7/2/2023 0 Comments New world order![]() ![]() The least we owe their children and our own is a world order based on rules more humane than: “We will interfere with a sovereign government when a) there is a lot of oil at stake, or b) they are trying to develop a nuclear bomb but haven’t yet succeeded, or c) the fight will be easy.”Īt first glance it looks difficult to set out guidelines for the new world order. ![]() But are we learning? The least we owe the ravaged Bosnians is some sense that suffering as terrible as theirs will never be permitted again, anywhere. Mistakes are understandable during a period of learning. We are making this world order up as we go along, and we are making mistakes. These principles are not yet operational at least they don’t yet add up to an “order.” Every new crisis - Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Russia - is treated differently. The new world order is trying to form around the principles of self-determination and international concern for the workability and decency of all governments. We should also have known the other lesson the world is now demonstrating, that when people lose the ability to choose their government, when they are treated brutally by their government, or when their government collapses, they need and want help from beyond their borders. Democracy is not a value limited to certain kinds of people, it is shared, it is human. Now there is hardly a nation in which people have not let it be known that they want to choose their leaders. Those were the dominant ideas of the old world order: cultural relativism and national sovereignty. ![]() As long as other governments stay within their own borders, they are not our problem. Anyway, whether other people like their leaders is no business of ours. Some may prefer to live under dictatorship. We who were born to democracy value it, but human beings are not all alike. ![]()
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