What kind of role should Europe play in some “New World Order” after the Cold War? The answer depends on two other questions: What sort of Europe? What sort of World?
Europe order and world order have been intimately related throughout modern history. European states, it might be said, invented the world system. As early as the sixteenth century, they began conquering large parts o the rest of the world and tying them to Europe through intercontinental empires. Most of the time, Europe’s imperialism did not so much create a single integrated global system as imprint Europe’s own divisions on the world at large. That was because the continent itself was not unified but pluralistic, a “Europe of states” that merely extend its own contentious disunity into the rest of the world. Struggles for global empires were intimately related to struggles for predominance on the continent itself. As we know, no European state ever achieved predominance on the continent, at least for long. Since Europe has never united, the world dominated by Europeans and their rivalries was also never united.
One period was a major exception – the so called Pax Britannica of the mid nineteenth century, when European states accepted a high degree of global economic integration, fostered by a series of international regimes, in particular free trade and the Gold standard. Politically and economically, this integrated period was based on British predominance in the world beyond Europe, together with the absence of any effective candidate for hegemony on the continent itself. This state of affairs was the result of Britain….