Especially for RiskRecon friends, followers, and associates – a preview of Emerging New World (dis)Order’s Preface…
Emerging New World (dis)Order
By Dr Kingsley Makhubela, Dr Petrus de Kock
Preface – The War of the Worlds?
“There will be no day of days then when a new world order comes into being. Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives, discover unsuspected problems and go on to new adventures. No man, no group of men, will ever be singled out as its father or founder. For its maker will be not this man nor that man nor any man but Man, that being who is in some measure in every one of us. World order will be, like science, like most inventions, a social product, an innumerable number of personalities will have lived fine lives, pouring their best into the collective achievement.”
H.G. Wells – The New World Order (1940)
While some may see a book, in whatever form it may come, digital as eBook only, or in paper form, as a concluded project, in this case RiskRecon would like to warn, in the very first lines, that what follows below is but the beginning of a conversation.
It will be shown that not only is globalisation dead (at least the post-Cold War manifestation thereof), but that the world system has been torn in two, and how, in a few months of the year 2022, in a dramatic twist of historical fate, hard fought for integration of continents, markets and peoples, since 1990, has been put in reverse gear, and is fast becoming a memory from an era that is passing. As ‘that world’ passes in the rearview mirror, instead, Eurasia integrates in response to- and in solidarity with, the Russian Federation, against NATO in particular, and the collective ‘West’ in general.
As will be argued, H.G. Wells’ reflection on the need for a New World Order, is anchored in his up close and personal horrendous experience of living through two world wars, and in so doing, seeing assumptions of both ‘order,’ and ‘peace,’ challenged in the most brutal ways.
Hence H.G. Wells’ search for a ‘New World Order’. In these pages you will find that our search, in turn, aims to find and profile evidence not of a Wellsian New World Order emerging, but of a New World (dis)Order, as the dream of a unified globalised system lies shattered on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine.
As we show in our analysis of morbid systemic, governance, social- and political phenomena in the South African context, these geopolitical dynamics have deep and substantive impacts on the stability outlook for nations in the global South – be they in the Asia Pacific, Latin American, or African and Middle Eastern environments.
Nevertheless, before we come to today’s tussle between global war and peace, H.G. Wells wrote novels that can in today’s parlance be described as science fiction. His first book, The Time Machine, published in 1895 became a huge success, and other of his works include – The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).
The War of the Worlds, probably the most well-known novel by Wells, relates the story of an alien invasion of planet earth. This novel was adapted to radio play format by Orson Welles. It aired on the ominous night of Halloween, 1938.
Orson Welles’ adaptation of War of the Worlds went on air, claiming aliens had landed in New Jersey (Biography.com, 2017). This broadcast put the proverbial cat among the pigeons, as the ‘make believe’ of fiction ended up inspiring real-world panic in towns, and cities across the USA.
People actually believed New Jersey, the USA, and by extension the planet, was indeed being invaded by aliens from Mars, in a real-time radio broadcast.
But, H.G. Wells was also an ardent political and social commentator. In 1940, within the first year of the Second World War, a small unassuming non-fiction book entitled – The New World Order – Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort of world a world at peace will have to be, appears.
It should be noted though that the expression, ‘New World Order,’ has in the course of the twentieth century, up until this very day, attained a peripheral conspiratorial meaning. This leads those who are aware of this trope, to use it only in hushed tones, fearing social and political censure as conspiracy theory nutcases, or, Alex Jones lackeys.
Few openly talk, or write about the idea of globalist leaders aspiring to the creation of a new order, based on a form of consolidated ‘world government.’ However, at the same time, this trope features as central pivot for world leaders, such as George H.W. Bush, to engage with- and project as an inevitable future wherein a New World Order will be birthed, having dominion over all continents and nations encamped on planet earth. In several speeches from the early 1990s, Bush raises the idea that the world has an opportunity, following on the Cold War – to realise this so-called ‘New World Order.’ Two examples follow below.
We thus find the trope ‘New World Order’ caught between powerful leaders deploying it as desirable vision of development in the global political, economic and social order on the one hand. While, on the other, it is treated and suppressed as mere ‘conspiracy theory.’ However this is not what concerns us here.
We bring H.G. Wells into the discussion due to the fact that some sections and reflections on war, history, and the future of human society, from his book published in 1940, will, if read today, send shivers of recognition down the spine.
Former President George Bush, from the 1990s, announcing the arrival of a New World Order.
On 29 January, 1991, in the State of the Union address:
“What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind–peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. . .”
(George Bush 1, 1991)
On 16 January, 1991, while announcing allied military action in the Persian Gulf (Gulf War 1) the trope of the New World Order, once again appear in a speech:
“We have in this past year made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and cold war. We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order–a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful–and we will be–we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfil the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders. . .”
