The underlying assumption is that such an order will be largely free of war and will generate prosperity for all of its member states. Communism is another universalistic ideology that could serve as the basis for building an ideological international order.
Indeed, Marxism shares some important similarities with liberalism. Communism's universalistic dimension is based on the concept of class, not rights. Marx and his followers maintain that social classes transcend national groups and state borders.
Most importantly, they argue that capitalist exploitation has helped foster a powerful bond among the working classes in different countries. Hence, if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War and had felt the kind of enthusiasm for Marxism in that the United States felt for liberal democracy, Soviet leaders surely would have tried to build a communist international order. If the unipole does not have a universalistic ideology, and therefore is not committed to imposing its political values and governing system on other countries, the international order would be agnostic.
It would not, however, be committed to shaping local politics on a global scale. The sole pole would instead be more tolerant and pragmatic in its dealings with other countries. If Russia, with its present political system, were ever to become a unipole, the international system would be agnostic, as Russia is not driven by a universalistic ideology.
The same is true of China, where the regime's principal source of legitimacy is nationalism, not communism. So far, I have distinguished between international and bounded orders, and I have divided international orders into realist, agnostic, and ideological kinds.
A third way to categorize orders—be they international or bounded—is to focus on the breadth and depth of their coverage of the most important areas of state activity. Regarding breadth, the central question is whether an order has some effect on the key economic and military activities of its member states. Concerning depth, the main question is whether the institutions in the order exert significant influence on the actions of its member states.
In other words, does the order have strong and effective institutions? With these two dimensions in mind, one can distinguish between thick orders and thin orders. A thick or robust order comprises institutions that have a substantial effect on state behavior in both the economic and military realms. Such an order is broad and deep. A thin order, on the other hand, can take three basic forms.
First, it might deal with only the economic or military domain, but not both. Even if that realm contained strong institutions, it would still be categorized as a thin order. Second, an order might deal with one or even both realms, but contain weak institutions. Third, it is possible, but unlikely, that an order will be involved with economic and military matters, but will have strong institutions in only one of those areas. In short, a thin order is either not broad, not deep at all, or deep in only one of the two crucial realms.
Figure 1 summarizes the different categories of orders employed in this article. No international order lasts forever, which raises the question: What explains the demise of an existing order and the rise of a new one? The same two factors that account for the prevailing order, the distribution of power and the leading state's political ideology, explain the fall of realist and agnostic orders as well as the kind of order that replaces them.
While those same factors also help explain the dissolution of ideological orders, two other factors, nationalism and balance of power politics, usually play the central role in causing their collapse. Realist orders, which are based on either bipolarity or multipolarity, collapse when the underlying distribution of power changes in fundamental ways. If the international system shifts from bipolarity to multipolarity or vice versa, or if the number of great powers in a multipolar system decreases or increases, the resulting order remains realist, although different in its configuration.
Regardless of the number of great powers in the system, they still must compete with each other for power and influence. But if bipolarity or multipolarity gives way to unipolarity, the new order will be either agnostic or ideological, depending on whether or not the sole pole is committed to a universalistic ideology.
Realist orders tend to have significant staying power, because major shifts in the balance of power are usually the result of differential economic growth among the great powers over a long period of time. Great power wars, however, can sometimes lead to a swift change in the global distribution of power, although such events are rare. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the two poles. Moreover, when realist orders change, they usually give way to newly configured realist orders—as happened after World War II—simply because unipolarity is rare.
Agnostic orders also tend to have substantial staying power, because the unipole accepts the heterogeneity that is inherent in political and social life and does not try to micromanage the politics of nearly every country on the planet. That kind of pragmatic behavior helps preserve, if not augment, the hegemon's power.
An agnostic order is likely to meet its end when unipolarity gives way to either bipolarity or multipolarity, making the order realist; or if the sole pole experiences a revolution at home and adopts a universalistic ideology, which would surely lead it to forge an ideological order. By contrast, any ideological international order based on a universalistic ideology, such as liberalism or communism, is destined to have a short life span, mainly because of the domestic and global difficulties that arise when the unipole seeks to remake the world in its own image.
