International Order Beneath an Empty Sky
This chapter lays out a tension that arises in a world that is dominated by the theory of imposed order, yet makes room for the theory of immanent order as a rhetoric that is set against what it done in the name of will and artifice. Theorizing international order in contemporary international relations can be interpreted as an attempt to negotiate these rival positions. However, the chapter makes the critical point that these theories of order represent incommensurable positions. The one cannot be assimilated to the other to form a coherent composite theory of order. The chapter discusses the implications of a world that is torn between these incommensurable positions. The theory of immanent order provides a sense of transcendent truth that conditions what human beings make and do, but in a constructed world, consistent with the theory of imposed order, this transcendent truth is an artefact of the same freedom it seeks to regulate. This is a consequence of substituting human decision in place of God to secure the regularity of international order. Secular alternatives to God are sustained in the same way that nominalist theologians repose confidence in God: through faith or belief. The chapter concludes by arguing that this theological inheritance begins to unravel at a certain point because, unlike God, human beings are conditionally, rather than absolutely, good. The danger is that abiding uncertainty exposes the regularity of international order to the arbitrary whims of power.