Master’s Program in International Affairs

Ming Chuan University

Master’s Thesis

Advisor: Wei-hwa Chen

The Elusive Quest for Order: The Formula

“World Order” as Ideology Exemplified in
Henry Kissinger’s Book World Order

Graduate Student: Iker Izquierdo Fernández

July, 2019
 ABSTRACT

This master’s thesis argues that the formula “World Order”, widely used in International
Relations literature, can only be properly addressed from a philosophical perspective
because its nature goes beyond any scientific field. To prove this point, the author
analyzes Henry Kissinger’s idea of World Order, since the US scholar is the only one
who directly tackles this formula. The analysis is made from the perspective of Gustavo
Bueno’s Philosophical Materialism. Drawing from the idea of the incompatibility
between the distributive and attributive totalities of the parts of the world, and the
attempt to solve this incompatibility by introducing unifying principles, the author
concludes that the formula “world order” used by Kissinger is ideological, since the he
uses the unifying principle of Westphalia plus Freedom to oversee the incompatibilities
between parts of the world (civilizations), thus making clear that “world order” is the
world map as seen from the perspective of the US Empire and Kissinger as the map
maker.

Key words: World Order, Henry Kissinger, Gustavo Bueno, Totality, Philosophical
Materialism, US Empire.

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first want to thank my advisor Chen Wei-hwa for allowing me to choose and
work on this topic from the perspective of Philosophical Materialism, a school of
thought barely known outside the Spanish-speaking world. It means a great deal to me.
My deepest gratitude to professors Rolando Chang and José Ramón Álvarez for
being part of the tribunal of this thesis and therefore, for taking the time of reading such
a long and unexciting text.
Gustavo Bueno’s followers Javier Pérez Jara, José Manuel Rodríguez Pardo and
Daniel Miguel López Rodríguez helped to refine my ideas for this thesis. Any
misinterpretation of Gustavo Bueno’s Philosophical Materialism is entirely mine.
I would not have been able to complete this Master’s Degree and thesis without
the blessing of my managers and co-workers at Radio Taiwan International: Andrea
Wang, Vanessa Lo, Sol Hong, Maider Gómez, Patty Lin and Carlson Huang, who
allowed me to constantly change my working schedule for two years and a half.
Manager Yuan Bi-wen supported my application at Ming Chuan. Also my co-workers
and managers at President Translation Services PTSGI: Hedy Hsu and Lucy Hung.
President Square Fang also supported my application to Ming Chuan.
Special mentions to Francisco Pérez Espósito, Miguel Rubio Lastra and José
Campos Cañizares.
The time and effort dedicated to this thesis would have been impossible without
the support of my family: my parents Fernando Izquierdo and María Ángeles
Fernández; my sister Estibaliz Izquierdo; and my dear wife, N-Ray Lai.

ii
To my wife, N-Ray
 The World, in short, is not the omnitudo rerum, the totality of things. Rather, it is the
totality of things accessible to us insofar as we possess the power to shape them.

Gustavo Bueno, Sciences as Categorical Closures

Thus, just as we found things themselves in some cases fitting together, in others not,
so too in relation to the signs we voice –some of them do not fit together, but those of
them that do fit together bring about speech.

Plato, Sophist

To achieve a genuine world order, its components, while maintaining their own
values, need to acquire a second culture that is global, structural, and juridical – a
concept of order that transcends the perspective and ideals of any one region or
nation. At this moment in history, this would be a modernization of the Westphalian
system informed by contemporary realities.

Henry Kissinger, World Order

 Table of Contents
List of Figures ............................................................................................................... vi
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1
1.1 Research Motivation .................................................................................................. 1
1.2 Research Background ................................................................................................ 3
1.3 Research Objectives .................................................................................................. 5
1.4 Research Area and Limitations .................................................................................. 6
1.5 Research Procedures .................................................................................................. 7
Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................... 9
2.1 A Short Natural History of the Formula “World Order” ........................................... 9
2.2 “World Order” Variations ........................................................................................ 14
2.3 Kissinger: a Realist or an Idealist? .......................................................................... 17
2.4 The Path to World Order .......................................................................................... 22
Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY .................................................................................... 28
3.1 Science, Philosophy and Ideology ........................................................................... 28
3.1.1 Symploké of Ideas .................................................................................... 31
3.2 World, Order, Totalities and Empires ...................................................................... 33
3.2.1 The Idea of Totality .................................................................................. 34
3.2.2 The Idea of Order ..................................................................................... 35
3.2.3 The Idea of World ..................................................................................... 38
3.2.4 The Idea of Empire as the World Map Maker .......................................... 41
3.3 A Summary of our Framework ................................................................................ 46
Chapter 4 KISSINGER’S IDEA OF “WORLD ORDER” AS THE
IDEOLOGY OF THE US EMPIRE .......................................................................... 48
4.1 A Summary of World Order ..................................................................................... 48
4.2 Kissinger’s World Order as a Philosophical Enquiry .............................................. 51
4.3 Totalities in Kissinger’s World Order ...................................................................... 55
4.4 Ordering the World: Westphalia as a Value-neutral System .................................... 61
4.5 Kissinger as the Transcendental Ego of the US Empire .......................................... 64
Chapter 5 CONCLUSIONS ....................................................................................... 70
5.1 Main Conclusions and Implications ........................................................................ 70
5.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research ................................................. 72
References ..................................................................................................................... 74

v
 List of Figures
Figure 1 Ngram graphic for “world order” ................................................................... 13

vi
 Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Motivation

Ideologies are still the powerhouse of our times. It is almost a mystery how

ideologies of all kinds emerge, expand, mutate or disappear. But perhaps even more

intriguing is how ideology can define individuals and groups without them being aware

of it.

Further, ideologies are well intertwined with myths in the broad sense of the

word. By the 1960s and 70s, the French fashion of Postmodernism declared the death of

the Grand Narratives: progress, Marxism and Christianity. With the fall of the Soviet

Union in 1991, it seemed that postmodern diagnostic was right; therefore our only task

from then on is to analyze the small narratives and unmask the footprints of power and

capitalism behind all kinds of social phenomena. For these reasons, all social

constructions are ideological, mythical and lack intrinsic value or objectivity, precisely

against what Grand Narratives were trying to provide: assurance in the meaning of life

and social forms, a well defined and solid-rock purpose for the future of the individual

and Humanity.

Postmodernism went even as far as to declare that not only social constructions

were relative; in fact, all elements of our reality were social constructions, and thus,

gratuitous, relative and subjected to change.

However, Postmodernism missed the point and took certain sociological trends

of Western countries in advanced capitalism for the epitome of all the historical

processes of the world. Empirically though, the postmodern idea of the death of Grand

1
Narratives can be easily dismiss when we take a look at the Big Bang Theory,

Democracy as the End of History, radical Islam, infinite progress of Science,

Globalization or Climate Change.

Because we still live in an era of Grand Narratives, we need, as always, to make

use of the philosophical scalpel to pierce through the thick skin of myths, ideologies and

fundamentalisms; not so much to demystify them but, on the contrary, to point at them

and declare, precisely, that they are myths, ideologies and fundamentalisms.

Nowadays, there are many metaphysical constructions that pass for scientific

concepts or given facts. I believe that the formula “World Order” conceals within itself

a great dose of ideology that needs to be thrown into the light. As we shall see later, the

fact that almost every one, whether in media, academia or the coffee shop around the

corner, uses the formula “World Order” as an idea that does not need definition, is a

good symptom that we are dealing with something that resembles some of the

ideological constructions we mentioned.

Although “World Order” is not as common in our daily language as

Globalization or Climate Change, it is certainly distinctive enough within the area of

international politics to justify closer scrutiny. When a regular citizen listens or reads

that “The World Order is starting to crack”1 or “China threatens the democratic World

Order”2 is catching a sublime formula of which meaning takes for granted, much the

same as a triangle, a vehicle or other configurations of our reality.

The fact that scholars, who are supposed to not fall for sublime formulas or

myths, also use “world order” without even attempting to understand the implications of

this formula, motivated me to look further into this question.

1
Stewart Patrick, “The World Order is Starting to Crack”, Foreign Policy, July 25, 2018,
2
J. Michael Cole, “China threatens the democratic world order—and Canada can’t be a weak link”,
Macleans, November 12, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ya2d2f5z

2
1.2 Research Background
The formula “World Order” is traditionally associated with George Bush’s

speech to US Congress3 in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it is in fact

much older. Its origins can be traced back as far as World War I.

Everything that surrounded Versailles Treaty was infused with the idea of the

creation of a “new World Order” according to Wilsonian principles. From then on,

European powers and their secret diplomacy would not dictate the nature of

international politics anymore. The rules have to be re-written.

However, as we shall see later, “World Order”, associated with international

politics was not the original meaning of the formula. In the two or three decades before

World War I, it was utilized in very different disciplines like education, psychological

upbringing, but mostly in religious publications of Protestant churches in America

although not exclusively. “World Order” is also the name of the official magazine4 of

the Bahá'í faith, a curious religion of Persian origins that started its publication in 1935.

The ambiguity of the meaning of “World Order” is one of the reasons why the

formula is so catching. It resembles an empty box where you can place whatever you

want. Sometimes it will refer to a set of diplomatic relations between states; others, to

the characteristics of “capitalism” as a force behind all the processes of the world; and

sometimes also, to conspiracy theories about world domination by a mysterious elite

that can take many forms (even extraterrestrial forms).

The common feature of these meanings is the lack of a direct definition of

“World Order” as an idea. Many books, mainly by Angloamerican scholars, bear this

name in their titles or subtitles, but once you dive into their pages you will just find a

3
See George H.W. Bush, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (September 11, 1990).
Retrieved from: https://tinyurl.com/yaae24fa
4
https://bahai.works/World_Order

3
direct description of the “state of the World” in terms of international relations at the

time of writing and from different perspectives: Marxism, Liberalism, Conservatism

and all sorts of “isms” you can imagine. But almost nothing about “World Order

means…”.

Robert W. Cox is an exception to this rule; however, his proposal of the usage of

world order as “particular configurations of forces which successively define the

problematic of war or peace for ensemble of states”5 has had no continuation. His is not

exactly an idea of world order but it pretends to resemble a scientific concept, which is

impossible, because of the implications of the formula necessarily bursts the borders of

any scientific field and take the form of a philosophy or ideology.

In fact, the only scholar with reputation and real influence that have attempted a

definition is Henry Kissinger in his recent World Order6.

Since this is a Master Thesis and the space is limited to a certain extent, I cannot

attempt to analyze the idea of World Order per se along history since it would require a

thorough review of a myriad of books and academic articles that approach world order

in actu exercito, that is, indirectly, with all the problems associated to the limited

amount of time and space available. That is why I have considered to narrow the

analysis to Kissinger’s idea of world order, and not only because he is the only one who

has attempted a direct definition, but also because Kissinger is widely read all around

the world. Perhaps a very detailed and thorough review of all secondary sources will

produce an article or a book with the same characteristics but its real influence would be

equal to zero. What kind of value would have a study on a book or article by an obscure

college teacher that nobody has read or has no influence even in its own country?

5
Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory”,
in Neorealism and its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 220.
6
Kissinger has never cited Robert W. Cox, and there is no evidence that he has read the article cited.

4
1.3 Research Objectives
The main goal of this research is to prove that the Idea of World Order, although

it belongs extensionally to the so-called discipline of International Relations, it cannot

be analyzed categorically –that is, within the limits of one single field. The implications

of the idea require a philosophical treatment, and it would be naïve to think that ideas

like order, world, humanity, civilization, history or causality can be treated from a

“scientific” perspective, the same way a geometrician would use the concept of “conic

section”, or a quantum physicist would use the concept of “wave function”.

Henry Kissinger’s idea of world order, as exposed in his book of the same name,

is treated precisely from a philosophical perspective, and he is quite explicit about it.

However, the borders between philosophy and ideology are not easy to draw, and

Kissinger will fall into the realm of ideology when his philosophical perspective is not

powerful enough.

A goal of this work will be to show the implicit philosophy of Henry Kissinger

in relation to World Order and how it slips into ideology. This insufficiency is related to

Kissinger’s lack of philosophical coherence, jumping from “Kantian idealism” to a sort

of “historical realism” which in fact is the classic prudence, or carefulness, brought

about also by political experience.

So, our research question goes like this: Is the formula “world order” ideological?

And can we prove it analyzing Kissinger’s book World Order as the only attempt to

define and analyze the formula?

Advancing my thesis; the analysis of the idea of world order, and the related

ideas of totality and empire, will show how Kissinger is not aware of the impossibility

of the idea of world order itself, and how trying to propose –as he does– possible

solutions to this conundrum leads him to the path of ideology: the ideology of the

5
United States as the only real-existing empire of our times. This deviation to ideology in

the case of Kissinger is not accidental to Kissinger, but essential to the formula “world

order”.

