Squandering Triumph: The West Botched the Post-Cold War World

1999 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles William Maynes
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War

scholarly journals The Sino-Russian Relationship: Fellow Travellers in the West-dominated World

2018 ◽  
Vol 236 ◽  
pp. 1197-1205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Kaczmarski
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Dividing Line

A decade ago, Beijing's relations with Moscow were of marginal interest to China scholars. Topics such as growing Sino-American interdependence-cum-rivalry, engagement with East Asia or relations with the developing world overshadowed China's relationship with its northern neighbour. Scholars preoccupied with Russia's foreign policy did not pay much attention either, regarding the Kremlin's policy towards China as part and parcel of Russia's grand strategy directed towards the West. The main dividing line among those few who took a closer look ran between sceptics and alarmists. The former interpreted the post-Cold War rapprochement as superficial and envisioned an imminent clash of interests between the two states. The latter, a minority, saw the prospect of an anti-Western alliance.

scholarly journals The Russian Federation and Reshaping a Post-Cold War Order

Politeja ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (5(62)) ◽  
pp. 161-174
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Bryc
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Crimean Peninsula ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
International Standing ◽  
Munich Security Conference

Russia attempts to revise a Western-led liberal world order. However, challenging the West seems to be a strategy aimed at improving Russia’s international standing. This strategy is undoubtedly ambiguous as Russia challenges the West, particularity the United States, and looks for a rapprochement at the same time.The Russian Federation abandoned the West in 2014 as a result of the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula what constituted breaking international law, andengagement into the war in the East Ukraine. Nevertheless, the milestone was not 2014, but 2008 when Russia had decided for the first time to use its militar yforce against Georgia and indirectly against the growing Western military and political presence in this post-Soviet republic. This game changer was hardly a surprise, because several signals of a desire to challenge the Western-led world order had appeared in the past at least twice in president Putin’s speeches in 2007 at Munich Security Conference and in 2014 during Valdai Club session in Sochi. This article seeks to provide a take in the discussion about the way Russia has been trying to reshape the post-Cold War order. This paper probes the notion that Russia has become a revisionist state trying to shape a post-Western world order. Besides, there are a few questions to be answered, first of all whether anti-Westernism is in fact its goal or rather an instrument in regaining more effective impact on international politics and how it may influence the post-ColdWar order despite its reduced political and economic potential.

Conclusion

After Lavinia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
First Century ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Legal Rationality

This concluding chapter reflects on marriage in the contemporary West, noting that it has become an affective arrangement. In Britain and the northern European countries that still retain a constitutional form of monarchy, twenty-first-century royalty now prefer their own subjects as marriage partners, even if it means marrying a commoner like Kate Middleton. To the extent that these marriages to indigenous commoners have any bearing on foreign policy, they reaffirm the nationalist sentiments of the post-Westphalian state. The chapter argues that, despite all the legal rationality, global peace remains as elusive now as it was when Europeans tried to settle their quarrels through interdynastic marriage. It suggests that the opposition between the West and its post-Cold War enemies has brought the matter of gender and the place of women once more to the center of international relations.

scholarly journals Islam, Modernism and the West

1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Francis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Many

The relations between Muslim peoples and the West, and between Muslimpeoples and forms of modernity, have become increasingly pressing issues ofscholarly and political concern over the past twenty-five years. In part, this isdue to the growing power of Islamism in the lives and politics of many Muslimsocieties and, in part, to the fact that some fonns of Islamism can appear to beprofoundly hostile to all that the West represents. The growing presence ofMuslim peoples in Western societies and the many assumptions which thatpresence calls into question has also caused scholars and politicians to focus onthese relations. Add to this the fact that some leading members of the Westernpolicy establishment, most notably the US political scientist S. P. Huntington, have come to talk in the post-cold war era of a “clash of civilizations” in whichthe clash between Islam and the West is the most profound and the most dangerousfor world p e .This book, which contains sixteen essays by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars,mainly from institutions in Europe and the Arab world, sets out to addresskey issues in the relations between Muslims, modernity, and the West. It is theoutcome of a symposium held in Toledo, Spain, in April 1996, which wasprompted by the Eleni Nakou Foundation for the promotion of cultural contactand understanding among European peoples, and held under the auspices of theJose Ortega y Gasset Foundation. &ma Martin Muiioz, professor of Sociologyof the Arab and Islamic World at the Autonoma University of Madrid was theintellectual “playmaker” of the occasion. Due to its Islamic past and the fundamentalrole it played in transmitting Islamic learning and culture for thedevelopment of Christian Europe, Spain was a goad choice of location for theaonference ...

