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The Return of History and the End of Dreams ハードカバー – 2008/4/29
英語版
Robert Kagan
(著)
ダブルポイント 詳細
Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that after the Cold War the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong.
For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.
For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.
- 本の長さ128ページ
- 言語英語
- 出版社Knopf
- 発売日2008/4/29
- 寸法20.32 x 1.91 x 12.7 cm
- ISBN-10030726923X
- ISBN-13978-0307269232
この著者の人気タイトル
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Advance Praise for The Return of History and the End of Dreams
“In this important, timely, and superbly-written book, Robert Kagan shows that the ‘end of history’ was an illusion. Today’s global challenges pose a stern test for the world’s democracies. This book is a wake-up call and should be read by policymakers, politicians, pundits and all who want a guide to the dangerous waters of 21st century geopolitics.”
—Senator John McCain
“Robert Kagan has once again written a provocative, thoughtful, and vitally important book that will reshape the way we think about the world, the special purpose that America must play in it, and the principles that must guide us. The Return of History and the End of Dreams is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of American foreign policy–and a reminder of why Robert Kagan is one of our nation’s most indispensable strategists.”
—Senator Joseph Lieberman
“An eloquent, powerful, disturbing, but ultimately hopeful view of the emerging balance of power in the world–and America’s proper role in it. Kagan’s views will be an essential part of the debate that will shape our next president’s foreign policy.”
—Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
“Robert Kagan gives us a picture of the world today in all its complexity and its simplicity. This is a world where America is dominant but cannot dominate, where the struggle for power and prestige goes on as it always has. Power is at the service of ideas, but the key ideas are also ideas about power: democracy and autocracy. All this in a hundred pages, with style, energy and panache.”
—Robert Cooper, Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union
“In this important, timely, and superbly-written book, Robert Kagan shows that the ‘end of history’ was an illusion. Today’s global challenges pose a stern test for the world’s democracies. This book is a wake-up call and should be read by policymakers, politicians, pundits and all who want a guide to the dangerous waters of 21st century geopolitics.”
—Senator John McCain
“Robert Kagan has once again written a provocative, thoughtful, and vitally important book that will reshape the way we think about the world, the special purpose that America must play in it, and the principles that must guide us. The Return of History and the End of Dreams is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of American foreign policy–and a reminder of why Robert Kagan is one of our nation’s most indispensable strategists.”
—Senator Joseph Lieberman
“An eloquent, powerful, disturbing, but ultimately hopeful view of the emerging balance of power in the world–and America’s proper role in it. Kagan’s views will be an essential part of the debate that will shape our next president’s foreign policy.”
—Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
“Robert Kagan gives us a picture of the world today in all its complexity and its simplicity. This is a world where America is dominant but cannot dominate, where the struggle for power and prestige goes on as it always has. Power is at the service of ideas, but the key ideas are also ideas about power: democracy and autocracy. All this in a hundred pages, with style, energy and panache.”
—Robert Cooper, Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union
抜粋
In the early 1990s, the optimism was understandable and almost universal. The collapse of the communist empire and the apparent embrace of democracy by Russia seemed to augur a new era of global convergence. The great adversaries of the Cold War suddenly shared many common goals, including a desire for economic and political integration. Even after the political crackdown that began in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and disturbing signs of instability in Russia after 1993, most Americans and Europeans believed China and Russia were on a path toward liberalism. Boris Yeltsin's Russia seemed committed to the liberal model of political economy and closer integration with the West. The Chinese government's
commitment to economic opening, it was hoped, would inevitably produce a political opening, whether Chinese leaders wanted it or not.
Such determinism was characteristic of post--Cold War thinking. In a globalized economy, most believed, nations had no choice but to liberalize, first economically, then politically, if they wanted to compete and survive. As national economies approached a certain level of per capita income, growing middle classes would demand legal and political power, which rulers would have to grant if they wanted their nations to prosper. Since democratic capitalism was the most successful model for developing societies, all societies would eventually choose that path. In the battle of ideas, liberalism had triumphed. As Francis Fukuyama famously put it, "At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy."
The economic and ideological determinism of the early post--Cold War years produced two broad assumptions that shaped both policies and expectations. One was an abiding belief in the inevitability of human progress, the belief that history moves in only one direction-- a faith born in the Enlightenment, dashed by the brutality of the twentieth century, but given new life
fall of communism. The other was a prescription for patience and restraint. Rather than confront and challenge autocracies, it was better to enmesh them in the global economy, support the rule of law and the creation of stronger state institutions, and let the ineluctable forces of human progress work their magic.
