Global danger instead of stability: two books about the “world disorder”. – Politics

In the beginning there was optimism, if not euphoria. The beginning means the year 1990. A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America’s victory in the Iraq War and shortly before the end of the Soviet Union, people thought they were on Beginning of a new liberal era: a time when nations coexist in domestic freedom and foreign political harmony, and the strong respect the rights of the weak. Interstate wars were considered a relic of the past. If military means were required at all, they should be used as internationally coordinated humanitarian interventions to put an end to the last remaining potentates and to give oppressed societies worldwide the freedom and democracy they long for.

The topic of peace has been said goodbye

In the meantime, people have fundamentally abandoned this world view. The contrast between then and now could hardly be greater. What went wrong that observers of international politics are calling for a reinvention of the liberal-democratic West and the international system that it has played a major role in shaping in order to enable a controllable – peaceful is out of the question – world order in the 21st century?

The London political scientist Peter R. Neumann and his Munich colleague Carlo Masala have each attempted to explain the current “world disorder” and to formulate proposals for a new order. The books are similar in reasoning and structure. The end of the Cold War led to a reorientation of Western security and defense policies based on the assumption that serious enemies no longer existed and that available budgets should be more wisely directed towards education, health and infrastructure. Defense policy no longer served to avert dangers, but to enforce democracy and free trade as supposed guarantors of world peace. In the early 2000s, people were still convinced that China and Russia would sooner or later not be able to resist Western pressure to liberalize. Clairvoyant contemporaries who warned early on about a revival of nationalism and a fanatical interpretation of religion as a consequence of globalization were hardly heard.

The “illusion” of exporting democracy

Neumann and Masala agree that decades of Western belief in the export of democracy and values ​​was an “illusion” – with retrospectively devastating consequences for the affected societies and for the West itself: in the Near and Middle East, the militarily often half-hearted and Economic self-interests interventions never flanked the desired breeding ground for democracy and the rule of law, but rather created new oppression and on top of that Hotbeds for Islamist terrorism; in Russia and China they promoted the stabilization of the dictatorship and the strengthening of nationalism and chauvinism, not least in contrast to western shop window morality.

At the same time, from 2008 onwards, the project of liberal modernity also came under pressure from within. Economically as a result of the global financial and national debt crises, socially due to the challenges of migration and nationalism. The most obvious consequences of this “rendezvous with globalization” (Wolfgang Schäuble) were Brexit in 2016 and Trump’s election as US President. Especially with a view to the more recent developments, including the disastrous flight of the western allies from Afghanistan last year, it is worth reaching for Neumann’s almost daily updated book, while the challenges of hybrid and informational warfare are examined in more detail in Masala’s volume, which was published in 2016 and is now updated .

We will have to get used to uncertainty

Neither Neumann nor Masala see any reason for optimism about the future. Both expect that we will have to get used to the current “disorder” of global conditions, which does not necessarily mean that a new “dark age” is imminent.

The two have different opinions on how the West should position itself in the world in the future. For Masala, the lesson has been learned over the yearsthat morality and democracy must no longer be the focus of international politics. Instead of pursuing illusory humanitarian goals, states should focus on pragmatic, interest-driven politics and replace established structures with task-oriented coalitions for a limited period of time – this may not always result in what is normatively good, but stability and reliability can.

Open detailed view

In essence, Neumann also shares the desire for more realism. Nevertheless, he warns against throwing the bond of common Western ideas completely overboard. Rightly so, after all, the Russia-Ukraine war is impressively demonstrating that positions that go beyond short-term state utility thinking can sometimes turn out to be correct. Unfortunately, Neumann’s concept of “sustainable modernity” as the basic framework for a renewed West does not live up to expectations. The few pages on this are at best a first sketch of an idea, for example when it says that the West should stick to fundamental values ​​such as human rights and freedom, but without wanting to enforce them at any price.

Open detailed view

The strength of von Neumann and Masala’s books clearly lies in their description of what has gone wrong since 1990. The ideas for change, on the other hand, hardly go beyond cloudy buzzwords (Neumann) and the realistically sober, but rather unambitious reference to the fact that international politics is not a wish concert and that one has to orientate oneself on what is feasible (Masala). The diagnosed “world disorder” will not be eliminated in this way.