The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century [Kindle Edition]

This short book explores the new world of the early 21st century. Cooper sees the defining moment in the end of the Cold War in 1989, which changed the state system that had defined world politics since the treaty of Westphalia, and that a new world is emerging with new challenges. This premise is quite generally accepted, but it is more interesting when he qualifies the new world order as a mixture between the old and the new, where new security threats/challenges are emerging in a world divided between "pre-modern", "modern" and "post-modern" states.
The challenges and solutions in the new world order lie in the interrelations between these types of states.
The most interesting part of the book is when Mr. Cooper enumerates his five maxims for conditions for world peace: (1) the need to understand "foreigners" better (being a foreigner myself in relation to Mr. Cooper, I would rather change the argument to understanding one another...); (2) the primacy of domestic politics; (3) the difficulty in influencing foreign governments; (4) the definition of interests in international relations; (5) redefinition the concept of identity in international relations.
The more detailed discussions of each of these maxims are extremely insightful and interesting, but I found his argumentation in line with social-constructivist models of international relations, that states identity is the most important thing in defining interests, extremely useful and relevant for the understanding of international politics: "Much more important than the question of how countries pursue their interests is the question of how they define them" (page 137).
Mr. Cooper's road to condition for peace in the 21st century is not one of a question between a balance of power or of power-hegemony (he completely parts with Mr. Kissinger in this regard), but states that it is about reaching a post-modern collective security model, where his clear source of inspiration is the European Union, which has achieved an unprecedented level of peace in only 50 years, but after centuries of bloody conflict. He is not blind to the challenges and difficulties though; Mr. Cooper is not a naïve pacificist, nor a hard-core "realist", and that is perhaps what makes him most in touch with reality in his argumentation: peace can be achieved, but one must not forget that there are real threats and dilemmas in balancing them, and that the use of military force should never be excluded as the "continuation of politics by other means" for the achievement of legitimate goals.
One can see the huge level of academic research behind the book and the argumentations: he obviously knows his history and theories of international relations, and that makes the book is suberbly well-written, getting around such broad issues in a coherent and brief manner that it can make the often too-academic and heavy literature on these subjects so simple, accessible and yet without losing the balance and seriousness of the issues at hand.
Fabulous book.

This book is a solid introduction to what the author sees as being the primary definition of types of countries in the 21st century. The author argues there are 3 different kinds: pre-modern, modern and post-modern.

The pre-modern states (e.g. Somalia) have no modern infrastructure and/or no modern systems of governance, and therefore, are not in a position to to conduct any kind of foreign policy. Modern states (.e.g USA) do have these things, but maintain a "realist" outlook on world affairs, particularly in terms of using force as a tool in diplomacy. Post-modern states (e.g the EU, Japan) are similar to modern, but generally avoid war because their strategic position is such that they don't need to worry about war anymore.

The book is a useful framework for viewing the world in the 21st century. It is useful to read alongside "Return of History" by Robert Kagan, and "Clash of Civizations" by Huntingdom, who also provide useful and different views of how to classify countries.

As a career diplomat, Cooper's working life is to a large extent dominated by the issues he explores in this book; unusually, he has taken the time to consider those issues objectively and, even more unusually, chosen to share his conclusions with the wider world. The result is a book that would make even the most interested, well-informed internationalist reconsider some of his frames of reference.

I won't rehearse what the other reviewer here has written, which sums up the book's contents pretty well, except to disagree with his assessment of the final section.

Unlike him, I believe that the discussion of Europe's (and, by extension, the post-modern world's) defence policy, and its willingness to engage in force if necessary, was a logical conclusion to the discussions of "grand strategy" in the first two sections. Cooper's point is that although post-modern solutions are an ideal goal, they are perhaps ultimately unattainable, at least on a global level, and it is no longer reasonable for the 450m citizens living in post-modern Europe to rely for their defence on the 250m taxpayers of the (modern nation state) United States. In a sense, Cooper seems to me to be recognising the limits of the post-modern approach he espoused in the first two sections - i.e. force is often still needed when dealing with pre-modern and modern states - and that post-modern entities like Europe and Japan should invest accordingly. Inevitably, such conclusions lack the majestic sweep of historical analysis, but as a thought piece over "What next?", I think it is both persuasive and appropriate.

Kagan is right - this book takes the geopolitical discussion a step further. Highly recommended.