1996 – Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky

For the first time, the major world powers share a commitment to democracy. By working together, they eventually will encourage other nations toward democracy and, ultimately, peace.

This is one of the predictions by Max Singer and the late Aaron Wildavsky, authors of The Real World Order: Zones of Peace/Zones of Turmoil. The ideas presented in the book have earned the 1996 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Singer and Wildavsky note in their work that the world’s superpowers have mutual interests in the political and economic success of democracy worldwide. Now the countries must establish a democratic, multinational effort to draw other countries into this “zone of peace.”

They suggest establishing a United Nations Democratic Caucus through which democratic nations can, by the majority principle, agree on issues of international significance. The economic development opportunities that stem from this cooperation eventually will attract non-democratic nations, who currently reside in what the authors call “zones of turmoil.”

Singer is president of The Potomac Organization Inc., a public policy consulting and research firm in Chevy Chase, Md. He has served as president of the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization now located in Indianapolis, Ind. and the World Institute in Jerusalem.

Wildavsky, who died in 1993, was founding dean of the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley. A former president of the American Political Science Association, he also taught at Oberlin College in Ohio.