Randall L. Schweller - Maxwells Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium

Maxwells Demon and the Golden Apple

Global Discord in the New Millennium

Randall L. Schweller

2014 Johns Hopkins University

Press All rights reserved. Published 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schweller, Randall L.

Maxwells demon and the golden apple: global discord in the new
millennium / Randall L. Schweller.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4214-1277-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4214-1278-8
(electronic) ISBN 1-4214-1277-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 1-4214-1278-0 (electronic) 1. World politics21st century
Forecasting. 2. International relationsForecasting. 3. International
organizationForecasting. 4. Twenty-first centuryForecasts. I. Title.

JZ1318.S366 2014

327.1dc23

2013025011

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Julie

This is a book about how and why international politics is transforming from a system anchored for hundreds of years in enduring principles, which made it relatively constant and predictable, into something far more erratic, unsettled, and devoid of behavioral regularities. In the fall of 2009, I was asked by Justine Rosenthal, then editor of the National Interest, to write an essay for their First Draft of History series which posed the question: Twenty-five years from now, what will we be saying about todays international politics? I decided to roll a grenade down the table, so to speakto write a provocative and theoretically unconventional piece that attempted to capture what is essential and unprecedented about global politics in the new millennium. In that article I argued that contemporary international politics is steadily moving toward a state of chaos and randomness, a change consistent with the universal law of rising entropy.

The present study is an outgrowth of that essay. In a sense, it throws down the gauntlet, challenging the garden-variety theoretical treatments of international politics that continue to populate an already crowded field of booksone fueled by the publics parlor game-like fascination with what comes after the American century or, in the language of academics, what comes after unipolarity. Most of these works are rooted in concepts, rules, and premises that, tellingly, would be familiar to Napoleon Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck, both of whom, if they suddenly awoke from their long sleeps and read these books, would mistakenly (but understandably) conclude that little had changed in their absence.

The title, Maxwells Demon and the Golden Apple, is a whimsical play on the books core theme of global (dis)order. I say whimsical because the theme is disguised not only in a fanciful but also a counterintuitive way: a commonsense guess as to which object, the demon or the golden apple, stands for order and which for disorder would most likely prove incorrect. The apple, not the demon, represents disorder and chaos; it is a reference to the mythical Golden Apple of Discord.

According to Greek mythology, Zeus held a banquet among the Olympian gods to celebrate the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Eris, the goddess of discord (corresponding to the Roman goddess Discordia) was deliberately not invited by Zeus because he feared that she, given her troublesome nature, would make the party unpleasant for everyone. Angered by this snub, Eris showed up at the fte anyhow with a golden apple upon which she had inscribed KALLISTI (THI KAAAIXTHI in ancient Greek), meaning For the Fairest, and tossed it into the banquet hall, sparking a vanity-driven dispute among the goddesses that eventually led to the Trojan War. The goddesses wanted Zeus to play the role of judge, but he, naturally reluctant to proclaim one of them the most beautiful, decided instead to send the three contestantsAphrodite, Athena, and Herato a mortal but fair-minded Trojan shepherd-prince, Paris, for a decision. Guided by Hermes, the three goddesses appeared naked before Paris at Mount Ida. As he inspected them, each goddess tempted him with a bribe to give her the apple. Hera offered to make him king of Europe and Asia; Athena promised him wisdom and skill in war; Aphrodite said that he could have the most beautiful woman in the world. In what is known as the Judgment of Paris, the prince, being a healthy young lad, gave the apple to Aphrodite, thereby making powerful enemies of Athena and Hera. In Aphrodites eyes, the most beautiful woman of the world was Helen of Sparta (now known as Helen of Troy), the wife of a Greek king, Menelaus. While the king was away, Paris carried Helen off to Troy, provoking the Greeks to combine their military forces for war on Troy to bring her back. Trojan civilization was destroyed in the process.

The demon, whom you will meet later in the book, is an allegorical creature at the center of a thought experiment by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell to reverse the entropy-rising process inherent in all closed systems. Entropy may be thought of as a measure of disorder in the universe (or, in a purely thermodynamic sense, of the availability of energy in a closed system to do work): the higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. The entropy of an isolated system never decreases because isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermo-dynamic equilibriumthe state of maximum entropy. Maxwells demon defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics by means of a superhuman sorting of molecules according to their differing kinetic energies. Guarding a frictionless door between two rooms filled with gas, the demon opens the door for particularly fast-moving molecules, allowing them to pass into a room that becomes progressively hotter. Likewise, the demon allows particularly slow-moving molecules to pass out of the warmer room into the cooler one. By segregating the fast particles from the slow ones, the demon creates a growing temperature difference within the system that violates the Second Law, restoring the potential energy available for work and, thereby, increasing order in the universe.

One of the core ideas of the book will strike most readers as counterintuitive. Large, destructive wars are not always or in all ways bad; they serve the function of providing world order. Indeed, the time-honored solution for rising global disorderas well as for rising discord among nations and what political scientists refer to as system disequilibriumis a large and total war fought among all the great powers. These so-called hegemonic wars have regularly ensued every hundred years or so. The destructiveness of modern weaponry, however, precludes any rational thought of another hegemonic war, and if rationality did not prevent another one being fought, a twenty-first-century hegemonic war would eliminate not only global disorder but everything else on the planet. That major-power war is unthinkable is a good thing, to be sure. The downside, however, is that there is no other known remedy for rising entropy in international politics. Also, todays rising disorder is not confined to the international politics conducted solely by nation-states but to a global system composed of many different types of actors exerting various kinds of power. Add to this the accelerated pace of technological change and we have a world that is dauntingly complex and driven by the certainty of unpredictable change. Is there a Maxwells demon in our future? Can the allegory become a reality? Candidates abound, but only time will tell if one will step forward. If not, thats fine too. International politics will be messier than ever, but life will carry on as it always does.