This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place. The course concludes in the present day, as communities everywhere are transitioning into a new era of world history. Again we work hard to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? Again we are drawn to pivotal choices made at key moments by individuals and communities.
Toward a New Era in World History
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The Modern World, Part Two: Global History since 1910
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The Next Phase (1991-2013)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Hi. Welcome back.
Make yourself comfortable.
Last time, we talked about the Washington Consensus that
seemed to be ordering the world of the 1990s.
Now, I'd like to take stock of how the world had changed
and the new era of world history
that seemed to be dawning during the 1990s.
In Week Seven, I said that we had ushered in
a kind of hundred year struggle of contesting
ideologies about how to organize these modern industrial societies.
The constant issues in this contest were issues of identity.
Who am I? What do I stand for?
Am I a worker? Am I a capitalist?
Am I an Aryan? Am I an American?
Who am I? Security, how do I protect myself?
What dominant power will look after me? In what block will I reside?
And political economy, how will we organize my state domestically?
Who will take charge of private property or public property?
What are the basic principles for politics?
And in the resolution of these issues,
I argue that you increasingly see the renaissance of classical liberalism.
Liberalism the way Europeans originally were using
that term, back in the early to mid-1800s
when classical liberalism was at its zenith.
Let's think about some of the ways
in which liberal ideals are making a comeback.
First, in the area of identity.
As in classical
liberalism, a lot about the individual
and individual rights and liberties.
Remember our discussion of the Rights Revolution
that becomes so important beginning in the 1960s.
Rights of women, rights of racial minorities,
ideals that harken back to a lot of that rhetoric
of the late 1700s and the first half of the 1800s.
Security. Liberals sought security primarily in
international cooperation, relying somewhat less on military power
and rival blocs or rival empires as the source of their security.
In political economy, liberals wanted as little government intrusion
economic life as possible in the classical liberal mode.
They celebrated free market principles and capitalism.
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Free markets at home. Free trade between countries.
As you can see the terms of the post-Cold
War settlement in the early 1990s actually seemed to be
doing quite a lot to be enshrining these principals and
making adherence to these principles more widespread than ever before.
China, for example, signs up to the World Trade Organization and
basic principles of free trade by the beginning of the 21st century.
The spread of democracy is visible in a map like this one.
Before 1939, really just a handful of democracies left.
A couple of states in Europe, Scandinavia, North America.
You can see a lot of these countries now shaded in green.
The spread of democracy across almost all of South America.
The spread of democracy, or at least partial
democracies, through actually much of sub-Saharan Africa. The
introduction, at least, of elections and partial democracy
through much of Eurasia including the old Soviet Union.
Though here, there's a spectrum of practices.
More democracy in Southeast Asia, places like Indonesia.
And even here in the Muslim world, and in some
of East Asia, you can see even in the last couple
of years, beyond the scope of this map, how democratic
revolutions or inspired revolutions have been shaking up the Muslim world.
If you look at in the spread of individual liberties, one simple test
is to look at the extension of the right of vote to women.
This map shows you how
this has become more and more a universal practice.
If you look at this category here no suffrage, here's Saudi Arabia and Oman.
The Gulf Emirates.
But very few other exceptions now, anywhere else in the world.
By the way, you can also see some parallel shifts of
women moving into employment, where women are making up more and more
of the workforce in these modern societies.
Now, to go back to an earlier lecture, the one that we had in Week Eight of the
course, where I talked about the origins of modern feminism and modern women,
I centered the entry of women into the workforce, the extension of the right
to vote, as starting out especially in the
Atlantic world and especially in the United States
of America,
to some extent in Britain, also Scandinavia, in the 1910s and the
1920s. So here we are a hundred years later, you can see how now
modern feminism, and then all the social and cultural arguments that go with
it, are now a commonplace for discussion in every part of the world.
So, now, moving from identity issues to security
issues, we can also see the way those have changed.
Remember in the world in which national
empires and great power blocs are battling
against each other, lots of interstate conflicts,
including many interstate conflicts all through the 1800s.
But look at this chart, and it's a crude chart, it's just the numbers of wars.
It doesn't gauge their intensity.
But you can generally get the impression of
a small number of interstate conflicts
really up until around the middle of the
1980s, at which point they reduce, and, after
the American conflict with Iraq in 2003, essentially
in the last ten years reducing to virtually zero.
What's taking its place are a lot of
internal conflicts that rise since the 1970s and
remain a significant theme.
But internal conflicts are very different from the kind of international blocs
that had characterized a lot of the world order ever since the 1600s.
So, the way in which people get security is more focused on how they get security
at home against social dangers arising within their societies,
not so much the obsession with the
military balance between rival blocs of states.