With the world converging around the shared principles of Enlightenment liberalism, the great task of the post--Cold War era was to build a more perfect international system of laws and institutions, fulfilling the prophecies of Enlightenment thought stretching back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A world of liberal governments would be a world without war, just as Kant had imagined. The free flow of both goods and ideas in the new globalized era would be an antidote to human conflict. As Montesquieu had argued, "The natural effect of commerce is to lead toward peace." This old Enlightenment dream seemed suddenly possible because, along with the apparent triumph of international liberalism, the geopolitical and strategic interests of the world's great powers also seemed to converge. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush spoke of a "new world order" in which "the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony," where "the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle," where nations "recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice." It was "a world quite different from the one we've known."
The world looked different primarily because the Soviet Union was different. No one would have suggested that history had ended if the communist Soviet Union had not so suddenly and dramatically died and been transformed after 1989. The transformation of Soviet and then Russian foreign policy was remarkable. The "peaceful influence of liberal ideas" completely reoriented Russian perspectives on the world--or so it seemed. Even in the last years of the Cold War, advocates of "new thinking" in Moscow called for convergence and the breakdown of barriers between East and West, a common embrace, as
Mikhail Gorbachev put it, of "universal values." Then, in the early Yeltsin years, under foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, Russia appeared committed to entering postmodern Europe. Moscow no longer defined its interests in terms of territory and traditional spheres of interest but rather in terms of economic integration and political development. It renounced regional hegemony, withdrew troops from neighboring states, slashed defense budgets, sought alliance with the European powers and the United States, and in general shaped its foreign policies on the premise that its interests were the same as those of
the West. Russia's "wish was simply to belong."
The democratization of Russia, beginning even in the Gorbachev years, had led the country's leaders to redefine and recalculate Russia's national interests. Moscow could give up imperial control in Eastern Europe, could give up its role as a superpower, not because the strategic situation had changed--if anything, the United States was more menacing in 1985 than it had been in 1975--but because the regime in Moscow had changed. A democratizing Russia did not fear the United States or the enlargement of its alliance of democracies.
If Russia could abandon traditional great power politics, so could the rest of the world. "The age of geopolitics has given way to an age of what might be called geoeconomics," Martin Walker wrote in 1996. "The new virility symbols are exports and productivity and growth rates and the great international encounters are the trade pacts of the economic superpowers." Competition among nations might continue, but it would be peaceful commercial competition. Nations that traded with one another would be less likely to fight one another.
Increasingly commercial societies would be more liberal both at home and abroad. Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honor and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history.
The ancient Greeks believed that embedded in human nature was something called thumos, a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, or state. In the Enlightenment view, however, commerce would tame and perhaps even eliminate thumos in people and in nations. "Where there is commerce," Montesquieu wrote, "there are soft manners and morals." Human nature could be improved, with the right international structures, the right politics, and the right economic systems. Liberal democracy did not merely constrain natural human instincts for aggression and violence; Fukuyama argued it "fundamentally transformed the instincts themselves."
The clash of traditional national interests was a thing of the past, therefore. The European Union, the political scientist Michael Mandelbaum speculated, was but "a foretaste of the way the world of the twenty-first century [would] be organized." The liberal internationalist scholar G. John Ikenberry described a post?Cold War world in which "democracy and markets flourished around the world, globalization was enshrined as a progressive historical force, and ideology, nationalism and
war were at a low ebb." It was the triumph of "the liberal vision of international order."
For Americans, the fall of the Soviet Union seemed a heaven-sent chance to fulfill a long-held dream of global leadership--a leadership welcomed and even embraced by the world. Americans had always considered themselves the world's most important nation and its destined leader. "The cause of America is the cause of all mankind," Benjamin Franklin said at the time of the Revolution. The United States was the "locomotive at the head of mankind," Dean Acheson said at the dawn of the Cold War, with the rest of the world merely "the caboose." After the Cold War it was still "the indispensable nation," indispensable because it alone had the power and the understanding necessary to help bring the international community together in common cause. In the new world order, as Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott put it, the United States would define "its strength--indeed, its very greatness--not in terms of its ability to achieve or maintain dominance over others, but in terms of its ability to work with others in the interests of the international community as a whole."
