A Grand Unified Theory of World Politics: The Stability Imperative and Reifying Imagined Communities in a Global Society

Download or read book A Grand Unified Theory of World Politics: The Stability Imperative and Reifying Imagined Communities in a Global Society written by Christopher C Bosley and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emerging global structure is wrought with tension. The contemporary international system, marshaled by the communications-and-information revolution and characterized by dense interaction capacities among transnational actors, can be conceived as a global society wherein a common normative framework guides and constrains state behavior. Its intersection with revisionist rising powers harboring intentions to mold that framework to reflect their own preferences risks an ambiguous standard of behavior, confusion, and a clash of norms that threatens to transform the cohesion that underpins accord in the global society into chaos. As the state upon whose values and principles the existing international system is based upon, it is the responsibility of the United States to ensure the stability and viability of that system and -- as far as other states are expected to conform to the normative standards thereof -- its ability to accommodate the development of the states within it. The United States has traditionally promoted the democratic peace as the key stabilizing mechanism in the international system. While fully institutionalized democracies may be more stable and less aggressive than other forms of government, however, emerging democracies tend to be extraordinarily violent as self-rule precipitates secessionist wars, pathological homogenization, and ethnic cleansing as "the people" are defined and those excluded are sorted out. In regions beset by the legacies of colonialism and multi-ethnic empires, wherein state boundaries were arbitrarily drawn to aggregate and divide a complex mosaic of social identity groups, the results are national cascades fueling pervasive identity-driven conflict in a struggle to reify into the primary organizing structure of modernity: the nation-state.