World Politics since 1989. Jonathan Holslag

of world politics, and for a long time ignored the challenges that built up. When it did wake up to the changes, the consequent nationalism made the situation worse. Nationalist remedies were about pretending strength and not about regaining strength. They did not call on citizens to take their responsibility, but put the responsibility on others. Western democracy became an incubator of demagogy.

Harmony contested

There is no single explanation for this upsurge of nationalism and turbulence. It was not just the power shift from the West toward China that caused new uncertainty, nor was it just the failure of capitalism, or the inability to address common challenges, like climate change. Such a one-size-fits-all explanation would make this book perhaps more straightforward, allow it to be summarized in a captivating headline. But would that make us wiser? To understand change in world politics, it is imperative to consider a combination of elements. In fact, one of the things that stand out as a factor contributing to instability, is the failure of politics to deal with complexity, its proclivity for black and white. This book is about connections between different trends. But let us try, at the start, to put up some markers, to identify some themes that recur throughout the chapters.

      A first such theme I title “Harmony contested.” We need to be cautious describing the period between 1989 and 2020 as a golden age. What looked like a golden age to some remained a challenging time to many others. Developing countries often saw globalization permitting consumers in North America and Europe to benefit from their resources and cheap labor. What the leading powers called just was considered abuse by others; what they considered harmony was a hierarchy. Many countries were dissatisfied, wanted to change that order, to catch up, to grow their own power, and become less dependent on the West. Disgruntlement also struck inside rich countries. After the turn of the century, many citizens in Europe and the United States saw their purchasing power stagnate, while the very rich at the top of their society flourished. In the United States, satisfaction about the state of the country declined. In the West and elsewhere, the frustration about cosmopolitanism had been brewing for years.

What most obviously caused the world to retreat into conflict positions was a profound power shift. This is the second theme. Power is the capacity to make others do what they otherwise would not have done. It is about possessing the economic, political, military, and moral weight to influence behavior. The West became the world’s center of power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For a while, it was able to dictate the rules. Several countries wanted to be part of its orbit of influence, become members of the European Union, join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and participate in the international organizations it dominated. Slowly but surely, this position eroded. Externally, it prompted other powers to contest Western interests, led smaller countries to play the West off against new partners, and in its turn created a defensive backlash in Western capitals. Internally, the loss of power coincided with social distress and the waning of the legitimacy of center politics.

      A third theme is the decadence trap. It was the rise of China and the uncertainty it instilled, in a way, that made conflict unavoidable. Still, the focus on China’s rise ignores the weakening of the West. Weakness and profligacy are as much the harbingers of friction as growth and ambition. Instead of preserving wealth at home by building more advanced and sustainable industries, large Western markets spent beyond their means on imported raw materials and consumer goods. They piled up debt and made competitors rich. Consumerism and speculation advanced at the expense of civic duty and entrepreneurialism. Fortune turned savage. Wealth was squandered and the free mind subjugated to materialism. The changes in the distribution of hard power followed changes in the soft tissue of morals, enlightenment, dignity, and civilization. Civic engagement, the bedrock of modern state power, crumbled. Communism was an excess of state control. It was supplanted by another excess: reckless consumerism.

      A fourth important observation is that the free world made authoritarianism strong. Benefiting the most from Western consumerism was China. Its annual trade surplus with the West grew to hundreds of billions of dollars. Its state capitalist model implied that this trade surplus was used for strategic purposes. The Central Bank hoarded the foreign currency and used it to buy technology, ports, and so forth. China’s sterilization policy meant that the West, so to say, had its influence undermined with its own money. Consumerism also came with vast imports of fossil fuel. Europe in particular depended on imports of gas. That bolstered the authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin and his attempt to halt Western influence. Energy imports also helped authoritarian regimes in the Gulf preserve their power and export radical Islamism, despite repeated requests from Washington and European capitals to stop it.

A fifth theme concerns hubris, or excessive self-confidence. Blind faith in military technology led to remote-control interventionism, the assumption that governments could be bombed into obedience, violence be controlled by long-range missile strikes, democracy installed by means of a dysfunctional combination of hard power and humanitarianism. Fortunes were spent on military interventions, in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the time the West came to understand the need for sustained presence and sophisticated engagement, its interest had disappeared altogether. Hubris also marked international cooperation. The West expected other powers to become responsible stakeholders, to subscribe to its rules and to liberalize. But for countries like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, cooperation was only a means to serve the end of amassing power. The same was true for political elites in smaller developing countries. For a while, they paid lip service to Western values, yet loathed its double standards and turned their backs as soon as they could.

      A sixth current is what I call the school of strife. While the West felt betrayed, others thought that the West had bullied and belittled them long enough. The three decades of relative peace did not usher in a virtuous path along which trade would first demand more political cooperation, then strengthen international organizations, teach citizens that it was more useful to see themselves as part of a world community than to perceive the world narrowly through national interests, and, in the end, change the very genetics of international politics. Countries did indeed find out that it was often easier to grow rich through openness. But at the same time, positive learning was superseded by negative learning. Interventionism taught them that the weak still obey the strong, that economic dependency is selfishly exploited, and that benign intentions can never be taken for granted. What mattered, the weak learned, was sovereignty and power. This school of strife, this negative socialization, left a larger imprint on the outlook of world politics than the school of peace.

A seventh dimension is about the changing nature of power. Not only the distribution of power changed; the nature of power evolved as well. Consider the economy. If economists argued that as long as the cake grew, everybody would benefit, the cake came to look more like a sponge cake. Societies needed much more of it to be saturated. Automation and digitization allowed more to be produced with fewer people. Thus these productivity gains were beneficial. But the benefits went disproportionally to those in possession of capital. Moreover, if the expectation was that productivity allowed citizens to work less, pressure to work harder increased in many countries.⁹ Some intellectuals prophesied that technology would help advance humanism, but many humans felt that technology degraded them into robots. The growth–wellbeing gap contributed to social anxiety. While globalization was touted for making products cheaper, the hidden costs of pollution, the devastating consequences of financial speculation, and the social instability caused by exploitation were hardly considered. If liberal thinkers like Adam Smith expected consumers to make rational choices with an eye on their wellbeing, long production chains made such impossible. Globalization became like a smoke screen instead of a facilitator of the enlightened selfishness that Smith and others had in mind. There also existed a widening chasm between the capacity of scientists to find solutions for challenges, like environmental degradation, and the extent to which they were implemented. Hence, for all the technological possibilities, pollution increased, precious resources were exhausted in more precarious environments, and hundreds of millions of citizens still suffered from famine. These were in a way good times, but certainly not the best of times, and for many they were still just bad times.

      A last theme is the limit of learning. One of the most interesting observations of the post-Cold