1.4 Research Area and Limitations

For the reasons stated above, my area of research will be limited to Henry

Kissinger’s latest book. I will also make the necessary references to a very limited

amount of secondary sources like biographies or commentaries on Kissinger or his

works. However, I do not desire to give the reader a wide range of opinions on

Kissinger’s idea; on the contrary, I will try to “let him speak by himself” as much as

possible and analyze him directly.

Now, that is everything about the point of view of “extension”. But from the

point of view of “intension” there are also certain limits to this research. An idea like

that of World Order cannot be study “by itself”, for example, analyzing the ideas of

“order” and “world” from an ontological and political perspective. In fact, World Order,

as a formula of the same semantic constellation as those of Globalization, International

System, or Geopolitics, makes necessary references to the ideas of Totality, History,

Empire, State, Civilization, etc. In the case of Henry Kissinger, three ideas are

constantly gravitating in his own thought since the beginning of his academic life:

History, Freedom and Balance of Power, and only more recently to Civilization; which

at the same time make references to others like Causality, Peace or War, only

“obliquely” treated by Kissinger.

For reasons I will explain in the main text of this work, the analysis of the Idea

of world order in Kissinger will be limited to detailed references to the idea of Totality

and Civilization/Empire. Of course, it will be peremptory to talk about History and even

6
Freedom. However, in that case the extension of this Master Thesis would be such as to

resemble a PhD thesis because of the importance of the ideas of History and Freedom in

Kissinger’s thought, but also for the complexity and long history of these ideas per se.

Consequently, it seems advisable not to address these problems directly in this work,

but only indirectly whenever impossible to avoid.

Further, this thesis is carried out from the perspective of Philosophical

Materialism, a very specific school of thought not known to English readers so I will

already need a significant amount of space to set out its doctrines before applying them

to Kissinger. If I have to do that for all ideas implied, the thesis would be ridiculously

long and it would miss its purpose.

1.5 Research Procedures

The research procedures for this work are fortunately simple since it only

requires a thorough reading of Kissinger’s works and of a limited amount of secondary

sources (taking Kissinger’s book World Order as a primary source).

Chapters and articles directly related to the subject matter will be given priority.

The whole idea is to pave the way for a future research that combs Kissinger as an

intellectual figure analyzing his philosophy of History, his idea of Freedom and his

political philosophy. The present work will be devoted to a small part of that

philosophy.

Chapter 2 will be divided into four sections. The first one will address a very

brief “natural history” of the formula “world order” since the times of World War I to

the present. Secondly, I will give some examples of works that treat World Order but

indirectly, without giving any definition or being aware of the implications of the

formula. Thirdly, I will briefly comment on the latest controversy regarding Kissinger’s

7
philosophy. Kissinger has been traditionally considered as a “realist”, but his latest

biographer and some other authors point out to Kissinger’s idealism. Finally, in the

fourth sub-section I will summarize Kissinger’s works when they are directly related to

the last one, “World Order”.

Chapter 3 will be devoted to methodology, which will consist in two parts.

Firstly, I will introduce the differences between science, philosophy and ideology from

the perspective of Philosophical Materialism.

Second, I will explain the ideas of Order and World in connection with the ideas

of Totality and Empire from the perspective of Philosophical Materialism.

Chapter 4 will be divided in five parts, where I will analyze Kissinger’s book

World Order following the methodological template of the previous chapter.

Chapter 5 will include the conclusions of this work.

8
 Chapter 2
LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 A Short Natural History of the Formula “World

Order”
World Order is nowadays universally recognized as an expression that has

“something to do” with international politics. However, that was not the case until the

beginnings of the 20th Century. Before World War I, the exact words of the phrase had

actually little to do with relations between states.

But even before that, similar expressions were simply part of the typical

vocabulary of metaphysics or natural philosophy with small variations. Saint Thomas

Aquinas talked about the “order of being”; Newton’s Book III of his Principia

Mathematica was retitled as “The System of the World” for the popular version of

1728.

But the specific formula “World Order” was widely used in Christian literature

in the United States during the previous decades to World War I. Thus, Frank M.

Thomas could write in 1913 a book titled The Coming Presence. The Second Advent of

Jesus Christ in the Light of Scripture and the World Order of which purpose was:

to examine into the nature of the Second Advent, by setting forth the

teachings of the Holy Scriptures, and then testing these teachings in the

9
 light of the world order, physical, mental, moral, social, ecclesiastical, and

last of all by the light of the human heart.7

It is quite clear, that Thomas is not talking exactly about an arrangement for the

relations between nations, but about theology and metaphysics.

Equally, the expression could also be found in texts that had nothing to do with

religion either. In 1907, Fletcher B. Dresler published a treatise on psychological

upbringing, Superstition and Education. He wrote:

Closely connected with the idea of luck is the unconscious attitude of

the folk-mind toward the world order. Is there in the world more of strife

and danger than peace and safety? Are we encircled with more antagonisms

than encouragements? Must we expect during the progress of life more

interference from the gods than support and good will? These are the

questions which have instinctively arisen in the minds of men of all ages,

and have been answered in a more or less unconscious manner, through

their doctrines, their beliefs, and their behavior.8

We will have to wait until the end of World War I to see our expression explicitly

linked to international politics for the first time, and curiously, all other acceptations of

the phrase will simply disappear along the 20th Century.

Indeed, it is the zeitgeist of the Peace of Versailles and Woodrow Wilson’s

political philosophy, deeply informed by Kant, the factor behind the political use of

7
Frank M. Thomas, The Coming Presence. The Second Advent of Jesus Christ in the Light of
Scripture and the World Order, (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1913): 18.
8
Fletcher B. Dresler, Superstition and Education, (Berkeley: University of California Publications in
Education, Vol. 5, 1907): 172.

10
World Order. Newspapers, magazines and books talked about a “new world order” to be

created from the ashes of the European war. The inspiration was no doubt Wilson

himself. In an address to Guildhall in the last days of 1918, the president assured his

audience:

They [the Allied soldiers] fought to do away with an old order and to establish a

new one, and the center and characteristic of the old order was that unstable thing which

we used to call the ‘balance of power’.9

The formula caught momentum, and despite its decline during the 1930s, due to

the failure of the League of Nations, it rose to popularity again during and after the

Second World War. In January 1940, when the Germans were preparing their campaign

against France and UK, renowned British science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, author of

The War of Worlds or The Time Machine, published A New World Order, a non-fiction

work that advocated for a sort of perpetual peace between nations to protect the Rights

of Man.

Wells was anticipating a new wave of “world order” proposals that brew out of

the negotiations of the Bretton Woods accords and the discussions to bring about what

later would be the United Nations. However, the tensions between the USA and the

USSR over Berlin put a shadow again to “World Order”, which was consequently

substituted by the term “Cold War”.

We would have to wait until the fall of the Berlin wall to see a new surge of

“World Order” usage. The person responsible for the explicit utilization of the formula

was again a US president, George H.W. Bush. In an address before a Joint Session of

Congress on September 11, 1990, Bush outlined the American vision of world politics

9
Woodrow Wilson, An Address at Guildhall, December 28, 1918, in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol.
53, p. 532. Quoted in Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994): 226.,

11
for the years to come and in the face of Saddam Hussein’s defiance of the United

Nations with his invasion of Kuwait:

Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world

order—can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in

the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. […] Today that

new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've

known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A

world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and

justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.10

And

At this very moment, they [US soldiers] serve together with Arabs,

Europeans, Asians, and Africans in defense of principle and the dream of a

new world order. That's why they sweat and toil in the sand and the heat and

the sun.11

This is, no doubt, the immediate present where we are placed; a present where the

formula “World Order” is again widely used, perhaps sharing its space with other

popular ideas like Globalization or Globalism, which actually belong to the same

semantic field.

10
George H.W. Bush, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (September 11, 1990). Retrieved
from: https://tinyurl.com/yaae24fa
11
Ibid.

12
 The pattern notwithstanding is quite clear. The term is essentially related to the

rise of the United States to imperial status during the 20th Century. With each victory,

the formula caught fire. A simple look at a very useful statistical tool provided by

Google graphically shows this pattern. When you introduce “World Order” in Ngram, a

tool that traces words in Google Books along history, this is the result:

Fig. 1. Ngram graphic for “world order”.

In our times, the idea of World Order takes many forms, again, not only reduced

to the closed field of relations between states, but also extended to the much

entertaining area of “conspiracy theories of the New World Order”. Despite the lack of

academic recognition, the conspiracy theories defending the existence of secret (or not

so secret) elites that actually control the world are absolutely pertinent to our work. And

not only because Henry Kissinger constantly appears in these “studies” as a member of

some of those elites (Illuminati, Bilderberg Club, Freemasonry, reptilians?)12, but also

12
A conspiracy theorist characterizes Kissinger as the “master architect of the New World Order… one
of the single most evil individuals still living, or to have ever lived. The problem with considering Dr.
Kissinger as "evil" is that inside of each of us there is a little Dr. Kissinger that lacked the nourishment to
reach the heights of satanic fruition that Dr. Kissinger has reached.” in Wesman Todd Shaw, “Henry
Kissinger: Architect of the New World Order.”, Nov. 12, 2012,

13
because there are simply organizations that at least want to be influential in world

affairs. However, from our analysis of the idea of World Order it will be quite clear that

“controlling the world” is as impossible as a regular decahedron.

2.2 “World Order” Variations

Having reached our most immediate present it is time to give some examples of

treatments of the idea of World Order but indirectly, that is, without defining what

“world order” means or, at least, the implications of the usage of this formula. The

authors I will present here are but a handful.

Renowned US scholar, Samuel P. Huntington, titled his famous book as The

Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. However, to our surprise, the

expression is not used one single time in the book. Huntington outlines a vision of

Humanity distributed among civilizations as the highest cultural grouping comprising

also states, but we don’t know if world order are civilizations themselves or the

relations among them, or their visions of international politics.

Another famous scholar although on an opposite camp to that of Huntington’s is

Noam Chomsky. In May 1993, the main proponent of universal grammar and constant

scourge of American foreign policy, gave a series of lectures in El Cairo that later

transform into a book titled World Orders. Old and New. In more than 500 pages,

Chomsky gives a detailed description of how capitalist countries suck the blood of weak

countries through economic binding, war and theft. The closest thing to a definition of

World Order in Chomsky’s book comes at the beginning:

https://hubpages.com/politics/Henry-Kissinger-Architect-Of-The-New-World-Order

14
 There is no little merit in the description of world order, old and new,

as “codified international piracy”.13

Chomsky’s words resemble Saint Augustine in The City of God, when stating

that the only difference between a pirate and Alexander the Great is that the pirate has

four ships and Alexander has four hundred. That is, there is no real difference between

them.

Perhaps, one of the most promising books on this matter (and in the end,

disappointing) is Nicolas Laos’ The Metaphysics of World Order. Laos is the founder

and chairman of the Research Institute for Noopolitical and Geopolitical Studies

(RINGS) and works closely with private intelligence companies. Having a deep

knowledge of Greek philosophy, ancient and medieval, Laos declares that “The

extensive use of the expression ‘world order’ by scholars, policy-makers, journalists,

political commentators, and newswatchers cultivates an illusion of understanding, while

it leaves the outline of the above expression blurred, and, furthermore, it preserves the

ambiguity of the terms ‘world’ and ‘order’.”14

We cannot but completely agree with the Greek expert. In fact, Laos does realize

that the expression “world order” goes beyond the area of international politics and

requires a philosophical treatment. However, despite the promises of the very first

paragraph of his book, the remaining two hundred pages deliver an interesting tour of

political and anthropological philosophy that includes, at the end, his own proposal for

world order, but there is no direct definition, and from the reading of his book, we are

left to believe that Laos’ idea of world order is a theory that comprises “philosophy,

13
Noam Chomsky, World Orders. Old and New, (London: Pluto Press, 1997): 16.
14
Nicolas Laos, The Metaphysics of World Order, (Eugene (US): Pickwick Publications, 2015): ix.

15
political theory and theology”15, and not a certain result of the interactions of states. His

idea of world order is placed in the realm of knowledge (ordo cognoscendi) more than

in the realm of the being (ordo essendi).

From these three examples (and we can mention many more) we can conclude

that the idea of world order, treated by scholars, gravitates between these two

perspectives, and most of the time the dividing line between them is not clear in their

formulation.

In fact, we could attempt a classification of ideas of world order attending to this

criterion. On the one hand we would have authors that identify “World Order” with

metapolitical theories, whether they are formulated by scholars themselves or they are

traditional worldviews of certain societies. This would be the case of Nicolas Laos.

We would also have another group of “World Order” acceptations that gravitate

between theories and configurations of the world. We can mention Huntington and

Kissinger himself, whom would follow the former to a certain extent.

