It's an entropic day in the neighborhood

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - 4:37 PM Share

Well, I'm in a fine mood this AM. Ahead of schedule on grading, lots of interesting stuff to blog about later this week. Yep, it's going to be a pretty good day.

Hey, I see that my friend Randy Schweller has an article in The National Interest. I wonder what it's about:

Contempoary international relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed in a time machine set for the third millennium. We live in an era in which unprecedented globalization and economic interdependence, liberal-democratic hegemony, nanotechnology, robotic warfare, the “infosphere,” nuclear proliferation and geoengineering solutions to climate change coexist with the return of powerful autocratic-capitalist states, of a new Great Game in Central Asia, of imperialism in the Middle East, of piracy on the high seas, of rivalry in the Indian Ocean, of a 1929-like market crash, of 1914-style hypernationalism and ethnic conflict in the Balkans, of warlords and failed states, of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, and of a new holy war waged by radical Islamists complete with caliphates and beheadings reminiscent of medieval times. In short, we live in a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The increasing disorder of our world will lead eventually to a sort of global ennui mixed with a disturbingly large dose of individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states. It is the result of the unstemmable tide of entropy. A world subsumed by the inexorable forces of randomness, tipped off its axis, swirling in a cloud of information overload.

Blackness.... aimlessness.... nothingness.... all of us are alone, spinning out of control.... depression.... resisting desperate urge to wear black, listen to Coldplay.

Seriously, the article is worth a read. I do think Schweller is a bit gloomier than myself. Some of what he characterizes as "entropy" I would characterize as "complexity" -- and complex entities still can create powerful forms of structures and constraint. Some of what he's talking about is, I suspect, more ephemeral than not.

Still, I'm in a slightly less good mood than I was a few minutes ago.

EXPLORE:INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, GLOBALIZATION, GREAT POWER POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

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BLUE13326

5:58 PM ET

December 16, 2009

Well, I hope it's more like

Well, I hope it's more like Gravity's Rainbow than the Crying of Lot 49, because I could kind of make sense out of Gravity, but Lot 49 seemed like just a mess. But, isn't this entropic state simply the logical outgrowth of multilateralism?

You have a bunch of states with their own interests and you're trying to forge policies despite this clash? And largely through failed multilateral institutions? And in a time of declining US influence?

I mean, the left has wanted for so long for us to become more like Europe, and we finally have a president who agrees with them, so why should it surprise anyone that the world begins treating us more like Europe, with minimal respect and largely ignored?

CICERO785

6:02 PM ET

December 16, 2009

Honestly Dan I don't think

Honestly Dan I don't think Coldplay would be the right music for the gloom. Radiohead and Elliott Smith come to mind as better fits (the former's "Spinning Plates" would get my vote). Or maybe The Microphones if you're seriously indie. It just seems as though something that has a slighly poppy edge (e.g., Coldplay) wouldn't work for this type of chaos.

PAPICEK

6:21 PM ET

December 16, 2009

well, what did we think...

the much vaunted multipolar world would feel like? This:

CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed in a time machine set for the third millennium. We live in an era in which unprecedented globalization and economic interdependence, liberal-democratic hegemony, nanotechnology, robotic warfare, the “infosphere,” nuclear proliferation and geoengineering solutions to climate change coexist with the return of powerful autocratic-capitalist states, of a new Great Game in Central Asia, of imperialism in the Middle East, of piracy on the high seas, of rivalry in the Indian Ocean, of a 1929-like market crash, of 1914-style hypernationalism and ethnic conflict in the Balkans, of warlords and failed states, of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, and of a new holy war waged by radical Islamists complete with caliphates and beheadings reminiscent of medieval times. In short, we live in a Thomas Pynchon novel.

Sounds much more like the era dominated by barons. In which political ways has the "liberalization" of the Washington Consensus turned back the clock to, say, 1509? In the face of globalization, is the state any more central than it was then? And was Erasmus a blogger?

DAN KERVICK

2:07 AM ET

December 17, 2009

Thanks for the Laugh, Dan

The violence in the world now pales in extent and comparison to what took place during the Cold War, and the overall level of threat and anxiety is lower. I suppose for the silly and morose Schweller, a world full of non-stop regional proxy wars, battling death squads and spy-vs-spy assassinations and shenanigans, a world that nevertheless made a sort of dumbed-down, bombed-out bipolar sense to Americans, is preferable to a less violent world that is more disorienting and confusing to American Cold War nostalgists, or to theory-obsessed IR academics. But let's not confuse a childlike hankering for paint-by-numbers moral clarity with the presence of actual chaos. If the world descends into real chaos, it won't look anything like the choppy, but generally pacific currents that prevail today.

CENTRAL EUROPEAN

11:59 AM ET

December 17, 2009

It is not the end of the world, it is the end of you...

As David Goldman famously put it (in Asia Times Online) "It is not the end of the world, it is the end of you". More seriously speaking, where we (American and Europeans) see chaos and decline, a promising and prosperous era is rising for the observers coming from Africa, Brazil, China and India.

ROB GENTLE

6:03 AM ET

December 18, 2009

Mr. Schweller is a century too late

In 1910, Henry Adams published A Letter to American Teachers of History. This had basically the same idea, taking the second law of thermodynamics and applying it to history.