Conclusion: where to next?
Although the debate over war against Iraq and the ongoing struggle against terrorism have commanded most headlines since 11 September 2001, a brief survey of the state of the world in the early twenty-first century does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the most significant structural issue facing the globe revolves around the fate of dictators or terrorists.
Terrorism and the threat of WMD are bound to remain a constant scourge in the search for a stable and secure world order in the new century but, as a few observers have noted, terrorism was but a symptom of a deeper conflict that was pitting the secular West (or, some argued, the Judaeo-Christian West) against the fundamentalist (or Islamic) East. The ‘war on terror' would be, according to such logic, not only the first war of the twenty-first century, but one bound to escalate into a ‘clash of civilizations', lending credence to a thesis first advanced by Samuel Huntington in 1993.Not everyone agreed with such a pessimistic analysis; indeed, some pointed out that the state of the world was, in fact, better than ever before. As the American political scientist Michael Mandelbaum argued in late 2002, a triad of liberal ideas — peace, democracy and free markets — represented the true underpinnings of the world in the new century. None of the political ideas that had challenged democracy had been successful in the twentieth century, he argued. Communism and Nazism had both been defeated, the former by the powerful and mutually reinforcing combination of democratic ideals and the prosperity provided by free markets, and the latter by force of arms. Western ideas, developed in the nineteenth century and forcefully espoused by Woodrow Wilson in the aftermath of the First World War, had finally triumphed and were threatening to engulf even such countries as China. Peace, democracy and free markets, Mandelbaum maintains, are not only the ‘American way' at the dawn of the twenty-first century, they are the global wave of the present and the future.
Is the world of the twenty-first century headed for a ‘clash of civilizations' or a triumph of liberal ideas? Historians, by and large, are hesitant to make such judgements. For while it is easy to look at the past and explain how certain developments were seemingly ‘inevitable', it is always hazardous to presume that one can predict the future with any precision. Yet it might be worthwhile, in closing, to consider the world of the early twenty-first century as compared with the world of the early 1900s.
To some extent, the early twenty-first-century world actually looks uncannily similar to the world a century earlier. Economically, despite the promise of the beneficial effects of globalization, the world remains unequal and polarized. On the one hand, what many writers call the ‘core’ countries of the West — those in North America and Western Europe, and Japan — experience levels of prosperity that would have been unimaginable a century earlier. On the other hand, the majority of the globe’s population, who live in what had been dubbed the Third World during the Cold War and had belonged to various European empires before the Second World War, remain largely marginalized. While many Western observers hail free markets as the ‘universally accepted’ principle for the organization of economic life in the aftermath of the Cold War, the benefits of neoliberalism are hardly evident to the unemployed in Brazil and Argentina, or the starving farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, while many in China may have benefited greatly from the transformation of their country’s state-run economy, millions of others, particularly in rural areas, have plunged deeper into poverty. Similar developments can be observed in other communist or post-communist states (from Russia to Vietnam), as well as in the most populous democracy of the globe (India). In short, while free (or relatively free) markets offer the only broadly accepted principle for organizing economic life in the early twenty-first century, they have yet to offer a panacea.
Much as it was in the early 1900s, and very much along similar geographical lines, the world’s wealth and economic power remain unequally distributed.Therein lies perhaps the greatest challenge for the new century. As the experience of the twentieth century showed, such unequal distribution of wealth and power, whether internal or international, could easily act as the catalyst for conflict and change. The great communist revolutions of the twentieth century, in Russia and China, were both made possible by the existence of large groups of disaffected people. Nazi Germany would hardly have emerged without the economic turmoil of the late 1920s. In contrast, the lack of war among the previously quarrelsome European powers after 1945 can, at least in part, be explained by the shared prosperity resulting from European integration. Whether such ‘war-free zones’ can be replicated elsewhere is an open question, but in areas lacking relative prosperity it appears unlikely.
