The New World Order: Origins of a Modern Myth

The phrase “New World Order” is one of the most contested pieces of political vocabulary in the modern English language. In the hands of statesmen it has denoted multilateral cooperation, collective security, and the post-Cold-War hope that great power rivalry might be replaced by international institutions. In the hands of conspiracy theorists, it has denoted a single, secret, transnational project to abolish national sovereignty and subordinate the world’s population to a small elite. The two senses have coexisted, often uneasily, for more than a century, and the resulting ambiguity is the single most important reason that the phrase has acquired its particular political charge.

The New World Order conspiracy theory, in its mature form, is a synthesis of older traditions: the late-eighteenth-century anti-Masonic narrative, the early-twentieth-century anti-Semitic forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Cold War fears of the John Birch Society, and the post-2001 anxieties about globalization. The theory has been remarkably adaptive. Each new political development that can plausibly be read as a step toward international integration, from the founding of the United Nations to the European Union to the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” initiative, has been incorporated into the framework. The result is a belief system that can absorb almost any evidence into its existing structure, and that is therefore very difficult to refute by the addition of new facts.

The Pre-History of the Phrase

Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations

The phrase “new world order” was used in American political discourse well before it acquired a conspiratorial meaning. President Woodrow Wilson, in a 1916 address to the Senate, used it to describe his vision of a postwar international order based on collective security. The context was the First World War and the project that would eventually become the League of Nations. Wilson’s usage was aspirational and progressive: a new international system, he argued, would replace the balance of power that had produced the war.

Wilson’s usage was widely discussed and was not controversial in itself. The controversy, such as it was, came from the Senate’s eventual rejection of the League, and from the perception among Wilson’s opponents that international cooperation was a cover for the abandonment of American sovereignty. That perception, dormant for two decades, would re-emerge after the Second World War in much stronger form.

H.G. Wells and the 1940 Book

The British science fiction writer H. G. Wells published a book titled The New World Order in 1940. Wells used the phrase to describe a world government that he considered inevitable and, in his view, desirable. Wells was not a conspirator; he was a public intellectual advocating an explicit political project. His use of the phrase is, however, an early example of the slippage between political program and conspiracy theory that would later characterize discussions of the same phrase.

Wells’s optimistic vision of a scientifically administered world state, in which a small educated elite would manage the planet’s affairs for the common good, has many of the structural features later attributed by conspiracy theorists to the alleged New World Order. The historical irony is that the conspiracy version inverts Wells’s evaluation: where Wells saw a desirable end, the conspiracy version sees a malign one. The structural similarity, however, helps to explain why the conspiracy theory has proven so durable. It draws on a real intellectual tradition of explicit advocacy for global governance, and it reads that tradition as evidence of secret implementation.

Cold War Origins in the United States

The John Birch Society

The phrase “New World Order” acquired its specifically American conspiratorial meaning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, primarily through the activities of the John Birch Society. The Society, founded in 1958 by Robert W. Welch Jr., produced a stream of publications alleging that an international network of bankers, politicians, and intellectuals was working to bring about a single world government under United Nations control. The Society’s enemies list, its blue books, and its speaker programs reached a wide audience in the conservative movement of the era.

The Society’s specific claims about the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission were, in many cases, distortions of documented institutional histories. The Council on Foreign Relations had been founded in 1921 and was, by the 1950s, a well-established foreign policy think tank. The Bilderberg Group had been founded in 1954. The Trilateral Commission would not be founded until 1973. The Society’s narrative treated all three as instruments of a single coordinated project, and the rhetorical power of the Society’s account came precisely from the way in which it combined real institutions with unfounded claims about their coordination.

Conspiracism and the American Right

The John Birch Society’s influence peaked in the early 1960s and was significantly reduced by the mid-1960s after a series of high-profile condemnations by mainstream conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr. The Society’s underlying narrative, however, was not extinguished. It was preserved in self-published newsletters, in small circulation books, and in the rhetorical habits of the conservative movement. The phrase “New World Order” itself was retained in conservative political vocabulary even by writers who rejected the Society’s broader worldview.

The persistence of the phrase is important for any contemporary account. By the time the Cold War ended in 1989, “New World Order” was already available as a term of art for use in describing the post-Cold-War international order. The fact that it had been a conspiratorial phrase in the 1960s gave it a head start in acquiring conspiratorial meanings in the 1990s.