Nationalism and balance of power politics work to undermine the requisite social engineering in countries targeted for regime change, while nationalism also creates significant problems on the home front for the sole pole and its ideological allies.
When such problems emerge, the unipole is likely to give up trying to remake the world in its own image, in effect abandoning its efforts to export its ideology abroad.
It might even forsake that ideology altogether. When that happens, the order stops being ideological and becomes agnostic. An ideological order can also come to an end in a second way. New great powers could emerge, which would undermine unipolarity and lead to either a bipolar or a multipolar system. In that event, the ideological order would be replaced by bounded and international realist orders.
The global distribution of power from to was bipolar, which led to the formation of three principal political orders. There was an overarching international order that was largely created and maintained by the Soviet Union and the United States for purposes of facilitating cooperation between them when they had common interests.
This emphasis on cooperation notwithstanding, it was not a liberal order, as the superpowers were engaged in intense rivalry throughout the Cold War, and the order they created was fully consistent with the security interests of both sides. Moreover, the Soviet Union was not a liberal democracy, and indeed Moscow and Washington were ideological adversaries. There were also two bounded orders, one largely confined to the West and dominated by the United States, the other consisting mainly of the world's communist countries and dominated by the Soviet Union.
They were created by the superpowers for purposes of waging security competition with each other. The international order that existed during the Cold War was a thin one, as it did not have a pronounced influence on the behavior of states—especially the great powers—in either the economic or military realm. Because the West and the communist world engaged in only minimal economic intercourse during the Cold War, there was little need to build institutions to help manage their economic dealings.
Given that the United States and the Soviet Union were bitter foes that competed for power, they concentrated on building thick bounded orders to help wage that struggle. Thus, the main military institutions that each superpower created—NATO and the Warsaw Pact—were not international in scope.
They were instead the key elements in the U. Nevertheless, the United States and the Soviet Union sometimes had good reasons to cooperate and negotiate arms control agreements that served their mutual interests.
Most importantly, they worked together to craft institutions designed to prevent nuclear proliferation. They also reached agreements aimed at limiting the arms race so as to save money, ban destabilizing weapons, and avoid competition in areas such as Antarctica.
In the process, Moscow and Washington helped strengthen the Cold War international order, although it remained a thin order. Both superpowers opposed further proliferation as soon as they acquired the bomb.
Although the United States tested the first atomic weapon in and the Soviet Union followed suit in , they did not put in place a set of institutions that could seriously limit the spread of nuclear weapons until the mids. The first step forward was the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Its primary mission is to promote the civilian use of nuclear energy, but with safeguards that ensure that states receiving nuclear materials and technologies for peaceful purposes do not use them to build a bomb.
The key institutions that the superpowers devised to curb proliferation are the NPT and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which, along with the International Atomic Energy Agency, markedly slowed the spread of nuclear weapons after The United States and the Soviet Union also began pursuing an arms control agreement in the late s that would put limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals.
The result was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty SALT I , which capped the number of strategic nuclear weapons each side could deploy although at very high levels and severely restricted the development of anti-ballistic missile systems.
Moscow and Washington signed the SALT II Treaty in , which put further limits on each side's strategic nuclear arsenal, although neither side ratified it. The superpowers worked on a follow-on agreement, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, during the s, but it was not put into effect until after the Cold War ended.
The other significant arms control agreement was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated all short-range and intermediate-range missiles from the Soviet and U. The superpowers negotiated a host of other less significant security agreements and treaties that were also part of the Cold War international order. There were some agreements that were reached during the Cold War, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was signed in , but not ratified and put into effect until , five years after the Cold War ended.
The UN was probably the most visible institution in the Cold War international order, but it had little influence on the behavior of countries around the world, mainly because the rivalry between the superpowers made it almost impossible for that institution to adopt and enforce consequential policies.
