New world order (politics)

The term "new world order" refers to a new period of history evidencing dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power in international relations. Despite varied interpretations of this term, it is primarily associated with the ideological notion of world governance only in the sense of new collective efforts to identify, understand, or address global problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve.

Quotes

• The peace conference has assembled. It will make the most momentous decisions in history, and upon these decisions will rest the stability of the new world order and the future peace of the world.
  • Letter from association president M. C. Alexander in the journal International Conciliation (January 1919)

• There are two rules of war that have not yet been invalidated by the new world order. The first rule is that the belligerent nation must be fairly sure that its actions will make things better; the second rule is that the belligerent nation must be more or less certain that its actions won't make things worse.
  • Martin Amis, "The Palace of the End", The Guardian (4 March 2003)

• Today Europe can propose the principles and rules that will shape a new global order.
  • José Manuel Durão Barroso, (21 October 2008), European Parliament, in Sarkozy calls for EU "Economic Government" (also includes: Barroso, Farage, de Villiers).

• We are indeed living historic moments. The kind of occasion where the crisis calls in to question all certainties and minds are more open to change. These are very special moments and they are not happening everyday. We have to understand that it’s really one of those moments where there is some higher plasticity and then where we can make a real change
  • José Manuel Durão Barroso, (21 October 2008)

• The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge: a new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.
  • George H. W. Bush, address to a joint session of Congress (11 September 1990)

• The old world order changed when this war-storm broke. The old international order passed away as suddenly, as unexpectedly, and as completely as if it had been wiped out by a gigantic flood, by a great tempest, or by a volcanic eruption. The old world order died with the setting of that day's sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow.
  • Nicholas Murray Butler in a speech to the Union League of Philadelphia (28 November 1915), printed in A World in Ferment (1918)

• Two centuries ago our forefathers brought forth a new nation; now we must join with others to bring forth a new world order.
  • Henry Steele Commager writing for the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia in A Declaration of INTERdependence (1976) printed in We the Other People (1976) by Philip Sheldon Foner, ed.

• The hope for the foreseeable future lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions … as the necessity for cooperation is perceived by the relevant nations.… In short, the "house of world order" will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down…. [A]n end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.
  • Richard Gardner, "The Hard Road to World Order", in Foreign Affairs (April 1974), p. 558

• Parallel with the process of wars, hostility, and alienation of peoples and countries, another process, just as objectively conditioned, was in motion and gaining force: The process of the emergence of a mutually connected and integral world. Further world progress is now possible only through the search for a consensus of all mankind, in movement toward a new world order.… The world community must learn to shape and direct the process in such a way as to preserve civilization, to make it safe for all and more pleasant for normal life.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, address to the UN General Assembly (7 December 1988), printed in Mikhail Gorbachev : Prophet of Change (2011)
• When Churchill and Roosevelt state that they want to build up a new social order, later on, it is like a hairdresser with a bald head recommending an unfortunate hair-restorer. These men, who live in the most socially backward states, have misery and distress enough in their own countries to occupy themselves with the distribution of foodstuffs.... We are allied with strong peoples, who in the same need are faced with the same enemies. The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots-that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.
  • Adolf Hitler, Speech Declaring War Against the United States (1941)

• My country's history, Mr. President, tells us that it is possible to fashion unity while cherishing diversity, that common action is possible despite the variety of races, interests, and beliefs we see here in this chamber. Progress and peace and justice are attainable. So we say to all peoples and governments: Let us fashion together a new world order.
  • Henry Kissinger, address for the UN General Assembly (22 September 1975), printed in A Dangerous Place (1980) by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

• NAFTA will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War, and the first step toward an even larger vision of a free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere.... NAFTA is not a conventional trade agreement, but the architecture of a new international system.
  • Henry Kissinger, "With NAFTA, U.S. finally creates a new world order" in The Los Angeles Times (18 July 1993), p. M2

• The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf's conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.
  • Karl Marx, in The Holy Family (1845).

