The New World Disorder: how the West is destroying itself

By Peter R. Neumann and David Shaw

A coruscating analysis of current international relations, setting out the dangers the world will face if the West does not succeed in reinventing itself.

The West is under pressure, and it has only itself to blame. Over the past thirty years, through a mixture of naivety and arrogance, it has lost its global advantage. The challenges are profound: the rise of China, climate change, and the polarisation of society. It’s time for a new start: modernity must become sustainable if it is to survive. The triumph of the West had seemed unstoppable not that long ago. After the end of the Cold War, the democratic market economy took hold in the former Eastern Bloc, Russia went from being an enemy to a partner, and even China turned to capitalism. Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that shook the world. The War on Terror destabilised an entire region; the Arab Spring only brought forth new autocracies; and, following the annexation of Crimea, the confrontation with Russia intensified. Instead of a liberal world order, a new world disorder has emerged. 

Peter R. Neumann, an internationally acclaimed expert on terrorism and geopolitics, uncovers the mistakes that led to our present dire situation and outlines what must happen now. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781761385407

Peter R. Neumann

Peter R. Neumann is Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London, where he directed the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) for many years. As an internationally sought-after expert, Neumann served as advisor to the USA at the United Nations in 2014. In 2017 he was special representative to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). He also writes for The New York Times and Der Spiegel, among others. His book The New Jihadists was a bestseller. He lives in Oxford. 

Book preview

THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

Peter R. Neumann is Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London, where he directed the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) for many years. As an internationally sought-after expert, Neumann served as advisor to the USA at the United Nations in 2014. In 2017 he was special representative to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). He also writes for The New York Times and Der Spiegel, among others. His book The New Jihadists was a bestseller. He lives in Oxford. 

David Shaw works as a journalist for Germany’s international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, as well as translating from several languages, including German, Dutch, Russian, and French. He lives in Berlin.

Scribe Publications

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First published in German as Die neue Weltunordnung by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag GmbH in 2022

Published in English by Scribe 2023

Copyright © Peter R. Neumann 2022

Translation copyright © David Shaw 2023

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

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978 1 915590 14 5 (UK hardback)

978 1 761380 24 2 (Australian edition)

978 1 957363 63 9 (US edition)

978 1 761385 40 7 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1

Optimism: 1990–2000

Chapter 1

The New World Order

Chapter 2

Perpetual Peace

Chapter 3

Who’s Afraid of Russia and China?

Chapter 4

Techno-optimism

Chapter 5

The New Terrorism

Part II

Hubris: 2001–2010

Chapter 6

Wake-Up Call 9/11

Chapter 7

The Good War

Chapter 8

Regime Change

Chapter 9

Market Excesses

PART III

DISILLUSIONMENT: 2011–2015

Chapter 10

Arab Spring?

Chapter 11

France’s Adventure

Chapter 12

The Syrian Disaster

Chapter 13

German–Russian Illusions

PART IV

CRISIS: 2016 to the present

Chapter 14

Europe Under Pressure

Chapter 15

The Brexit Revolt

Chapter 16

A Populist in the White House

Chapter 17

China’s Authoritarian Modernity

Chapter 18

Climate Emergency

Towards a More Sustainable Modernity

Notes

Introduction

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT IDEAS AND THEIR (OFTEN UNINTENDED)consequences. It describes how the West — still considered ‘invincible’ only thirty years ago — is now in the process of bringing about its own downfall. This book documents the developments that have played a part in that process. And it demonstrates that the West’s downfall is ironically due to the same ideas that once made it so strong. The conclusion is not that the West needs different ideas, or that it needs no ideas at all. Rather, the conclusion is that the West must do better at learning from its mistakes, and that its core ideas must be reconsidered and reformulated in order for liberal modernity to survive.

