Toward a Genuinely New World Order

Abstract

According to a school of thought, state sovereignty is dead-having been killed by globalization and allied forces. This book holds that the seriousness of the sovereign state's ailments might have been exaggerated, and the announcement of its death premature. The book interrogates the logic underpinning contemporary globalist determinism, and concludes that, based on the contradictory interests of parties to collective security arrangements, the world should not hasten to bury the sovereign state until the legitimacy of the supranational arrangements has been fully established. The book begins by examining perspectives in the study of international relations, and, due to their limitations, argues the case for a new approach. The interest contiguity theory, at the very least, attempts to make the study of international relations genuinely international. By acknowledging the existence of parallel and competing interests, the theory covers both the strong and the weak states. It also provides the tools for the empirical analysis of trends and issues in international relations. 8.2 Perspectives in the Study of International Relations: Focus on Three Competing Traditions There are broadly three contending paradigms in the study of international relations-the realist, the idealist, and the Kantian. While all of them, in varying degrees, lean toward sovereign states and international institutions, none has responded in any meaningful way to the individual yearning for freedom. Grotius, a foremost exponent of natural law theory, started off with moral values that are shared by all human beings. However, realizing that conflict is bound to arise over the interpretation of the values, he settled for a system most likely to check 131 M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality,