Robert Kagan
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
Philip Stephens, FT May 1 2008
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall politicians and pundits have been imposing patterns on the world. We started off, some will remember, with the end of history
It is just that the upheavals in the global system since 1989 – the most profound for at least a century – are not susceptible to neatness.
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." (quoted from "The End of History?", 1989)
The End of History and the Last ManIn the early 1990’s, Foreign Affairs devoted an entire issue to an article written by political science professor Samuel Huntington titled the “Clash of Civilizations,” which predicted a terror war between Islam and the west. And now Peter Peterson just wrote an article about the deficit crisis facing the United States and the almost inevitability of a dollar crisis.
Låt oss kalla dem jihadister
Timothy Garton Ash, DN 27/12 2007
Vad ska vi kalla de människor som vill döda oss? Islamofascister? Islamister? Jihadister? Eller bara vanliga mördare? Man kan säga att det inte spelar så stor roll - huvudsaken är att stoppa dem. Men att hitta rätt ord är en del av stoppandet. Det handlar om att identifiera våra verkliga fiender. Det betyder också att vi inte i onödan skaffar oss nya fiender genom att få alla muslimer att känna att de behandlas som terrorister.
Så vad ska vi kalla självmordsbombarna och dem som är beredda att bli massmördare? Det bästa svar som jag hittills hittat är "jihadister". Jag vet att jihad också kan tolkas som fredlig andlig kamp, men de muslimska opinionsledare som jag konsulterat verkar beredda att acceptera denna användning av ordet. Den drar en tydlig demarkationslinje mellan vanliga muslimer, inklusive politiska islamister som använder fredliga medel, å ena sidan och dödens kolportörer å den andra. Ändå tappas den religiösa kopplingen inte bort. Faktum är att denna term gör sambandet tydligare än vad någon av de andra gör. Jihad, heligt krig, är just det som självmordsbombarna i sina avskedsmeddelanden stolt säger sig vara engagerade i.
There is no alternative to war
Blame-the-U.S. pacifism misses the point. Bin Laden
wants to eradicate Western modernity, not liberate Palestine, and the U.S. has
no choice but to fight him.
Salon
Magazine
Speech by Tony Blair, Prime Minister, Labour Party conference, Brighton 2001
The
White Man's Burden
by Rudyard Kipling
First published in McClure's
Magazine (Feb. 1899).
Under 1800-talet kom A. att klämmas mellan sina
två mäktiga grannar - det expanderande Ryssland i norr och Brittiska
Indien i sydöst. Kampen mellan dessa båda stormakter om det
avgörande inflytandet över landet kallas, med en term lånad
från Kipling, "The Great Game". Tre gånger, 1838, 1878 och 1919,
försökte Storbritannien uppnå dominans över A. De
brittiska styrkorna slogs i samtliga fall tillbaka av de afghanska
stamkrigarna.
Källa: Nationalencyklopedein
The
Great Game : The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia
In a phrase coined
by Captain Arthur Connolly of the East India Company before he was beheaded in
Bokhara for spying in 1842, a "Great Game" was played between Tsarist Russia
and Victorian England for supremacy in Central Asia. At stake was the security
of India, key to the wealth of the British Empire. When play began early in the
19th century, the frontiers of the two imperial powers lay two thousand miles
apart, across vast deserts and almost impassable mountain ranges; by the end,
only 20 miles separated the two rivals.
Georgien hävdar att Ryssland försöker slå ut den oljeledning som löper från de kaukasiska oljefälten via Tbilisi till Medelhavet.
Bra karta
History Is Still Going Our Way
By Francis Fukuyama. Mr. Fukuyama,
a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies, is author of "The End of History and the Last
Man."
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB1002238464542684520.htm
The need for a new imperialism
Afghanistan is just one example of
failed states that threaten world order.
The only answer is active
intervention by the west
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, October 9 2001
20:00
A few years ago, Robert Cooper, a British diplomat, presciently identified the challenge posed by what he called the ”pre-modern world, the pre-state, post-imperial chaos”.**
**The Postmodern State and the World Order (London: Demos and the Foreign Policy Centre, 1996, 2000);
Mr Cooper listed Afghanistan in this category. ”The existence of such a zone of chaos is nothing new,” he remarked, ”but previously such areas, precisely because of their chaos, were isolated from the rest of the world. Not so today ... If they become too dangerous for the established states to tolerate, it is possible to imagine a defensive imperialism. If non-state actors, notably drug, crime or terrorist syndicates take to using non-state (that is pre-modern) bases for attacks on the more orderly parts of the world, then the organised states may eventually have to respond.”
Today, Mr Blair is assisting the Americans to do just that in Afghanistan. The job of replacing the Taliban will be extraordinarily difficult. But Mr Blair wants to do far more. He wishes, in effect, to undo the damage done by the failure of states throughout the world. If one is to understand what this means, it is necessary to analyse why states fail.