• The problems with Russia are not just NATO expansion. There were also a process that began with the second Bush administration of withdrawing from all of the arms control — almost all of the arms control agreements that we had concluded with the Soviet Union, the very agreements that had brought the first Cold War to an end.... In effect, what the United States did after the end of the Cold War was they reversed the diplomacy that we had used to end the Cold War, and started sort of doing anything, everything the opposite way. We started, in effect, trying to control other countries, to bring them into what we called the “new world order,” but it was not very orderly. And we also sort of asserted the right to use military whenever we wished. We bombed Serbia in the ’90s without the approval of the U.N. Later, we invaded Iraq, citing false evidence and without any U.N. approval and against the advice not only of Russia but of Germany and France, our allies. So, the United States — I could name a number of others — itself was not careful in abiding by the international laws that we had supported.
  • Jack F. Matlock Jr., Ex-U.S. Ambassador to USSR: Ukraine Crisis Stems Directly from Post-Cold War Push to Expand NATO, Democracy Now!, February 17, 2022

• In the final analysis, the South's plea for justice, equity, and democracy in the global society cannot be dissociated from its pursuit of these goals within its own societies. Commitment to democratic values respect for fundamental rights—particularly the right to dissent, fair treatment for minorities, concern for the poor and underprivileged, probity in public life, willingness to settle disputes without recourse to war—all these cannot but influence world opinion and increase the South's chances of securing a new world order.
  • Julius Nyerere, The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South Commission (August 1990)

• It's a true New Deal at a global scale that is necessary. An ecological and economical New Deal. In the name of France, I call all the states to gather, in order to forge the new world order of the twenty first century.
  • C'est un véritable New Deal à l'échelle planétaire qui est nécessaire. Un New Deal écologique et économique. Au nom de la France, j'appelle tous les États à se réunir, pour fonder le nouvel ordre mondial du XXIème siècle […]
  • French president Nicolas Sarkozy, in a speech before UN general assembly, (25 September 2007)

• We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.
  • Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in "Back to the Womb? Isolationism's New Threat" in Foreign Affairs (1995 Jul/Aug)

• We believe we are creating the beginning of a new world order coming out of the collapse of the US-Soviet antagonisms.
  • Brent Scowcroft, in "Bush's Talk of 'New World Order': Foreign Policy Tool or Mere Slogan?" in The Washington Post (1991 May 26) on page A31

• A great war requires some great military powers, ready and eager to risk all. The New World Disorder lacks the muscle for conventional warfare. The New World Order has plenty of muscle but a problem finding foes to war with.
  • Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002), St. 7: "Mere Oblivion", ISBN 0679463224, p. 258

• The minds of our comfortable and influential ruling-class people refuse to accept the plain intimation that their time is over, that the Balance of Power and uncontrolled business methods cannot continue, and that Hitler, like the Hohenzollerns, is a mere offensive pustule on the face of a deeply ailing world. To get rid of him and his Nazis will be no more a cure for the world's ills than scraping will cure measles. The disease will manifest itself in some new eruption. It is the system of nationalist individualism and uncoordinated enterprise that is the world's disease, and it is the whole system that has to go.
  • H. G. Wells, The New World Order (1940), Ch. 1: "The End of an Age" (p. 10 in the 2007 reprint, ISBN 1599868431

• Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by the frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it.
  • H. G. Wells, The New World Order (1940), Ch. 12: "World Order in Being"

• The World Bank's ... job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force... Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering... The World Bank engages in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia’s President Putin said that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia’s population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF.
  • Michael Hudson quoted in The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness, - Bonnie Faulkner, CounterPunch, (5 July 2019)

• It’s a tectonic shift [the decline of the American empire and the rise of another one]. Let’s look at this from Russia’s point of view. This is everything that Russia has been aiming at and insisting upon for the last five years. President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have been leading the understanding that the world needs to be de-dollarized, that the United States has declared an economic war against Russia, China and their allies, really against Eurasia. So, in effect, by drawing the sanctions — not only the sanctions — but the most important thing is by seizing Russia’s foreign holdings in the United States, its treasury bond holdings and the bank deposits. What the United States has done itself is exactly what both Lavrov and President Xi of China have been saying the world must move towards. They’ve been saying we must have a multinational world, multipolar world. We must be de-dollarized. We must cut free of the dollar and isolate, protect ourselves from the United States’ ability to use sanctions, to interrupt our economic activity, to use oil to threaten any country that doesn’t follow U.S. policy from having their energy reserves cut off, to protect countries that don’t produce their own food from being able to buy food and feed themselves... So everybody thought for the last five years: How will Russia and China and their allies, India, Iran, create this new world order? Well, the United States... has destroyed itself.
  • Michael Hudson, Grab Bag Imperialism, (31 March 2022)

• So they get it, the game is over. And it’s not over because Russia and China and India and Iran defeated America. It was the self-defeating policies of this blindly arrogant, greedy, Republican, Democratic, deep state philosophy.
  • Michael Hudson, Grab Bag Imperialism, (31 March 2022)