In addition to this thin international order, the superpowers each built a thick bounded order to help wage the Cold War. The Soviet-led order included institutions that dealt with economic, military, and ideological matters.
The Pact also helped Moscow keep its Eastern European allies in line. Both were designed to coordinate the efforts of communist parties around the world, mainly for the purpose of allowing the Soviets to purvey their policy views to their ideological brethren.
The Communist Information Bureau was dissolved in The bounded Western order was dominated by the United States, which shaped it to suit its own interests. Although the liberal United States dominated this bounded order, which also included a number of other liberal democracies, it was a realist order from top to bottom. Its primary mission was to create a powerful West that could contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union and its allies. This emphasis on security notwithstanding, generating prosperity was an important end in itself for the countries in this bounded order.
Moreover, there were some aspects of this realist order that are compatible with liberal principles. For instance, there is little doubt that ceteris paribus U. But promoting democracy always yielded when it conflicted with the dictates of balance of power politics. The United States did not preclude non-democracies from joining NATO or throw out countries that abandoned democracy once they joined, as the cases of Greece, Portugal, and Turkey illustrate.
Moreover, although Washington tended to favor economic policies that encouraged free trade and investment among the order's members, those policies were guided foremost by strategic considerations.
After the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was by far the most powerful country in the world. Comecon and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in the summer of , and the Soviet Union collapsed in December Unsurprisingly, President George H. Bush decided to take the realist Western order and spread it across the globe, transforming it into a liberal international order.
This remarkably ambitious endeavor enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the liberal democracies in East Asia and especially Western Europe, although there was never any doubt that the United States was in charge. Specifically, they were committed to transforming a bounded realist order into an international liberal order.
Creating a liberal international order involved three main tasks. First, it was essential to expand the membership in the institutions that made up the Western order, as well as erect new institutions where necessary. In other words, it was important to build a web of international institutions with universal membership that wielded great influence over the behavior of the member states.
Second, it was imperative to create an open and inclusive international economy that maximized free trade and fostered unfettered capital markets.
This hyperglobalized world economy was intended to be much more ambitious in scope than the economic order that prevailed in the West during the Cold War. Third, it was crucial to vigorously spread liberal democracy around the world, a mission that was frequently shortchanged when the United States was competing for power with the Soviet Union.
These three tasks, of course, are directly tied to the principal liberal theories of peace: liberal institutionalism, economic interdependence theory, and democratic peace theory. Thus, in the minds of its architects, constructing a robust, sustainable liberal international order was synonymous with creating a peaceful world.
This deep-seated belief gave the United States and its allies a powerful incentive to work assiduously to create that new order. Integrating China and Russia into it was especially important for its success, because they were the most powerful states in the system after the United States. The goal was to embed them in as many institutions as possible, fully integrate them into the open international economy, and help turn them into liberal democracies.
NATO expansion into Eastern Europe is a good example of the United States and its allies working to turn the bounded Western order into a liberal international order. There is no evidence that its chief architects—Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama—thought that Russia might invade its neighbors and thus needed to be contained, or that they thought Russian leaders had legitimate reasons for fearing NATO enlargement.
The United States based its policy toward China in the post—Cold War period on the same liberal logic. For example, Secretary of State Albright maintained that the key to sustaining peaceful relations with a rising China is to engage with it, not try to contain it the way the United States had sought to do with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Engagement, Albright claimed, would lead to China's active membership in some of the world's major institutions and help integrate it into the U.
The Bush Doctrine, which was developed over the course of and used to justify the March invasion of Iraq, is a third example of a major U. In the wake of the September 11, , terrorist attacks, the Bush administration concluded that winning the so-called global war on terror required not only defeating al-Qaida, but also confronting countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The administration's key operating assumption was that the regimes in these purported rogue states were closely tied to terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida, were bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and might even give them to terrorists.