But what is ‘the West’, anyway? As used in this book, the West is neither a point on the compass nor a political alliance; it is, first and foremost, a state of mind. Its origins lie in the ideas of the Enlightenment, which began to spread in the 17th century, first across Western Europe and then North America. The pioneers of the Enlightenment include scholars and philosophers like Francis Bacon in England and René Descartes in France, who were interested in questions of metaphysics and epistemology. The answers they came up with were revolutionary by the standards of the time, and provoked much fierce debate among intellectuals in the coffeehouses and Masonic lodges of the day. They included the ideas that human beings did not have to submit to their fate; that progress is possible; and that everything can be understood through a process based on reason, logic, and measurement. ¹

Those ideas were a declaration of war on the status quo. The notion that all human beings have a capacity for reason and can be masters of their own fate was incompatible with the absolute authority claimed by the Church and feudal rulers. Consequently, over the course of time, this intellectual revolution developed into a political one. One hundred and thirty-five years after Descartes formulated his famous statement ‘I think, therefore I am’, the people of the Thirteen British Colonies in North America proclaimed their right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. And a further decade later, French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille in the name of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. Those were the most important and, even to this day, most influential events that gave the liberal modern age, and with it, the West, its substance. They created the conditions for what the British historian Niall Ferguson called the ‘killer apps’ of Western modernity: broadly speaking, a combination of science and technology, economic competition, the rule of law, and democracy. ²

One pivotal reason for the successful spread of these ideas around the world was that, right from the outset, they were deemed to be universal — meaning they applied to every human being as a matter of principle: all people, not just the French or the Americans, were politically equal and had the right to fundamental freedoms and dignity. And, although slavery and colonialism showed that there was often a wide gap between aspiration and reality, these ideas had enormous appeal, even far beyond the reaches of Western Christian culture. The dissemination of Western ideas became a historical ‘mission’: few people doubted that a world in which everyone enjoys the benefits of modern, liberal — that is, Western — values would be a more just, free, prosperous, and peaceful world.

Today, the ideas of the liberal modern age appear so self-evident to us that barely anyone can imagine how it could be any other way. In countries where society is aligned with Western ideas, people are living longer. Diseases that once killed millions have been eradicated. The market economy has brought unprecedented prosperity. Almost all states shaped by Western ideas are democracies with free elections, independent judiciaries, and individual civil liberties that protect their citizens from state persecution. The maxim coined by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, that human existence is always ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, is now true only for a minority of people in Europe and North America.

In reality, however, liberal Western modernity is a paradox. Many of the causes of the ‘disorder’ described in this book are rooted in the very values and ideas that have made Western societies so successful. Modern technology, science, and competition form the basis of prosperity in the West, but at the same time, they are also partly responsible for the divisions within it. Democracy, liberty, and universal human rights are the West’s greatest achievements, but when they are ‘exported’, they are often met with resistance.

The dark side of the West has become particularly apparent over the past decades. One reason for that is globalisation, which gave extra centrifugal force to liberal modernity. The global market has replaced individual national economies, with production and supply chains now spanning the globe. The internet has made universal connectivity possible. Open borders and low transportation costs mean we can now reach places previous generations could only dream of. Most people now have a greater awareness of events in other parts of the world, rather than just their neighbourhood or country. ³ These developments are positive for many people, but not everyone has benefitted equally from them by any means. Globalisation has not only ‘shrunk’ the world, but it has also made it more demanding — more efficient and prosperous, but also faster, more complex, and more aggressive. According to the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, globalisation has led to the radicalisation of the modern age. ⁴

Such criticism of the West is nothing new. A century ago, the conservative French philosopher René Guénon had already identified a ‘crisis of the modern world’ and predicted its imminent demise. The developments he blamed for this crisis were the very same ones that gave supporters of liberal modernity reason for optimism. Rather than seeing modern science and technological development as progress, Guénon saw them as the cause of psychological uprootedness and a loss of spirituality. In his opinion, ideas such as democracy and equality were not just wrong, they were responsible for destroying the natural order of things and propelling societies into chaos and misery. For Guénon, the entire history of the Enlightenment was a spiritual catastrophe that could only be averted by returning to ‘traditional’ — that is, pre-modern — values. ⁵ There is an Italian saying that sums this up perfectly: ‘Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio’ — ‘Things were better back when they were worse.’

But that’s certainly not the line taken in this book. The achievements of the West are undisputed. The clock cannot be turned back. No one wants to ‘switch off’ the internet or abandon modern medicine; political concepts such as equality and universal human rights are deeply rooted in our mindset — and cannot easily be removed from it, thank goodness. This book is not a manifesto for abandoning liberal modernity as Guénon wanted. It is a call for a renewal. It presents guiding principles for a version of the West that should be more honest with itself and with others, and which, most importantly, needs to be more pragmatic and inclusive in the way it functions.