While Americans saw their self-image reaffirmed by the new world order, Europeans believed that the new international order would be modeled after the European Union. As scholar-diplomat Robert Cooper put it, Europe was leading the world into a postmodern age, in which traditional national interests and power politics would give way to international law, supranational institutions, and pooled sovereignty. The cultural, ethnic, and nationalist divisions that had plagued mankind, and Europe, would be dissolved by shared values and shared economic interests. The EU, like the United States, was expansive, but in a postmodern way. Cooper envisioned the enlarging union as a kind of voluntary empire. Past empires had imposed their laws and systems of government. But in the post--Cold War era, "no one is imposing anything." Nations were eager to join the EU's "cooperative empire . . . dedicated to liberty and democracy." A "voluntary movement of self-imposition [was] taking place."
Even as these hopeful expectations arose, however, there were clouds on the horizon, signs of global divergence, stubborn traditions of culture, civilization, religion, and nationalism that resisted or cut against the common embrace of democratic liberalism and market capitalism. The core assumptions of the post--Cold War years collapsed almost as soon as they were formulated.
commitment to economic opening, it was hoped, would inevitably produce a political opening, whether Chinese leaders wanted it or not.
Such determinism was characteristic of post--Cold War thinking. In a globalized economy, most believed, nations had no choice but to liberalize, first economically, then politically, if they wanted to compete and survive. As national economies approached a certain level of per capita income, growing middle classes would demand legal and political power, which rulers would have to grant if they wanted their nations to prosper. Since democratic capitalism was the most successful model for developing societies, all societies would eventually choose that path. In the battle of ideas, liberalism had triumphed. As Francis Fukuyama famously put it, "At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy."
The economic and ideological determinism of the early post--Cold War years produced two broad assumptions that shaped both policies and expectations. One was an abiding belief in the inevitability of human progress, the belief that history moves in only one direction-- a faith born in the Enlightenment, dashed by the brutality of the twentieth century, but given new life
fall of communism. The other was a prescription for patience and restraint. Rather than confront and challenge autocracies, it was better to enmesh them in the global economy, support the rule of law and the creation of stronger state institutions, and let the ineluctable forces of human progress work their magic.
With the world converging around the shared principles of Enlightenment liberalism, the great task of the post--Cold War era was to build a more perfect international system of laws and institutions, fulfilling the prophecies of Enlightenment thought stretching back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A world of liberal governments would be a world without war, just as Kant had imagined. The free flow of both goods and ideas in the new globalized era would be an antidote to human conflict. As Montesquieu had argued, "The natural effect of commerce is to lead toward peace." This old Enlightenment dream seemed suddenly possible because, along with the apparent triumph of international liberalism, the geopolitical and strategic interests of the world's great powers also seemed to converge. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush spoke of a "new world order" in which "the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony," where "the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle," where nations "recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice." It was "a world quite different from the one we've known."
The world looked different primarily because the Soviet Union was different. No one would have suggested that history had ended if the communist Soviet Union had not so suddenly and dramatically died and been transformed after 1989. The transformation of Soviet and then Russian foreign policy was remarkable. The "peaceful influence of liberal ideas" completely reoriented Russian perspectives on the world--or so it seemed. Even in the last years of the Cold War, advocates of "new thinking" in Moscow called for convergence and the breakdown of barriers between East and West, a common embrace, as
Mikhail Gorbachev put it, of "universal values." Then, in the early Yeltsin years, under foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, Russia appeared committed to entering postmodern Europe. Moscow no longer defined its interests in terms of territory and traditional spheres of interest but rather in terms of economic integration and political development. It renounced regional hegemony, withdrew troops from neighboring states, slashed defense budgets, sought alliance with the European powers and the United States, and in general shaped its foreign policies on the premise that its interests were the same as those of
the West. Russia's "wish was simply to belong."
The democratization of Russia, beginning even in the Gorbachev years, had led the country's leaders to redefine and recalculate Russia's national interests. Moscow could give up imperial control in Eastern Europe, could give up its role as a superpower, not because the strategic situation had changed--if anything, the United States was more menacing in 1985 than it had been in 1975--but because the regime in Moscow had changed. A democratizing Russia did not fear the United States or the enlargement of its alliance of democracies.
