World Politics since 1989. Jonathan Holslag. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Jonathan Holslag
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509546749
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environment, climate change, cyber security, and migration? Thinking about international politics, like thinking in general, is partially contingent. Theory evolves as also the world evolves. Yet, caution is due when it comes to considering themes to be new. The impact of the environment on political stability attracted the attention of kings and thinkers already in ancient times. Cyber security is obviously a new phenomenon. But the struggle for information dominance, whether through messenger networks or the telegraph, has been a perpetual concern. Migration is another issue that has occupied officials and thinkers throughout the centuries, their responses oscillating between openness and disdain for the alleged barbarians. The form changes, but the issues are not entirely new. Environmental change, migration, and technology have shown their capacity to make societies flourish and suffer many times in the past. This is not to downplay their importance, but rather to steer clear of a tendency for exaggeration. There certainly exist perennial forces that shape politics, like the desire of most men and women to settle in a place where it is good to live and to defend that place against outsiders. Some call that the power of proximity, others the pull of provincialism. Only a minority of the world population is cosmopolitan and that makes centrifugal forces powerful.

      So, the reader should not expect this book to be a long opinion article with a single idea and everything organized accordingly. It consists of different themes that are studied throughout the chapters, themes that are inseparable. It is mostly chronological. The chronological approach sometimes leads to repetition. The reader will, for example, discover that the incapacity of the West to deal with the growing instability of the South comes back in different periods. They will also find that while some warnings were already audible in the late 1980s – about the impact of social inequality on the resilience of Western society, for instance, or the consequences of underinvestment for economic power – politicians were still seen to be incapable of addressing these issues in the 1990s and the subsequent two decades.

      This repetition, the recurrence of a problem and statements of concern, helps the reader understand themes like the limits of learning or the decadence trap. Oftentimes, we did have the scientific reports about the challenges and we even had clues about solutions, yet were too slow to react. We knew that consumerism and the sorry state of citizenship were rendering Western society vulnerable in a competitive world. Books were written about the matter and important leaders signaled their worry, decade after decade. Yet, to make a rich society change track, so it would appear, is like trying to change the course of a mammoth tanker whose rudder is broken. If there is repetition in this book, let it be an affirmation of inertia.

      The result is a broad canvas of events and personalities, connected through different themes. This approach is somewhat at loggerheads with today’s more common approach of looking at history through the lens of small events or personalities. In those cases, one can look at history as through a drop of water: through something very tiny, one obtains an all-around panorama. This is indeed a very enchanting way of writing, allowing readers to identify themselves with personalities or to be offered salient anecdotes, to smell and feel history. Yet, sometimes, it is also important to look at the world as it is: a murky and vast complex of intrigues, partnerships, and conflicts.

      This book will therefore be less an elegant miniature and more a panorama that invites the reader on certain occasions to study facets in detail and then again to take a few steps back to see the bigger picture, to gaze through one perspective and then to take another viewpoint. It is a more demanding approach, less straightforward perhaps, but an approach that encourages the reader to master the complexity that is inherent to world politics. It will not be easy to read this work leisurely. Pages are rather packed with information and sometimes one will have to turn back to keep seeing the plot. While this book certainly has flaws, it needs to be read with this purpose in mind.

      The book consists of 12 chapters. A very short first chapter documents the move of the pendulum with data. It became fashionable for optimistic intellectuals to display charts that had only one destination: up. Optimism is a moral duty, it was said. There was indeed reason to be optimistic. The chapter shows growth in production and trade, a decrease also of extreme poverty. Yet, it recommends