Finally, we would have acceptations that predominantly see “World Order” as

given configurations of the result produced by the interactions of states at a given

moment in history, regardless of the authors being aware of it and regardless of the

content given to world order. Chomsky for example is clearly in this group, with a

negative content (capitalist exploitation). Robert Gilpin, on the contrary, seems to think

of world order as a kind of peaceful arrangement between nations16, while Kenneth

Waltz identifies it with American foreign policy concerned with security17. Robert W.

15
Ibid.
16
“Certainly the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction necessitate a more
stable and more peaceful system or world order”. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics,
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 228.
17
“The conviction that we must be concerned with every remote danger is analytically
distinguishable from the world-order theme that developed out of old American ideas about national
self-determination. In practice, however, they are closely connected. The interest of the country in
security came to be identified with the maintenance of a certain order”. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of

16
Cox is also clearly included in this group, with the particularity mentioned earlier that

he is one of the few authors that gives a direct definition of “World Order”. In an

endnote to clarify what he means by “world order” he says:

I use the term “world order” in preference to “interstate system”, as

it is relevant to all historical periods (and not only those in which states have

been the component entities) and in preference to “world system” as it is

more indicative of a structure having only a certain duration in time and

avoiding the equilibrium connotations of “system”.18

However, Cox does not analyze the idea and the implications of it, mainly the

necessary trespassing of the borders of the political field.

2.3 Kissinger: a Realist or an Idealist?

Before I move on to comment Kissinger’s works prior to the publication of

World Order, I consider interesting to briefly comment on the different overall views on

him.

Kissinger has always been considered a political realist by both academics and

journalists in general; however, that vision has started to shift in the last few years. As

in the case of the idea of World Order, the question of realism as an attribute of Henry

Kissinger is also confusing, since most of the time we do not know if authors refer the

realism to his works as academic or to his actions as National Security Advisor and

Secretary of State.

International Politics, (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979): 200.

18
Cox, op. cit., 249. In fact, Cox’s differences between “system” and “order” are very confusing and
he does not elaborate on it.

17
 Further confusion is added when idealism is identified with morality whereas

realism is equal to amorality. However, these associations are opportunistic. Idealism

and realism do not necessarily have to be associated with ethics or morals.

His latest biographer, Niall Ferguson, tackles this question when he uses “the

term ‘idealism’ in its philosophical sense, meaning the strand of Western philosophy,

extending back to Anaxagoras and Plato, that holds that (in Kant’s formulation) ‘we can

never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining’

because ‘the reality of external objects does not admit of strict proof’”19. In his Critique

of Pure Reason, Kant defended that the material world was a phenomenon presented to

our senses. Those phenomena hid a noumena, the “things in themselves”. Ferguson

argues that this is the tradition Kissinger will hold to throughout his life and in constant

struggle with materialist theories.

Although Ferguson is very clear in his intentions, he will not entirely follow this

acceptation of idealism throughout the book. Some of the examples of Kissinger’s

idealism that he points out are better understood from the perspective of idealism as

morality, even though it coincides with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. But the

problem is that Ferguson does not cite this work as Kissinger’s inspiration, and further,

in this work, Kant reverted some of the ideas of the Critique of Pure Reason.

In a brainstorming meeting with Rockefeller in April 30, 1961, where they

discussed foreign policy, Kissinger made clear that

Paint the picture of how the world looks at us: we are not moral.

We are doing everything the Russians are doing and trying to excuse

19
Niall Ferguson, Kissinger. 1923-1968: The Idealist, (New York: Penguin Books, 2016): 28.

18
 ourselves morally on the ground that we are not doing it effectively… […]

We need a deeper moral purpose and a willingness to run risks.20

Ferguson quotes Kissinger here as an example of idealism, but this moral

idealism is different from the epistemological and ontological idealism he ascribes to

Kissinger at the beginning of the book.

In any case, Ferguson is not exactly the first scholar to defend Kissinger as an

idealist (at least, during the first half of his life). Others have pointed out this

characteristic of his thought before, especially in relation to his ideas about history.

In 1978, Peter W. Dickson said of Kissinger that he was “more Kantian than

Kant”21. More recently, Lauren Moseley devoted her Master’s thesis to Kissinger’s

vision of history in his early career:

Kissinger's belief in the progress of humanity towards ideals and

the potential of individual action stands in stark contrast to many

historians' conception of him as a coldblooded practitioner of Realpolitik

and a disciple of such realist statesmen as Metternich and Bismarck.22

In a twist of the meaning, famous journalist and author of many books on

Geopolitics, Robert D. Kaplan, defends Kissinger’s deep sense of morality but not out

of his idealism. On the contrary, it was Kissinger’s realism, understood as “the ultimate

moral ambition” that tries to avoid war “through a favorable balance of power”23, what

20
Hugh Morrow took these notes during the meeting. Quoted in Ferguson, ibid., 474.
21
Peter W. Dickson, Kissinger and the Meaning of History, (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1978); quoted in Ferguson, ibid., 28.
22
Lauren Moseley, “The Search for Purpose. Henry Kissinger’s Early Philosophy and American
Foreign Policy” (Master’s thesis, Brandeis University, 2010): 92.
23
Robert D. Kaplan, “In Defense of Henry Kissinger.” Atlantic Monthly (April 2013): 70-78. Article

19
makes him a moral statesman, much against leftist commentators or conspiracy

theorists.

These latter groups of Kissinger’s critics are among the ones who have always

seen him as a realist understood as lacking all sense of morality. “God, what an icy

man!” famously said Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Equally, Hunter S. Thompson, the

father of gonzo journalism described him as “a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler

with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power

structure”.

One of the most belligerent accounts of Kissinger’s immorality is Christopher

Hitchens’ The Trial of Henry Kissinger, where the British intellectual accuses him of

perpetrating crimes and atrocities in places like Chile or Indonesia by sanctioning

assassinations and mass murdering of civilian population.24

However, this immoral realism is of a different nature of the amoral realism of

which he is usually ascribed to by academia. Many manuals of International Relations

theory count him in the ranks of realism together with E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau or

Zbigniew Brzezinski25. In their Dictionary of International Relations, Graham Evans

and Jeffrey Newnham consider Kissinger as a second-generation realist together with

Raymond Aron, R.W. Tucker and even Kenneth Waltz.26

From the perspective of Philosophical Materialism —the theoretical framework

we are going to use here—, authors cannot be identified as a whole with a specific

school of thought. Rather, what is subjected to fall under the mark of realism, idealism,

materialism or spiritualism are not authors but theses. Plato’s theory of war and politics

included in his recent book, The Return of Marco Polo’s World, (New York: Random House, 2018):
219-243.
24
See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, (London: Verso, 2001).
25
See, for example, Kelly-Kate S. Pease, International Organizations. Perspective on Governance in
the Twenty-First Century, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000): 37.
26
Graham Evans and Jeffrey Newnham, Dictionary of International Relations, (New York: Penguin
Books, 1998): 465.

20
as described in The Politician can be considered as idealist, but the theses outlined in

Laws are definitely materialist or realist. The consequences of Morgenthau’s theory of

international politics can be counted as realists, but the road that leads to this conclusion

is clearly rooted in a psychological view of history, that is, clearly idealist from the

perspective of Philosophical Materialism.

In a recent book, professor Greg Grandin has tackled the question of how

Kissinger’s philosophical thinking not only deeply informed his years in office but also

how it has determined the basic traits of American foreign policy up until now. Grandin

does not go full idealism or realism. He recognizes both traits in Kissinger, which in the

end leads him to a sort of epistemological and ontological relativism:

The “realism” he is famous for is profoundly elastic, anticipating

the extreme subjectivism of the neoconservatives.27

And

For all his insistence that human interpretation of reality could

never be anything other than relative and subjective, Kissinger did think

(or at least he said he thought) that reality imposed restraints and limits28

This is going to be our task in regard of Henry Kissinger’s ideas about World

Order.

27
Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow. The Long Reach of America’s most Controversial Statesman,
(New York, Picador: 2015) : 190.
28
Ibid., 170.

21
2.4 The Path to World Order
World Order. Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

is the latest book produced by Henry Kissinger’s pen after a long political and academic

career. Many consider it, giving his age, as his diplomatic and philosophical testament,

a kind of summa diplomatica29.

Kissinger started his academic career in Harvard under the guidance of William

Yandell Elliott, a professor of Government that made himself a name with The

Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism and the Constitutional State,

published in 1928. Elliott was passionate about Kant and required all his students to

thoroughly read the philosopher of Konigsberg. Kissinger made a first impression on

Elliott when he re-exposed the Critique of Pure Reason for his course Government IA.

It was in this environment that Kissinger ruminated his senior thesis The

Meaning of History. Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant (1951), that regardless

of his academic achievements, made history in Harvard for being the longest bachelor

thesis ever written: 388 pages after he was forced to delete some chapters.30

“The Meaning of History” would be a constant preoccupation for Kissinger

throughout all his life, citing his early thesis in the last page of World Order, as if his

philosophy would be coming full circle at the end of his life. In this unpublished work,

Kissinger first reflected on the fundamental problem of how the determinism of history

can be reconciled with human’s deep sense of free will. In short, Kissinger was treating

a classic philosophical problem that reached high intensity during the 16th century in

Spain, and was later rekindled by Kant as the theme of his third transcendental

29
Paul Johnson, “Paul Johnson on Henry Kissinger, Susan Hill on David Walliams, Julie Burchill on
Julie Burchill: Spectator books of the year”, The Spectator, (November 15, 2014),
https://tinyurl.com/y962yunq
30
After Kissinger’s thesis, Harvard established a limit on length of 35,000 words or 140 pages; the
“Kissinger rule”. See Ferguson, op. cit., 237.

22
antinomy. Kissinger dismisses Spengler and Toynbee’s historical determinism and

returns to Kant, although pointing out that Nature’s “secret plot” to lead humans to

perpetual peace ruined Kant’s take on the problem of freedom and determinism.

Kissinger agrees with Kant in that “freedom does have a place in a determined universe”

but dismisses any kind of teleology and suggests that “freedom and necessity cannot be

reconciled except by inward experience”31.

The problem of freedom and historical determinism would take Kissinger to a

concrete historical example where he can analyze in detail how the choices of statesmen

at a given moment can determine the future of international relations. This would be the

problem tackled in his PhD thesis A World Restored. Metternich, Castlereagh and the

Problems of Peace, 1812-1822. If his senior thesis, according to Ferguson, made

Kissinger a classical historical idealist, his PhD thesis was saluted as “the classic

statement of political realism”32 by no other than Francis Fukuyama. In this already

classic of the history of International Relations, Kissinger would lay out the principles

of balance-of-power diplomacy that characterizes the realist school in IR.

The choices facing Castlereagh and Metternich in the aftermath of the

Napoleonic Wars present the statesman with the problem of how to secure your

country’s interest in the long run with the tools at your disposal and the realities of the

moment. Kissinger argues that the order coming out of the Congress of Vienna gave

stability to Europe for 100 years thanks in the end, not to Metternich’s machinations to

save the Austrian Empire but to Castlereagh’s understanding of the balance of power as

force of stabilization.

In the end, Kissinger is still under the frame of Kant’s Perpetual Peace, but

where Kant trusted into an ultimate plan of Mother Nature for Humanity, Kissinger put

31
Quoted in Ferguson, ibid., 241.
32
Quoted in Ferguson, ibid., 291.

23
his hopes in the right choices of statesmen to devise a stable system that asymptotically

brings us closer to a long-lasting peace. This is a theme that Kissinger will mull over all

his life. In the closing arguments of one of his latest books, On China, one cannot but

see a parallelism of the problems facing the European powers in 1815:

In a period experiencing so many simultaneous upheavals, the

creation of new modes of international order is inevitable. […] One goal

of coevolution, therefore, would be to ensure that the United States and

China pool efforts, with each other and with other states, to bring about an

agreed world order.33

His PhD thesis is full of reflections on the question of History, both as an object

and as a discipline, but we can see already a partial deviation from Kant’s philosophy of

History that will have consequences to his idea of the possibility of Perpetual Peace.

Isn’t World Order a conservative version of Perpetual Peace?

After publishing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, the book that

launched his political career, Kissinger kept on working on similar topics but applied to

the politics of his days. About entering to work part-time for the Kennedy and Johnson

administrations, he published The Necessity for Choice in 1961, a compilation of several

articles and essays, reshuffled into a book. Despite its lousy writing, due to time

constraints, this is one of the most important books published by Kissinger. It is here

where he delves deep into the question of “the counterfactual in history”, the problem,

again, of the choices presented to the statesman, but at the same time, the problem of the

33
Henry Kissinger, On China, (New York: Penguin Books, 2012): 543.

24
Historian, who must somehow address the importance of the necessity for choices that

change the course of history.

The process of evolution does not operate so smoothly or in so

clear a direction as it appears to posterity. The pluralism of the West was

the result of hundreds of choices, each of which, if taken otherwise, could

have led to an entirely different result.34

Despite his insistence on the importance of contingency in the evolution of

history, Kissinger surprises us by saying that “unless we [USA] are able to make the

concepts of freedom and respect for human dignity meaningful to the new nations, the

much-vaunted economic competition between us and Communism in the uncommitted

areas [the Third World] will be without meaning”35.