If Russia could abandon traditional great power politics, so could the rest of the world. "The age of geopolitics has given way to an age of what might be called geoeconomics," Martin Walker wrote in 1996. "The new virility symbols are exports and productivity and growth rates and the great international encounters are the trade pacts of the economic superpowers." Competition among nations might continue, but it would be peaceful commercial competition. Nations that traded with one another would be less likely to fight one another.
Increasingly commercial societies would be more liberal both at home and abroad. Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honor and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history.
The ancient Greeks believed that embedded in human nature was something called thumos, a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, or state. In the Enlightenment view, however, commerce would tame and perhaps even eliminate thumos in people and in nations. "Where there is commerce," Montesquieu wrote, "there are soft manners and morals." Human nature could be improved, with the right international structures, the right politics, and the right economic systems. Liberal democracy did not merely constrain natural human instincts for aggression and violence; Fukuyama argued it "fundamentally transformed the instincts themselves."
The clash of traditional national interests was a thing of the past, therefore. The European Union, the political scientist Michael Mandelbaum speculated, was but "a foretaste of the way the world of the twenty-first century [would] be organized." The liberal internationalist scholar G. John Ikenberry described a post?Cold War world in which "democracy and markets flourished around the world, globalization was enshrined as a progressive historical force, and ideology, nationalism and
war were at a low ebb." It was the triumph of "the liberal vision of international order."
For Americans, the fall of the Soviet Union seemed a heaven-sent chance to fulfill a long-held dream of global leadership--a leadership welcomed and even embraced by the world. Americans had always considered themselves the world's most important nation and its destined leader. "The cause of America is the cause of all mankind," Benjamin Franklin said at the time of the Revolution. The United States was the "locomotive at the head of mankind," Dean Acheson said at the dawn of the Cold War, with the rest of the world merely "the caboose." After the Cold War it was still "the indispensable nation," indispensable because it alone had the power and the understanding necessary to help bring the international community together in common cause. In the new world order, as Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott put it, the United States would define "its strength--indeed, its very greatness--not in terms of its ability to achieve or maintain dominance over others, but in terms of its ability to work with others in the interests of the international community as a whole."
While Americans saw their self-image reaffirmed by the new world order, Europeans believed that the new international order would be modeled after the European Union. As scholar-diplomat Robert Cooper put it, Europe was leading the world into a postmodern age, in which traditional national interests and power politics would give way to international law, supranational institutions, and pooled sovereignty. The cultural, ethnic, and nationalist divisions that had plagued mankind, and Europe, would be dissolved by shared values and shared economic interests. The EU, like the United States, was expansive, but in a postmodern way. Cooper envisioned the enlarging union as a kind of voluntary empire. Past empires had imposed their laws and systems of government. But in the post--Cold War era, "no one is imposing anything." Nations were eager to join the EU's "cooperative empire . . . dedicated to liberty and democracy." A "voluntary movement of self-imposition [was] taking place."
Even as these hopeful expectations arose, however, there were clouds on the horizon, signs of global divergence, stubborn traditions of culture, civilization, religion, and nationalism that resisted or cut against the common embrace of democratic liberalism and market capitalism. The core assumptions of the post--Cold War years collapsed almost as soon as they were formulated.
著者について
Robert Kaganis senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990, and editor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives in Brussels with his family.
登録情報
- 出版社 : Knopf (2008/4/29)
- 発売日 : 2008/4/29
- 言語 : 英語
- ハードカバー : 128ページ
- ISBN-10 : 030726923X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307269232
- 寸法 : 20.32 x 1.91 x 12.7 cm
- Amazon 売れ筋ランキング: - 213,662位洋書 (洋書の売れ筋ランキングを見る)
- - 159位Nationalism
- - 478位National & International Security
- - 573位21st Century History
- カスタマーレビュー:
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Helene Masliah-Gilkarov
5つ星のうち5.0
Must read
2023年7月24日にドイツでレビュー済みAmazonで購入
What a book! For everyone interested in world politics and geopolitics. Top stuff!
j zand
5つ星のうち5.0
Truly the end of dreams
2014年10月17日に英国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
Robert Kagan traces the emergence of new powers such as China and Russia in the new global set up. Written in 2008, he did predict the new challenges that the international community especially the West is facing at the moment. A must read for academics as well as general readers.
Theodore A. Rushton
5つ星のうち5.0
Chaos rules, democracy survives, all the rest cause trouble
2008年5月24日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
Brilliant; history has not ended, it is alive and well and in most part ignoring and even rejecting the "exceptionalism" of America and writers such as Fukuyama.
