World Order

by Henry Kissinger

In China and Islam, political contests were fought for control of an established framework of order. Dynasties changed, but each new ruling group portrayed itself as restoring a legitimate system that had fallen into disrepair. In Europe, no such evolution took hold. With the end of Roman rule, pluralism became the defining characteristic of the European order. The idea of Europe loomed as a geographic designation, as an expression of Christianity or of court society, or as the center of enlightenment of a community of the educated and of modernity. Yet although it was comprehensible as a single civilization, Europe never had a single governance, or a united, fixed identity. It changed the principles in the name of which its various units governed themselves at frequent intervals, experimenting with a new concept of political legitimacy or international order. In other regions of the world, a period of competing rulers came by posterity to be regarded as a “time of troubles,” a civil war, or a “warlord period”—a lamented interlude of disunity that had been transcended. Europe thrived on fragmentation and embraced its own divisions. Distinct competing dynasties and nationalities were perceived not as a form of “chaos” to be expunged but, in the idealized view of Europe’s statesmen—sometimes conscious, sometimes not—as an intricate mechanism tending toward a balance that preserved each people’s interests, integrity, and autonomy. For more than a thousand years, in the mainst...