MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA

MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA
the nature of orders, shifting alliances and luctuating systems, in which
the distribution of power is quite observable.
4 Limitations of Theories of International Relations
While theories of international relations are generally understood
as tools that help to comprehend the complex world around us in
systematic way, currently, they fail to explain why the global system
is as chaotic as we observe it today, and where it is heading. They do
not predict, or provide guidelines about changes and transformations
that ought to occur. For most international relations’ scholars, the end
of the Cold War starkly revealed that existing theories of international
relations were incapable of explaining or anticipating fundamental
changes in the international system. It is equally questionable, whether
the theories are better equipped to address subsequent phenomena,
such as the resurging ethno national conlicts, the consequences of
new trends towards democratization and market economy, the nature
and implication of the emerging international system – the alleged “new
world order.” Several scholars, for instance, Holm 26 has pointed out, our
universal theories; most importantly realism and liberalism are not
more adequate for understanding the emerging world order than for
explaining the changes that overwhelmed the bipolar Cold War system.
A number of main stream theories including realism and liberalism
and other theories of international relations including the marginal
ones, attempt to address the global environment and the interactions
among actors based on such concepts like: balance of power, polarity,
global capitalist trade systems, the end of history, perpetual peace
theories, oligarchy, hegemony, imperialism, neo-Marxist and neoanarchist
critiques such as anarcho-syndicalism and the “façade” of
democratization, and the clash of civilizations.
Historically, Realism has been used as a major explanatory theory.
Numerous thinkers, who belong to this school of thought have utilized
the realist approach to explain the State, power, sovereignty, and balance
of power. These thinkers include among others: Thucydides, Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Grotius, Clausewitz, Niebuhr, Carr, Morgenthau and Waltz. The
26 HOLM, HANS-HENRIK: Who’s World Order: Uneven Globalization and the
End of the Cold War. Georg Sørensen, ed., Boulder, Col.: Westview Press,
1995.
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