Kissinger is here telling us again that World Order or Perpetual Peace will not

come by itself because there are contingencies in History and not a magical teleology

behind to correct it (as Kant would think): the right choices must be made with the

knowledge of history, that “teaches by analogy”36.

Many years after his tenure in office during Nixon and Ford administrations,

Kissinger will devote all his efforts to outline a history of diplomacy that summarizes all

his academic and political knowledge accumulated during the last four decades. The

time, 1994, was ripe. A new situation in world politics had arisen with the demise of the

Soviet Union and the birth of a new era of optimism in the outstanding power of the US

as the sole hegemon and the prospects for the End of History. In his masterpiece,

Diplomacy, Kissinger directly treats the question of the new world order in a situation
34
Quoted in Ferguson, op. cit., 452.
35
Ibid., 453.
36
Ibid., 300.

25
where the choices were not to be made by European diplomats with other European

diplomats but “by statesmen who represent vastly different cultures”37.

The world of diplomacy is not that of the European powers any more, it is

peremptory to understand other cultures if we want to think seriously about the

possibility of a stable peace. At the end of the book, he warns:

International systems live precariously. Every “world order”

expresses an aspiration to permanence; the very term has a ring of eternity

about it. Yet the elements which comprise it are in constant flux; indeed,

with each century, the duration of international systems has been

shrinking.38

However, and this is something that he will repeat in World Order, “some

priorities must be established.”39 And those priorities, in a world that resembles the 19th

Century European competition “albeit on a global scale”, are the founding of a system

of balance like that of the Congress of Vienna but “reinforced by a shared sense of

values. And in the modern age, these values would have to be democratic”40.

His book on China, published almost 20 years later, reflects the development of

the situation opened to the US in the aftermath of the Cold War: the rise of China. The

Middle Kingdom is now clearly the main contender of American power in the world,

and the element to be counted on in any plans for world order. As the principal person

responsible for the opening of Communist China to the world, Kissinger recalls that

“when Premier Zhou Enlai and I agreed on the communiqué that announced the secret

37
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994): 27.
38
Ibid., 806.
39
Ibid., 812.
40
Ibid., 834.

26
visit, he said: ‘This will shake the world.’ What a culmination if, forty years later, the

United States and China could merge their efforts not to shake the world, but to build

it”41.

China would prove to be a not so easy enemy to deal with at a time when doubts

of American power are starting to arise. The reality of a rapprochement with India to

confront China and the revival of Russia makes advisable for the USA to consider again

the question of a world populated by vastly different peoples more interconnected than

ever before. From the perspective of Philosophical Materialism, the question for all

aspirants to universal empire in History is how to make plans for the rest of the world.

Consciously or not, World Order tries to answer this question.

41
Kissinger, On China, op. cit., 530.

27
 Chapter 3
METHODOLOGY

To answer the research question of this study, we are going to use the framework

of Philosophical Materialism, a Spanish school of thought developed by philosopher

Gustavo Bueno since the 1970s until his death in 2016. In this chapter I will explain as

briefly and simply as possible the ideas that are necessary to prove that the formula

“world order” is ideological, exemplified with the analysis of Henry Kissinger’s idea of

world order as the only explicit theory available.

I will use two approaches contained in Philosophical Materialism. First, I will

draw a distinction between science, philosophy and ideology, with a reference to the

principle of Symploké. Second, I will analyze the ideas of order and world conjugating

them with the idea of Totality first, and then with the idea of Empire.

3.1 Science, Philosophy and Ideology

From the perspective of Philosophical Materialism, a formula like “world order”

can only be analyzed from a philosophical perspective. The reason for this is that

“world order” implies ideas and not concepts.

Although differences between sciences and philosophy run deep, a first

distinction, sufficient to our study, can be drawn easily between them.42

Sciences (and technologies) are configurations of our reality that, among many

other things, use concepts immanent to their own field. When we operate with these

concepts we cannot step out of the field we are in (not excluding a metaphorical use of

42
An exposition of the following distinction is everywhere in Gustavo Bueno’s work, but it can be
found in English in his Sciences as Categorical Closures (2013).

28
them in other contexts). For example, “wave function” is a concept immanent to the

field of Quantum Mechanics; “equilateral triangle” is a concept of Geometry; and

“refugee status” is a concept of International Law.

Now, not all sciences have the same degree of closure. Some of them are more

exposed to “intrusions”. These intrusions are ideas that run through scientific fields, that

is, they are not immanent to any of them. Different concepts of different scientific fields

might use the same name, for example: in Physics there is the concept of “free” fall; in

Chemistry, “free” radicals; “freedom” on bail, in Criminal Law. Now, all these concepts

are immanent to their own field, but share the same name: Freedom. Now, Freedom is

an idea that tries to figure out the commonalities between the different concepts, a

coordination of them. This coordination is the task of philosophy.

So if sciences (and technologies) work with concepts, philosophy works with

ideas that run through different disciplines. Ideas thus, do not come from a Platonic

heaven, from the mind of God or from our Pure Reason, prior to all phenomena, but

from the coordination of concepts, scientific or technological. Most commonly ideas

can come from the most humble of devices, like the idea of Progress coming from the

ladder, or the idea of Evolution coming from the unrolling of a papyrus. The

coordinations of ideas are philosophical systems or doctrines, and their contents will

depend on the level of development of sciences and technologies. We can say then that

Philosophy is not the Mother of Sciences, but the Daughter.

Now that the difference between sciences and philosophy is quite clear, the next

problem is to distinguish philosophy from ideology, for the latter is actually a kind of

philosophy. Ideologies are also coordinations of ideas but we certainly do not mean the

same when we use either of the two names.

Marx and Engels proposed a fine definition of ideology as the set of ideas that

29
some social groups use against others in their struggles. The parameter will not be the

individual like in Kant or the French “ideologues” but social classes, parts of a given

society.

Gustavo Bueno defends that ideologies can be set also in other parameters

within a political society like guilds, army or church; but political societies themselves

“could be a parameter (Rome, North America, Russia) given that they are a part of the

universal society, confronted with other political societies (so that we can talk about

“roman ideology”, “Yankee ideology”, or “soviet ideology”).”43

Now, the distinctive feature of ideology consists of its connection with the idea

of “false conscience”. However, Philosophical Materialism rejects psychological or

subjective ideas of conscience. It also rejects the traditional view of false conscience as

pure error of the conscience, because objective conscience needs of error to configure

itself. Therefore, “false conscience” is defined by Gustavo Bueno as “the characteristic

of any system of orthograms [worldviews] in exercise that have lost the capability to

‘correct’ their errors, since any material will be absorbable by the system. According to

our premises, this atrophy of the ‘self-correcting’ capability can only lie in the weakness

to perceive the very same conflicts, limitations or contradictions determined by the

orthograms in exercise, and eventually in the capability to surround them or encapsulate

them in its global course.”44

A historical example of ideology as false conscience can be soviet Marxism

during Brezhnev tenure; the official ideology kept saying that communism was just

around the corner, when in fact, soviet economy was already showing alarming signs of

43
Gustavo Bueno, Cuestiones cuodlibetales, (Madrid: Mondadori, 1989): 383.
44
“la falsa conciencia la definiremos como el atributo de cualquier sistema de ortogramas en
ejercicio tal que pueda decirse de él que ha perdido la capacidad ‘correctora’ de sus errores, puesto que
cualquier material será asimilable en el sistema. Según nuestras premisas, esta atrofia de la capacidad
‘autocorrectora’ sólo podrá consistir en el embotamiento para percibir los mismos conflictos, limitaciones
o contradicciones determinados por los ortogramas en ejercicio, eventualmente en la capacidad para
envolverlos o encapsularlos en su curso global.” Ibid., 394.

30
breakdown.

Plato’s dialectical method is, from the perspective of Philosophical Materialism,

the quintessential philosophical method. When analyzing an idea, Plato (through

Socrates and the other characters of his Dialogues) first discusses the several theories

about the idea available to them. Then analyses each of them looking for contradictions

and loopholes; and finally, he either chooses one of the options (the one with less

contradictions or loopholes) or he proposes a new one. Ideologies directly defend their

ideas without confronting them dialectically with reality, thus losing its potential for

correction of mistakes.

Although philosophies are coordinations of ideas, not all their coordinations

within the system are philosophical, they might be ideological. Usually, the ideological

trace in these cases are substantialized ideas that, being the philosopher aware or

unaware of it, can function as ideology, especially when connected to the plans and

programs of groups towards others, whether these groups are social classes, political

parties, States or empires.

In this sense, we can say that there are no pure philosophical systems, or pure

ideological systems. Philosophies cannot be 100% critical and above hypostatization,

and all ideologies have roots in reality.

3.1.1. Symploké of Ideas

Substantialized ideas are philosophical ideas that have lost their connection to

other ideas or to the concepts that gave them “birth”. When an idea is treated as if it

could sustain itself, as if it is eternal, a hypostasis, then, this idea is metaphysical45 or

substantialized, and therefore easily used ideologically. Also, when the attributes of an

45
[...we call “metaphysical” to all kind of thought that hypostasizes an idea,...] Gustavo Bueno,
Ensayos materialistas, (Madrid: Taurus, 1972): 46.

31
idea are not compatible with each other, then it is not an idea but a pseudo-idea. An

example could be the idea of God, which attributes (infinite good, infinite power and

infinite knowledge) are not compatible with each other.

Now, Philosophical Materialism defends the principle of Symploké, by which

the processes of the world, the configurations of our reality are both connected and

disconnected to each other. The principle, firstly formulated by Plato in The Sophist46,

was rekindled by Gustavo Bueno in 1972, in the foundational Ensayos Materialistas

[Materialist essays] and it goes like this: if everything were disconnected from

everything we would not be able to know anything; and if everything were connected to

everything we would not be able to know anything either.

Plato has formulated, for the first time, the fundamental principle of

dialectical Ontology when he assures that the entities of the world are

neither united all with all (like primitive continuist monism presupposed,

and whose limit is mysticism) nor are separated all from all (like radical

atomism or megarism presupposed, and whose limit is skepticism). Entities

partly mix and communicate with each other, and they remain, partly,

incommunicated and unmixed. This is the content of the “postulate of

discontinuity” which is constitutive of the very same dialectical reason. The

idea of symploké, in its dialectical moment, determines this postulate of

discontinuity: entities, genera, are not only diverse (and discontinuous) but

incompatible on the one part, and necessarily (synthetically) united, on the

46
“Thus, just as we found things themselves in some cases fitting together, in others not, so too in
relation to the signs we voice –some of them do not fit together, but those of them that do fit together
bring about speech.” Plato, The Sophist, (London: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 168.

32
 other part.47

Things must be connected to other things in order to understand processes of our

reality. The principle of causality would be impossible if things were totally

disconnected to any other thing. But equally, if all things were connected to each other,

we would need to know the whole chain of causal connections in order to know a thing,

and this would take us to a limit. In previous eras this limit could be God, nowadays is

Big Bang.

Since philosophical ideas as are also configurations of our reality, they follow

the same principle of connection and disconnection, otherwise risking

substantialization.

3.2 World, Order, Totalities and Empires

The formula “world order” is obviously made up of two ideas, world and order,

fused into a formula that acts as one. The world is an idea and obviously not a scientific

concept, since it is not immanent to any science, and there is no “science of world”. The

same can be said of “order”. We can find the idea of order in many different fields or

contexts, scientific or not.

Now, following the principle of Symploké, world and order must be related at

least to other ideas. For the purpose of this study, we are going to relate world and order

with the ideas of totality and empire.

47
Gustavo Bueno, Ensayos materialistas, (Madrid: Taurus, 1972): 391. [Platón ha formulado, por
primera vez, el principio fundamental de la Ontología dialéctica, al afirmar que los entes del mundo, ni
están unidos todos con todos (como suponía el monismo continuista primitivo, cuyo límite es el
misticismo), ni están separados todos de todos (como suponía el atomismo radical, o el megarismo, cuyo
límite es el escepticismo), sino que los entes se mezclan y comunican en parte, y, permanecen, en parte,
incomunicados y no mezclados. Este es el contenido del “postulado de discontinuidad”, constitutivo de la
misma razón dialéctica. El concepto de symploké, en su momento dialéctico, determina este postulado de
discontinuidad: los entes, los géneros, no sólo son diversos (y discontinuos), sino incompatibles, por un
lado, y necesariamente (sintéticamente) unidos, por otro.]

33
3.2.1 The Idea of Totality48
Totalities are everywhere. Our reality is made up of totalities of some kind. The

configurations of our reality are totalizations. They can be results of operations of

human activity, mostly, and also results of ananthropic processes.