They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. It appeared to many observers in the early s that the United States was well situated to construct a liberal international order. It had abundant experience building and running the Western order during the Cold War, and it was remarkably powerful compared to its potential rivals. China was in the early stages of its rise, and Russia was in a state of complete disarray, which remained the case throughout the s.
This huge power advantage meant that the unipole could largely ignore realist dictates and act according to liberal principles, which was impossible during the Cold War. It also meant that the United States could coax or coerce other states into following its edicts. And of course, there was always the possibility that Washington would use force to get its way. Finally, the United States and its allies had abundant legitimacy in the years immediately after the Cold War ended.
Not only did they win that protracted conflict, but there seemed to be no viable alternative to liberal democracy, which looked like the optimal political order for the foreseeable future. In essence, it looked like the United States was well positioned to pursue liberal hegemony, a foreign policy that called for building a world order based on liberal principles.
During the s and the early s, the United States and its close allies appeared to be well on their way to fashioning a full-scale liberal international order. There were certainly problems, but generally speaking the emerging order was working nicely. Few people expected that it would begin to unravel a few years into the new millennium, but that is what happened. Efforts by the United States and its allies to integrate China and Russia into the order's key economic institutions after the Cold War ended were generally successful.
China joined the WTO in Despite a minor crisis over Taiwan in , Beijing and Washington were otherwise on good terms throughout the s and early s. Engagement appeared to be working. Relations between Moscow and Washington also fared well during this period. The story in Europe was also positive. The Maastricht Treaty was a major step in promoting European integration, and in the euro made its debut, which was widely seen as evidence that the EU had a bright future.
Finally, both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union broke apart peacefully. Yugoslavia did not, however, resulting in wars over Bosnia and Kosovo, which the United States and its NATO allies were slow to respond to and bring to an end. But a cold peace was eventually imposed on the Balkans by Developments in the Greater Middle East were more mixed, but even there it appeared that the region was slowly but steadily being incorporated into the liberal international order.
Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords in September , giving hope that the two sides might find a peaceful solution to their conflict by the end of the decade. The United States, operating with a UN Security Council mandate, led a broad coalition of allies to a stunning military victory over Iraq in early —liberating Kuwait, significantly weakening Iraq's military, and exposing Saddam Hussein's secret nuclear weapons program, which was then shut down.
Nevertheless, the Baathist regime maintained power. Afghanistan also remained a trouble spot, mainly because the Taliban allowed al-Qaida to plan its operations there, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, without interference. The events of that day, however, prompted the United States to invade Afghanistan in October and topple the Taliban, putting in its place a pro-Western regime. Then, in March , the U.
It appeared by the summer of that the Bush Doctrine, which aimed to spread democracy across the Greater Middle East, was going to work as intended. Democracy was clearly on the march in the wake of the Cold War, seemingly confirming Fukuyama's claim that there was no viable alternative to it. According to Freedom House, 34 percent of the countries in the world were democracies in That figure jumped to 41 percent by and then 47 percent by In addition, interest was growing in prosecuting human rights violators, leading a prominent scholar to write a book titled The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics.
North Korea, which was on its way to developing nuclear weapons in the early s, agreed in to terminate its program. The United States and its allies did face some setbacks during the s. India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in ; the Clinton administration suffered policy failures in Somalia and Haiti —95 ; and it reacted too slowly to the Rwandan genocide in The United States also failed to end deadly wars in Congo and Sudan, while al-Qaida grew more dangerous within the confines of Afghanistan.
Still, one could make a strong case that enormous progress had been made in a short time in spreading the liberal international order across the globe and that the United States and its allies would eventually be able to integrate troubled countries in Africa and elsewhere into the new order and make further strides in rolling back proliferation.
Midway through the first decade of the s, serious cracks began to appear in the liberal international order, which have since steadily widened. Consider what has happened in the Greater Middle East. By , it was evident that the Iraq War was becoming a disaster, and the United States had no strategy for stopping the fighting, much less turning Iraq into a liberal democracy. At the same time, the situation in Afghanistan began to deteriorate, as the Taliban came back from the dead and took aim at the U.
