Andreas Herberg-Rothe

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.

Auschwitz is still the greatest challenge for philosophy and reason, rather than representing their end, as Lyotard most prominently seems to imply. The article shows how the evolution of the question of dialectics from Hegel to postmodernism must be thought in relation to Auschwitz. The critics of reason and Hegel such as Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault are highlighting the break between reason and unspeakable suffering, for which Auschwitz is the most prominent symbol, but reintroduce ‘behind’ the scene much more speculative concepts than Hegel himself (Plasma by Lyotard, khora by Derrida and power as an absolute by Foucault). Adorno for his part thought that only a negative dialectics could address the problem adequately but transferred the unity of opposites just in the realm of utopia. But there is no negative (Adorno) or positive dialectics, only dialectics which mediates and posit the positive and the negative on a higher level.

In an attempt to capture the unexpected forms taken by excessive violence since the epochal years of 1989-91, Robert Kaplan has argued that these developments indicate a coming anarchy, which has to be prevented. This statement is based on the assumption that the level at which wars are being fought has shifted from the level of the state to a 'lower' level. It is argued that in most of these conflicts, non-state actors are involved on at least one side. The motivation and goals of these non-state actors seem not to follow political or ideological imperatives but have other sources, which may be ethnic, economic, or the fact that violence has become an autonomous force. Things would look different, however, if this diffusion were no more than a transitional phase after the breakdown of the polar order of the Cold War. The paradigm of the wars to come would then be determined not by the order/anarchy antithesis, but by the conflict between different conceptions of order. Finally, I argue that there will be a re-politicization of war and violence in the long run.

Rather than discarding Clausewitz’s theory of war in response to the revolutionary changes in modern warfare, this article articulates a broader theory of war based on his concept of the “wondrous trinity,” identifying it as his true legacy. The author shows that the concept of trinitarian war attributed to Clausewitz by his critics, which seems to be applicable only to wars between states, is a caricature of Clausewitz’s theory. He goes on to develop Clause- witz’s theory that war is composed of the three tendencies of violence/force, fighting, and the affiliation of the combatants to a warring community. Each war can be analyzed as being composed of these three tendencies and their opposites.

Since the 1990s various influential authors have argued that Clausewitz’s theory is no longer applicable, not only in relation to contemporary conflicts, but also in general. Some have suggested that it is harmful and even self-destructive to continue to use this theory as the basis for understanding and as a guide to political action, given the revolutionary changes in war and violence occurring in the world’s communities.2 Clausewitz, it is proposed, was only concerned with war between states employing regular armies, whereas conflict today mainly involves non-state actors.