In brief, Kagan presents the logical facts about why international turmoil will continue unabated. Yet, he's still stuck in the idealism of Kant and Montesquieu who argued, "The natural effect of commerce is to lead toward peace."
But, commerce is competition which becomes riddled with cheating and bullying. From steroids in sports to bribes in business, competition leads to cheating which leads to fisticuffs and, when enough people are involved, to war. Kagan astutely recognizes the ills of the last century; he doesn't sumble until he gets to the future.
This may be the most relevant book issued this election year. One of it's central ideas is already part of Sen. John McCain's campaign platform, and an issue for discussion in the Financial Times. Ignore Kagan's sense of reality and Bush's blundering bozos will look like picnickers playing in the park compared to what comes next.
"In a world increasingly divided among democratic and autocratic lines, the world's democrats will have to stick together," Kagan advises. It's a proposal McCain has voiced with his 'League of Democracies'. Kagan likely originated it; McCain copied, which at least shows he's capable of recognizing good ideas.
Yet, there's another "reality". At this point (May 2008), Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can't form a 'League of Two Democrats' let alone two democracies. Many Republicans have a similar problem in forming a "league" to elect McCain.
What does it prove? It proves life is challenged more by chaos than by all the clever philosophies from Plato to Kagan, who writes, ". . . they regarded democracy as the rule of the licentious, greedy, and ignorant mob".
They were right. Now it's called chaos. Success is the ability to recognize useful patterns within chaos. The world is not an orderly formula which everyone obeys, like some "Universal Theory" Albert Einstein sought so vainly. It's chaos, confusion, conflict and contusion which the wise learn to analyze and the foolish continue to lament.
Aye, there's the rub. How do you implement perceptive insights and good ideas in a world of chaos?
Kagan goes right up to this point, then hesitates rather than plunge into uncertainty. He's an American idealist, ready to build the 'city on a hill' as the perfect answer, a man governed by reason, inspired by perfection but somewhat above reality.
It is a brilliant essay. It's as current as this year's U.S. elections, as timeless as history itself and as relevant as anything else you may read this year.
But, chaos rules. You'll understand after reading this book.
In brief, Kagan presents the logical facts about why international turmoil will continue unabated. Yet, he's still stuck in the idealism of Kant and Montesquieu who argued, "The natural effect of commerce is to lead toward peace."
But, commerce is competition which becomes riddled with cheating and bullying. From steroids in sports to bribes in business, competition leads to cheating which leads to fisticuffs and, when enough people are involved, to war. Kagan astutely recognizes the ills of the last century; he doesn't sumble until he gets to the future.
This may be the most relevant book issued this election year. One of it's central ideas is already part of Sen. John McCain's campaign platform, and an issue for discussion in the Financial Times. Ignore Kagan's sense of reality and Bush's blundering bozos will look like picnickers playing in the park compared to what comes next.
"In a world increasingly divided among democratic and autocratic lines, the world's democrats will have to stick together," Kagan advises. It's a proposal McCain has voiced with his 'League of Democracies'. Kagan likely originated it; McCain copied, which at least shows he's capable of recognizing good ideas.
Yet, there's another "reality". At this point (May 2008), Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can't form a 'League of Two Democrats' let alone two democracies. Many Republicans have a similar problem in forming a "league" to elect McCain.
What does it prove? It proves life is challenged more by chaos than by all the clever philosophies from Plato to Kagan, who writes, ". . . they regarded democracy as the rule of the licentious, greedy, and ignorant mob".
They were right. Now it's called chaos. Success is the ability to recognize useful patterns within chaos. The world is not an orderly formula which everyone obeys, like some "Universal Theory" Albert Einstein sought so vainly. It's chaos, confusion, conflict and contusion which the wise learn to analyze and the foolish continue to lament.
Aye, there's the rub. How do you implement perceptive insights and good ideas in a world of chaos?
Kagan goes right up to this point, then hesitates rather than plunge into uncertainty. He's an American idealist, ready to build the 'city on a hill' as the perfect answer, a man governed by reason, inspired by perfection but somewhat above reality.
It is a brilliant essay. It's as current as this year's U.S. elections, as timeless as history itself and as relevant as anything else you may read this year.
But, chaos rules. You'll understand after reading this book.
