From Empire to Community by Amitai Etzioni

From the Publisher

Whether one favors the U.S. global projection of force or is horrified by it, the question stands - where do we go from here? What ought to be the new global architecture? Amitai Etzioni follows a third way, drawing on both neoconservative and liberal ideas, in this bold new look at international relations. He argues that a "clash of civilizations" can be avoided and that the new world order need not look like America. Eastern values, including spirituality and moderate Islam, have a legitimate place in the evolving global public philosophy.
Nation-states, Etzioni argues, can no longer attend to rising transnational problems, from SARS to trade in sex slaves to cybercrime. Global civil society does help, but without some kind of global authority, transnational problems will overwhelm us. The building blocks of this new order can be found in the war against terrorism, multilateral attempts at deproliferation, humanitarian interventions and new supranational institutions (e.g., the governance of the Internet). Basic safety, human rights, and global social issues, such as environmental protection, are best solved cooperatively, and Etzioni explores ways of creating global authorities robust enough to handle these issues as he outlines the journey from "empire to community."

Foreign Affairs

In this sweeping vision of an emerging world community, Etzioni, a distinguished sociologist and leading communitarian thinker, lays out a world order that charts a path between power-oriented realism and law-oriented liberalism. It is a vision in which U.S. power is closely tied to a wider global community infused with shared values and bolstered by legitimate institutions of governance. Despite acrimony over the war in Iraq and U.S. unilateralism, this new era of global cooperation is already afoot, Etzioni claims. In fact, the leading edge of this emerging order is counterterrorism: governments share intelligence and jointly arrest suspects and track money, and the nascent "Global Safety Authority" even gained its own enforcement capability with recent agreements on search and seizure on the high seas. Transnational cooperation is also growing in other areas, such as commerce, banking, the Internet, health, the environment, human rights, and crime prevention. Etzioni believes that effective global governance requires normative and institutional innovations, and his most ambitious proposal is to unite the growing array of transnational authorities into a formal, United Nations-style global institution-a modern-day "world state." This idea is worthy of debate. But today's informal and decentralized transnational networks may offer a more realistic formula for successful global governance.

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