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Bringing in the New World Order: Liberalism, Legitimacy, and the United Nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Michael N. Barnett
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Abstract

The end of the cold war and the attendant security vacuum unleashed aflurryof intellectual activity and international commissions that reflected on the world that was being left behind and the world that should be created in its place. The reports under review are among the best and most influential of the lot. This article focuses on three issues raised by these reports. First, the portrait of the new international order offered by these reports is a liberal international order. Second, the concept of legitimacy appears in various guises, and the UN is considered the site for the legitimation of a particular order. Few international orders are ever founded or sustained by force alone, something well understood by the policymakers who drafted these reports and wisely heeded by international relations theorists who attempt to understand their actions and the international orders that they construct and sustain. Third, these reports envision the UN as an agent of normative integration. As such, it contributes to the development and maintenance of a liberal international order by increasing the number of actors who identify with and uphold its values.

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Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1997

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References

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18 This raises a potentially interesting, though generally unexplored, question: what role did the UN play in helping to manage the end of the cold war? As international relations theorists isolate various explanations, they tend to focus on the Soviet Union's “new thinking” and the emerging belief that the U.S. would not take advantage of its international retreat and domestic reforms. Was the easy fall of the Soviet Union facilitated by the existence of the UN? The U.S. and the Soviet Union worked jointly and multilaterally to end various regional conflicts, and they did so under the auspices of the UN. It is conceivable that by working through the UN, the Soviets (1) could rest assured that there was a forum that guaranteed them superpower status and decision-making power despite their declining stature (and perhaps caused the U.S. to give it more due than otherwise might have been the case, for example, in the negotiations preceding the Persian Gulf War in January 1991); and (2) learned through doing that the U.S. would not try to settle these and other conflicts in a manner immediately disadvantageous to the Soviets. As Roberts and Kingsbury note, Soviet premier Gorbachev increasingly and simultaneously stressed the necessity of a framework of international cooperation and the importance of the UN. See Roberts, and Kingsbury, , “The UN's Roles in International Society,” in Roberts, A. and Kingsbury, B., eds., United Nations, Divided World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4647Google Scholar.

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