Speak about current international relations: general trends.

December 26th, 2011

There are about 200 states today and they all together make an international system in which a great role is played by international organizations. States and intergovernmental organizations are primarily the main subjects of international law, whilst non-governmental organizations are not. It goes without saying that the powers and potentials of international actors are quite different and so a group of states which are more powerful or a single hegemony do always exist. Today we can see that the US is still dominating the world which is considered to be unipolar. But it is the common interest of the majority of powerful economies that the international system should become multipolar. by the way it is one of the principle objectives of the Russian federation foreign policy. So we can see the first trend characterizing international relations in the 21st century.

One more tendency we can speak about today is the transition of international relations to the context of international organizations. There is an enormous quantity of the latter in the world and more and more states are becoming parties to this organizations. Moreover, it is an international organization which coordinates relations between states and other actors. And regardless of the fact that some countries try to minimize the meaning of this coordinating center, it is still effectively working though it might be reasonable to reform it in some respects.

Two more trends are without a doubt to be mentioned concerning this issue – they are regionalization and globalization. They actually can be viewed as the consequences of the increase in number of the large-scale universal and general organizations and regional groupings to some extent. But nevertheless they obviously have their own impact on modern international relations. Globalization is known as increasing integration of the world economies. The world is becoming a single economic unit through international trade, capital investments and financial institutions. there are quite different views concerning globalization. Antiglobalizers’ key claim is that due to this phenomena income inequality and poverty are rising, environmental degradation and cultural imperialism are becoming more and more evident. Pro-globalizers on the contrary assert that it actually helps the poor countries to overcome their poverty, they find it to be a key source of economic and human development, low inflation, high productivity and even democratization. As far as regionalization is concerned, it is a modern trend of integration on the basis of geopolitical position, which also has a number of certain advantages and disadvantages.
It is still not clear whether and in what way the new global order will be built, but the world today is facing new challenges such as terrorism, organized crime, extremism, separatism and proliferation of WMD. It’s hard to believe but these are also the increasing trends in modern society and we all have to undertake mutual and joint measures against such new challenges, otherwise we’ll have no world to live in.

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