Dianne Roberts
5つ星のうち5.0
Thucydidean Return of Man's Permanent Nature in Global Affairs
2008年12月27日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
The Return of History is a concise and clarifying explanation of the state of geopolitics in early 2008 from a very Thucydidean point of view. The author at a point alludes to the ancient Greek concept of thumos, or a spirited connection with kin, not so much as the unifying concept of our time (as Huntington on a larger scale or Ralph Peters on a tribal scale would have it) but as one of the myriad rocks of man's permanent nature on which the ship of pre-ordained international democratic liberalism has foundered since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The main theme of his book is that there is no Marxian march of history towards a single conclusion, no guarantee that liberal democracy as seen in the west in general and as most powerfully crystalized in the US in particular is the ineluctable result of social progression.
The brief illusion that this was the case in the early to mid nineties started to unravel first with the Balkans, then with 9/11, and has, since the publication of this book, come full circle with the Russian invasion of Georgia (not per se predicted by the author who wrote before the event, but was put forward as both highly plausible and consequential) and the liberal democracies' complete inaction beyond empty words in response. Like the shot heard around the world at Concorde the Russian invasion of Georgia bears out the thesis of this book, that liberal democracy is challenged by other legitimating forms of government, namely autocracy born anew in Putin's Russia, and reformed anew in post Tiananmen China. Towards these pole stars of autocracy much of the world aligns, including North Korea, Burma, Iran, Syria, Venezuela (oddly never mentioned in the book) and a growing number of Central Asian and African countries. Radical Islam is also on the rise, a complicating and consequential factor which can wreak much devastation if unchecked, but one which the author believes can never legitimate itself as a viable alternative to liberal democracy and autocracy. But, importantly, one which autocracy does not mind seeing tying down democracy.
The import of the author's thesis is that the liberal democracies must band together and continue to take an active role in the struggle for what form of government people find most desirable and beneficial, and therefore most legitimate to their needs. To believe otherwise he seems to suggest, to believe that liberal democracy is where human nature evolves to, would logically be to bear as a corollary a belief that the democracies need not have fought either world war or cold war of the past century, and to believe that we are free from having to defend and promote liberal democracy today is just as foolish.
A good, quick and easy to read treatise. Recommended.
The brief illusion that this was the case in the early to mid nineties started to unravel first with the Balkans, then with 9/11, and has, since the publication of this book, come full circle with the Russian invasion of Georgia (not per se predicted by the author who wrote before the event, but was put forward as both highly plausible and consequential) and the liberal democracies' complete inaction beyond empty words in response. Like the shot heard around the world at Concorde the Russian invasion of Georgia bears out the thesis of this book, that liberal democracy is challenged by other legitimating forms of government, namely autocracy born anew in Putin's Russia, and reformed anew in post Tiananmen China. Towards these pole stars of autocracy much of the world aligns, including North Korea, Burma, Iran, Syria, Venezuela (oddly never mentioned in the book) and a growing number of Central Asian and African countries. Radical Islam is also on the rise, a complicating and consequential factor which can wreak much devastation if unchecked, but one which the author believes can never legitimate itself as a viable alternative to liberal democracy and autocracy. But, importantly, one which autocracy does not mind seeing tying down democracy.
The import of the author's thesis is that the liberal democracies must band together and continue to take an active role in the struggle for what form of government people find most desirable and beneficial, and therefore most legitimate to their needs. To believe otherwise he seems to suggest, to believe that liberal democracy is where human nature evolves to, would logically be to bear as a corollary a belief that the democracies need not have fought either world war or cold war of the past century, and to believe that we are free from having to defend and promote liberal democracy today is just as foolish.
A good, quick and easy to read treatise. Recommended.
M. McManus
5つ星のうち4.0
Very good challenge to "clash of civilizations" theory
2008年6月14日に英国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
Kagan argues that the world is not divided by religion or race as Samuel Huntingdon's 'clash of civilizations' theory suggests and the modern trouble with Islam/West seems to vindicate. Rather he argues the real division in modern geopolitics is between democracies and autocracies, with places like the USA, Europe and Japan on one side, and countries like China, Russia and Iran on the other. As he explicitly states in the book, "But in today's world, a nation's form of government, not its `civilization' or its geographic location, maybe the best predictor of its geopolitical alignment". For example, China and Japan may have a shared Asian culture, but one is a democracy and the other is an autocracy, therefore, Japan will have more in common with another democracy, even if it is not culturally similar, that it will with China.
