0.6 The end of the west  (Page 10/19)

Fukuyama argued that desire and reason alone might lead us to be content to live in “market-oriented authoritarian states”, but humans’ “thymotic pride in their own self-worth…leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognizing their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realization that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition.”

Fukuyama suggested that nationalism and religion need not be “obstacles to the establishment of successful democratic political institutions and free-market economies.” He asserts that “the success of liberal politics and liberal economics frequently rests on irrational forms of recognition that liberalism was supposed to overcome” and argues that they require “irrational elements of thymos as well”, but takes the argument no further. Likewise, his deflection of the realist paradigm of “power politics” with the argument that nationalism is “a modern, yet-not-fully-rational form of [state] recognition” and that “[a]world made up of liberal democracies…should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would…recognize one another’s legitimacy”, is correct, but no indicator of early global tranquillity. Fukuyama recognized that nationalism was rising in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. His prognosis was that these nationalistic tensions would subside, just as they had in Western Europe, and as religious conflicts there did three to four centuries earlier.

Addressing the UN General Assembly in 1988, Gorbachev had proposed a new world order. Reflecting the weakness of the Soviet Union, he suggested strengthening the United Nations through the active involvement of all members in a non-ideological framework. He postulated a single world economy, implying an end to economic blocs, and suggested that the use of force was no longer legitimate. He asked for cooperation on environmental protection, debt relief and nuclear disarmament.

Three years later, in September 1991, in a speech to the Joint Houses of Congress on the eve of the first Gulf War, after meeting Gorbachev in Helsinki, President GHW Bush used the same phrase. He spoke of

“……a new world order…: a new era -- freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. … Today that new world is struggling to be born …A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”

But that order was not upon us, and the successful prosecution of Desert Storm, with the modest objective of driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, did nothing to achieve it. When Bush and Scowcroft wrote A World Transformed in 1998, their proposals were cautious. They argued that the US had the resources to pursue its national interests, but a responsibility to use its power for the common good and an obligation to lead. It ought to seek to create stability in international relations, not by engaging in every conflict, but by helping to develop multilateral responses. While it could act unilaterally to resolve disputes, it ought to act whenever possible in concert with committed allies to deter major aggression.