Totalities can be found in sciences, like quantum mechanics: Niels Bohr’s model

of the atom is a totality; also in technologies, from the most humble ones like an axe to

the most sophisticated like a personal computer. Politics also work with totalities: social

classes, States, families, taxpayers, pensioners, police departments, etc.

In the discipline of international relations, some authors explicitly use the idea of

totality. Kenneth Waltz, in his classic Theory of International Politics, deeply discusses

international relations as a whole whose parts (units) are states.

Now, Philosophical Materialism gives the utmost importance to Holotic Theory,

that is, the theory of wholes and parts (totalities). Not all totalities have the same

configuration, and the same totality can have different configurations depending on the

perspective we use or apply.

Gustavo Bueno distinguishes at least two perspectives or kinds of totalities

which are pertinent and should sufficient to our purpose: attributive perspective and

distributive perspective.

A distributive totality is a whole whose parts do not refer to each other when

they participate in the whole. Each part reproduces the whole. The relations between

these parts are those of symmetry, reflexivity and similarity. For example, a screw that

comes out of a production chain and whose specifications are the same as the other

48
The idea of totality is explained in many Bueno’s works, but this subchapter is a summary of
Gustavo Bueno, Teoría del Cierre Categorial, Vol. 2, (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1993): 134-142. The examples
for the distinctions are entirely mine.

34
screws in the series.

In the case of international relations, States can be distributive parts when

consider from the perspective of International Law and its UN membership, regardless

of the territory, the demography, economic or constitutional system.

An attributive totality is a whole whose parts do refer to each other when they

participate in the whole, having relations of connectivity and adjacency. Now, each part

does not reproduce the whole. Only when they are related to the rest of parts can they

reproduce it: in the example of screws, when one screw is not considered from the

perspective of the production series but as a part of a device like hair-dryer.

Again, for the case of international relations, when States are not considered

from the perspective of International Law but from the perspective of economics, war,

migration, etc., then they act as attributive parts of the international society of human

beings.

As we can see by the examples, the difficulty of totalities and their parts is that

they can be attributive and distributive at the same time, and these two perspectives are

not always compatible in reality. For example, from the perspective of International

Law, all states are equal, that is, the principle of equality is distributed throughout them.

They all have one vote per state in the general assembly of the United Nations. But from

the perspective of economy or security, the attributes of the different states makes them

unequal with each other, and some states are virtually non-existent, even though they

are legally recognized as that. Attributively, China cannot be compared with the

Salomon Islands, even though distributively they are both states on equal foot.

3.2.2 The Idea of Order

The idea of order is not explicitly treated in Philosophical Materialism, although

35
Gustavo Bueno does refer to order in some of his works. However, we can attempt to

propose an idea of order following the materialist method of identifying the nature and

dialectics of the totalities related to the idea.

Etymology can be a first step; although it does not solve the problem, it can give

us a hint of the nature of some ideas. In English, “order” (and its derivatives) is a

common word, and like in his counterparts of the rest of Western languages, it has many

acceptations, not always fully related to each other.

“Order” comes from Latin ordo, ordinis, which used to refer to the weave of a

fabric, and later on, to a row or an alignment49. Therefore, an order seems to be the

specific result of an operation, which matches with many acceptations of the word in

our modern language: a way of arranging things, the amount of goods purchased in a

store, etc. Religious orders, for example, are the result of arranging members of the

clergy into different groups according to different rules. So these sets of rules are

orders.50

In these cases, orders are totalities of which the arrangement of their parts makes

them different from each other. Now, this is what Philosophical Materialism identifies

as an attributive totality: a whole whose parts are referred to each other to form the

whole like when ears, eyes, mouth and nose make up a face, so that each face is

different.

A state is an order in itself, since its parts (territory, demography, law, economy,

military, etc.) are attributive, so that no states are alike.

The parts of the whole have to be considered from the attributive perspective if

they are to be identified as an order. A soldier of a platoon, although he is replaceable

49
A. Ernout et A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Latine, (Paris: Klincksieck,
2001): 467.
50
I have defended this thesis in my article “Prolegómenos para un análisis de la idea de Orden
Mundial” in Encuentros en Catay No. 32, (Taichung: Ediciones Catay, 2019): 139-164.

36
(distributive perspective), forms an order with the other soldiers of the group when

consider from the perspective of the platoon itself (attributive perspective). This is the

same example that Gustavo Bueno uses when discussing a passage of Aristotle’s

Posterior Analytics:

It happens […] like when a soldier, fleeing from the battle, stops

and determines that another one stops beside him, and so on, until the

army (the universal) is rebuilt. The thing we want to highlight here is this:

in this example, apart from the “sensual taste” that Aristotle gives to his

explanation of the induction process, we need to recognize that what he

presents us, even at the forefront, is not so much passing from the sensible

part to the intelligible part, but passing from the attributive part to the

attributive whole (because the soldier only collectively and not

distributively is one part of the army), that is, notwithstanding that

simultaneously this attributive part (that not only forms a set or a

collection with the other parts but an order) plays the role of an individual,

that is, a pigeonholed part (the soldier as an element or number of a set,

replaceable by another).

Now, as we can see, the attributivity of the idea of order requires multiplicity51.

An order, to be so, needs to distinguish itself, and for that you need other orders. So, an

order is so when compared to other orders. Also, following the principle of Symploké,

orders, as configurations of reality, are necessarily connected to other orders so that they

can co-determine each other; if they were all disconnected, they would be substances

51
See the chapter about the postulate of multiplicity in Gustavo Bueno, Teoría del Cierre
Categorial, Vol. 2, (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1993): 155-157.

37
that self-determinate; and if they were all connected they would be the same order, a

single reality, which is also a limit idea.

3.2.3 The Idea of World

The idea of world is one of the three classic ideas of traditional metaphysics

together with the idea of Man and the idea of God. However, far from being a product

of pure reason (like Kant would say), the idea of world also comes from humble origins

in the Western tradition. Gustavo Bueno suggests that

The Idea of World would come from the technical concept of a chest

or an ark, that developing or expanding until “it commensurates the

firmament” would lead us of the Idea of a universal chest, an enclosure of

finite or infinite volume containing “all things” that, as creatures, God would

have gradually place in its interior during the six days [of Creation].52

During this process of development of the idea, the world grows bigger, from the

planet Earth to the universe known to us by super telescopes. Further, this greater world

we know today is quite recent, which means that for centuries the world was identified

with the known parts of the Planet and the stars of the firmament visible at plain sight.53

Therefore, there is an ambiguity in the idea of world: sometimes it refers to the planet

Earth, and sometimes to the whole known universe, that is, the Cosmos.

Another difficulty comes, precisely, from language. The English name “world” is

the translation of Latin “mundus”, which at the same time is the translation of its Greek

52
Gustavo Bueno, Televisión Apariencia y Verdad, (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2000): 25.
53
This situation only starts to change in the 17th Century with the invention of the telescope, and
later, the microscope.

38
counterpart “cosmos”. But “cosmos”, in its origins, is very similar to the idea of order,

for it refers to an arrangement of sorts. Cosmos referred, for example, to the arrangement

of Greek phalanxes: a battalion of hoplites was a cosmos. Similarly, the “arrangement”

of the face and body of Greek women was also a cosmos, thus our modern word

“cosmetics”54.

This cosmos, applied to restricted spaces, was soon applied to the known reality.

The first one to do it was the pre-Socratic metaphysician Anaximander of Miletus, who

according to Suidas55, was also the first one to draw a world map, although we do not

know if that map was purely geographical or also cosmic.56 This only emphasizes the

ambiguity of the idea of world.

Now, if the world is the cosmos, it means that the world is already an order,

which means the formula “world order” is redundant. Certainly, from the perspective of

ontological monism, “world order” is redundant.

These characteristics of the idea of World make it appear as an attributive totality,

for all the parts of the world are related to each other. Surely, the logical format of the

idea is attributive, and for that it shares the same format as the idea of order.

The problem with the idea of world is that as much as it has an attributive format,

contrary to the idea of order, it does not presuppose multiplicity but unicity. Whereas

order is always “orders”, the world is just one and not many. There are no worlds, except

metaphorically, because if there were other possible worlds we would not know about

them, and if we know something about another world it means is connected to ours,

therefore is the same world.

As Gustavo Bueno says,

54
Gustavo Bueno, La metafísica presocrática, (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1974): 102.
55
Gustavo Bueno, El Ego trascendental, (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 2016): 24.
56
Ibid., 101-106.

39
 The idea of “World”, on the contrary, is an idea that, at least in the

philosophical tradition […] speaks unicity. “And it would be insolent (wrote

Mauthner) to speak about “Worlds” in plural, as if it were more than

one”.57

And

The world, as complexio omnium substantiarum, can only be one

(the idea of World does not have the format of a class).

Seeing from this perspective, the world as an order is not possible, because the

world has no limits. No one can get “out of the limits of the world” and see it from the

outside, less so to determinate it, like with the idea of order.58

Further, there is a second problem derived from the principle of Symploké; the

connection and disconnection of the parts of world mean that the world is fragmented

with parts that are incommensurable.

Certainly, Philosophical Materialism goes exactly against monism which defends

the unity of parts of the world:

… “materialism”, in general Ontology, is, overall, the result of a

critical methodology: the critique to the thesis of the unicity of the being

(“unicity”, no so much in the substantial meaning –unicity of the

substance– but, overall, of the unity of the Being, of the unity of order, of

the constitutive harmony of Cosmos). This unity of the universal

57
Gustavo Bueno, La vuelta a la caverna: Terrorismo, Guerra y Globalización, (Barcelona:
Ediciones B, 2005): 54.
58
Ibid., 55.

40
 concatenation make up the Idea of Cosmos, of the World –and within it, is

a particular case of the thesis of the unity of substance.59

These characteristics make the idea of World a very special attributive totality:

single and internally fragmented. Gustavo Bueno even says sometimes that, if totalities

must be finite and limited60, then the world is not even a totality. So what kind of unicity

is that of the world? From the perspective of Philosophical Materialism the totalization

of the world is the totalization of the world map.

A world map or mappae mundi – understood as the Latin equivalent

to what the Germans called the Weltanschauung of each time period – is thus

an act of constitution of the World itself, which does not pre-date the state of

the world depicted by the map. As such, a world map, even when considered

on a strictly geographical level, must inevitably burst the bounds established

by its geographic coordinates, for these coordinates must be necessarily

situated within a meshwork of explicit or implicit ideas. Their meaning would

lose all sense if removed from this rich meshwork of ideas: ideas on the

world’s limits, on the location of the lands and heavens portrayed on the map,

on the scale used by the map itself, and ideas on the impossibility for the map

to represent itself.61

3.2.4 The Idea of Empire as the World Map Maker

Now, a world map, as a map of reality, has a maker, like any other map.

59
Bueno, Ensayos Materialistas, op. cit., 45.
60
Bueno, La vuelta a la caverna, op. cit., 55.
61
Gustavo Bueno, Sciences as Categorical Closures, (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 2013): 9-10.

41
Through the centuries, maps have grown until they have “covered” the planet Earth and

beyond (even the microscopic and subatomic world).

Now, the map maker must be capable of totalizing the parts of the world, and the

bigger the world grows, the bigger the demiurge of the map must be. This map maker is

an ego, but an ego that can transcend the different parts of the world: a transcendental

ego, which taken to the limit, identifies himself with the world map62.

Throughout history, transcendental egos have taken many forms, the most

famous being the God of Old Testament when appearing to Moses saying “I am what I

am” (Exodus, 3:14). The god of the European Middle Ages was also the God that

commensurate the world and gives it unity.

Now, since Philosophical Materialism is an atheist system that defends the

impossibility of the idea of God, and denies the possibility of getting out of the world

and totalize it from the outside, the only materialist transcendental ego must be inside

the world. In our present of the international society, globalizations and United Nations,

many ideologies and philosophical systems consider Humanity or Human Kind as the

transcendental ego that makes the world map and is the subject of History (and the

subject of universal rights).

Philosophical Materialism not only denies the unity of the world, emphasizing

the disconnection of some parts of the world, but also denies the unity of Human Kind

as a historical subject (the unity of humanity is strictly biological). Humanity has been

divided since the beginnings of the species; divided in several groups, bands or tribes

dispersed around the planet, often isolated and of course not knowing of other groups

and other lands. This is the situation that Spain finds in America during the 16th Century

or the European powers in central and southern Africa during the 19th.

This situation of bands and tribes disconnected from one another is a distributive
62
Gustavo Bueno, El Ego trascendental, (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 2016): 27.

42
situation, and its study is the task of ethnology (or cultural anthropology). These bands,

from the Paleolithic to the present non-contacted tribes of the Amazon, live out of the

historical time.

However, other groups of humans slowly made contact among them, forming

bigger groups, growing demographically and territorially; they would found the first

pre-political societies, and with the invention of writing came the first states and the

Historical time. The expansion of these pre-political and political societies in interaction

is an attributive situation, and its study is the task of History as a discipline. The idea of

Civilization, as an attributive totality, is closely connected with this situation.