If you turn to the economic principles, the rise of these economic
liberal principles, international financiers, globalization are
a big topic all through the 1990s.
The notion of a Washington Consensus around
these principals, and maybe even a little bit
of the hubris surrounding that moment at the end of the 1990s, is captured here.
Depicted in the picture,
towards the end of the administration of Bill Clinton, is the
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Allen Greenspan, in the center,
and two former Secretaries of the Treasury from
that era: Robert Rubin over here on
the left side of the picture, and Larry Summers, on the right side of the picture.
It is interesting to notice why they are on the cover of this magazine.
They're on the cover of this magazine because, for about the preceding two
years, there had been a constant run of financial crises
involving Russia, Brazil, Southeast Asia, Korea,
because one thing that goes with this new, freer international financial system is
more volatility of the kind that was also evident in the early gold standard era.
That volatility
is being managed by American officials, central bankers,
but of course, to us now, we know that nine years after this picture is
taken the world will be plunged into a financial crisis of
extraordinary proportions that brings us to
the precipice of another Great Depression.
So by the early 1990s, that hundred year struggle is
ending in a kind of great convergence,
an ideological convergence that we can trace using some of our old charts.
Remember this menu of political families in which
the most important ones were the Democratic Socialists,
that the state should own all property,
Liberals, National Conservatives -- but the National Tradition
Party, Revolutionary Socialist Party.
Then by the 1920s that had morphed. These families, the
Revolutionary Socialists turn into Communists and Fascists and, by the
1920s, all of these political families are of roughly comparable influence.
That then turned into the world of the 1930s,
in which the Communists and the Fascists were probably the most influential
political movements, with the new hybrid Social Democracy coming in third.
Then we saw that in the postwar era the
two dominant factions are the Communists and the Social Democrats.
Democratic Socialists remain important, as do National Conservatives,
top-down modernizers often
in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states,
with some residuum of liberalism, but now much smaller in influence,
and fascism almost disappearing from view.
But now look how this morphs into the present day.
Social Democracy massively important, remaining massively important.
Indeed most of the political
parties in what we think of as the United States, Europe, are different shadings
along a spectrum of Social Democratic parties, in my definition of this term.
But the other hugely important faction are National Conservative ideologies.
For instance, I classify the leadership of China today as National Conservatives.
I classify the leadership of
Russia today as National Conservatives.
I frankly can classify the leadership of a place like Iran also as
National Conservatives, though I'll note in
a moment of a particularly idiosyncratic kind.
Liberalism probably is third most important as a continuing influence
and an undercurrent underneath Social Democracy,
with Democratic Socialism still there but running kind of a fourth, and
communism and fascism on the extremes, almost at the vanishing point.
This is a little bit what I mean by a sense of ideological convergence.
But, I want to admit to some problems of classification with my fancy typologies.
For example, National Conservative oligarchies.
Take, for instance, the problem of China. China is ruled by a communist party.
The Communist Party not only controls the ministries of the state, the Communist
Party effectively select the leaders of all
of China's leading companies, also party members.
Including many other non-profit and academic organizations.
So what are we to make of a National Conservative oligarchy of this kind?
Is it turning
into some other variant of a total state? Anyway, challenging.
Or an Islamic republic,
like, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran or the new Islamic republic that
for the moment has taken hold in
Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood has been elected.
We could classify it as National
Conservative but somehow that category doesn't fit
as neatly there.
The Iranian leadership, for example, does have transnational revolutionary
goals for the spread of Islamic ideals -- a hard problem.
Maybe this is some new type, limited at the moment only a
few countries, but it might become more important in the Muslim world.
Too soon to tell. And there's a third
category which we can just call: enabled predators.
They may carry the title of president and say they're in charge of a
democratic republic, but if you look at the rule of someone like Robert Mugabe
in Zimbabwe, it's hard not to just simply see them as these are dictators
who are simply looting the instruments of their state and looting their countries,
to dignify this with an ideological title
like National Conservative does them too much justice.
But as we step back, it is remarkable to
notice, in the early 1990s, the degree of convergence
that's going on,
the beckoning, perhaps, of a new dawn in which the era of
great power conflict and the rivalry of great power blocs and
large rival empires has finally come to an end, at least come
to an end in a form in which we knew it before.
That doesn't mean that a new utopia is taking over the world.
It does mean, though, that we have entered, in this period,
the last 20 years, a really new phase of world history with
different kinds of issues than the issues that have dominated so much
of the world's political and economic life over the previous hundred years.
It's that new world
I want to spend some more time on, when I see you again next time.
See you then.
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