The Bactra Review
The Myth of Global Chaos
by Yahya Sadowski
Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998
Local Stability Analysis
There is little doubt that the world after the Cold War is a violent, horrid
place, full of brutal governments, and even more brutal wars, often nationalist
or ethnic; as I write, Milosevic's band of thugs, ex-Communist Party hacks and
shrinks in Belgrade is carrying out its third campaign of ethnic cleansing this
decade. It is natural to ask why this is so, if only for the cold
comfort of knowing why things are so hopeless. One very popular theory,
elaborated mostly by American historians, political theorists and journalists,
explains them as follows:
- The current trend for the political, economic, and cultural
institutions of the West to be spread around the world --- what is called
``globalization'' --- is forcing more and more people to confront alien values,
whether in the form of glitzy television commercials or through resettlement
in industrial shantytowns where tribes of different religions are forced to
live cheek-to-jowl.
- When the basic values of a culture are threatened, violence becomes
more common and more savage. For some, the decay of rationality means an
easing of the restrictions against theft, murder, and rape. Others seek to
resist the threat to traditional values through a fanatic, angry reasseration
of fundamentalist tradition. Either way, apparently irrational violence
increases.
- As a result of globalization and the way it threatens traditional
values, the world is witnessing an explosion of irrational violence, manifest
in the drug wars of Latin America, the tribal massacres of Africa, fundamentalist revolts in the Middle East, and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Crime,
warfare, and genocide all seem to be not only proliferating but also
spinning out of control. [p. 4]
Since the developers of this view have neglected to provide it with a single
label, Sadowski, following some newspapers, dubs it ``global chaos theory.''
(He apologizes to the mathematicians.) He begins by providing an exposition
of the theory in its leading variants.
Bertrand Russell used to relate an ancedote about his stay in China, as follows: he was writing an essay on ``The Causes of the Present Chaos,'' and showed
it to his translator, who happened to be named Chao. He immediately replied:
``I imagine they were the previous Chaos.''