Each passing year serves up its reminder that history didn’t end in the final decades of the last century and that the conclusion of the Cold War wasn’t a moment of resolution but merely the prelude to the phase we live in today of disorder and deadly tumult, reports Qoshe.
End of history
It was precipitous of Francis Fukuyama to proclaim the triumph of liberal democracy as the Soviet Empire was disintegrating, and hubristic of the West to be seduced by his “end of history” thinking.
America’s unipolar moment – what Robert Hughes described in the early 1990s as “an exquisitely silly piece of late imperial thinking, if you don’t happen to be American” – proved fleeting. Rather than a “New World Order”, we were on the verge of a 30-year phase of global disorder.
Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, there were signs of trouble. Vladimir Putin rose to power on December 31, 1999, a Y2K bug in human form. The bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000 hinted at how the digital economy could be as destructive as it was disruptive. The Battle of Seattle in November 1999, when protesters targeted a meeting of the World Trade Organisation, semaphored the backlash against globalization. The Florida election debacle in 2000 demonstrated the fragility of US democracy.
Did you subscribe to our daily Newsletter?
It’s Free! Click here to Subscribe
Source: Qoshe
