I was still in the Canadian navy when the Berlin Wall fell and, for the next few years, we all naively thought that we were on the cusp of some fantastic, better world.
There were numerous articles and much talk of the “peace dividend” and published in 1992 was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Wikipedia has a quote from the book: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Full disclosure - I never got around to reading it, unfortunately.
So here we are with ISIS, ISIS-inspired violence, social media providing a medium for the whack-jobs etc etc
In a recent conversation with a millenial co-worker, I was telling him (more and more excitedly) that “it wasn’t supposed to be this way”, with ISIS etc blah blah blah.
I have often wondered what things would be like now if:
[ol]
[li]the coup against Gorbachev had never taken place and he had been permitted to fulfill his vision; and[/li][li]of course, what if George W. had never been president.[/li][/ol]
Thoughts?
I never read the Fukuyama book. I read about it, concluded that he was so full of it his eyes must be brown, and frankly waited for either some religious or ethnic blow-up to come along to disprove him.
Gulf War I and Rwanda came along right on schedule.
Great question Velomont. Always fascinated by that time as I was backpacking through Eastern Europe then.
From various books cranked out for anniversary of 1989, prevailing view seems to be that Gorbachev’s reforms were too modest and came too late, and that he was willing to cut Warsaw Pact states adrift to deescalate tensions --> reduce military spending as fast as he could With this would go military support to dictators / deadbeats globally.
What no one foresaw was just how avidly some countries, esp Jugoslavia, would react to dismantling strong centralist structure. Reduced resources for oppressive tools to squash segments of their citizenry, or to pressure countries to play nice with neighbours.
So my feeling is that Gorbachev managed to save a large still-viable Russia, but the loss of Soviet power elsewhere tended allowed pressures of local ethno- nationalist interests to take over. His reforms would not, I think, have stopped this once cat was out of the bag. Invasion of Iraq by US created a similar destabilising between two relatively stable regional powers.
Still, the “Weak Fukuyama Principle” seems to have some validity: more and more nations are adopting representative forms of government. Look at the decline in the number of overt dictatorships in the world, in the last 50 years. Look at the incredible reforms in China.
The world, on average, is getting more democratic, and the trend shows no sign of large-scale failure, only local set-backs.
Reported for moving to IMHO or GD. But interesting, nonetheless.
Ah what might have been. Had Yeltsin been stronger. And wise enough not to choose Putin as his successor. If capitalism had been allowed to develop on a small scale, rather than by selling off the Russian state businesses to kleptocrats, yes things might have worked better in Europe.
But while ISIS might have been formed in 1999, it didn’t become a real force until the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq (and Afghanistan, although I regret to say I did not oppose the latter) and especially to disband the Iraqi military (without being able to disarm them), thanks to the axis of evil: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. Or was it stupidity? This is much more serious.
Then there is the question of the “Arab spring”. I see no reason to blame that on outside forces like ISIS and Russia. That would probably have happened regardless.
When a revolution occurs against a dysfunctional government, there is a likelihood that the resultant government will also be dysfunctional — for example, a kleptocracy might be replaced with another kleptocracy, or worse. If the starting government is very dysfunctional there is a high likelihood of a poor result. Simplest might be to model such revolutions stochastically, e.g. 1/3 chance of good outcome, 1/3 chance of kleptocracy, 1/3 chance of civil war.
Russia might have developed better than it did under Yeltsin and Putin, or it might not have. We’d be guessing the results of a horse race that was never held. Saddam’s Iraq would have eventually foundered had GWB pursued a more conservative course, probably with a poorish result, but not nearly as bad as present-day Iraq and the Daesh wars.
So, it’s low-accuracy guesswork. One thing should be clear, at least in hindsight: the push by U.S. and its allies (e.g. IMF) to pursue Friedmanist experiments in Eastern Europe and Iraq led to results much poorer than expected if policies were more enlightened, or even if the fledgling democracies were left to their own devices.
I don’t think Gorbachev’s vision encompassed anything other than preservation of Communist Party authority, and I think the compromises and half-measures necessary to do so would have led to a state looking much like Putin’s regime, perhaps with more vestigial ideological gloss. In fairness, I’m not sure what more Gorbachev could have done; the Soviet economy had been pretty thoroughly hollowed out by then, and the sort of devaluation and upheaval needed to normalize back into the world economy would have produced largely the same collapse that we saw under Yeltsin anyway.
Similarly, I think a confrontation between the US and Iraq was likely to be inevitable no matter who was in charge. There was a lot of pressure developing to lift sanctions and the no-fly zone, which means a good chance that Saddam would have gone back to killing the Kurds and shopping for provocative technology. Sooner or later the same pressures would have built back up, and while we may not have occupied the country, I suspect we eventually would at least have done to his government what we did to Libya, leaving similar instability behind.
