Order Wars and Floating Balance: How the Rising Powers Are Reshaping Our Worldview in the Twenty-First Century(Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics)

A sense of order has irreversibly retreated at the turn of the twenty-first century with the rise of such ancient civilizations as China and India and the militant resurgence of Islamic groups. The United States and like-minded states want to maintain the once-dominant international and global order buttressed by a set of mainly Western value systems and institutions. Nevertheless, challengers have sought to redraw the international and global order according to their own ideas and preferences, while selectively accommodating and taking advantage of the established order. Because of this, the entire world is teetering on the brink of an order war. This book is a synthesis of two separate bodies of thoughts, from Western and East Asian ideas and philosophies respectively. The authors deploy the major ideas of key Western and East Asian thinkers to shed a new light on their usefulness in understanding the transition of global order. They locate new ideas to overcome the contradictions of the late modern world and provide some ideational building blocks of a new global order. The new concepts proposed are: recognition between the great civilizations; a harmony and floating balance between and within contrasts—individual versus community, freedom versus equality—;and mediation between friends and foes. As the former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin put it, "you don’t need to make peace with your friends, you have to make peace with your foes." The values of the West as well as that of the East cannot survive in a globalized world by taking them as absolute, but only by balancing them to those of the other great civilizations of the world.

Table of Contents:
Preface Prologue: The Birth Pains of a New Global Order Part 1: The Order War 1.The Order Wars in the Twenty-First Century 2.Between Lyotard and Hegel: Beyond Kant and the Binary Logic 3.The End of Western Modernity? Part 2: Floating Balance 4.Clausewitz’s ‘Wondrous Trinity’ and Floating Balance 5.Clausewitz, Polarity, and a Different Dialectics: A New Beginning Part 3: Harmony 6.Harmony between Freedom and Equality 7.Confucian Harmony and East Asia’s Mega-Discourses for Governance Part 4: Recognition 8.Marx’s Reversal of Hegel 9.Between Clausewitz and Hegel: Revitalizing the Struggle for Recognition 10.Between Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt: Mediation between Friends and Foes Epilogue: Sharing Power in a New Global Order

About the Author :
Andreas Herberg-Rothe is Senior Lecturer at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Key-young Son is Humanities Korea Professor at the Asiatic Research Institute, Korea University

Review :
'Drawing on Clausewitz, Confucius and other East Asian and European theorists, this capacious book's call for recognition of differences among different communities moves beyond binary thought and the conceptual and political cul-de-sac of modernity. This is an ambitious and thought-provoking effort addressing a political problem that none of us can any longer neglect.' - Peter J. Katzenstein, Professor of International Studies, Cornell University, USA 'An important and timely book to our understanding of international order, in particular when the rising powers in the power transition process are non-Western countries. Neatly framed, balanced, informed, lucid and important, this book with the painstaking efforts convincingly deconstructs the common sense on the incommensurability between the West and the Rest, regardless such rivalry is based on either historical or cultural grounds. This is particularly meaningful to Chinese IR which has long been dominated by the parochial position on the heterogeneous nature between Chinese and Western culture and hence has spent thirty years on Chinese IR theory. This book has pointed out a new direction of theoretical studies for both Western and non-Western IR scholars.' - Lu Peng, Research Fellow, Nanjing University, China 'Herberg-Rothe and Son provide a tantalizing mixture of philosophic insights applied to realist problems. They offer promising pathways around the binary formulations that so easily foster international conflicts.' - T.J. Pempel, Jack M. Forcey Professor, University of California, Berkeley 'Andreas Herberg-Rothe and Key-young Son revisit the legacy of great thinkers of Europe and East Asia—Hegel, Clausewitz, Confucius, Schmitt and Arendt— in search of fresh ideas to overcome seemingly intractable contradictions of the contemporary era. This book, which blends political philosophy with international relations theory, is no easy reading, but it is certainly thought-provoking and intellectually rewarding.' - Artyom Lukin, Deputy Director for Research, School of Regional and International Studies, Far Eastern Federal University, Russia 'All civilisations, it can be rightly argued, stand to gain from pondering the messages of this volume.' - Beatrice Heuser, Professor of International Relations (Politics), School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Glasgow