The twentieth century was one of persistent change and intermittent conflict. It saw the rise and fall of Nazism and communism, the collapse of empires and a rapid increase in the number of independent states. It witnessed the development of the nuclear bomb but also the establishment of the first truly international organizations, the League of Nations and, in particular, the United Nations. It was a century that saw highly systematic and bureaucratized forms of genocide as exemplified by the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and by the butchering of human lives in the killing fields of Cambodia or Rwanda. It saw the forced labour camps in Siberia, but also the virtual eradication of war from the European continent after 1945. Two world wars and countless other military conflicts killed millions around the globe, but the century was also an age of impressive innovations in every field of human endeavour, some of the most far- reaching in medicine, science and computer technology.
The twentieth century was, in short, an amalgam of human experience, a hybrid of disaster and triumph.
It is likely that in this essential way the twenty- first century, even as its specific characteristics are bound to be unique, will be very much like its predecessor.globalization
The cultural, social and economic changes caused by the growth of international trade, the rapid transfer of investment capital and the development of high-speed global communications.
Third World
A collective term of French origin for those states that are part of neither the developed capitalist world nor the communist bloc. It includes the states of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and South-East Asia. Also referred to as ‘the South' in contrast to the developed ‘North'.
Nazis (or Nazi Party) The abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)). It was founded in October 1918 as the German Workers Party by the German politician Anton Drexler to oppose both capitalism and Marxism. It took on its more notorious title in February 1920. One year later Hitler became the Nazi Party Führer (German: leader).
League of Nations
An international organization established in 1919 by the peace treaties that ended the First World War. Its purpose was to promote international peace through collective security and to organize conferences on economic and disarmament issues. It was formally dissolved in 1946.
Holocaust
The systematic mass murder of six million European Jews by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945.
Recommended reading
For general discussions on terrorism see Walter Reich, Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind (Washington, DC, 1998), Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York, 2006), Mark Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia, PA, 2004) and Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went Global (Cambridge, 2005). The literature on 9/11 is already a virtual subfield of its own. For a relatively sober collection of essays see Mary L.
Dudziak (ed.), September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment? (Raleigh, VA, 2003).On US foreign policy and the Bush Doctrine see Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (New York, 2005), Paul Pillar, Terrorism and US Foreign Policy (Washington, DC, 2004) and Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep inside Americas Pursuit ofits Enemies since 9/11 (New York, 2006). The trilogy by Bob Woodward offers an entertaining if not always fully reliable narrative account of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror: Bush at War, Plan of Attack and State of Denial (New York, 2002, 2004, 2006). David J. Rothkopf, Running the World (New York, 2006) places the decision-making in the Bush White House into a broader historical perspective. For another type of overview, focusing on the notion of empire and where America may be heading, see Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price ofAmerica’s Empire (New York, 2004).
The literature on the invasion of Iraq is already vast. Among the most thoughtprovoking are Michael Gordon, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York, 2007), Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story ofSpin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York, 2007), Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London, 2006), Peter Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (New York, 2007) and George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York, 2007). As the titles of these works indicate, the war is not particularly popular with scholars and journalists.
The same is true of the first front line in the war on terror. Afghanistan is the focus of Nick B. Mills, Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (New York, 2007) and Sonali Kolhatkar, James Ingalls and David Barsamian, Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (New York, 2006).
A view from inside Afghanistan can be gleaned from Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban (New York, 2006) and Ann Jones, Kabul in Winter: Without Peace in Afghanistan (New York, 2007).The issue of nuclear proliferation is dealt with extensively in Kurt M. Campbell, Robert Einhorn and Mitchell Reiss (eds), The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider their Nuclear Choices (Washington, DC, 2004), Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2007) and Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York, 2005). An overall discussion of the potential threat of WMD is Joseph Cirincione, John B. Wolfstahl and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats (New York, 2005).
For the Iranian nuclear programme see Ali Ansari, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East (New York, 2006), Shahram Chubin, Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions (New York, 2006), Alireza Jafarzadeh, The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis (New York, 2007), Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and America (New York, 2005) and Kenneth M. Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (New York, 2006).
For readings on al-Qaeda and on the ‘war on terror' in South-East Asia, see the recommended reading section in Chapter 19.