As Gustavo Bueno says,

We conceive Barbarity through the logical form “class of classes”

(distributive), created from certain relations (disconnected, symmetrical,

etc.) that constitute their logical intension, its quality. These classes –each

of the barbaric cultures- have a logical extension, changeable to a certain

margin, and that constitutes its quantity. […] The Idea of Civilization is

presented to us as the negation of the plurality of barbaric cultures through

the conversion of this plurality into a single “universal culture”.63

It is one of these attributive parts of Humanity that have been gradually

totalizing other societies along history, and making world maps. These societies whose

historical itinerary is totalizing the world are the universal empires.

63
“La Barbarie la concebimos por medio de la forma lógica “Clase de clases” (distributivas),
generadas a partir de ciertas relaciones (no conexas, simétricas, etc.) que constituyen su intensión lógica,
su cualidad. Estas clases –cada una de las culturas bárbaras- tienen una extensión lógica, variable dentro
de ciertos márgenes, y que constituyen parte de su cantidad [...] La Idea de Civilización se nos presenta
entonces como la negación de la pluralidad de Culturas bárbaras, mediante la conversión de esta
pluralidad en una única “Cultura universal””. Gustavo Bueno, Etnología y Utopía, (Madrid: Jucar, 1987):
13.

43
 The very same idea of Human Kind, as a whole, can only be

configured through some of its parts, that is, the Universal Empires; which

at the same time means that if certain societies start to conceptualize an

idea of Human Kind (as a practical project), it will be due to not so much

because the “human kind” gets self conscious but because such parts are

confronting other parts, other societies that are incompatible with its own

political project, whether because these societies restrict themselves to

merely particular projects […] or because they constitute other concepts or

models of Human Kind not compatible with each other.64

The first empire that was consciously attempting to totalize the world was the

empire of Alexander the Great. As we know, Alexander of Macedonia, after conquering

Persia wanted to reach the farthest shore of Asia and come back to Egypt by sea, thus

totalizing the world. He couldn’t for several reasons, and his empire was divided among

his generals shortly after his death, but he set the example for the time to come.

Now, the Empire of Alexander the Great acted as a map maker that totalized

parts of humanity known to the Greeks that were divided until that time, and he could

do that drawing on religion and science. In order to commensurate the world, Alexander

had to proclaim himself God by assuring that he was the son of Zeus. After the conquest

of Egypt, he declared himself the supreme god Among-Ra. Why? Because only a God

64
“La Idea misma de Género Humano, como un todo, sólo se configura a través de alguna de sus
partes, a saber, los Imperios Universales; lo que significa, a su vez, que, si determinadas sociedades
comienzan a formarse una Idea del Género Humano (como proyecto práctico), será debido, no tanto a que
el “Género Humano” toma en ella la “conciencia de sí”, sino a que tales partes están enfrentándose a otras
partes, a otras sociedades que resultan ser incompatibles con su propio proyecto político, sea porque éstas
se circunscriben a proyectos meramente particulares [...] sea porque constituyen otras concepciones o
modelos de Género Humano, no compatibles entre sí.” Gustavo Bueno, España frente a Europa,
(Barcelona: Alba, 1999): 210-211.

44
can commensurate the world.65

Being god is the principle of unity of the different and incompatible parts of the

world for Alexander, who could have the project of going around the world because the

Greeks knew that the world was a sphere. Eratosthenes had calculated the radius of

Earth using the only known science at that time: Geometry. This very same theory took

Christopher Columbus to present the project of arriving at Japan sailing to the West to

the Catholic Kings of Spain in 1492. Only 30 years later, another Spanish expedition

ended up circumnavigating the planet for the first time in history and thus scientifically

proving Eratosthenes theory.

The totalizing principle of the Spanish empire as a universal empire was also

God, the catholic god. “Catholic” means actually “universal”. Later empires with

totalizing principles will use others that not for being non-theological are less

metaphysical. USSR and USA empires, as empires that want to totalize the world, drew

and still draw their maps of the world according to transcendental principles. In the case

of the USSR was final communism of the human kind; in the case of the present US

Empire, are democracy, individual freedom and human rights.

Now, the totalization of the world through the world map is impossible. If a

universal empire as an attributive totality totalizes (conquers) the rest of the world then

it has no borders, therefore it ceases to be an empire, a state and an attributive totality.

Therefore, the idea of “world government” is as impossible as a squared circle, if a

government implies the existence of the State. This does not mean that societies do not

stop trying to totalize the world, because reality changes and with new situations, new

ideas and principles appear. The idea of Empire works as a driving notion or

idée-force66. The map of the world is then constantly changing and expanding. The

65
Ibid., 220-225.
66
“In any case, the philosophical idea of Empire, as a limit idea, iwould find its function not as a

45
society that makes the map makes the world at the same time. The empire whose map is

more “accurate” survives longer. The Spanish Empire lasted more than three hundred

years, the British barely more than a hundred; and the Nazi “Reich” lasted twelve.

The limits to the empires are other parts of humanity that have their own world

maps with different unifying principles of the parts of the world. And thus, the world of

international relations between different states is not a unity and it can’t be, the result of

the interactions between states is a Symploké. Therefore, any unifying principle takes

the form of an ideology, since it is incapable of seeing the limits and contradictions of

the project of totalizing the world, of totalizing the Human Kind.

3.3 Summary of our Framework

Sciences and technologies use concepts immanent to their respective fields.

Philosophy uses ideas that come out of scientific and technological contexts and

transcend their fields. The same do ideologies, but instead of doing it critically, they do

it dogmatically.

Ideas, as the rest of the configurations of our reality, are connected and

disconnected necessarily from other ideas, co-determining each other and not sustaining

themselves (not self-determining).

The ideas of world and order are connected to others, but specially to the idea of

totality. There are two kinds of totalities: distributive and attributive.

Order has an attributive format, which requires multiplicity of orders that

co-determinate each other. Therefore, they need boundaries.

The idea of world also has an attributive format, but the world has no boundaries,

utopian ideal that leads us “beyond” History but as an Idea of a “reverted limit”, applicable to certain
historical situations…” [En cualquier caso, la Idea filosófica de Imperio, en cuanto Idea límite,
encontraría su función, no ya tanto como una Idea utópica, que nos remitiera “más allá” de la Historia,
sino como una Idea de “límite-revertido”, reaplicable a las situaciones históricas determinadas...] Bueno,
España frente a Europa, op. cit., 207.

46
therefore there is nothing outside the world to co-determine it. Also, the world is

fragmented in parts that are incommensurable.

The totalization of the incompatible parts of the world is actually the totalization

of the world map. This world map is drawn by a transcendental ego capable of

commensurate the world. Since God is impossible and Humanity is not a historical

unity, only one part of humanity can totalize others through totalizing principles, but

never completely, because the world map never “exhausts” the world (that is infinite)

and other parts of humanity have their own world maps with their own unifying

principles not always compatible with each other. Therefore, the world, even if we

consider it only from the political perspective, is necessarily fragmented, and its parts

connected and disconnected. The unifying principle is always an ideology.

47
 Chapter 4
KISSINGER’S IDEA OF “WORLD ORDER”
AS THE IDEOLOGY OF THE US EMPIRE

With framework we have outlined in the previous chapter, we now go on to

applying it to Kissinger’s idea of World Order. If we remember the research question,

we have to prove now that the formula “world order” is ideological, and we prove it

through the only serious attempt to directly define it, that of Henry Kissinger.

4.1 A Summary of World Order

Henry Kissinger defines World Order as “the concept held by a region or

civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought

to be applicable to the entire world”, whereas an “international order is the practical

application of these concepts to a substantial part of the globe –large enough to affect

the global balance of power.”67

In our present of the universal society, what passes for order “was devised in

Western Europe nearly four centuries ago, at a peace conference in the German region

of Westphalia, conducted without the involvement or even the awareness of most other

continents or civilizations.”68

The Westphalian system of “independent states refraining from interference in

each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general

67
Henry Kissinger, World Order, (New York: Penguin, 2015): 9.
68
Ibid., 2-3.

48
equilibrium of power”69 became a sort of global international system thanks to

European expansion all over the world, imposing their rules to other civilizations that

had held their own world views and conceptions of order for centuries.

According to Kissinger, the genius of the Westphalian system consists of rules

that are “value-neutral”, thus accommodating to different systems of beliefs and

worldviews with their own values. Still this “’rules-based’ system faces challenges”. […]

Our age is insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a concept of world order.

Chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented interdependence: in the spread of

weapons of mass destruction, the disintegration of states, the impact of environmental

depredations, the persistence of genocidal practices, and the spread of new technologies

threatening to drive conflict beyond human control or comprehension.”70

This combined with the persistence of different worldviews by other regions of

the world that were forced to accept Westphalian rules (China, India, Islam), makes the

quest of world order urging.

For Kissinger, the entities that host different world orders are civilizations,

whose history “is a tale of the rise and fall of empires”71 where war presented itself at

their borders (or as civil wars), therefore peace was merely the reaching power of rulers.

While this is true of civilizations like China, India or Islam, it is not the case and

evolution of Europe, where no ruler or state could impose its sway over the rest, thus

coming to a balance of power and a more or less accepted rules-based system.

World orders different to European Westphalian system were “applied to the

geographic extent known to the statesmen of the time […] This was largely because the

69
Ibid., 3.
70
Ibid., 2.
71
Ibid., 11.

49
then-prevailing technology did not encourage or even permit the operation of a single

global system”72.

Kissinger then goes on to describe each of these region-civilizations’ world

order ideas, starting with Europe, then Islam, Asia and finally the role of the United

States during the Cold War and the relations with these regions. For Kissinger, the USA

is an ambivalent superpower, since it “has alternated between defending the

Westphalian system and castigating its premises of balance of power and

non-interference in domestic affairs as immoral and outmoded, and sometimes both at

once.”73

The problems of the new technologies that challenge human consciousness and

control over its own affairs, together with new arms races and the power of Internet

pose new threats to world order and freedom. In the light of these challenges, the

different civilizations need a common ground able to cope with their differences.

Therefore:

To achieve a genuine world order, its components, while

maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is

global, structural, and juridical –a concept of order that transcends the

perspective and ideals of any one region or nation. At this moment of

history, this would be a modernization of the Westphalian system informed

by contemporary realities.74

But the US is still the sole superpower, and “his quest for world order functions

on two levels: the celebration of universal principles needs to be paired with a

72
Ibid., 4.
73
Ibid., 8.
74
Ibid., 373.

50
recognition of the reality of other regions’ histories and cultures. Even as the lessons of

challenging decades are examined, the affirmation of America’s exceptional nature must

be sustained”; because the United States is “the modern world’s decisive articulation of

the human quest for freedom, and the indispensable geopolitical force for the

vindication of humane values.”75

Freedom is the keystone of this updated Westphalian system, for its quest is

“ingrained”76 in human condition. But freedom needs an order to keep it secured and

maintain peace.

4.2 Kissinger’s World Order as a Philosophical Enquiry

Henry Kissinger does not adopt a scientific approach to his book World Order,

even though his idea largely lies in the field of international politics. In his definition of

world order, he talks about notions of “just arrangements” and “distribution of power”

held by civilizations. However, although he refers to political arrangements and power,

these are not concepts immanent and distinctive of the field of politics. We can find

concepts of “just arrangements” in Law, Commerce, Ethnology, Sports, etc. The same

happens with power, which is not a concept immanent to politics, but can be found in

ethology, economy, physics, electromagnetism or anthropology.

The reason is that justice and power are not concepts but ideas, because they go

through different fields. In other words, the field of politics is constantly pierced by

philosophical ideas. We can say that the immanence of Politics as a discipline is

definitely weaker, for example, than the immanence of Classical Mechanics.

In fact, when Kissinger describes the different world-order ideas held by

75
Ibidem.
76
Ibid., 8.

51
civilizations, these very same civilizations constantly go beyond politics when they

justify their political arrangements.

For example, Kissinger says that “Islam’s different universal concept of world

order held sway, with its own vision of a single divinely sanctioned governance uniting

and pacifying the world. […] Its version of universal order considered Islam destined to

expand over the ‘realm of war,’ as it called all regions populated by unbelievers, until

the whole world was a unitary system brought into harmony by the message of the

Prophet Muhammad. […] As Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror admonished the Italian

city-states practicing an early version of multipolarity in the fifteenth century, ‘You are

20 states… you are in disagreement among yourselves… There must be only one

empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.’”77

But the same happens with the United States:

As Europe’s seventeen-century political and sectarian conflicts

raged, Puritan settlers had set out to redeem God’s plan with an ‘errand in

the wilderness’ that would free them from adherence to established (and in

their view corrupted) structures of authority. There they would build, as

Governor John Winthrop preached in 1630 aboard a ship bound for the

Massachusetts settlement, a ‘city upon a hill,’ inspiring the world through

the justness of its principles and the power of its example. In the American

view of world order, peace and balance would occur naturally, and ancient

enmities would be set aside –once other nations were given the same

principled say in their own governance that Americans had in theirs.78

77
Ibid., 5.
78
Ibid., 6.

52
 The other “civilizations” considered by Kissinger (India, China, Russia, Japan,

even Europe) also refer to principles of world order that are not immanent to politics or

diplomacy, but go beyond it, and they are mostly metaphysical ideas: harmony, balance,

etc. So as we can see, throughout his book, Kissinger is constantly moving in

philosophical waters, even though most of the time they are waters of political

philosophy.

