Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Q and A: Transitioning to a new world order with U of A professor Andy Knight

Hamdi Issawi - 
Edmonton Journal

Thinking about the future of global governance, University of Alberta political science professor Andy Knight has his eye on the international stage and the complex, interconnected pieces holding it together. But for how long?


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Prof. Andy Knight is a political science professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Currently the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in International and Area Studies at Yale University, Knight is spending the academic year south of the border to research and write a book on the subject, tentatively titled International Organization Today, which posits that the world as we know it is in a transitional state marked by uncertainty, disorder and fragmentation as it shifts to a new world order.

In a telephone interview with Postmedia, Knight said he’s still keeping tabs on current events both foreign and domestic — from the streets of downtown Ottawa to Ukraine’s borders — noting signs of this transitional state, which he plans to explore, among other ideas, in the upcoming book.

Is it a stretch to call the current Russia-Ukraine crisis a sign of this transition to a new world order?

Not really. One of the premises I begin with is that we are living in an interregnum — a period of time when there is a transition from one world order to the next. I’m of the view that we are living in that kind of transition right now, from the 1945 world order, which we’ve come to embrace and understand quite well, to a different kind of a world order that we haven’t yet seen the full outlines of.

This period of interregnum is one that’s filled with flux, uncertainty, disorder and violence. If you go into history, you’ll find that almost every single transitional period is also accompanied by this kind of fragmentation and violence and disequilibrium.

What you see happening between Russia and Ukraine is simply one symptom of that broader pattern, and part of this transitional moment. The reason it’s difficult to resolve is we don’t have a power that’s strong enough to control Russia right now. The United States is very reluctant to have a military confrontation with Russia for obvious reasons. They both hold nuclear weapons and could cause a major problem if those two countries decided to utilize those weapons.

What about closer to home, like the convoy protest in Ottawa?

You have to ask yourself, ‘What else is driving this?’ Over time, the demonstrations have been morphing from anti-vaccine mandate protests to anti-Trudeau or anti-government protests. They’re dissatisfied with the government and the way the government handles these things.

But there’s an element of right-wing political violence that’s been creeping into this movement. We saw the arrests of some of the leaders or architects of this convoy, and you get a sense that there is something else behind it that’s a little bit more sinister.

It could be anti-government, which means that it could be closer to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C. There could also be anti-immigrant and antisemitic sentiments because you see the swastikas and the different flags of white supremacy.

There are a lot of things happening, but the main thing I see is this tension and a lack of civility. They talk about freedom, but it’s freedom for themselves, not freedom for the other people around them.

This whole thing is an indication of the kind of fragmentation I’m talking about, where all ideas are being questioned, forms of governance are being questioned, the material capabilities of people and businesses are being challenged. This seems to be an indication that the old world order — from 1945 to the present — is beginning to die, and the new one is emerging somehow.

So the question would be, “How best can we shape that new world order?”

When did this period of transition begin?

I think it begins around 1989-1990, at the end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union fell apart and the Berlin Wall came down. These are all signs that something was changing. Involvement in Afghanistan was one of the biggest factors in the fall of the Soviet Union. It overstretched itself, and big powers tend to do that.

We went from a bipolar structure in the world to a unipolar system in the sense that the United States became the global policeman, and the go-to country for countries who wanted to get social and economic development and loans, et cetera.

The new challenge is this competition between the United States and China. There’s a kind of movement towards another bipolar arrangement, whereby the United States is declining in its influence at the same time that China seems to be rising.

What will the next world order look like?

We don’t know what the end picture is going to look like. What I can do, though, is identify the elements that are creating this new world order.

We’ve gotten a lot of agreement around things like sustainable development goals and getting people out of poverty. In 1945 there wasn’t a lot of attention paid to that, but it has now become a big issue, along with the environment and idea of building resilient health-care systems to address pandemics.

The creation of parallel institutions to the United Nations is another one, because not everything gets done within the UN. Sometimes you have to do things outside that system, so we’ve created a number of bodies like the G7 (or G8 dependent on whether Russia is in or not).

This changing environment within which this new world order is emerging, and institutions that have been developed, is a little different. The ideas created to undergird these institutions may be a little different, too. Who knows what the next dominant ideology will be?

That’s why I keep calling for things like justice, equity, fairness, diversity and inclusion — I think these represent, in large part, the best of people. Let’s see if we can focus on the more positive things, and maybe — in our social construction of this new world order — construct a world that’s much better than the one we’re living in right now.

Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

hissawi@postmedia.com

@hamdiissawi

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