Stosunki międzynarodowe, system międzynarodowy i poliarchia
International relations, the international system and polyarchy

Summary/Abstract: Nations arose out of the evolution of social relations and the development of consciousness rooted in selected characteristics of a given human grouping. These were not objective or universal characteristics but those the grouping attributed to itself to prove its superiority and special rights in relation to outsiders. A number of processes are currently leading to the destruction of this consciousness and the social interrelationships based on it, with the result that key categories of international relations theory are increasingly being called into question. New points of reference for international relations must be discovered, especially as we are becoming ever more aware of the fact that its origins do not lie in the relationship of forces known as the “Westphalian Order” which took shape after the Thirty Years’ War. Its beginnings go back much further into the past and are connected to the emergence of political-territorial organizations capable of operating in the Grossraum (large space). It was the ancient Greeks who created universal categories to analyze the reality created by the functioning of political-territorial organizations, a reality that we describe today as international. These categories are anarchy, monarchy and polyarchy. Every political union with the character of a political-territorial power functions in conditions of disorder in which it establishes its own centres of force, law and government. Over time such a political union begins to possess a monopoly of legal force, and its existence is secured when it receives the recognition of other units of the same type. In this way polyarchy, or multigovernment, arises, a collection of monarchies functioning in the anarchic conditions of the Grossraum, or the area in which there is no supreme centre and mutual relations are formed by participants among themselves and at their own risk. Polyarchy does not represent a particular order; it is rather a constituent part of the social system within which political units coexist in the Grossraum and each one creates a separate social order based on its own vision of the universe.

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