The Shifting Global Power Balance Equations and the Emerging Real ‘New World Order’

Year 2010, Volume: 9 Issue: 2, 72 - 87, 16.06.2010

Alex İgho Ovie-d’leone

Abstract

Expansion in globalization arising from increased interconnectivity and interdependence across the world
is causing a shift both in the focus of what now could determine the principal international power
variables and the criteria for power balancing calculus. One direct challenge to the status quo is the
emergence on one hand of new state actors which are becoming more assertive, as well as some other new
key non-state actors now matching states seemingly one-on-one on the world stage in many spheres of
international political concourse. Consequently, there is a visible or perceptible shift from the current USled
unipolar ‘New World Order’ to a new form of multi-faceted power balancing structure that abstracts
sharply from the traditional patterns of international power balancing calculus. The predominant position
of the US in a post-Cold-War order is being threatened on several fronts. Consequently, unipolarity
appears to be obviously on its decline. However, the US has started to respond in kind to such new threats
to its continued international hegemony. It is a unilateral response that seeks to perpetrate unipolarity. But
how long can it hold on to its grip and status as a global hyper power balancer? The challenges presented
by such sundry scenarios including also other new related developments are exhaustively tackled here in
this article.

Key words: globalization, New World Order, international hegemony, unipolarity

Keywords

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