Ideas or interests?

Of course, this is not the first book to deal with the problems and contradictions of the West. The questions of what the West is, what it stands for, and whether it has a future have occupied researchers and commentators for decades. ⁶ Broadly speaking, there are three main schools of thought. The first is the left-wing, or ‘anti-imperialist’ tradition, represented in my native Germany by writers such as the commentator Michael Lüders, and in the United States by the linguist Noam Chomsky. ⁷ They see the supposedly altruistic ideas of the West as a mere pretext for enforcing its brutal economic and power-political interests. In their eyes, the real rogue states are not China, Russia, or Iran, but the US and its European junior partners.

In opposition to that is the liberal school of thought, which is exemplified by the historian Heinrich August Winkler in Germany and by his fellow historian Niall Ferguson in the English-speaking world. ⁸ Unlike the anti-imperialists, liberals believe the West is sincere about its ideas, that it is defined and held together by them, and that spreading those ideas is the West’s historic mission. That does not mean that the West never makes mistakes, or that it never pursues its own vested interests. But what distinguishes the West from other political philosophies, power alliances, or empires, according to Winkler, is that it is self-correcting. Precisely because the West is liberal and democratic, he argues, its mistakes have never been able to be swept under the carpet for long and — sooner or later — their consequences eventually had to be faced. Thus, Winkler rejects the claim of the anti-imperialists that Western values are nothing but a pretext, arguing that they are the basis for long-lasting resilience and adaptability. His optimistic conclusion is that ‘the corrective power of this project has […] proved that it is far from exhausted’. ⁹

The third position is that of the ‘realists’, who include the security policy researcher Carlo Masala in Germany and the political scientist John Mearsheimer in the US. ¹⁰ Like the idealists, the realists believe that Western politics is determined by modern, liberal ideas. But unlike the idealists, they believe this is a mistake. In their opinion, it is the modern, liberal mission that has plunged the West into so many unnecessary and costly adventures that its dominant position is now in question. In contrast to the anti-imperialists, they do not see this as a reason for the West to stop pursuing its interests. On the contrary, they believe the West should finally get serious about doing so. Masala believes that ‘realistic foreign and security policy […] begins with accepting the situation as it is and no longer chasing after the dream of a liberal world order’. ¹¹

While this book builds upon these three schools of thought, it advocates for a position which differs from them. The anti-imperialists are right when they say that the West pursues not only its values, but also its own interests. But it is not the case that Western values are just a pretext. As many of the chapters in this book will show, the desire to spread modern liberal ideas has often been a sincere — and enthusiastically pursued — concern of the West. When ideas and interests have come into conflict with each other, there has often been an attempt to reconcile the two. And in many cases, the supposed interests were defined by values (‘a united Europe’, ‘a democratic world’, ‘free trade’) to such an extent that the two could no longer be separated.

So the idealists are correct when they claim that Western values are the deciding factors more often than we think. But their notion that the West has had an exclusively positive effect on the world, or that its mistakes have always been corrected rapidly, is naïve. While it is true that democratic institutions have enabled Western countries to react more quickly to societal changes — for instance, by affording equal rights to women and minorities — mistakes made outside of the Western countries themselves have often taken decades, if not centuries, to be replaced by right and morally correct views. Colonialism, for example, from which Western countries profited for centuries, did not end because resistance to it developed within Western societies, or due to some self-corrective will, but because the colonies themselves fought against it.

All this means that the ‘realistic’ position comes closest to actuality in its description of the problem. With its naïve, values-driven politics, the West has often shot itself in the foot and, rather than correcting itself as the idealists hoped, it has often made its own mistakes worse. However, the conclusion the realists draw from this is not only wrong but also self-contradictory: if the West is a community of ideas, then declaring its own conceptual framework to be defunct would be tantamount to self-destruction. If Western nations were to pursue only their own interests, they would no longer have any common ground and in Europe especially, it would be ‘every country for itself’. Thus, the answer to the crisis of the West cannot lie in the West’s abandoning its own values, but rather — if anything — in reinventing them.