(George Bush 2, 1991)
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H.G. Wells (1940:10) explains that before the outbreak of World War I, 1914, his generation had thought, very wrongly, “…that war was dying out.” Wells argues that his generation imagined that the Franco-German War (1870-71), and the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78), had been the ‘final conflict’ between great powers. In his words:
“…that now there was a Balance of Power sufficiently stable to make further major warfare impracticable… We believed war was shrinking to mere expeditionary affairs on the outskirts of civilisation, a sort of frontier police business.”
The above words frame one of the first potential historical parallels between the era H.G. Wells writes about, and the short three decades that have passed since the end of the Cold War, and the abdication of the Soviet Union from a planetary ideological death race.
In the absence of direct major power conflicts, or military confrontations, civil wars and insurgencies in Africa, and even major power military interventions in countries such as Iraq by both Bush senior, and junior, can in Wells’ words be described as, “…expeditionary affairs on the outskirts of civilisation, a sort of frontier police business.”
How often has the concept of the USA as ‘world policeman’ not come up in commentary on its unilateral military interventions in the affairs of regions, and nations around the planet? This means, in the post-Cold War period, like in the time of H.G. Wells, major powers were broadly speaking ‘at peace’ with each other, while dealing with conflicts on other continents, and within other nations, as a sort of frontier police business.
Since 1990, assumptions of market integration, technological advancement, unfettered movement of finance, goods, trade and people around the planet also stirred a rather simplistic assumption that due to this inter-dependence, intra-trade, and globalisation- major power rivalry, especially direct military confrontation and conflict, has been relegated to the dustbin of history.
To Francis Fukuyama’s notion in the 1990s that liberal-democratic nations were not only victorious in the Cold War, but that they’d reached the ‘End of History’, the historian Eric Hobsbawm has a short answer, being:
“The journalists and philosophical essayists who detected ‘the end of history’ in the fall of the Soviet Empire were wrong.” (Eric Hobsbawm, 1994:9)
Similarly to the era in which Wells lived, the period between 1990 and 2022 also inspired the thought that a ‘Balance of Power’ exists between major powers, and that there are more disincentives to major power armed conflict, than there are reasons to deploy armed force against each other. Wells presents the following mind map:
“In 1914 hardly anyone in Europe or America below the age of fifty had seen anything of war in how own country. The world before 1900 seemed to be drifting steadily towards a tacit but practical unification. One could travel without a passport over the larger part of Europe; the Postal Union delivered one’s letters uncensored and safely from Chile to China… In the United States you could go for days and never see a military uniform. Compared with to-day that was, upon the surface at any rate, an age of easy-going safety and good humour. Particularly for the North Americans and the Europeans.”
The same can be said about the current era, to some extent. While the world has been rocked by several internal armed conflicts, regional wars, and major power interventions in ‘other countries’ (Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya to name but a select few), the world has most certainly, since the demise of the Soviet Union, not faced any imminent threat of major powers in direct military confrontation with each other.
As in Wells’ period, the post-1990 world was also seen as, “…drifting towards a tacit but practical unification.” That is until the year 2022 came to turn not only a generational assumption (of peace and global integration) on its head, but, additionally ushering in significant and potentially permanent changes to the fundamental structure of the world system itself.
Being shocked out of imaginative assumptions that ‘war is dead’ by two world wars, H.G. Wells, in his book New World Order, argues that the only way world peace can be achieved is through a subordination of what he calls nationalist individualism. Nationalist individualism pertains to the nation-state, but, at the same time Wells argues that in order for world peace to emerge, unbridled ‘free markets’ will also have to be brought to heel under a global socialist-inspired regime.
This means H.G. Wells identifies nationalist individualism, and free-for-all free market profiteering as what he calls the ‘world’s disease’. The cure, according to him: a unified global system, under one government, based on socialist principles and a new form of collectivism (H.G. Wells, 1940: 17).
While H.G. Wells and George H.W. Bush may be removed from each other by decades, they shared the trope of a ‘New World Order’ – an ‘order’ promising world peace. It is our contention in pages below that the trope, New World Order, whether by design, or by accident, was fundamentally fractured in the year 2022. Hence our contention that we are living in an era not only of turbulence, but the emergence of a New World (dis)Order as nations and regions are, as we speak reconfiguring global trade, reassessing foreign policies, and preparing for the re-emergence of a block-based bifurcated world with a Cold War 2.0 in the making as well.
Furthermore, we explore how these sudden sharp global shocks are accelerating processes of State Failure, State Collapse, and State Disintegration the world over. The latter theme is articulated through an in-depth analysis of indicators of state failure at a local government level in South Africa, complicated, and compounded by dynamics of friction and fragmentation in the ruling African National Congress.
From local- to global (dis)Orders, we present a case for an urgent need to re-think what it is we think we know about the world system, and how it is changing dynamically and dramatically before our eyes with as yet multiple unpredictable outcomes.
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