World Politics since 1989. Jonathan Holslag

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.

Readers who expect to find simple critiques will be disappointed. This work identifies flaws of the past generations of political leaders, but also stresses that citizens easily surrendered politics to a class of professional election campaigners. Citizenship hence was reduced to going to vote once every few years and bitterly complaining about their elected politicians in between. Some intellectuals called for participatory democracy, but have citizens truly become ready and willing to participate? This book confirms the crippling gap between poor and rich, the excesses of capitalism, yet also stresses that many who did not belong to the jet set showed the same profit-maximizing behavior at a more modest scale. Lower income groups refused to match their indignation about inequality with action.¹⁷ Instead of supporting the small entrepreneur, they made the giants bigger. Joe sixpack exploited the lack of transparency of globalization, the invisibility of exploitation and abuse, as eagerly as the Wall Street shark. I would bet that if we gave citizens a basic income, as some suggest, they would still spend it on the same multinationals, watch the same billionaire soccer players. If one only applies ethics on the income side and not on the expenditure side, can we expect the economy to become better? Or take the criticism about China. The reader will discover the cunning statecraft of China. Instead of blaming China for the economic problems in the developed world, however, this book explains how Beijing essentially aligned its own policy that focused on industrialization with Western governments that were primarily concerned about consumption.

Nor should this work be expected to be prophetic. It emphasizes a lost momentum for the Western world, its weakening, but does not predict its collapse. Yes, democracy is in bad shape. In fact, there has been an endless stream of warnings. In 1974, the German Chancellor Willy Brandt famously remarked: “Western Europe has only twenty or thirty more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship.”¹⁸ One cannot deny the feeling that Western politics is on a slippery slope, that the rota fortunae now inevitably shrieks toward distress and uncertainty. One cannot disagree with the assessment that dignity retreats from the assemblies, that big business is tremendously influential, and that policy is frequently about sterile economics instead of the deeper chords of identity and pride that form a nation.¹⁹ Yet, in many countries democracy remained resilient and all around the world activists shed their blood for political liberty. For all the dynamism, authoritarian states also remain fragile and often lack the freedom that is so crucial for innovation.²⁰ I can thus not conclude at this stage whether Western liberalism will die, whether the Western world will be eclipsed by the authoritarian countries, as Brandt suggested. Thirty years is a wavelet in history, a few books in a long line of library shelves. I do not even think our times were so exceptional; they were different. All I can conclude is that the West has lost a golden opportunity to grow stronger, that it has saddled the next generations with formidable challenges, that the world became more divided, and that other powers can take advantage of it.

      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 account takes the reader back and forth between different viewpoints. The book approaches world politics from the viewpoint of the West, roughly defined as North America and Europe, but also looks at the West from the perspective of other parts of the world. This is required to understand how tensions built up, how common challenges, like financial instability, were approached with different interests in mind. The book takes an interest in the internal causes of the difficulties of the West, but also in its foreign policy, the way Western experts evaluated its effectiveness, and the way non-Western voices commented on it. The reader will be introduced to Western assessments of world security, but also to Russian, Chinese, Indian, and various African interpretations. Hence, this project draws from multiple sources. It builds on various previous studies, but also reviews policy documents, integrates insights from personal conversations, and includes figures from multiple databases. The merit of the book lies thus not so much in sensational revelations, but in bringing information from many sources together, combining viewpoints, and connecting aspects of world politics that are often treated separately: connecting the dots.

      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.

Outline

      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