The demand expressed in this book, therefore, is something new: neither cynical anti-imperialism nor naïve idealism, but a realistic analysis of the current crisis without throwing the successful and identity-forming ideas of the West overboard. Most recently, the war in Ukraine has shown that many people want values-based politics, and that such a basis is what makes the implementation of joint policies possible at all. The ‘trick’ is to identify key problems and then solve them through the smart application of modern liberal means.

About this book

This book is the result of many years studying questions of foreign and security policy, although many of its chapters are concerned with political developments in the domestic, economic, or technological realm. The common thread is the modern liberal ideas that dominate thinking among the political elite in Western nations and the West’s attitude to new political challenges — whether they concern domestic, foreign, or economic policy. If the resulting analysis says anything about those ideas themselves, it is how all-encompassing their influence is, and how closely they are intertwined.

The book does not present grand ideas for a ‘new world order’ in the way that scholars of international relations usually do. Instead, it should be read as a short history of Western unipolarity, which demonstrates how liberal ideas have influenced Western thinking and, on many occasions, hindered the West’s own success. Its purpose is to re-examine that history, identify key mistakes, and — in doing so — make sure that they are not repeated.

In this context, the term ‘elite’ is a necessary, albeit ill-defined construct. The elites — or, depending on the context, ‘political elites’, ‘business elites’, or ‘security elites’ — are people who shape ideas on politically relevant issues, and thereby gain influence over the way decision-makers think, or over the decision-making process itself. In very rare cases, that happens in secret, but more often it takes the form of commentaries, media publications, interviews, speeches, or other interventions which are public, but often little-noticed by the general population.

As this book shows, there are different elites, who are not in agreement with one another at all times — or on all issues. In order to gain an idea of which views were influential at certain points in time, I carried out 75 semi-structured interviews with experts and decision-makers who witnessed or helped shape many of these debates. ¹² The picture these give of the ideas and sentiments involved may not be exhaustive, but it is more nuanced and more empirically well-founded than that seen in most books of this kind.

Then there is the view of Europe. Many books about the West concentrate almost exclusively on the role played by the United States, treating Europe as an appendage that can be dominated, dragged along, or ‘seduced’ as America chooses. However, although the US is undoubtedly the most important Western state when it comes to politics, economics, and military matters, European states, as well as Australia and New Zealand, have also played an important — and independent — role in many events. They are similarly based on modern liberal ideas to America and also try to stand up for those ideas with great self-confidence, albeit in a rather different way. It is for this reason that this book reflects the debates not only in the US, but also, where necessary, in other Western countries. ¹³

The main section of this book consists of 18 chapters, each dealing with a particular key event or development. Most follow a similar pattern: the first stage is to understand the debate on a given issue; then comes an understanding of the political decisions that followed from that debate; and — finally — the consequences of those decisions. As mentioned at the outset, this book is about ideas and their consequences.

The thematic chapters are grouped into four sections, structured chronologically. The first part — ‘Optimism’ — covers the 1990s and shows the initial optimism of elites about the future of the West. Rather than considering the new risks, they hoped for a world in which the West’s victory in the Cold War was a permanent one, where there were no more ideological opponents and where democracy and the market economy would prevail throughout. Their rude awakening came with the terror attacks of 11 September 2001.

The second part — ‘Hubris’ — is mainly about the defiant reaction to that shock, which was shaped by the West’s exaggerated self-confidence and led to the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One chapter deals with the global financial crisis, which spelled the end of the illusion that the West’s economic and financial system was superior.

The third part describes the resulting disillusionment in the first half of the 2010s. The clearest manifestation of this was the grossly inadequate response of the West to the Arab Spring, which drastically worsened the situation in Libya and Syria and further aggravated global challenges like terrorism and migration. Perhaps most important from the current perspective: during that period, Vladimir Putin’s revanchist, anti-liberal Russia was developing into an authoritarian counter-project to the liberal West, although its aggressive anti-Western campaign went totally unnoticed, especially by elites in Germany.

The final part — ‘Backlash’ — deals with the present situation: with the European project in crisis and the West tearing itself apart in a conflict between liberal and authoritarian forces; on the other hand, a rising China, whose technocratic version of the ‘authoritarian modern age’ appears to many to be stronger, more successful and more forward-looking than the West; and the existential challenges posed by climate change, to which neither the liberal nor the authoritarian version of modernity has so far managed to find a convincing response.

