Worldbuilding 204: World Order
Greetings and sinal! …My nose is not that big! Or maybe it is… Anyway, greetings everyone! How are you doing? Today, we’re going to talk about world order, so let’s get straight into the best part of any blog post I make.
Definition
This is the best, I am sure we all can agree:
A world order is the dominant configuration of power, economic structure, institutions, and legitimising norms that governs interactions among political entities within a given historical space and period.
Some say that it has to be entirely global, but I say region specifically because for large swaths of time, the ability for anything to be global was exactly at 0. But they still had dominant structures in a local area that shaped everything and how everyone related to it.
Are they inevitable?
I would say… yes, a world order is inevitable. And here is why: ever since the dawn of civilisation, people have gathered together into structures. That is the entire bloody point of a civilisation. You are a large group of people spread across lots of land who are organised together with some vague sense of belonging together. When this happens, power discrepancies happen.
One civilisation will inevitably always have more power than another. That is just how it is. It can be due to more people, due to more fertile land, due to lots of raw materials, and there can be different civilisations that acquire power through different means, making it highly complicated. But the power imbalance will exist because there are only so many ways you can be powerful, and the number of political entities always exceeds these means.
So we have at bare minimum one entity that is more powerful than the rest; do you know what they will do with that? Of course, they will be very kind and pleasant and fair and just give lots of help to the weaker… said no one who knows history and politics. The powerful one is going to start using their powerful position. At the best of times, it is through soft power and the veneer of being pleasant; at the worst of times, it will be with swords and guns.
But because this (or these) power(s) have so much power and become dangerous to anyone who in anyway challenges their power, or simply doesn’t play along, the smaller powers will start to arrange themselves around the larger powers to get benefits and the larger powers will of course use this and tada, you have a world order emerging on its own.
Evolution of world orders
World orders are inherently very stable. That is because they are self-reinforcing. When a great power, a power big enough to influence a lot of other entities, has gained its status, it is going to do things to keep that power, and other political entities are going to align themselves with the great power in order to get the most benefit from the situation. And in most instances in history and life, trying to challenge what is is rarely a worthwhile proposition.
But at the same time, anyone who is over the age of 36 also knows that world orders shift and change. Anyone who is 120 years old will have seen this happening at least 2 times, with a third coming. Which ones am I talking about here? I will explain in my next section. But if they are inherently stable and self-reinforcing, then HOW is it that they keep changing?
The beginning of one world order is the death of another. And the death of a world order is ultimately always the same: the waning power and influence of one of the poles. A pole in this context of world order is one of the powers that the world order is arranged around. A quick way to look at it is that it's a power strong enough to matter in the world order. A world order is thus always arranged around one or more poles. Monopolar has one pole, bipolar has two, tripolar has three,and multipolar, three or more.
The waning of power of the poles involved can happen in one of two ways normally. Decline of their own power, or the rise of power of another power. The rise of a monopolar or bipolar world order is usually due to the rise of power of other entities, while the rise of multipolar world orders is usually from the decline of a power. And historically, there is a rough cycling between the mono/bipolar world order and the multipolar world order structure. Though to be honest, the multipolar structure tends to be more stable for longer times primarily because it allows a change in what poles exist without necessarily toppling the entire world order.
So you can see it as a cyclic thing: mono/bipolar ➡️ multipolar, and then back with multipolar being the longer of the two. Multipolar ones decline by a sudden rise of a new power (or two) that becomes the great new power, the mono/bipolar ones decline because said power(s) decline in power on the world stage.
A common event that can cause dramatic upheaval for an entire world order is a great war. This is a war between great powers, and great powers are poles, often. So it can be seen as a war between poles. Not all world order shifts have been due to war, but a lot of them have been because wars are expensive.
Historical Examples
There have been many world orders in the history of humanity, but which ones are the most famous ones?
One of the earliest examples of two world orders is two that actually co-existed and knew of each other but had no interest in each other due to the sheer distance. The Roman world order in Europe, and the Chinese world order in Asia. They were monopolar, and every entity that existed in their vicinity aligned with whatever they wanted. What happened when Rome fell? That is right, a multipolar world order in Europe arose, and France (or what was to become France) was among those that rose then.
