The End of the End of History: Why the 21st century will look like the 19th

The New Republic ^ | April 2008 | Robert Kagan

[DB]

I’d like to assume you read the article but that doesn’t appear to be the case...

[brityank]

A capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with -- Lenin

[LjubivojeRadosavljevic]

Let me summarize a problem that Kagan is attempting to demonstrate.

_______________________________

Kosovo in 1999 was a more dramatic and disturbing turning point for Russia and China than was the Iraq war of 2003....

From Moscow's perspective, it was a clear violation of international law,...To the Chinese, it was just "liberal hegemonism." ...The Russians and the Chinese were in good company...(Henry Kissenger, et. al)...

...the United States and its democratic allies succeed in imposing their views on others not because they are [legally] right but only because they are powerful enough to do so. To non-liberals, the international liberal order is not progress. It is oppression.

___________________________

In other words, Jim Crow laws can be imposed, for example.

[Jack Black]

If the Supreme Court rules against the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights, It will look like 1860.I see your point but the more I study the Civil War the more I am impressed with the honor and rightness of many of the combatants on both sides. This is what makes the war such a moving tragedy.

In the next war there will only be one right side. Perhaps Second Revolutionary War is a better moniker than CW2, which we've used for our ping list for years. The original RW was about throwing off the yoke of illegitimate political control from afar.

[TopQuark]

Marked for later. Thanks for the post.

[RoadTest]

Mr. Kagan uses the term “liberal’ in its old fashioned and classic sense: the belief in man’s inherent, if not freedom, its dignity - or human rights.

But the “liberals” of today, at least the American ones, are, if not avowed believers in autocracy, obvious practitioners of it, with them being the autocrats.

[killjoy]

outstanding comment on an in depth and very insightful article

Thank you.

[schu]

My take on it is Kagan says that we mistook the defeat of communism as the victory for liberal democracy. In fact the enemy is autocracy, communism was simply a method to convince the masses to give power to the few.

Today the autocrats (kings, czars, emperors, imams, you name it), use economic freedom and material goods to subjugate their citizens. But as they maintain political power, they still control what happens.

In the end the “war” is not democracy (self rule) vs communism, but democracy vs autocracy. Russia and China are autocracy's and are still rivals.

IMHO, in the end, desire for power is the nature of man. "Above all else men desire power", as in LOTR. All men want to be god and this is just the same story that we have seen since the beginning of time. It is a battle that will never end.

schu

[Billthedrill]

Many thanks for the ping. A wonderful, thought-provoking article that is, it seems apparent, the precise for Kagan's new book, "The Return Of History And The End Of Dreams" - a direct reference to Francis Fukuyama's nicely-reasoned but hopelessly inaccurate End Of History. For anyone who might have missed it, Kagan is quite specific here:

Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of worldviews over the centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer.

"Our political philosophers" is, of course, Fukuyama, and his treatment of the whole thing was entirely Hegelian. Hegel seems to have acqured a nearly cult status on campus that is loosely related to his part in Marxian historiography. A minor point - Fukuyama, of course, is no Marxist.

It seems clear that forms of government and the ideologies they follow are two very separate arenas. One might have a relatively benign autocracy, for example, the sort of an arrangement that Edmund Burke cautioned against overthrowing with insufficient reason. One might have a less benign one, even a police state. This is a separate issue from ideology. One sees two ironies here - first the irony of Marx, who promised democracy and delivered the autocracy of the Party in practice. Second, the irony of Khomeini, whose religion the 1400 years ago of his fondest memory contained no ayatollahs whatever. In Mohammed's day it was in a theological sense intensely democratic, and what that religion has delivered both in Shi'ism and Sunni practice is a militant autocracy.

There are classic problems with autocracy, the most prominent being the problem of succession. This caused bloody warfare in the Roman and Chinese empires, and in nearly every one of the rest. The classical solution to this problem is to involve some sort of hereditary relationship - "keeping it in the family" keeps the money with the power and interlopers out. At least that moves the theater of engagement to between families at best, and where not, chaos. Rome never really did figure that one out.

The notion of an organized international community that possesses some sort of meta-right over the sovereignty of its constituent citizens and states is one that has never really been examined to completion. Not, at least, beyond a gooey sighing of "Wouldn't it be nice?" In fact, it isn't. The vehicles of international "democracy" have proven unaccountable to their constituent peoples, arrogant, lazy, corrupt and ineffectual. Far from theorizing about what right they have to interfere with the affairs of their sundry states, one wonders what right, beyond a sinecure for an aspiring international governing class, they have even to exist? But certain "autocratic" concerns that they have become a vehicle for interference in interal affairs belie the fact that they have done no such thing in application, as Darfur reminds us.

"As China's Li Peng told Iran's Rafsanjani, China and Iran are united by a common desire to build a world order in which "the selection of whatever social system by a country is the affair of the people of that country."

That is nonsense, of course, but a tribute to Enlightment terminology that even Marx never kicked. The point of an autocracy is the the people of the country do not get to decide. They might well choose it if the alternative is chaos, starvation, or incessant warfare, all of which can be arranged. Mugabe, anyone?

There are broad historical currents being paddled about in canoes here. Autocracy took a major hit in the year 1917, when the Hohenzollern, Romanov, Ottoman, and Habsburg dynasties fell in the course of a single year. Even those of us who do not subscribe to an Hegelian historical dialectic must take pause in the face of this sort of change. Autocracy is obviously not dead, but it no longer dominates. Why is the topic of a much longer dissertation than this, but it's so. That was not, incidentally, the end of the associated Great Powers geopolitical alignment, far from it. Those also are separate arenas.

I have mocked the French in particular for a nostalgic desire to return to the days of the Great Powers, wherein all decisions of any import were undertaken in luxurious salons peopled by Europe's aristocracy. One sees the return of autocratic government, yes, but any Great Powers configuration within world geopolitics is going to either have to account for the asymmetrical power still wielded by the United States and its democratic allies, or wait for its highly-touted but rather exaggerated demise. In short, Russia and China are free to pursue their respective national interests, but when did they not? There is nothing new here.

As for Russia and China, it will be tempting for them to enjoy the spectacle of the United States bogged down in a fight with Al Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups in the Middle East and South Asia...

...but disturbing should we win it without their perceived help, and hence we may well see just such a thing attempted as victory in Iraq becomes undeniable...

...just as it is tempting to let American power in that region be checked by a nuclear-armed Iran. The willingness of the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing to protect their fellow autocrats in Pyongyang, Tehran, and Khartoum increases the chances that the connection between terrorists and nuclear weapons will eventually be made.

At some point - and this is especially true under the Great Powers paradigm - these governments are going to figure out who is really threatened as opposed to the rhetoric; i.e., who is within nuclear missle range and who is not. That is a pragmatic, non-ideological decision, and on that level of geopolitics there are no friends, only temporary allies with permanent weaponry. Who is really being hurt here? And why does no one seem to want to talk about that?

But enough of that. It seems clear that both of these autocratic governments are feeling heat from an ideological foe in Islamism. It may be what it will take to get Russia and China to be serious about this one is to point out that their own self-interest is at stake, not simply U.S. prestige. And that is the other limitation to the "keep the world safe for fellow autocrats" approach to international relations - they tend to be hungry, and are prone to acting as if "there can be only one." A thing to ponder when thinking about 1917.

All IMHO and subject to furious debate as usual, of course...

[Tolik]

Very Interesting!

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You can see the list of articles I pinged to lately  on  my page.
You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about). Besides this one, I keep 2 separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson and Orson Scott Card.  

[DuncanWaring]

The original RW was about throwing off the yoke of illegitimate political control from afar.

There was a lot of that in CW1, also.

[Yardstick]

Bump for later

[FreedomPoster]

I somehow missed this on your earlier ping. Just caught it on Tolik’s ping, will read later.

[norton]

"Got the Cliff Notes version? "

That was it.

[Tolik]

Robert Kagan: For three centuries, international law, with its strictures against interference in the internal affairs of nations, has tended to protect autocracies. Now the democratic world is in the process of removing that protection, while the autocrats rush to defend the principle of sovereign inviolability.

I think I am not alone in resting sovereignty with individual. As long as individuals, free and voluntarily, relegate their sovereignty to their government, it has legitimacy. Otherwise, its not. A coercive power of the modern state is much more difficult to defeat that of any of the worst monarch of the past. This why I disagree with those who say that it should be left to people to get rid of their unjust rulers - it may be impossible to do.

Now, the form of such help is quite debatable, not even mentioning a feasibility of going against such mammoth as China, for example. It does not have to be a war, all other means are possible. And in case of Russia, it looks like they freely voted in the autocrats, because its not a totalitarian police state anymore, and people did vote without a KGB minder breathing heavily into the neck. 

Billthedrill.: It seems clear that both of these autocratic governments are feeling heat from an ideological foe in Islamism. It may be what it will take to get Russia and China to be serious about this one is to point out that their own self-interest is at stake, not simply U.S. prestige.

China is too powerful and too ruthless to be afraid of any Islamists disturbance on its border or within. Russia is not by both counts and may be playing with fire. Muslims in and around it were for decades, or better say centuries, of a "mild" variety. Chechnya was only recently religiously radicalized. It was predominately nationalistic struggle for them. But now, one can find Chechens among foreign fighters in many Islamic frontiers. I don't see how Russia can justifiably close her eyes to radicalization of its Muslims. Thinking logically (that might not be justified in this case), I'd predict a responsible Russian leader to sooner part the ways with Islamists than Chinese would. But who knows!? For now, Russians benefit from the high oil prices when Chinese suffer. I hope we can live long and have a positive answer to these fascinating questions.

[netmilsmom]

I don’t think I am smart enough for this article.

Good thing for comments by our profound FReepers!

[Cacique]

btt

[gonzo]

"...If the Supreme Court rules against the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights, It will look like 1860..."

I am also waiting for the USSC ruling on the DC gun-ban-law. How they 'rule' will be a good indicator of how our gummint intends to treat us in the future.

My tagline went-up when they took the case ............. FRegards

[C19fan]

A big difference between now and the 19th century is the self-confidence of the liberal Western bloc. Britain had no problem with using its might overseas and attempting to make the world English. Today Britain is crucifying itself on the cross of multiculturism and PC. The US national ethos was manifest destiny. A significant portion of the population of the US aka Obama supporters are embarassed to be Americans and are part of the “BLame America First” crowd. It is Russian and China that have strong nationalistic feelings, especially with the case of China bordering on jingoism with a cultural memory of avenging the humiliations it endured by the Western powers during the 19th/early 20th century.

One thing I wish would make a comeback from the 19th century would be the fashions. ;)

[jokar]

btt
Reads like Richards blog at Belmont club. We used to get a lot of postings like this. Good work. Very stimulating.