Kryachkov 2!indd

UNIT V
HOW THE WORLD 
WORKS

---

---

139
Английский язык для магистратуры
H
ow the W
orld W
orks
READING 1
LEAD-IN
1. Suggest an explanation of the concept ‘the world order’? Is this term a recent coinage? Is 
‘world disorder’ its opposite? Compare ‘the world order’ with ‘a new world order’? 
2. What makes up the world order? Consider the following constituents: international commu-
nity, collective defence, collective security, sovereignty, spheres of influence, international law. 
Can you continue the list? 
Skim the text to find out what the author thinks about the changes taking place in 
the world.
THE REAL NEW WORLD ORDER
Alan Caruba
American Daily
You don’t have to be a Ph.D. to know that we are now in a period of transition between the 
world as it existed at the end of World War II, the international organizations created at that time, 
and today’s world that is made up of more democracies than have existed at any time since the 
founding of our own nation. 
Emerging from the horror of WWII in which an estimated sixty million people died, the world 
was divided between the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a world 
determined to avoid a third World War. Out of this emerged the United Nations, an institution 
that was largely the creation of Soviet agents in the US State Department and their counterparts 
in Russia. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization also came into being to defend Europe against 
the potential of aggression from the Soviet Union that had created a buffer of satellite states to 
include East Germany. A ‘Cold War’ existed until the fall of the Soviet Union. 
Now both international organizations have come to the end of their usefulness. The UN has a 
long history of being unable to avert war anywhere and NATO, whose purpose was to defend Eu-
rope against the Soviet Union, is no longer needed. The dithering of both over the prospect of war 
with Iraq are examples of their death throes. The establishment of the European Union, composed 
of Socialist states, is already showing signs of strain as socialism contributes inexorably to that 
continent’s economic problems and sovereign European nations discover their independence is 
of greater value than this new, huge bureaucracy. 
The New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, postulates that we now exist in a world di-
vided between nations striving for order, i.e., the absence of war, and those for whom war is a 
necessity, i.e., dictatorships that require an external enemy to divert their populations from the 
fact they are enslaved. What Friedman overlooks, however, is that democracies do not go to war 
with one another, so it is vital that democracy be spread everywhere, that people be encouraged 
to overthrow despotic governments in favor of self-rule. 
The history of the past half-century since WWII amply demonstrates that democracy can be 
achieved. The three nations who contested the power of free nations, Germany, Italy and Japan, were 
not only defeated, but thereafter put on the path to becoming democratic, free states. Following the 
United States’ determined containment of Soviet efforts to spread Communism Poland freed itself 
of Soviet domination and Communism. The fall of the Soviet Union freed its satellite nations. Spain, 
after Franco died, became a democracy. Taiwan, freed of its oligarchy, became a thriving democracy. 

---