not appropriate today, when existing states and empires are breaking down and new states are brought into existence, many of which do not really qualify as states. We need a totally different conceptual framework for dealing with this situation, because it involves not only relationships between states but also relationships within states, or what used to be states.

It is the characteristic of revolutions that people do not fully understand what is going on; that is why events spin out of control and the prevailing order breaks down. There is no doubt that the collapse of the Soviet system amounts to a revolution, and this fact is now generally recognized. But the collapse of the Soviet empire has also brought about a revolutionary change in the prevailing world order and this fact is not properly recognized. Indeed, it is widely ignored. People in the former Soviet empire cannot help being aware of the revolution, but people in the Western world have not been so directly affected. The Foreign Ministry of the former Soviet Union did produce some new thinking, even if it was rendered irrelevant by subsequent events; but our State Department has done practically no new thinking at all. Unless we develop a new frame of reference, the world order that prevailed since the Second World War is likely to be followed by world disorder.

The Soviet system under Stalin was a good example of the first kind of extreme, where the Bolshevik dogma was extremely rigid and incapable of modification. Society itself was highly regulated and frozen into inactivity. Yet there was an enormous gap between the prevailing dogma and reality, with absolutely no tendency for the two of them to come closer together. If anything, they drifted further apart as the outside world continued to evolve.

I think the distinction between open and closed societies is more revealing in the present situation than the Cold War distinction between communism and the free world, because it allows us to see the Soviet system as just one particular form of closed society. The important thing to recognize is that an open society is a more advanced, more sophisticated form of social organization than a closed society. In a closed society, one particular point of view prevails; but in an open society, every citizen is both allowed and required to have his own point of view. This means that an open society is both more desirable and more vulnerable. While a closed society may expend practically all its energies on maintaining the existing order, an open society takes a state of law for granted and builds a complex structure of institutions on top of it capable of producing wealth, prosperity and progress. The structure cannot evolve if the proper foundations are missing, and it can collapse if the foundations are disturbed.

The Soviet system was a universal closed society because communism was a universal dogma. But the system has broken down and communism as a dogma is well and truly dead. There was a chance, at the early stages of the breakdown, to make the transition to a universal open society; but that would have required a major effort on the part of the free world and the effort was not forthcoming. Therefore, that option is no longer open. The universal closed society held together by communist dogma has broken down into its territorial components. Some parts, like Poland and Hungary, are making progress towards a more open society; but even these countries tend to fall back on what prevailed before the communist regime. Other parts are reconstituting themselves as more or less closed societies, or they just continue to disintegrate.

Milosevic, on his own, does not constitute a security threat to Europe or to the rest of the world; but nationalist dictatorships do. That is the point that European statesmen who are set on appeasing Milosevic fail to understand. Already Serbia has a worthy counterpart in Croatia. Croatian forces recently committed a massacre in a Bosnian village, provoking retaliation by Bosnian Muslim forces; the effect is to force Bosnian Croats to flee from areas where they are in a minority to areas held by Croat forces, thereby constituting a majority there.

It is still possible to avert the danger, but who is going to make the effort? That is where my conceptual framework fails to provide an answer. The so-called free world failed to rise to the challenge when it would have been possible to set in motion a trend towards an open society. Why should it do anything now, when events are clearly going in the wrong direction and the free world has increasing problems of its own?

The United States, as the remaining superpower, is weighed down by domestic difficulties which derive, at least partially, from the burdens of being a superpower. We are not like England in the nineteenth century which, as the main beneficiary of the world trading system, could afford to maintain a fleet in being that could be sent to distant trouble spots. There is a discrepancy between the needs of the world for a new world order and the national self-interest of the United States. The United States cannot be expected to act on its own. Can it act in concert with others?

The United Nations might have become an effective organization if it were under the leadership of two superpowers cooperating with each other. As it is, the United Nations has already failed as an institution which could be put in charge of U.S. troops. This leaves NATO as the only institution of collective security that has not failed, because it has not been tried. NATO has the potential of serving as the basis of a new world order in that part of the world which is most in need of order and stability. But it can do so only if its mission is redefined. There is an urgent need for some profound new thinking with regard to NATO.

Closed societies based on nationalist principles constitute a threat to security because they need an enemy, either outside or within. But the threat is very different in character from the one NATO was constructed to confront, and a very different approach is required to combat this threat. It involves the building of democratic states and open societies and embedding them in a structure which precludes certain kinds of behavior. Only in case of failure does the prospect of military intervention arise. The constructive, open society building part of the mission is all the more important because the prospect of NATO members intervening militarily in this troubled part of the world is very remote. Bosnia is ample proof.

President Bush has coined the phrase a new world order. It is being used to describe the abrupt changes taking place internationally brought about, in part, by perestroika in the Soviet Union and the new alliances being formed in Western Europe. The President is hoping that such global changes will precipitate a political stability that will enable worldwide peace to be realized in our time.

Christian friend, knowing the eternal horrors that await the unsaved and the eternal bliss that can be theirs by believing in Christ as Savior, we should be doing all we can to proclaim the gospel to our neighbors and friends so that they can have a part in the new world order with us.

Moreover national boundaries will be more permeable than in the past. Nationalism and transnationalism will be contending forces in the new world politics. Large transnational corporations distribute economic production according to global strategies. Transnational technological changes in communications and transportation are making the world smaller. Diplomacy occurs in real time; both George Bush and Saddam Hussein watched Cable News Network for the latest reports. Human rights violations and mass suffering in distant parts of the globe are brought home by television. Although Marshall McLuhan argued that modern communications would produce a "global village," his metaphor was misleading because a global political identity remains feeble. In fact nationalism is becoming stronger in most of the world, not weaker. Instead of one global village there are villages around the globe more aware of each other. That, in turn, increases the opportunities for conflict.

Not all transnational forces are benign any more than all nationalisms are malign. Transnational drug trade, terrorism, the spread of AIDS and global warming are cases in point. With time, technology spreads across borders, and the technologies of weapons of mass destruction are now more than a half century old. The collapse of the Soviet Union removes two of the factors that slowed the spread of nuclear weapons in the old world order: tight Soviet technological controls and influence over its client states. The United States cannot escape from these transnational problems, and few of them are susceptible to unilateral solutions. Like other countries in the new world order, the United States will be caught in the dialogue between the national and the transnational. 2b1af7f3a8