He argues that the autocracies are dangerous, not just because of their oppressive internal policies, but because they typically are experiencing rapid economic growth. This allows them to fund a more powerful and threatening military with which to threaten democracies: Russia's booming oil wealth has seen it pick fights with the EU and send nuclear bombers on training runs on Western cities, and China makes increasingly murderous demands on Taiwain. Also their economic success in the absence of democracy could lead other countries to emulate their autocratic rule as a means of imitating their success, and there are the beginnings of this in places like Venezuela.
Kagan acknowledges that one autocracy can have friction with another autocracy: for example, Russia and China may distrust each other over their mutual ambitions in Siberia. He also acknowledges that democracies can have friction with each other: for example, the bitter exchanges between the US and France on the eve of the Iraq war. However, Kagan's key point is that when push comes to shove, a democracy will always side with a democracy in conflict with an autocracy, and an autocracy will always side with an autocracy in a conflict with a democracy.
Perhaps most controversially, Kagan accuse the UN of sheltering autocracies under the guise of sovereignty. Also, China and Russia are permanent Security Council members with the veto, and thus can protect other client autocracies like Sudan and Turkmenistan from UN action. To solve this, Kagan advocates setting up a "League of Democracies", where democratic countries can co-ordinate policies for dealing with autocracies that compliment the UN, but which in fact will probably be an alternative to it. He claims the autocracies have already set up a "League of Autocracies" under the guise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which in his eyes is nothing more a Warsaw Pact for the 21st century which needs to be countered.
The book is not without weaknesses. Firstly, Kagan's plan for a League of Democracies is unconvincing on two levels. Firstly, it is hard to see how such a structure could be set up without it being seen as an alternative to the UN rather than a compliment. Secondly, democratic countries often have rivalries and friction with each other, for example France and America have a mutual hostility, and bitter memories of their clashes before the Iraq war. Kagan seems to dismiss these as trivial rivalries, but it is hard to see how such clashes would be avoided within his League of Democracies. Kagan's dismissive claim that democracies will overcome these due to greater fears of the autocracies are, in my view, unconvincing.
All in all, the book is an interesting overview of a reality that undoubtedly puzzles some political thinkers, and is well worth a read.
He argues that the autocracies are dangerous, not just because of their oppressive internal policies, but because they typically are experiencing rapid economic growth. This allows them to fund a more powerful and threatening military with which to threaten democracies: Russia's booming oil wealth has seen it pick fights with the EU and send nuclear bombers on training runs on Western cities, and China makes increasingly murderous demands on Taiwain. Also their economic success in the absence of democracy could lead other countries to emulate their autocratic rule as a means of imitating their success, and there are the beginnings of this in places like Venezuela.
Kagan acknowledges that one autocracy can have friction with another autocracy: for example, Russia and China may distrust each other over their mutual ambitions in Siberia. He also acknowledges that democracies can have friction with each other: for example, the bitter exchanges between the US and France on the eve of the Iraq war. However, Kagan's key point is that when push comes to shove, a democracy will always side with a democracy in conflict with an autocracy, and an autocracy will always side with an autocracy in a conflict with a democracy.
Perhaps most controversially, Kagan accuse the UN of sheltering autocracies under the guise of sovereignty. Also, China and Russia are permanent Security Council members with the veto, and thus can protect other client autocracies like Sudan and Turkmenistan from UN action. To solve this, Kagan advocates setting up a "League of Democracies", where democratic countries can co-ordinate policies for dealing with autocracies that compliment the UN, but which in fact will probably be an alternative to it. He claims the autocracies have already set up a "League of Autocracies" under the guise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which in his eyes is nothing more a Warsaw Pact for the 21st century which needs to be countered.
The book is not without weaknesses. Firstly, Kagan's plan for a League of Democracies is unconvincing on two levels. Firstly, it is hard to see how such a structure could be set up without it being seen as an alternative to the UN rather than a compliment. Secondly, democratic countries often have rivalries and friction with each other, for example France and America have a mutual hostility, and bitter memories of their clashes before the Iraq war. Kagan seems to dismiss these as trivial rivalries, but it is hard to see how such clashes would be avoided within his League of Democracies. Kagan's dismissive claim that democracies will overcome these due to greater fears of the autocracies are, in my view, unconvincing.
All in all, the book is an interesting overview of a reality that undoubtedly puzzles some political thinkers, and is well worth a read.