The key point of our argument is that Kissinger, when proposing his own idea of

world order or pointing out the problems of this question, also resorts to ideas or

principles that are not strictly political but philosophical. One of the most important for

his book is the idea of the “unity of opposites”, which he comes to summarize at the

very last page, appealing to Greek philosophy:

Cryptic fragments from remote antiquity reveal a view of the

human condition as irremediably marked by change and strife.

“World-order” was fire-like, “kindling in measure and going out in

measure”, with war “the Father and King of all” creating change in the

world. But “the unity of things lies beneath the surface; it depends upon a

balanced reaction between opposites.” The goal of our era must be to

achieve that equilibrium while restraining the dogs of war. And we have to

do so among the rushing stream of history. The well-known metaphor for

this is in the fragment conveying that “one cannot step twice in the same

river.” History may be thought of as a river, but its waters will be ever

changing.79

79
Ibid., 374.

53
 This reference to pre-Socratic philosophy (quoting Heraclitus without

mentioning him) is not a mere ornamentation for a poetic and cheesy ending of his book.

In fact, this idea of the unity of opposites has been guiding Kissinger’s philosophy since

the beginning of his intellectual life in the 1950s, but even during his years in office and

beyond. Greg Grandin has weighed in on this subject:

Kissinger was familiar with Hegel’s “unity of opposites,” the

notion that ideas, people, political movements, and nations are defined

by their contradictions. He believed that effective diplomacy was the

managing of those contradictions, that what made great statesmen great

was their ability to “restrain contending forces, both domestic and

foreign, by manipulating their antagonisms.”80

Most of the arguments in his PhD thesis, A World Restored, have to do exactly

with this question of practical diplomacy as manipulation of contradictions and

differences.

This notion of the unity of opposites is certainly not distinctively scientific. In

fact, it is an ontological principle that, as we can see, dates back to pre-Socratic

philosophy, and walks through history to Hegel and the present. It is not surprising then,

that principles as abstract as those of the metaphysicians of Greek antiquity, have

practical applications in several fields of our present.

In fact, Kissinger, once again appeals to ontological principles to define different

civilizations. Whereas non-European civilizations are ruled by the constant search for

“unity”, the history of Europe is that of “division and multiplicity”81:

80
Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow, 113.
81
Kissinger, World Order, op. cit., 3.

54
 In China and Islam, political contests were fought for control of an

established framework of order. Dynasties changed, but each new ruling

group portrayed itself as restoring a legitimate system that had fallen into

disrepair. In Europe, no such evolution took hold. With the end of the

Roman rule, pluralism became the defining characteristic of the European

order.82

In the present of the international society, where all states know of each other,

and several units have their own world order idea, the problem of unity and multiplicity

reproduces itself at a global scale. After exposing this problem at length, Kissinger

comes to the last chapter to propose a principle that can establish the unity of opposites,

or the unity of multiplicity. This is exactly the program of his book:

The mystery to be overcome is one all peoples share –how

divergent historical experiences and values can be shaped into a

common order.83

4.3 Totalities in Kissinger’s World Order

Henry Kissinger does not use the word “totality” throughout his book, neither he

explicitly presents a theory of wholes and parts. However, this does not mean that

Kissinger is not exercising it. In fact, much of the confusions and contradictions of his

book come from the absence of abstract notions of totalities.

82
Ibid., 11.
83
Ibid., 10.

55
 Further, even though he defines what he understands by “world order”, he does

not define what he understands by “world” and “order”. The reader is forced to

constantly fill these gaps.

We can assume that at first, for Kissinger, the World is the planet Earth as its

surface is claimed entirely by States, that is, the World of political geography:

The idea of world order was applied to the geographic extent known

to the statesmen of the time –a pattern repeated in other regions. This was

largely because the then-prevailing technology did not encourage or even

permit the operation of a single global system.84

However, the question of “world order” always burst the borders of pure politics

or diplomacy. Technology is decisive, and not only for the expansion of the world map

until covering the Earth, but also in our present, where new technologies open up

problems and possibilities of chaos. Further, new technologies threaten “human

consciousness”, “freedom”, and ultimately the way humans see the world:

In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the

proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the

world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take

root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. […]

[However] By moving so many items into the realm of the available, the

Internet reduces the impulse to remember them. Communications

technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward

quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and

84
Ibid., 4.

56
 mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertips encourages the

mindset of a researcher but may diminish the mindset of leader. A shift in

human consciousness may change the character of individuals and the

nature of their interactions, and so begin to alter the human condition

itself.85

Therefore, “the World” considered by Kissinger is much more than pure

diplomatic or political relations, basically because these relations are not immanent, and

come to be influenced by other planes of reality. New technologies bring about new

ways of communication and new ways of protest and mass mobilization, threatening the

traditional vision of international politics.86

Kissinger does not define “order” either, but by the reading of the book we can

easily assume that Kissinger opposes “order” to “chaos”:

Our age is insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a

concept of world order. Chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented

interdependence […] Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the

restraints of any order determine the future?87

However, Kissinger struggles throughout the book between restricting order to

the parts of the world (the civilizations or regions) or applying it to the whole. In any

case, Kissinger recognizes the division of the world in parts with their own ideas of

order, that is, these parts are orders themselves. Let’s remember:

85
Ibid., 349-352.
86
Ibid., 354-360.
87
Ibid., 2.

57
 World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization

about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought

to be applicable to the entire world.88

In this short paragraph Kissinger condenses the very same problem of totalities.

A region is a geographical concept that refers to a part. A region is always a part of

bigger geographical whole. But Kissinger equalizes region to civilization, which is not a

geographical concept but an idea that largely lies in the field of History. These “regions

or civilizations” act here as distributive totalities: the world of humans is distributed in

parts (civilizations or regions). However, the problem is that some of these civilizations

or regions have ideas that they deem applicable to the rest of the world, thus making

them attributive parts.

The conflicts or the contradictions of our present reality consist of different parts

of world that hold different ideas about the world, different world maps (understood as

maps of reality). Although Kissinger is aware of these conflicts, he treats them as

accidental, that is, as problems, and therefore they can be solved. The last chapter is

dedicated to the solution.

But the real question is that these conflicts are not accidental to our reality but

constitutive. The contradiction is logico-material: the incompatibility between the

attributive and the distributive perspectives of the parts of the world.

The contradiction is very well exemplified with how Kissinger uses the idea of

civilization. He does not define it, and as we saw before, he equalizes it with “region”.

This equalization gives us a hint –civilizations stay in their own regions, holding

different worldviews that clash with each other:

88
Ibid., 9.

58
 With no means of interacting with each other on a sustained basis

and no framework for measuring the power of one region against another,

each region viewed its own order as unique and defined the others as

“barbarians” –governed in a manner incomprehensible to the established

system and irrelevant to its designs except as a threat. Each defined itself as

a template for the legitimate organization of all humanity, imagining that in

governing what lay before it, it was ordering the world.89

This paragraph gives us an even better example of the incompatibility of the

distributive perspective (With not means of interacting with each other…) and the

attributive perspective (Each define itself as a template for the legitimate organization

of all humanity…).

Kissinger adds more confusion, using “cultures” instead of regions or

civilizations, in other parts of the book, like when he asks rhetorically “Is it possible to

translate divergent cultures into a common system?”90 In this question, “cultures” are

understood as “cultural spheres” which are equalized with “civilizations”. The problem,

as we saw in the previous chapter, is that again, “cultural spheres” and “civilizations”

are ideas with a different format –distributive and attributive respectively. The idea of

Civilization tends to unity, and therefore is the matter of History, whereas “cultural

spheres” presuppose distributive multiplicity and isolation, therefore they are the matter

of ethnology or cultural anthropology. Kissinger totally confuses both ideas.

From this perspective, it is legitimate to talk about the European civilization,

because is the one who came to globalize the world, but that is not the case of the other

89
Ibid., 4.
90
Ibid., 373.

59
parts, whose world map remained restricted while the European world map did not

cease to grow until it covered the planet and expanded reality.

If we admit with Kissinger, that the Westphalian system is what defines the

“Western Civilization” in its political realm, then we can say that this system acts as an

attributive totality because it has engulfed the other parts gradually by interaction.

Of all these concepts of order, Westphalian principles are, at this

writing, the sole generally recognized basis of what exists of a world order.91

Still, Kissinger admits that this order is in crisis, because other parts that have

their own traditional ideas of world order, want to change the rules according to their

own principles.

Yet today this “rules-based” system faces challenges. The frequent

exhortations for countries to “do their fair share,” play by

“twenty-first-century rules,” or be “responsible stockholders” in a common

system reflect the fact that there is no share definition of the system or

understanding of what a “fair” contribution would be. Outside the Western

world, regions that have played a minimal role in these rules’ original

formulation question their validity in their present form and have made clear

that they would work to modify them.92

Summarizing, Kissinger presents the reality of opposites in the world, of parts

that are incompatible with each other while connected (symploké), but because he treats

91
Ibid., 6.
92
Ibid., 2.

60
them as accidental instead of constitutive, he goes now onto propose the solution to the

incompatibilities –the unifying principle of opposites or the ordering principle of the

parts of the world.

4.4 Ordering the World: Westphalia as a Value-neutral

System
The solution is simple. Since we have different parts of the world with

incompatible ideas of how to order the relations among the parts, we need rules of

interaction that do not imply values, because values are what make civilizations

incompatible with each other. In the present state of the world, the only value-neutral

system is the Westphalian system:

The universal relevance of the Westphalian system derived from its

procedural –that is, value-neutral– nature. […] …it did not supply a sense of

direction.93

This paragraph suggests that the Westphalian system succeeded in establishing

itself as a world system, not because it was imposed by the reality of European

expansion, but because of its own virtues of neutrality: recognition of sovereignty

among states and restrain from meddling in each others’ affairs. Now, if these rules

were neutral as Kissinger defends then no “civilization” would need to challenge them.

But they do, and Kissinger contradicts himself throughout the book:

93
Ibid., 363.

61
 The conflict of two concepts of world order is embedded in the

Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israel is by definition a Westphalian state, founded as such in

1947; the United States, its principal ally, has been a steward and key defender of the

Westphalian international order. But the core countries and factions in the Middle East

view international order to a greater or lesser degree through an Islamic consciousness.

[…] [And] once Al-Qaeda appeared on the scene […] Saudi Arabia found itself facing

two forms of civil war in the Middle East, which its own proselytizing efforts had

(however inadvertently) helped to inflame: one between Muslim regimes that were

members of the Westphalian state system and Islamists who considered statehood and

the prevailing institutions of international order an abomination to the Quran.94

In sum, from the perspective of at least one the civilizations in contest, the very

same core of the Westphalian system, statehood, is not value-neutral at all.

But the funny thing is that Islam is not the only civilization that finds

Westphalian rules abhorrent or despicable; the United States itself, “a steward and key

defender” of Westphalia, has also decried these principles throughout its history and in

the present in the name of superior values.

The United States has alternated between defending the Westphalian

system and castigating its premises of balance of power and

non-interference in domestic affairs as immoral and outmoded, and

sometimes both at once.95

94
Ibid., 139-140
95
Ibid., 8.

62
 As we can see, the rules of Westphalia are far from being neutral from the

perspective of other civilizations, but even from the perspective of the very same

civilization that gave birth to it. When the rules of a system are constantly broken in the

name of superior rules or values we might start to suspect if that is really a system.

The examples of this, in the past and in the present, are so overwhelming that it

would fill up dozens of pages.

The problem with Westphalia, again, is that it is conceived as an attributive

whole (because the parts are inevitably in contact with each other) but considering the

parts as distributive (because each part is sovereign, equal and entitled only to its own,

without interference). The incompatibilities are not accidental but constitutive of the

reality. The order is not unlikely to achieve but impossible, because the only orders are

states themselves as attributive totalities with borders that co-determine each other, but if

the Westphalian system is an attributive totality, which political reality outside the

system determines the system? Where is the border of the system? It cannot be the

planet Earth, because this is not a political boundary but a purely spatial or geographical

one. Only the present state of technology prevents political societies from expanding

themselves beyond the orbit of Earth. However, this problem does not hamper the plans

and programs of some states like US, Russia or China to colonize the Moon or Mars in a

not so distant future.

