Global Complexities

During the second Gulf War, people around the world were inundated night and day with television images of smart bombs, shock-and-awe, and network-centric warfare, bringing them closer than ever before to events unfolding thousands of miles away. Tanks, missiles, pilotless surveillance planes, bombs, helicopters, and gunships circled Baghdad, but these instruments of war were equally present—if not equally destructive—to people elsewhere. In a world with one billion television screens and nearly one billion Internet users, it is impossible not to confront "distant proximities" of some sort on a daily basis. According to James Rosenau, ours is not "one world" (see Ohmae 1990), but neither is it a world of distant "little boxes" that can be kept isolated and at arms length. Rather, as the title of Rosenau's new book suggests, ours is a world of Distant Proximities. This massive and, in places, magisterial volume seeks to make sense of a world that is turbulent, uncertain, ambiguous, contradictory, and dynamic—a world replete with newly empowered individuals and nongovernmental agents of change. What animates people, Rosenau argues, is less a commitment to abstract ideals and national identities than an orientation to various near and distant local, private, and global worlds. Individuals have become central to the course of events, and Rosenau draws on structure-agency theory from sociology to better understand how people make history, albeit not always in circumstances of their own choosing (see Giddens 1984). Rosenau seeks, in effect, to sociologize international relations by describing and analyzing the complex local–global intersections of various near and distant worlds. In the process he hopes to absolutely undermine the notion that the global order is comprised principally of intersecting sovereign states.