The Taliban has grown stronger with time, and the war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U. Moreover, there is no apparent path to victory for the United States. In addition, Washington and its allies pursued regime change in Libya and Syria, which ended up helping precipitate deadly civil wars in both countries. Furthermore, in the process of helping wreck Iraq and Syria, the Bush and Obama administrations played a crucial role in creating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which the United States went to war against in The Oslo Peace Process, which once seemed so promising, has failed, and the Palestinians have virtually no hope of acquiring their own state.
With Washington's help, Israeli leaders are instead creating a Greater Israel, which, as two former Israeli prime ministers have said, will be an apartheid state. Far from incorporating the Greater Middle East into the liberal international order, the United States and its allies inadvertently have played a central role in spreading illiberal disorder in that region.
Europe, which appeared to be the brightest star in the liberal galaxy during the s, was in serious trouble by the late s. Even more damaging was the Eurozone crisis, which began in late and lingers on. Not only has the crisis exposed the fragility of the euro, but it also created intense animosity between Germany and Greece, among other political problems.
Indeed, fundamentally illiberal views are commonplace among leaders in Eastern Europe. The head of Poland's governing party has said refugees are riddled with disease. The leader of Hungary has described migrants as poison … [and] Austria's new far-right interior minister suggested concentrating migrants in asylum centers—with all its obvious and odious echoes of World War II.
Finally, a civil war began in in Eastern Ukraine that involves Russia, which seized Crimea from Ukraine in March , causing a serious deterioration in relations between Russia and the West. Both sides have built up their military forces in Eastern Europe and routinely engage in military exercises that escalate suspicions and tensions between them.
This crisis, which largely resulted from EU and NATO expansion, coupled with the West's efforts to promote democracy in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, and maybe even Russia itself, shows no signs of ending anytime soon. Cracks have also opened up in the transatlantic relationship, especially with Trump's arrival in the White House. Unsurprisingly, the United States is now more interested in containing rather than engaging China. In fact, the Trump administration recently said that admitting China into the WTO was a mistake, as Beijing's protectionist policies clearly show that it is unwilling to play by that institution's rules.
Finally, the number of liberal democracies has been declining since , reversing a trend that once looked unstoppable. And some leaders extol the virtues of illiberal democracy, while others govern countries that are committed to political systems based on deeply held religious beliefs.
Even serious scholars worry about the future of American democracy. The early successes of the United States and its allies in building a liberal international order notwithstanding, the order contained the seeds of its own ruin. Even if Western policymakers had been wiser stewards of that order, they could not have extended its longevity in any meaningful way.
It was doomed to fail because it contained three fatal flaws. First, intervening in the politics of countries to turn them into liberal democracies is extremely difficult, and attempting such ambitious social engineering on a global scale is virtually guaranteed to backfire and undermine the legitimacy of the enterprise itself.
Nationalism is almost certain to cause significant resistance inside the countries targeted for regime change. Balance of power politics will also help impede the enterprise in particular cases. States that fear regime change—or other forms of U. Thus, Syria and Iran aided the Iraqi insurgency after the U. Second, the liberal international order ultimately creates conditions that lead to serious political problems regarding sovereignty and national identity within the liberal democracies themselves, and all the more so when efforts at regime change fail and produce large-scale refugee flows into liberal countries.
Again, the principal cause of the problem is nationalism, which is far from dead even in avowedly liberal societies. Third, hyperglobalization has produced significant economic costs for large numbers of people inside the liberal democracies, including the sole pole. Those costs, including lost jobs, declining or stagnant wages, and marked income inequality, have serious domestic political consequences, which further undermine the liberal international order.
Moreover, the open international economy helped fuel the rise of China, which, along with Russia's revival, eventually undermined unipolarity, an essential condition for creating a liberal international order. The most important requirement for building a liberal international order is to spread liberal democracy far and wide, which was initially seen to be an eminently feasible task.
