The idea of creating a sustainable social order is as old as the history of mankind and has come to be perceived by all civilizations as their ultimate goal. These quests to establish order have sometimes remained at a city-state level, while at other times they have transcended geographical limits to transform into comprehensive and inclusive political orders. When it encompassed a number of civilizational basins, this comprehensive nature ultimately embraced the assertion of establishing a world order.

While their basic creeds, ideologies and tools may differ, their search for world order can be classified in terms of method and type of approach into three eras; antiquity/traditional, modernity and globality. An understanding of these eras’ intrinsically shared features as well as the elements of continuity between them is a prerequisite to being able to shed light on the problematics we face today with respect to the world order.

From this perspective in the first chapter of the book a background to the historical course of world order is provided under the headings of traditional, modern and global world orders.

This chapter explores how liberal internationalism, the order’s animating 'regime of thought and action', has addressed the question of cultural diversity. It argues that liberal internationalism evinces no simple or singular theory about cultural diversity, and that since the nineteenth century four different approaches are apparent, combining, at distinct moments in time, to form what we see here as distinctive liberal diversity regimes. These approaches are to build a liberal order on the pluralism of Westphalian sovereignty; to confine issues of culture within domestic civil societies; to foster ideas of modernization that would in time erase global cultural differences; and to construct institutions of 'exclusion,' manifest in political hierarchies and, at the extreme, formal empire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, civilizational and racial prejudices informed how these approaches were interwoven, but by the end of the Cold War these had been replaced with more universalistic conceptions of human rights, multiculturalism, and civic nationalism. It was at this very moment, however, that the now-globalized liberal international order revealed its limits.