The Real World Order: Zones of Peace, Zones of Turmoil, by Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky (Chatham House, 212 pp., $25)
MANY a pundit has offered a blueprint for the post—Cold War order. But wrapping our minds around the formlessness and contradictoriness of today’s world isn’t easy, and most of the would-be George Kennans have fallen flat. Mr. Singer and Mr. Wildavsky are an exception. Presented in a little book that is a flash of clarity and illumination, their basic insight is to distinguish between parts of the world in which different modes of analysis apply. These are the “zones of peace,” consisting mainly of the industrial democracies, whose prospects for prosperity and security are brighter than ever, and the “zones of turmoil” in the developing world, where misery, anarchy, and bloodshed still quite obviously reign. Mr. Singer and Mr. Wildavsky view the latter with compassion, offer some intelligent analysis, but see no realistic policy by which the West can bring stability to these regions. Ghettoization and fatalism are not their message, however. On the contrary, they take a longer-term historical perspective and see prospects for an evolution toward a more decent global order. The book is a tribute to both authors’ intellectual boldness and a fitting remembrance of Aaron Wildavsky, whose recent untimely death deprives us of a great political mind.
Comments