Can the West be saved? This book concludes that it can, but only by reinventing itself and ushering in a new and more sustainable modernity.

PART I

Optimism:

1990–2000

CHAPTER 1

The New World Order

THE IDEA OF A NEW WORLD ORDER AS PURSUED BY WESTERN POLITICIANS after the end of the Cold War was an optimistic liberal fantasy. The first person to attempt to claim it for himself was the US president, George H.W. Bush. In September 1990, less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and America’s victory in the Gulf War, he spoke of the dawn of a new era in which ‘the nations of the world […] can prosper and live in harmony’. After the end of the East–West conflict, Bush continued, there was an opportunity to create a world where ‘the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.’ ¹

Bush used the term ‘new world order’ almost 50 times in the months following that address, but its precise meaning was never clear. Bush’s comments were vague, and no policy or strategy document ever appeared defining the term in more detail. The ‘new world order’ suddenly stopped appearing in Bush’s statements in May 1991. ² Indeed, the phrase is practically absent from his foreign policy autobiography. ³ Bush’s security advisor and co-author, Brent Scowcroft, later said the expression was ‘a mere slogan’. ⁴

Apparently, the only people who knew what the term really meant were the conspiracy theorists. They interpreted the new world order to be some kind of globalist dictatorship allegedly sought by the Freemasons, Illuminati, Satanists, Jews, and other ‘dark powers’. During the nineties, they believed Bush’s aim was to abolish America and replace it with a world government. Flyers claimed millions of ‘American traitors’ had already been trained to be ‘slave-masters under the New World Order’. Every helicopter sighted anywhere in America was taken as the harbinger of an imminent invasion. ⁵ Speeches in which Bush promised partnership with Russia and a greater role for the United Nations were cited as proof.

However, the true meaning of Bush’s new world order lay not in its substance, but in its symbolism. From America’s point of view, the West had not just ended the Cold War, but won it. The people who took to the streets in Eastern Europe were not demonstrating for better, more efficient communism, but for freedom and democracy. To Bush and his allies, it seemed obvious that a ‘more Western’ world order would be a fairer and more just one. They saw no contradiction between American leadership and a stronger role for the United Nations. Although Bush and the US government did not yet have a clear idea of what it would look like, the new world order was an expression of liberal optimism, which shaped America’s geopolitical stance throughout the nineties.

And it wasn’t only the Americans. The optimistic idea that the newly developing world order would be both more peaceful and more democratic was also, and perhaps particularly, prevalent in Europe. Klaus Naumann, who was Chief of Staff in the armed forces of a newly reunified Germany, recalls:

The Cold War was an enormous strain. When it ended, the first feeling was one of huge relief: We did it! That was followed by a feeling of optimism, which culminated in the Paris Charter of November 1990. It framed the idea of a single ‘security zone from Vancouver to Vladivostok’ in which there would be a rejection of violent force, respect for national borders, freedom. That was when we in Europe hoped we really would be able to create a zone of understanding, of peace, in the wake of the tension of the Cold War. We all shared that hope. ⁶

The later chapters in this part of the book deal with the various policy areas where that optimism had a particularly powerful impact on political thinking: security policy, hopes for a process of transition towards democracy in Russia and China, technological progress, and belief in an end to terrorism. This chapter is about the vision itself — and the limits it came up against very early on, even on apparently friendly territory.

Free people

The liberal optimism of the 1990s was based on two widely held beliefs among the Western political elite. The first was confidence in liberal democracy’s inexorable march of triumph. One of the most prominent supporters of this idea was the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who published the provocatively titled article ‘The End of History?’ just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. ⁷ In his essay, Fukuyama explains that the collapse of communism was not just an accident or a concatenation of fortunate conditions, but the result of a historical dialectic. Over the course of two centuries, Fukuyama argues, liberal democracy had prevailed over monarchy, fascism, and communism as the best — and ultimate — form of government. According to Fukuyama, no system was better suited to satisfying all fundamental human needs. No other system could provide more efficient means of solving conflicts. And no other system had better expressed the pursuit of individual dignity and the quest for ‘mutual recognition’, already described in the philosophical dialectics of the 19th-century thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Fukuyama did not proclaim an end to violent conflict in the future. What he meant by ‘the end