The Post-Cold-War Pivot

George H.W. Bush’s 1990 Speech

On September 11, 1990, President George H.W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to discuss the Persian Gulf crisis. In the speech, Bush used the phrase “new world order” several times to describe a hoped-for international cooperation in the post-Cold-War era, particularly through the United Nations. The phrase was reported in the mainstream press as a reference to multilateralism, and the speech was generally received as such at the time.

Within months, however, the speech had been incorporated into the conspiracy framework. Bush was alleged to have used the phrase at the direction of the Council on Foreign Relations or the Bilderberg Group, to signal to initiates that the long-anticipated New World Order was being formally announced. The conspiracy reading of the speech is examined in greater detail in the new world order evidence overview, but the relevant point for this account is that the speech marks the moment at which “New World Order” became a general-purpose political accusation in American discourse.

The 1990s Populist Synthesis

The 1990s saw the consolidation of a broader populist conspiracy synthesis that combined the John Birch vocabulary with newer themes: the United Nations, the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the broader process of economic globalization. The militia movement of the mid-1990s, the Patriot movement, and a long tail of radio programs and self-published books all used the New World Order narrative to explain a wide range of perceived threats: the Oklahoma City bombing, the Branch Davidian siege, the assault weapons ban, and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The narrative’s adaptability was its strength. Almost any political event could be incorporated, because almost any political event could be read as a step toward the alleged consolidation of global governance. The narrative’s weakness, from a serious historical point of view, was the absence of a coherent account of the alleged conspirators. The hidden elite changed names and locations depending on the specific claim, and the alleged mechanism of control shifted between financial manipulation, military occupation, mind control, and demographic replacement.

The George W. Bush and Barack Obama Years

Continuity Across Administrations

Conspiracy narratives about the New World Order proved remarkably resilient across changes in American administration. The election of George W. Bush in 2000, who was himself a member of Skull and Bones at Yale and a Bohemian Grove attendee, did not, as some theorists had predicted, mark the end of the conspiracy; if anything, his election was read by some theorists as proof that the alleged network controlled both major American political parties.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 added new elements. The “birther” conspiracy, which held that Obama was not constitutionally eligible to serve as president, was related to, but distinct from, the New World Order narrative. The two narratives often combined in the rhetoric of the period, with some commentators arguing that Obama’s election was a deliberately engineered move by the alleged elite to acclimate American voters to the idea of a non-citizen head of state.

The two-term Obama presidency was also marked by sustained discussion of a Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade agreement that was widely read in conspiracy circles as a further step toward the consolidation of transnational governance. The agreement was ultimately not ratified by the United States, and the conspiracy reading of it remains, in mainstream terms, unevidenced.

Contemporary Forms

The World Economic Forum and the “Great Reset”

The 2020 pandemic and the policy responses to it gave the New World Order narrative a substantial new lease on life. The World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” initiative, which proposed a series of economic and social reforms in the wake of the pandemic, was read by some theorists as a kind of public version of the alleged New World Order agenda. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, became a particular focus of attention, and statements he had made about the relationship between the World Economic Forum and national governments were taken out of context and circulated as evidence of coordinated global control.

The mainstream reading of the Great Reset is more prosaic. The WEF is a real institution that convenes real meetings of real people, and its published documents reflect a real set of policy preferences. Whether those preferences are wise is a question for debate; whether they constitute a conspiracy is a different question, and one to which the available evidence does not support a positive answer. The conspiracy reading is examined in greater detail in the new world order evidence overview.

The United Nations as Persistent Bugbear

The United Nations has been a fixture of New World Order narratives since the 1940s. The symbolism of UN buildings, the design of the UN flag, and the rhetoric of UN officials have all been read as evidence of a hidden agenda. The Agenda 21 document, produced after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, became a particular focus of conspiracy attention after the 1990s, with theorists arguing that it represented a UN blueprint for the abolition of private property and the imposition of totalitarian environmentalism.

The available evidence on the United Nations supports a more modest account. The organization is a real international body with real member states and real policy outputs. Its staff includes a wide range of political perspectives, and its decisions are the product of negotiation among sovereign governments. The strong conspiracy reading, in which the UN is alleged to be a kind of shadow world government imposing its will on reluctant member states, is not supported by the documentary record.

The End-Times Christian Reading

Apocalyptic Interpretation

A distinct but related reading of the New World Order comes from Christian eschatology. In some end-times frameworks, the New World Order is identified with the prophesied one-world government that will be led by the Antichrist in the period immediately preceding the Second Coming. The Book of Revelation, the Book of Daniel, and certain Pauline epistles are read as prophecies of a future global regime that will persecute true believers and require them to choose between compliance and martyrdom.

