Unrecognised Dynamics of Global Interdependence

The decline of the liberal international order and a world order that operates “at the edge of chaos” create new challenges for the West. Many scholars have elaborated on the need for the West to redefine its purpose and “reinvent” the liberal order. The core of the liberal international order is the transatlantic partnership which is in a state of flux in an effort to cope with internal and external turbulence and the rise of powers that create their own regional hegemonic orders that challenge the liberal order and threaten the survival of the transatlantic partnership. In this chaotic state of affairs, novel approaches to theorizing about regional orders are needed in an effort to devise policymaking tools that promote multilateralism and regional and international cooperation and manage global turbulence and uncertainty. This paper presents a mapping of conceptualizing the transatlantic partnership and regional orders such as those of the Middle East and East Asia as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Envisioning the global order as a collage of CAS with CAS properties, behavior and characteristics, drawing on CAS theory, assists theorists and policymakers alike to devise models for managing complexity, turbulence and uncertainty in world affairs and creating conditions that foster greater interdependence and interconnectedness between different regional systems, which ultimately encourages cooperation at the micro and macro levels and creates resilient security governance structures. The quest for how to create order out of chaos, most importantly, must involve methods of addressing the problem of prediction that is one of the greatest problems in order to manage global and regional uncertainty and diffuse policies cross-regionally to deal with tipping points and address transnational security issues. The paper concludes that a reinvention of the liberal order must certainly involve a pluralist agenda with adaptation mechanisms for complexity management and perturbation management in order to deal with the problems of uncertainty and prediction and encourage regional systems to self-organize and co-evolve together with the transatlantic partners in their effort to promote continuity in a global order that operates at the edge of chaos. It is the only way for the liberal order to survive and for the West to maintain its preeminence in regional environments of nonlinear interactions.