The insufficiency of the Westphalian system is explicitly recognized by

Kissinger who talks about a “modernization of the Westphalian system informed by

contemporary realities”96. However, whatever that modernization is (Kissinger does not

explain it), the key problem is still what is it that determines the statu quo of

international relations since it cannot be the whole (for it take us to the absurd of

determination from outside the world). As we said in chapter 3, the determination of the
96
Ibid., 373.

63
world is actually the determination of the map of the world, and this map is not drawn by

the whole (Humanity) but by one part (Universal empires) that walks this path with

unifying principles transcending the parts.

Kissinger does not escape this reality.

4.5 Kissinger as the Transcendental Ego of the US

Empire
The book World Order is a world map. Intentionally is a world map of

international politics, but goes beyond it –it is a philosophical map of reality that

appeals to ontological principles (the unity of opposites).

We have already explained that Kissinger’s map recognizes conflicts and

contradictions between parts of the world, although very confusedly. It is because he

implicitly considers these conflicts as accidental that goes on to proposing a solution.

We have already destroyed the pretensions of the first part of this solution: the

Westphalian system. Now comes the second one: Freedom.

Henry Kissinger is the mapmaker, but all mapmakers are situated in one part of

the world or humanity from which they draw the map that includes the rest of the parts,

which makes the mapmaker transcendental.

Kissinger does not even pretend to place himself in a neutral position, which is

actually impossible for the reasons stated above –nobody can get out of the world and

see it from the outside; the world is always seen from one part of the inside.

The totalization that Kissinger attempts is made from one part of humanity that

happens to be the last of the universal empires: the USA. This totalization necessarily

passes through the procedure of describing and reducing the other parts to the system of

64
coordinates from where they are described. If we take a look at the index, World Order

structure goes on to describe each of the units of the system: Europe, Islam, Japan, India,

China and finally the United States. In fact, each chapter considers also the relations

between the respective civilization and the United States, and even one entire chapter is

solely dedicated to the relations between Iran and the US97. Curiously, although

Kissinger talks about Russia as a distinctive approach to world order in the text, he does

not dedicate a specific section to it.

This structure of the book, that actually reproduces the Platonic method we

mentioned in Chapter 3, makes quite clear that the platform from which Kissinger is

drawing his vision is that of the United States.

But the whole book is plagued with references to the necessary US leadership in

any attempt to order the world. Besides “a modernization of the Westphalian system”

lies the unavoidable “American purpose”.

Although “the celebration of universal principles [American values] needs to be

paired with a recognition of the reality of other regions’ histories and cultures. […]

America –as the modern world’s decisive articulation of the human quest for freedom,

and an indispensable geopolitical force for the vindication of humane values– must

retain its sense of direction.”98

Kissinger identifies four dimensions where imbalances threaten the existing

world order: the nature of the state; the difference between the international economic

system and the survival of the nation-state; the absence of mechanisms of cooperation

among big powers; and finally, the purpose of the American power99.

97
Ibid., 146-171.
98
Ibid., 373.
99
Ibid., 367-371.

65
 American leadership has been indispensable, even when it has been

exercised ambivalently. It has sought a balance between stability and

advocacy of universal principles not always reconcilable with principles of

sovereign noninterference or other nations’ historical experience. The

quest for that balance, between the uniqueness of the American experience

and the idealistic confidence in its universality, between the poles of

overconfidence and introspection, is inherently unending. What it does not

permit its withdrawal.100

Later on, Kissinger proposes several questions that US must answer to contribute

to the evolution of “world order” in the twenty first century:

What do we seek to prevent, no matter how it happens, and if

necessary alone? The answer defines the minimum condition of the survival

of the society.

What do we seek to achieve, even if not supported by any

multilateral effort? These goals define the minimum objectives of the

national strategy.

What do we seek to achieve, or prevent, only if supported by an

alliance? This defines the outer limits of the country’s strategic aspirations

as part of a global system.

What should we not engage in, even if urged by a multilateral group

or alliance? This defines the limiting condition of the American

participation in world order.101

100
Ibid., 370-371.
101
Ibid., 372-373.

66
 Shall we note the use of the pronoun “we”?

That Kissinger is talking from the perspective of the US Empire is clear also

when he talks about “universal principles” and American “idealism”. The fallacy is

clear. The universal principles he is talking about are those of the US Empire, which by

deeming them as “universal” act as unifying principles of the opposites. If they are

universal it means they are valid for all civilizations. The contradiction is flagrant: if the

Westphalian principles are considered by Kissinger as value-neutral (therefore,

universal, distributive) and we already have proved that other civilizations like Islam

and even the US consider them as immoral, how can values like Freedom, Democracy

or Human Rights (that are clearly not value-neutral) be considered as universal?

Kissinger says (at least for the case of Freedom) that is “ingrained in human

nature”. Let’s remember once again the passage that summarizes the whole ideological

position of World Order:

Can regions with such divergent cultures, histories, and traditional

theories of order vindicate the legitimacy of any common system?

Success in such an effort will require an approach that respects

both the multifariousness of the human condition and the ingrained human

quest for freedom. Order in this sense must be cultivated; it cannot be

imposed. This is particularly so in an age of instantaneous communication

and revolutionary political flux. Any system of world order, to be

sustainable, must be accepted as just –not only by leaders, but also by

citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained

by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet

67
 freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to

keep peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on

the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as

interdependent. Can today’s leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day

events to achieve this balance?102

If the quest for freedom is “ingrained in human nature” it means that it is a

distributive principle that crosses any attributive border –the borders of culture, state,

religion, etc. However, freedom is not a scientific concept that can be defined like an

equilateral triangle. Freedom is a very complex philosophical idea that comes from

many contexts, it is understood in many ways, and has important connections with other

ideas like determination or causality. But Kissinger uses it uncritically, without

explaining it, without analyzing its problems and without explaining its contradictions.

If freedom is an inherent part of human nature (how should we understand this formula?

As if we had a gene for freedom?) then, why other civilizations utterly reject the idea in

favor of other principles? Shouldn’t have the peoples of other civilizations also achieved

“freedom” at least at the same time as the American people?

And here comes the second fallacy: when Kissinger praises America for the

idealism of spreading these universal principles, he is taking “idealism” already as

axiologically positive; but the same idealism guides the Al-Qaeda terrorist that blows

himself up in front of a US Marine’s platoon in Iraq, convinced that he will go to the

Islamic Paradise for contributing to expanding the one true faith. The trick here is taking

“idealism”, in this context, as the content of the variable of the function, instead as the

variable itself, that can have many different contents.

102
Ibid., 8.

68
 For Kissinger, “freedom” works here as the unifying principle that cancels all

incompatibilities because all men want the same: freedom. And this freedom must be

sponsored by the United States, who is “the modern world’s decisive articulation of the

human quest for freedom”103. This proposal is a scandalous example of false conscience

as ideology. The total failures of the USA in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria; the resistance

of China and Russia to accept American values, and the incompatibility between

China’s commercial interests and US commercial interests, not only put limits to the US

Empire geographically, but also philosophically; that is, the world map devised by

Kissinger is incapable of seeing these errors, therefore absorbing them without yielding

a millimeter in the philosophical coordinates that led to disaster.

The solution to “world order” as Westphalia plus Freedom just exemplifies how

believing in the possibility of ordering the world necessarily leads you to ideological

positions; the positions of the part of the world that can attempt to totalize the others.

“World order” then is not a scientific concept, and not even a philosophical idea

(although it can start as such) but an ideological formulation: that of the United States of

North America in its rise to world superpower after WWI and until the present when its

fortitude as a universal Empire is day by day challenged by other parts of the world with

different plans for humanity.

103
Ibid., 373.

69
 Chapter 5
CONCLUSIONS

At the beginning of this work we asked ourselves if the formula “world order” is

ideological. Since the usage in the last 100 years has multiplied but nobody gives a clear

analysis of the idea, we considered impossible to make a thorough study of all the usages

and contexts in this last hundred years. The only way to prove that the formula is

ideological is to analyze the sole attempt at defining extensively “world order” –Henry

Kissinger’s book of the same name. These are our findings.

5.1 Main Conclusions and Implications

The formula “world order”, when analyzed from the perspective of its

logico-material format, results in an impossibility, because the structure of the ideas of

order and world are incompatible. Under this light, “world order” does not make more

sense than “squared circle”. However, the formula is used extensively anyway as a

force-idèe of one part of the world that can attempt to totalize the other parts under its

own principles.

The main finding of this research is precisely how these contradictions are

implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) present in any given analysis of the formula; in our

case, Henry Kissinger’s work, as we have seen.

Accepting the formula “world order” as something positive, real, without seeing the

implications, can only lead to a series of contradictions, and in the end, to ideology as

the system of ideas that have lost capacity to correct its course when facing reality –that

is, ideology as false conscience.

From the perspective of his take on “world order”, we can actually see that

70
Kissinger’s framework is typically idealist. Kissinger’s ontology and epistemology are

idealist because he is incapable of seeing that “the problems” of the world are

incompatibilities of the logical structure of our material world: a problem can be solved,

an incompatibility is unsolvable.

The hypothesis of the unity of opposites as an ontological principle that guides his

approach to international realities can only end in idealism, the same idealism that can

be found in Kant, a major interest of Kissinger since his first academic years.

However, this circumstance does not imply that all the results of his analyses have

to be idealist. There are no pure idealist systems; all of them must have some basis in

material reality. In this sense, we can say that Kissinger, at least, sees that there are

difficult problems to overcome in the world that require more than good faith or a

“secret plot” of Nature. Therefore he postulates the necessity for statesmen to have a

bigger picture of reality that includes these difficult problems.

We can say that all his previous books deal with this question from a historical

perspective: how to overcome the difficulties of a multiplicity of actors that fight for

limited space and resources, and with different ideas. This part of his thinking, together

with his actions as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State of the US during the

1970s, surrounded by constant controversy, has led to an interpretation of Kissinger as

“the supreme realist”.

Commentators probably miss the point because they mix the scale of analysis. Even

the most idealist person cannot lose sight of reality, like Descartes and his “provisional

morality”, when dealing with the practice of the world. Kissinger, Descartes or Kant

could be idealists, but they were no fools. If Kant could talk about perpetual peace from

the comfort of his well-heated house in Konigsberg, it was because he did so sheltered

behind Frederick II’s bayonets, not from his pure conscience. If Kissinger can talk about

71
the possibility of “World Order” is because he has the dollar, Hollywood movies and the

whole US imperial army behind him imposing order wherever it can.

His world map, where he includes the incompatibilities between the parts of the

world (civilizations), also includes the idealist principle that will unite them underneath.

But if, to say it with Marx, the principles of the French Revolution –Liberty, Equality

and Fraternity- were actually Napoleon’s infantry, cavalry and artillery, then the

principles of Kissinger’s recipe for world order –Westphalian system and Freedom as

ingrained in human condition- are the US Empire’s Marine Corps and Free-market

economic recipes. World Order is not more than US Imperial Order wherever it can

extend its reach.

When publications as respected as Foreign Policy, The Economist, The Diplomat or

other Western outlets warn against Russian or Chinese attempts to subvert World Order

they’re no more no less than defending US Empire and its world statu quo. In this sense,

when politicians, journalists or intellectuals appeal to “world order” to condemn these

attempts they are using an apotropaic ideology to turn away chaos or harm, which is in

fact not such a thing but the limits of US Empire reach.

5.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research

We have choose to prove our hypothesis of the necessity of the ideological nature

of the formula “world order” by applying our framework to Kissinger’s book of the

same name, since we consider it the only available “thorough” analysis of this syntagma.

However, it would be desirable to further prove this idea by analyzing more thoroughly

the history of this formula since its inception in the aftermath of WWI.

This project is, of course, impossible to carry out in a Master’s thesis, since it

implies the research of a massive amount of documents and books written and produced

72
in the last 100 years, with the particularity that the formula “world order” is not directly

defined. But if we are right, the implications of our analysis of “world order” will not

only be found in Kissinger’s book, which is the main limitation of this thesis, but also in

the context of all the uses of the formula during this last century.

It will be particularly interesting to know why “world order” was even more used

after WWII than after the fall of the Soviet Union and how it was overshadowed rapidly

by the formula “Cold War”. If the USSR were the greatest limit to US Imperial Order, to

the point of confining it to less than half the world, then it would be presumptuous to

talk about “world order”. However, with the fall of the soviet block, the US is left as the

only existing Empire with universal aspirations, therefore it seems more “legitimate” to

talk about “world order”, and thus, the steady rise of China as the new biggest limit to

US order explains usages such as those we mentioned at the very beginning of our work:

China as a threat to world order. In fact, a threat to US imperial order.

73
 References

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—. El Ego trascendental. Oviedo: Pentalfa, 2016.

—. Ensayos materialistas. Madrid: Taurus, 1972.

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