This reading has a long history in American Protestantism and was given substantial popular reach by the Left Behind book series published between 1995 and 2007, which sold tens of millions of copies. The end-times reading and the secular conspiracy reading of the New World Order have a complex relationship. They share a common structure (a hidden elite, a coordinated agenda, an imminent moment of revelation) but differ in their ultimate referent (a literal satanic figure versus a literal human network). The two readings often combine in popular discourse, with the result that contemporary New World Order claims can simultaneously invoke geopolitical institutions and apocalyptic prophecy.

The Rhodes Scholar Myth

A particularly durable sub-claim within the secular New World Order narrative is the assertion that a long list of politicians, including Bill Clinton, are members of a coordinated elite by virtue of their status as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. The Rhodes Scholarship, founded in 1902 by the South African mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, was intended to identify future leaders and to bind them together through the experience of study at Oxford. The scholarship has produced an extraordinary list of alumni, including several heads of state and numerous other senior political figures.

The fact that Rhodes Scholars have gone on to prominent political careers is not, on its face, evidence of a conspiracy. The selection criteria of the scholarship, and the network of senior alumni who participate in selecting future scholars, are publicly documented. The strong conspiracy reading, in which the scholarship is alleged to be a deliberate instrument of elite formation, is not supported by the evidence. The scholarship is, however, a useful case study in the way that real institutions, with real histories and real networks, can become the subject of conspiracy claims that exaggerate the institutional purpose into a coordinated project.

What the Theories Actually Cite

The specific items of evidence cited in support of New World Order claims are examined in the new world order evidence overview, but it is worth noting here that the most cited items fall into several broad categories. There are visual symbols, including the Eye of Providence on the American dollar bill and the design of certain UN buildings. There are public statements by political leaders, including Bush’s 1990 speech and various statements by UN and WEF officials. There are documented institutional histories, including the founding of the CFR and the Bilderberg Group. And there are alleged connections, including the claim that senior politicians are linked through overlapping membership in elite organizations.

The mainstream rebuttals of these items are also reasonably consistent across cases. The visual symbols have conventional explanations. The political statements are read in their actual contexts. The institutional histories are described accurately but the alleged connections are not supported. The connections that are documented (overlapping membership in organizations that are themselves legal and public) are real; the strong conclusion that they add up to coordinated control is not supported.

The question of who really rules the world is treated in a separate overview, which sorts the major candidates by the strength of the available evidence and provides a careful distinction between coordination and conspiracy.

The Distinction Between Coordination and Conspiracy

A useful way to think about the New World Order theory is in terms of the distinction between coordination and conspiracy. Coordination is the ordinary observation that powerful people talk to one another, share information, and sometimes agree on policy. This kind of coordination is documented in abundance. Conspiracy, in the strong sense required by the New World Order theory, is the further claim that the coordination is secret, deliberate, sustained over decades, and aimed at a specific transformative end. The first claim is supported by abundant evidence; the second is not.

This distinction is not, on its face, a refutation of the conspiracy theory. The conspiracist can respond that the appearance of openness is itself part of the conspiracy, and that the real coordination is hidden behind the visible coordination. The response, however, raises the standard of evidence required to maintain the theory to a level that is essentially impossible to satisfy, because any evidence can be reinterpreted as part of the cover. A conspiracy theory that is not falsifiable by any possible evidence is not, in the strict philosophical sense, an empirical claim at all.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly references for the various episodes are: on the John Birch Society, Robert W. Welch Jr., The Politician (1958) and the critical biography by James F. Simon, The Devil’s Advocate (2018); on the WEF Great Reset, the World Economic Forum’s own The Great Reset (2020, Schwab and Malleret), and the more critical essays in the 2022 special issue of Global Policy; on the end-times Christian reading, the relevant scholarship in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture; on the Rhodes Scholar question, Philip Ziegler, Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships (2008); on the Barruel-Robison tradition, Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy (2003). For the broader analytical framework, Jodi Dean, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories in American History (2019), and the 2018 special issue of Critical Inquiry on conspiracy theory.

The conspiracy theories and hidden power pillar, Bilderberg Group, secret societies and government, and deep state and secret societies cover the surrounding context. The new world order evidence and who really rules the world long-tail pages answer the most common specific questions.