It was widely believed in the West that politics had evolved to the point where there was no sensible alternative to liberal democracy. If so, then it would be relatively easy to create a liberal international order, because spreading liberal democracy around the world would meet little resistance. Indeed, most people would welcome the idea of living in a Western-style democracy, as appeared to be the case in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism.
This endeavor, however, was doomed from the start. To begin, there never has been and never will be universal agreement on what constitutes the ideal political system. One can argue that liberal democracy is the best form of government I would , but others will invariably favor a different governing system.
It is worth remembering that during the s, many people in Europe preferred communism or fascism to liberal democracy. Thus, it should not be surprising that illiberal democracies are appearing in Eastern Europe, while China and Russia have embraced authoritarian rule, North Korea is a dictatorship, Iran is an Islamic republic, and Israel increasingly privileges its Jewish identity over its democratic character.
This diversity of opinion about what constitutes the best governing system combines with nationalism to make the process of spreading liberal democracy around the world extremely difficult. Nationalism, after all, is a remarkably powerful political force that places great emphasis on self-determination and sovereignty.
Nation-states, in other words, do not want other nation-states telling them how they should order their political system. Thus, trying to impose liberal democracy on a state that prefers an alternative form of government is almost certain to provoke fierce resistance. Trying to build a liberal international order invariably leads to wars against minor powers that aim to turn those targets into liberal democracies.
There are significant limits on how much social engineering of this sort great powers can attempt in a bipolar or multipolar system, mainly because they must focus on competing with each other for power and influence.
Spreading liberal democracy is of secondary, if not tertiary, importance; indeed, at times liberal states will seek to prop up authoritarian governments if they are aligned against rival great powers, as the United States did repeatedly during the Cold War. In unipolarity, however, the sole pole is free to go on crusades to make the world more democratic, simply because there are no rival great powers to worry about.
Thus, it is unsurprising that the United States has fought seven wars in the years since the Cold War ended and has been at war for two out of every three years over that period. The occupying forces not only failed to achieve that goal, but they also ended up precipitating bloody wars that did enormous damage to political and social life in those two countries.
The main reason for this dismal record is that large-scale social engineering in any society is difficult, but it is especially daunting in a foreign country whose political leadership has just been toppled from power. The target state will be in turmoil; the invading forces will be dealing with an alien culture that might even be hostile to liberal democracy; and most importantly, nationalist sentiment is sure to increase sharply and generate an insurgency against the occupier, as the United States discovered in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Although these failures eroded public support for the liberal international order and cast doubts on the competence of its leaders, they did not stop the sole pole from trying to spread liberal democracy by military means, over-extending itself even further.
Thus, when fighting broke out among rival factions in Libya in , the United States and its European allies employed airpower to help remove Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi from power. But the Western powers had no way of turning Libya into a functioning state, much less a liberal democracy, with or without troops on the ground. Also in , the United States and its allies in the Middle East sought to topple President Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria by arming and training rebel groups that opposed him.
That effort failed, however, largely because Russia, which has had long-standing strategic ties with Syria, intervened in to keep Assad in power. Realpolitik thwarted U. But even if Assad had been deposed, the end result would have been either a continuation of the conflict, as in Libya, or the installation of another ruthless autocrat, as eventually happened in Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak was deposed in early Liberal democracy in Syria was not a serious possibility, but an abundance of murder and mayhem was.
Finally, the crusader mentality that underpins the attempts to build a liberal international order leads to the poisoning of relations between the unipole and any major power in the system that is not a liberal democracy. Although the dominant state will be strongly inclined to make war on minor powers to promote liberal democracy, it will rarely ever attack major powers for that purpose, especially if they possess nuclear weapons.
Hence, U. Nevertheless, the United States has been committed to turning China and Russia into liberal democracies and absorbing them into the U. In effect, the aim is peaceful regime change. Predictably, China and Russia have resisted the unipole's efforts for the same reason that minor powers have contested U.
In a world in which nationalism is the most powerful political ideology, self-determination and sovereignty matter hugely for all countries. China and Russia have also resisted the spread of the liberal order for realist reasons, because it would allow the United States to dominate the international system economically, militarily, and politically.