Though before the Roman one, by a long shot, we had the Bronze Age world order, which had the Myceaneans (Greece), Hittites (Turkey), and Egypt being great powers in the Mediterranean area. And those were the big ones that get talked about because they left writing, but there were others around as well.
But if we move forward by one and a half thousand years and some change to around the 19th century, there was a multipolar world order in effect then. France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Britain, Prussia were the biggest players of the time. And it was formalised into what would be called the “Concert of Europe”, where the idea was that they would talk things out so the wars with Revolutionary France or the like would not happen again, and the big 5 would not infringe on each other's sphere of influence that would cause wars. You know, to avoid those kinds of wars that could threaten the world order and balance of power between each other.
After World War 1, several of those powers ceased being great powers. After World War 2, even more of them ceased to be great powers, and in the end, only two stood left. USSR and USA, and we were left with a bipolar world, which ended in 1991 when the USSR collapsed, and we were left with a monopolar world. How long will this last? Might be about 40 years if current trends continue.
Mini Practicum: Concert of Stars
What better way to illustrate world order than to show one of my own? In Stellima, the current world order, or maybe space order? Nah, world order it is. Anyway, it is called Concert of Stars, clearly derived from Concert of Europe, because I like that era of history, and I have mimicked the geopolitics of that era, but in space!
But there are more complexities to it as well. The Concert of Europe was all about just the great powers deciding among each other; in the Concert of Stars, however, there are more structures that allow for more power balancing. It is divided into 3 principal layers, though you could say there are 4 layers where the fourth one is “not a concert member,” also known as “Farspace.” How are you a member? You have to be powerful enough that people have to listen to you on some relevant scale.
The first layer is what is called the Core. They are the uppermost and essentially define everything. They are the most powerful and contain dozens of species each that they either conquered or got to join in. They control a lot of space and worlds and, if they absolutely wanted, they could be self-sufficient entirely. But that is expensive if you want quality. If the Core tells you to jump, you just jump so hard that your head slams into the ceiling. The known and developed members here are Divine Dominion, The Raixhen Empire, The Fungal Duarchy, The Workers’ Federation, and the Commonwealth of Worlds.
Below the Core are the Major powers. The Core powers are about 20-50 times the power of a Major power, but the Major powers still pack a punch and thus get their own category. A thing that exists, though, is a patronage system. Which means that the Major powers align themselves with a core member, which gets labeled as “The Patron” and is thus in that core member's official sphere of influence. This patronage means that the Major member has access to a larger market for trade, and has a Core member that will defend them if any other Core member starts doing anything. After all, you don’t want another Core member messing with your turf.
Beneath that are the Minor members; the Minors are quite numerous and are the weakest, about 10-20 times weaker than any Major member. They also have a patronage system with Major members, but this does not guarantee the safety brought to them by the Core member. The Core members generally don’t deal with the Minor members because they are so incredibly small by comparison, and any escalations below do not in any meaningful way influence the Core members. Though there have been instances where enough Minor and Major members have made a ruckus that the Core members have had to listen. Those instances are rare and few, though.
The astute among you might notice that this system is a siphoning system that siphons resources, energy, and more from those below toward the top, which is by design. It helps keep those below weak enough to never challenge the system, while also being too busy to ever get the idea that the system could be exploitative toward them. The Minors exploit Farspace, the Majors exploit the Minors, and the Core exploits the Majors. It is the hierarchy of exploitation!
Summa Summarum
World orders are a set of rules that political entities play by between each other, and a world order is always arranged around one or more poles that dominate the system. They often change through big events, such as wars, but can also change through other means. Multipolar world orders often collapse by the sudden rise of one or two powers that overshadow the rest, while mono/bipolar world orders collapse by the relevant powers weakening.
A world order can be extremely exploitative and extractive by nature, and is then held up by people’s tendency to not want to be at the bottom and thus prop up the system to avoid being at the bottom. Even the best of nations or political entities will start to abuse these kinds of systems because not doing it means losing their own status within the system.
A bit dark, yeah, but that is how power works.
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