The Post-Cold War International Relations Student's Reading List

I remember how back after the end of the Cold War a certain number of books about what would follow after it—about what would be the defining features of the post-Cold War international scene--were quite fashionable. They were the books that "everyone was talking about," that every academic was expected to cite or otherwise address in their work, that every student of the subject was supposed to read. There was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. There were the books by Benjamin Barber and Thomas Friedman. There was Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. There was Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy. Other books could and did come up, but these were the main "big picture" ones, with the fact underlined by the syntheses produced of these works, like Thomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map of the World.

Looking back I'm not sure the conversation has been so tightly focused since.

Equally looking back I'm struck by how pathetically limited it all was in origin and content. The "national" conversation consisted of a mere handful of longtime senior policy insiders setting forth the possibilities as seen from a very limited portion of the intellectual and political spectrum (overwhelmingly dominated by the right, Barber the only figure here that I would not unhesitatingly class as in the neoliberal-neoconservative orbit, though it is relevant that Thomas Friedman's book is readable as a variation on his own book, with, in line with his simple-minded cheerleading amid the illusions of the late '90s, down to the title, the implicitly critical "McWorld" replaced with the admiring "Lexus," etc). Unsurprisingly, it is easy enough to produce from their collective work a consensus along the lines of:

The ideological disputation that characterized history since the Enlightenment is over--thankfully--with liberal capitalism the last man standing, now and for all time. Indeed, the specifically globalizing neoliberal version is now carrying all before it, and likely to go on doing so, especially in the American-led world we have every reason to expect for a long time to come. Still, the world is an unequal place, with some not keeping up, and others seeing their societies fall apart altogether. Failure will feed a tribalism that the principal challenge to the international order with which American foreign policy must contend, taking forms ranging from terrorism to rogue states to failed states. The policy meeting those challenges may be more or less unilateral, more or less activist, more or less attentive to this or that peril, but that is the essential framework.

That Barnett (and others) so easily produced such syntheses underlines the limited range of the thinking. Limited, and in the wake of time's test, pathetically inadequate. Even where the neoliberal-neoconservative framework was concerned it left out much that was important--as with the realities of realpolitik too much taken for granted, as others were left to deal with them, usually in the most unrealistic fashion, imagining that Russia and China would one way or another conveniently cease to be complicating factors, perhaps collapsing, perhaps breaking up, perhaps simply "falling into line." (As you can see from the headlines, this did not quite happen.) Globalization, far from being quite the unstoppable force of nature so many made it out to be, proved quite fragile, while the turning point in its unraveling was decidedly not opposition by some anti-liberal regime, but rather the tendency to stagnation, speculation and crisis that increasingly defined it as this came to a head in 2007-2008, after which global integration began to stall out, with international conflict escalating after the miserable failure of policymakers to deal with the problem, not before. (In remembering how Friedman thought globalization a great and glorious and unstoppable thing it is worth remembering that in The Lexus and the Olive Tree he breathlessly declared the same about Enron.) The vision of tribalism and clashes of civilization was simplistic and crude--and in cases, plainly and simply racist. (Indeed, one remembers that Samuel Huntington spent the '80s personally doing his bit to help South Africa's government in its attempt to preserve the apartheid system, while his last book was, in the view of critics, a nativist anti-immigrant screed--while in rigor, and insight, his "clash of civilizations" compares poorly indeed with Emmanuel Todd's examination of the "convergence of civilizations."*) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

As with so much else in the late twentieth century it bespoke the intellectual impoverishment of an elite discourse that even in its best days had been far from what it ought to have been, and had long since narrowed in the most suffocating fashion. The result not only left us unprepared for the hard realities of the twenty-first century, but could seem almost a conditioning to respond to those realities in the worst possible ways--even before the commentariat confused things further with their tossing about the names of books they did not read, let alone understand, in a manner reminding us (as if we needed reminding) that the Ivy League educations and high academic and government office by which meritocracy-singing elitists set such great store are no proofs of expertise, scholarly capacity, intelligence or even basic literacy in their native and first (and if we are to be honest, usually only) language.** Indeed, while I reject Idiocracy's sneer at the American public, it does not seem unfair to say that the elite the country had then, and has now, is exactly the one I would expect to see in such a dystopia, where one could believe that a character played by Luke Wilson really is the smartest man in the country. Still, just as stupidity tends toward the simplistic, one ought not to be simplistic in treating of stupidity. There is nothing like power to make people stupid, and the manner in which the conversation was gatekept, giving us the ideas of a groupthinking little club whose membership is all but required to pander to the prejudices--the assumptions, the hopes, the inclinations--of an elite is an excellent guarantee of that outcome.

* While Todd raised the matter in After the Empire he gave the issue a book-length treatment when he coauthored 2011's A Convergence of Civilizations.
** I am ever less an admirer of Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis--but it always struck me as profoundly unfair that so many seem to have thought that the "end of history" meant "no more bad or dramatic stuff will happen."