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. 8In adopting this critical stance, Grotius combined two of the definingcharacteristics of modernity, a claim of moral superiority associated with thespecific identity of  the Christian world that should inform political lifewherever possible and an implicit deprecation of non-Christian societies as thevast domain of  barbarous races. 9 The first impulse led to the idea that therelations among states are to some extent governed by law, while the secondgave a sort of underpinning to the Eurocentric hegemonic conceptions of worldorder and hierarchical relations between Western and non-Western peoples thatcame to flourish in the colonial age.Such liberal rationalizations for the politicsand structures of domination were later produced by several of the most admiredand influential Enlightenment figures: among others, Hegel, Kant, and JohnStuart Mill.None of these were fully implemented or led to humane governancefor the peoples of the world: International law was too weak and Eurocentric tocontain the passions of nationalism or dreams of empire, and the validation ofcolonial rule amounted to little more than a rationalization for the exploitationand domination of non-Western peoples.In many instances, it generated deeppatterns of ethnic resentment and frustration based on divide and rule tactics thatresurfaced in the form of intense intrasocietal violence in postcolonial settings,especially Africa.There have been attempts in the recent past to associate this normativeorientation toward political reality with an emergent and evolving world orderthat had within it the potential to achieve humane governance for the entireworld.Hedley Bull, an influential Oxford professor of international law, depictedan international society of states that sustained a balance between sovereign rule136 " THE DECLINING WORLD ORDERwithin territorial limits and a kind of prudent geopolitical moderation,safeguarded by the benevolence of leading military powers in the relationsamong states, a type of world order described by Bull as an  anarchicalsociety. 10 Myres McDougal, the founder of the New Haven School ofJurisprudence and International Law, together with a group of collaborators,depicted the spread of Enlightenment values through the commitment todemocratic types of public order systems as an evolving foundation for a humaneintercivilizational pattern of governance that had the capacity to produce, bystages, peaceful and equitable governance structures of benefit to the entireworld.11Both of these normative approaches to the future were premised on thepersistence of the states system as the basis of world order, the role of power inmanaging relations among states, and were in these respects rooted in the anti-utopian traditions of political realism.12 Additionally, building on the heritage ofWoodrow Wilson and the experiments in world organization represented by theLeague of Nations and the United Nations, there emerged a more utopian strainof secular thought that fundamentally believed that the only secure andlegitimate form of world order depended on the establishment of juridicaluniversalism in the form of world government, a body of thought that came to beassociated with world federalism and is probably still best represented by thereform proposals of Grenville Clark and Louis B.Sohn in World Peace throughWorld Law.13Even the World Order Models Project (WOMP), with its explicit under-takingto consider the diverse world order perspectives representative of the leadingregions and ideologies active in the world of the 1980s and 1990s, failed toinclude in any serious or systematic manner the relevance of religion, although itdid acknowledge that world order values, widely shared on an intercivilizationalbasis, provided the normative framing of any successful project to establish, oreven to envisage, humane global gov ernance.14 In this sense, although notexplicitly religious or utopian, WOMP is easily reconcilable with inclusivistunderstandings of religion and secular utopianism [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]