The End of the 1990s, and the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Over the last couple of decades I have found myself paying less and less attention to international security in the "traditional" sense of the term (the state-centric, realpolitik-minded, military affairs-heavy stuff), and much more to economics (which, for me, broadly includes the socioeconomic and the ecological).

It seemed the natural thing not only because economics seems to ever more primary and politics ever more secondary, but, I suppose, because I came of age in the 1990s, after the Cold War. I think I was less credulous than most when it came to the claims for what we then summed up as "globalization" (the term a shorthand for the neoliberal package), and especially its beneficence. (Thomas Friedman's writing seemed to me drivel from the start.) Yet if globalization meant a world of worsening economic stagnation, inequality, vulnerability to shocks of every kind and decreasing capacity to solve pressing problems (like climate change) it also seemed to me that it was likely to go on rolling over any obstacles in its way for a good long time to come, with the old power politics among nations on the backburner.

Looking back it seems that this vision has been falling apart for a long time, with 2008 a turning point--this the year when it the conclusion that the financial crisis clearly underway by the preceding year was no mere hiccup became inescapable, from which point on the growth of international trade and investment stalled, the already anemic economic growth of the neoliberal era became more anemic still, and amid the widely felt pain of the events and government response to them (bailout for some, austerity others, and you know full well which persons got what) nationalism resurged; and the post-Cold War competition between the U.S. and Russia turned into a shooting war between Russia and Georgia, an event that soon proved not some last aftershock of twentieth century geopolitics but the beginning of something bigger and more dangerous, with those flattered as statesmen by a sycophantic press never missed a chance to prove to all and sundry that the patients are in control of the asylum, defense budgets resurging, hot spots around the world getting hotter and conflicts for a long time bloodless ceasing to be so.

And so, with regret, I find myself returning my attention to war--in which many, maybe most, members of the human species may not be interested, but which these days is most certainly showing its unfriendly interest in them.