In a brilliant new book, William Easterly, of the World Bank, provides the answer.***
*** The Elusive Quest for Growth (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001).
The story of failures is one of an accumulation of bad incentives. The country often started its independent history as an arbitrary assemblage of ethnic groups. It is desperately poor. Disease is endemic and debilitating. The economy is locked into low-skill, low-return activities and growth in income per head is slow, perhaps even negative.
Those in power use their positions for personal enrichment. Corruption is pervasive. There is neither an independent judiciary nor an honest police force. Generals are greedy politicians, not disinterested soldiers. Political competition among interest groups is intense. The result is inefficient economic policies aimed at favouring particular groups. High fiscal deficits, inflation, costly protection against imports and repression of the financial system are the debilitating outcome.
In a poor country whose state has limited resources and commands little loyalty, interest group competition readily turns into civil war. Alternatively, criminal organisations operate freely. At the limit, the government’s monopoly of organised violence - a precondition for civilised life - collapses.
Europe must have looked like this during the dark ages. Unfortunately, this, or something like it, is the state of a sizeable part of the globe. Still more tragically, a country stuck in this trap finds it frighteningly difficult to escape. Europe’s escape took many centuries.
If a failed state is to be rescued, the essential parts of honest government - above all the coercive apparatus - must be provided from outside. This is what the west is doing today in the former Yugoslavia. To tackle the challenge of the failed state, what is needed is not pious aspirations but an honest and organised coercive force.
There are two reasons why the idea will cause horror: imperialism remains suspect; and the effort will be costly. Yet these objections can be met. Some form of United Nations temporary protectorate can surely be created. The cost of action to save failed states is also less than that of doing nothing. Above all, it is clear that there can be neither justice nor elementary international order if substantial parts of the globe lack responsible government. To do nothing is to choose disorder. The question is: are Mr Blair and his peers, above all in the US, prepared to will the alternative?
Outlaw States and Western Colonies, Then and Now
By Paul
Johnson
From The Wall Street Journal Europe
Mr. Johnson is the author of many books, including “Modern Times” and “The Birth of the Modern.”
The West has no alternative but to wage war against states that habitually aid terrorists. U.S. President George W. Bush warns the war may be long but he has not, perhaps, yet grasped that this may entail long-term political obligations for America—and possibly its European allies as well. For the nearest historical parallel—the war against piracy in the 19th century—was an important element in the expansion of colonialism. It could be that a new form of colony, the Western-administered former terrorist state, is only just over the horizon.
Significantly, it was the young U.S., not Europe, that initiated this first campaign against international outlaws (most civilized states accepted the old Roman law definition of pirates as “enemies of the human race”). By the end of the 18th century, the Beys of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli had become notorious for harboring pirates and were themselves engaging in piracy and the slave-trade in whites (chiefly captured seamen). European states found it more convenient to ransom these unfortunates rather than go to war. Admiral Nelson, commanding the British Mediterranean Fleet, was forbidden to carry out reprisals. “My blood boils,” he wrote, “that I cannot chastise these pirates.”
America and her allies may find themselves, temporarily at least, not just occupying with troops but administering obdurate terrorist states. These may eventually include not only Afghanistan but Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Iran and Syria. Democratic regimes willing to abide by international law will be implanted where possible, but a Western political presence seems unavoidable in some cases.
Geopolitics and terrorism
No, realists can be optimists too
Oct 4th 2001 From The Economist print edition
Pointing out that “the end of history” hasn't happened doesn't require dropping into hyper-pessimism
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. By John J. Mearsheimer. Norton; 555 pages; $27.95 and £22
TO MANY people, the title of this book will bring a sharply raised eyebrow. In the new, post-September 11th world, do “great-power” relations still matter; isn't “the tragedy” now being enacted on a different stage? The answers are: yes, they do, and no, it basically isn't.
John Mearsheimer, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, has written a sensible if somewhat over-dark book, and the arrival of mega-terrorism does not destroy his argument.
His target is the optimistic view of geopolitics that grew up after the cold war's end in 1989. He demolishes all the main components of that happy vision.
The “end of history” is not in sight, even if it were true (which it probably isn't) that everybody will before long be living in free-market democracies. There is not going to be a “world government”; nation-states remain the chief shapers of world politics, not the grey, relatively powerless international institutions they have created. A more prosperous world will not necessarily be a peaceful one; states do not fight each other only for money. And it is not true that democracies, at any rate, will never fight one another; they may sometimes be cautiously slower to go to war, but national pride and clashing interests can get democracies too hitting each other.
To replace this punctured illusion, Mr Mearsheimer offers a stern, perhaps excessively stern, version of realist pessimism. Power is wielded by states. States fear each other, and the more powerful they are—in population, wealth and military clout—the more the others fear them. Each state has to look after itself; there is no higher authority it can call upon for help, no number 911 it can telephone (999 to British readers) to bring in the global police.