Abstract
The end of the cold war and the prevalence of globalization have occasioned not only millennial optimism but many a grand theory, a carnival of competing generalizations among writers on international affairs as to how to characterize the contemporary world. Globalization is conventionally portrayed as producing uniformity, but in the domain of ideas at least it has produced diversity of meta-historical claims. Some writers such as Robert Kaplan have seen the world after 1989 as a reversal, a return to the past, or a resurgence of ‘the repressed’, especially in ethnic and religious terms.1 Others such as Zaki Laidi have seen 1989 as ushering in ‘a world crisis of meaning’, or what he terms a ‘gigantic semantic cemetery, where words, scarcely having been used and popularized, lose their meaning and then fall into obscurity’.2 Both approaches may make their mark by intuition, but may lose by excess of generalization. Elsewhere there is a more articulated, but as ever debatable, set of alternative visions, a variety of competing approaches to the contemporary world, and to global governance. For the sake of convenience we may analyse them in terms of four schools, somewhat simplified or ideal types perhaps, but not that far from the range of contemporary debate about the international system.
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Notes
Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1996).
Zaki Laidi, A World Without Meaning. The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics (London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 1, 178).
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Chapter 2, note 5; Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (London: HarperCollins, 1999).
In 1995, in the course of a set of interviews with US foreign policy makers, I asked Dr Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state and author of books on the balance of power, what the role of the balance was in the postcold-war world. His answer indicated that he, like the rest of us, did not have a clear view on this question: ‘Very difficult, very complicated. I would answer that there are various kinds of balances of power that have to be dealt with simultaneously - economic, political, maybe military. I would really now no longer say balance of power as much as equilibrium. It’s more or less the same thing, but not exactly the same thing. I would add to it an equilibrium between ends and means. It’s the unanswered question of our period, for which America is very badly prepared.’ Fred Halliday, From Potsdam to Perestroika. Conversations with Cold Warriors (London: BBC Publications, 1995, p. 33).
Robert Cooper, The Post-modern State and World Order, 2nd edn (London: Demos and the Foreign Policy Centre, 2000).
For one cautious variant, see John Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity. Essays on International Institutionalization (London: Routledge, 1998).
A.J.P. Taylor, The Troublemakers. Dissent over Foreign Policy 1792–1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–39 (London: Macmillan, 1983), Ch. 6, ‘The Limitations of Realism’.
Mark Curtis, The Great Deception. Anglo-American Power and World Order (London: Pluto, 1998);
Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble. Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999);
Tariq Ali (ed.) Masters of the Universe. NATO’s Balkan Crusade (London: Verso, 2000).
Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism. Lessons from Kosovo. (London: Pluto, 1999).
Edward Said, Peace and its Discontents (New York: Vintage, 1995).
Alain Minc, Le Nouveau Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1993);
Robert Harvey, The Return of the Strong: The Drift to Global Disaster (London: Macmillan, 1995);
Robert Kaplan, To The Ends of the Earth see note 1. In separate vein, see Christopher Coker, The Twilight of the West (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998).
Peter Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961, pp. 151–2).
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© 2001 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (2001). Arguments about World Politics. In: The World at 2000. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99427-6_3
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