Today the international system is more complex than ever. There are multiple issues concerning migration, terrorism, violence, populism, income equality issues and so much more. Events in international relations seem like getting out of control and almost impossible to keep track of. Things may look like unpredictable, uncontrollable and generally hard to explain in simple terms. But nevertheless, I would like try to explain it using a cup of coffee, with milk as an allegory.
Some tend to see social sciences completely disconnected from natural sciences. But in the end, all the actors and forces in social sciences are products of nature. Leaders are still complex biological creatures, guns and missiles still work within the scope of physics and chemistry. Identities, social values and religions are still products of human beings. If we can analyze our own species and its environment within the scope of natural sciences successfully, why not try to understand the creations of the subjects of natural sciences with its help?
The second law of thermodynamics simply states that “the total entropy can never decrease over time for an isolated system”. We can try to use this law to explain why time moves forward. For example, if you drop a vase, it will create hundreds of broken pieces behind. But if you try collecting and throwing them again to the floor, chances of getting a vase back is pretty slim. You can explain this situation from many different perspectives. But in the end, you will always come back to the second law of thermodynamics. So far, in the physical world, this law seems to hold up pretty good. Keep in mind that while this law holds true for entropy, it says nothing about complexity. And these two terms are completely different. For now, let’s try to apply this rule, as a thought exercise, for the international system. Specifically, trying to explain today’s chaotic events and the effects of globalization.
Before we dive into this problem, we need a lever, an allegory, to help us simplify concepts and theories we are going to use. So this is where “coffee with milk” comes in. Imagine you have a transparent cup half filled with black coffee sitting on your desk. And you pour milk very slowly into the cup. If you do it right, you will have a full cup where black coffee sits at the bottom and milk on top of it. At this point, things are simple. Easy to understand, and explain. In terms of physics, the cup has low “entropy”. If milk molecules (particles) changed place, nothing will really change in your cup (system). Things will look almost exactly the same. The same can be said for coffee as well. As long as you don’t mix coffee with the milk the system stays in a simple state. Simple systems are useful. To create and test theories, to make measurements and to explain concepts we need simple systems. For example, you can measure how much coffee is in this system, how much milk, where they are interacting with each other etc. just by looking at the cup. If you slowly start stirring your cup (or system) you will start mixing coffee and milk and raise entropy. At that point, you will have a highly complex system. There will be strains of milk and coffee, swirling constantly and creating beautiful shapes and patterns. The thing is, your cup became hectic. If you took a picture of it at that point and tried to explain every part of it, it will be really hard and cumbersome. Because you will have to pinpoint every particle of milk and coffee, and their positions within the system. Where they are, how they are interacting with each other etc. Also while you can loosely predict the shapes they are going to create, you can’t truly foresee the exact combinations of all unique states and outcomes during that stage. You will have a very complex system in your hands. But if you continue stirring and raising entropy, at some point your cup will be mixed very well, reaching the highest entropy point of your system. But surprisingly the complexity will be lower. Since now you have almost a homogenous mixture, you can swap any milk and coffee particle between each other and nothing will really change from your perspective. And you can again explain your system easily. You will now have just a cup of coffee with milk. From this allegory, we can see that in some systems if you raise entropy, the complexity will rise at first, but may get lower at a later stage. This phenomenon is seen everywhere in the universe. While the second law of thermodynamics holds true, and entropy always rises, complexity has a more parabolic graph. It will rise at first but will reach a maximum and start getting lower.
Now let’s talk about the international system. International system was never as simple as a cup of coffee with milk. At early stages, like in Westphalian era, we had states interacting with each other. So our cup had hundreds of states. It was fairly complex I must admit, but not as chaotic and complex as today’s system. States were generally well defined within their borders. Options or the ways of interactions were limited. So philosophers and researchers were able to create great theories which put forward good predictions and explained the system somewhat sufficiently. But something started stirring the international system. In general sense it was globalization. You may argue that globalization was in effect since the starting of human history or that it started with modern ages. There are tremendous amount of debate on that topic. What is undebatable, in my view, is that globalization gathered pace with internet and telecommunications technologies.
Communication was always a key point in globalization together with transportation and in both of these areas 20th and 21st century, there were breakthroughs in technology and capabilities. We saw exponential growth in accessibility and improvement in these areas last 100 years. They got cheaper, more common, easier to use and understand. This meant the system, our cup, was being stirred or being stirred more swiftly. So the system became more complex than ever. We knew its entropy will rise eventually. It had to, according to the second law of thermodynamics. But no one expected this amount of complexity within this timescale. That brought us today’s system. There are swirling conflicts, multiple regional tensions, terrorism, cyber threats, migration crises and a lot more. Just like swirling strains of coffee and milk, it is hard to create and test theories, make good encompassing predictions or simply understand and explain the system. Even though we don’t individually realize these differences, this system we created is going through multiple furious, instantaneous, unpredictable changes. It became so complex we can’t precisely say where every swirling event going to be at any point. But again just like coffee with milk we can make a general assumption; it will be thoroughly mixed, homogeneous and simple again.
Since the forces in effect which are responsible for this chaos are not going anywhere, we can safely assume the pace of “stirring” will be the same if not higher. This means at some point the system will be so thoroughly mixed, once again it will be easier for us to create good theories and qualitatively better predictions. Maybe better than the “good old times” of the Westphalian era. States, borders, identities, religions and conflicts will be diluted within each other. And just like our cup’s final stage of coffee with milk swapping one particle (an actor, identity or concept in this case) won’t make a lot of difference from our perspective. This will lead to creating universal theories without the need of narrowing them so down they will become useless.
Ultimately, if we leave aside the debate on the goods and bads of the globalization, I would argue that today’s complex, hard to understand system will become much simple and homogenous in the hands of globalization. This might not be desirable from some perspectives, but at least it will make our job easier, if we would like to understand and explain the international system. So maybe we should embrace the chaos and try to see some of the beautiful shapes it shows to us; multicultural, complex, evolving, swirling cultural and social scene.