Neither Beijing nor Moscow, for example, wants U. Thus, it is hardly surprising that China talks about pushing the U. Indeed, moving those institutions toward Russia eventually led to the Ukraine crisis in In short, both nationalist and realist calculations caused the two major powers in unipolarity to contest the unipole's efforts to build a robust liberal international order.
Information changes rapidly today. Books on many subjects can become dated very quickly. When you order an eBook, it can be the most up-to-the-minute information available. You usually get far more than just the book. Most eBooks are sold with bonuses and related information that usually don't come with the purchase of a traditional book. You might pay the same or even a bit more for an eBook, but you usually get more, too.
Instead of a bulky library, you can fit literally thousands of books on your computer. It also makes it easier to share this information with family and coworkers. Except when you print one out—something I usually do for booklets and special reports—eBooks use very few natural resources.
We save trees and help reduce pollution from pulp mills. They're more portable. You can have quick and easy access to hundreds of books on your desktop computer, notebook or eBook reader. That makes books different from other human technologies.
People have always needed to eat, but methods of agriculture, preservation, and distribution have evolved. People have always wanted to get around, but transportation has unlocked faster and more specialized means of doing so.
Ideas and information have also enjoyed technological change—cinema, television, and computing, to name a few, have altered expression. But when it comes to the gathering of words and images pressed first to pages and then between covers, the book has remained largely the same. That puts books on par with other super-inventions of human civilization, including roads, mills, cement, turbines, glass, and the mathematical concept of zero. As the book snowballed forward in history, it collected accoutrements of refinement rather than evolution.
If you have a high-quality hardbound book nearby, pick it up and look at the top and bottom edges of the binding, near the spine, with the book closed. The little stripey tubes you see are called head and tail bands one at the top, one at the bottom. They were originally invented to reinforce stitched binding, to prevent the cover from coming apart from the leaves.
And yet for those who might notice, a book feels naked without such details. Now open the book and turn to its first pages to see another example of how print-book habits die hard. Find the first normal page. Why are both of these title pages here? The first one, luridly known as the bastard title or half title , was created to protect the full title page behind it during the binding process. That was necessary because printers printed only the pages of a book, which individual readers would send to a binder to encase in leather covers, perhaps to match the rest of their library.
That meant that the pages themselves would be cast about quite a bit during transit to and from these varied trades. After binding, some would even cut out the bastard title and paste it to the inside of the cover or to the spine, in order to help identify the book on a shelf. That risk and practice are long behind us, but like an appendix, the bastard title remains. So do all manner of other peculiarities of form, including notations of editions on the verso the flip side of the full title page and the running headers all throughout that rename the book you are already reading.
And yet removing any one of these features would, if just in a small way, erode the bookiness of a book. One site of that erosion, which may help explain ebook reticence, can be found in self-published books. That matter is debatable. More clear is the consequence of disintermediation: Nobody takes a self-published manuscript and lays it out for printing in a manner that conforms with received standards.
And so you often end up with a perfect-bound Word doc instead of a book. But if you look back at the list of features that underlie that idea, ebooks embrace surprisingly few of them. The Kindle-type book does have text , and that text might still be organized into sections and chapters and the like. But the basic unit of text in an ebook does not correspond with a page, because the text can be made to reflow at different sizes and in various fonts, as the user prefers.
Some aspects of bookiness do translate directly to ebooks, and particularly to the Kindle. The Kindle is highly portable and easily handheld.
Some of the reading that corresponds particularly well with this conception of bookiness includes fiction in general and genre fiction—such as mysteries, sci-fi, young-adult fiction, and romance—in particular. In the year ending this May, for example, 58 percent of romance-fiction titles and 60 percent of mystery and detective-fiction titles were purchased in ebook format.
An independent publisher analysis came to the same conclusion. The top 10 overall best sellers include a political-nonfiction title Mark R.
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