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION by Co-editors and Contributors of the Special Section Elena Chebankova and Piotr Dutkiewicz

2021 ◽  
pp. 8-13
Author(s):  
Elena Chebankova ◽  
Petr Dutkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Virtual Currency ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
Global Discourse

The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the twentieth century ended the pre-existing bipolar Cold War system and resulted in a unipolar moment in which the United States enjoyed a position of almost unchallenged global and civilizational leadership [Krauthammer 1991; Waltz 1993; Wohlforth 1999]. However, despite the initial elation of some Western politicians and analysts [Fukuyama 1992; Brooks, Wohlforth 2008; Kagan 2008], who hoped to see the triumph of the Western idea universally, this situation was relatively short-lived. Global dialogue soon moved beyond this moment of unipolarity toward its more conventional form, in which states struggle for power and influence and search for areas of mutually beneficial co-operation. At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, we see a qualitatively different world. There have been profound political changes since the post-Cold War unipolarity. In this world, the idea of civilization has become a virtual currency of international relations and global dialogue. Many analysts [Coker 2019; Acharya 2020; Stuenkel 2016; Higgott 2019] discuss the rise of civilizations in world affairs as the new sociopolitical reality. Countries such as Russia, China, India, Turkey, and Brazil are often considered civilizational states – challengers to the West. Historically, philosophers have oscillated between the idea of multiple civilizations, with the West being one civilization of many (Spengler, Huntington, Danilevsky), and a single and universal Western civilization (Hayek, Kant). The former approach became a cardinal frame of reference of the global discourse during the past decade.

scholarly journals Russian Neo-Revisionism

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sakwa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
International System ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
Consistent Application

A revisionist state would seek to challenge the existing balance of power in the system and threaten the foundations of the system itself. This does not apply to contemporary Russia. It seeks to enhance its status within the existing framework of international society. Russian neo-revisionism does not attempt to create new rules or to advance an alternative model of the international system but to ensure the universal and consistent application of existing norms. Russia’s neo-revisionism represents a critique of western practices in defense of the universal proclaimed principles. It is not the principles of international law and governance that Russia condemns but the practices that accompany their implementation. This reflected Russia’s broader perception in the post-Cold War era that it was locked into a strategic stalemate, and that the country was forced into a politics of resistance. This has taken many forms, including the creation of an anti-hegemonic alignment with China and others. For Moscow, it was the West that had become revisionist, not Russia. Although the implementation of applicable norms was patchy, Russia did not repudiate them. In its relations with the European Union, Russia’s neo-revisionist stance means that it was unable to become simply the passive recipient of eu norms, and instead tried to become a co-creator of Europe’s destiny. The struggle is not only over contested norms, but also over who has the prerogative to claim their norms as universal. However, it was precisely at the level of practices that there was least room for compromise, and thus Russian neo-revisionism became another form of the impasse, and only intensified tensions between Russia and the Atlantic system.

Islam, the West, and Ethnonationalism

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Iftikhar Malik
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
The Us ◽  
Western View ◽  
New Generation

Western analysis, due to its dangerous oversimplification of Islam and othermatters in the Muslim world, has traditionally seen the appearance of anyindigenous movement calling for change and improvement in the name of Islamas a major threat. Muslims continue to be viewed in the stereotypical perspectiveof the “us-against-them” syndrome, a practice which prevents a propercomprehension of the dynamics and dilemmas faced by Muslims in thepostcolonial era. The Western media and, to some extent, academia thrive onsuch themes as minority rights, nuclear proliferation, human rights, anddemocracy, which they use as barometers. Based on the data which they collect,they then pass sweeping decrees about Muslim countries. Internal diversity andconflict receive a great deal of attention, whereas human achievements andcivilizational artifacts are considered as “foreign” to the Muslim ethos. Islamas a religion is reduced to so-called “fundamentalism” and a mere puritanicaland/or coercive theological orthodoxy. Moreover, no distinction is made betweenIslam as a religion and Muslim cultures and societies, nor between Muslimaspirations for unity and the realities of national and ethnic differentiation. Theresult is a Western view which both distorts and demonizes a large part of theMuslim world.As if this were not enough, Muslims in the post-Cold War era are now beingpresented and “imagined” as the next enemy. Among the factors responsible forthis are a) the multiple nature of the Muslim world, given its geostrategic locationright next to Europe; b) Islam as the second major religion in the West; and c)the assertion of a new generation of Muslim expatriate communities at a time ...

Size Does Matter

2021 ◽  
pp. 169-189
Author(s):  
Fernando Casal Bértoa ◽  
Zsolt Enyedi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Effective Number ◽  
The West ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Party System Institutionalization ◽  
Concentrated Systems

The eighth chapter looks into inter-temporal and cross-sectional differences in the effective number of parliamentary parties, and analyses the covariation between closure and fragmentation. The chapter allows us to revisit classical debates in comparative politics about the merits and vices of two- and multi-party systems. After showing how the inter-war and post-Cold War years were more fragmented than other periods, we find that concentrated systems tend to breed stability, and if they do not, then they often do not survive. And yet, there is only a moderate, far from deterministic, relationship between closure and fragmentation. In particular, we found that the recent proliferation of parties in the West poses a challenge to party system institutionalization.

The PLA and Chinese National Security Policy: Leaderships, Structures, Processes

1996 ◽  
Vol 146 ◽  
pp. 360-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Swaine
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Major Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Chinese Case ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Territorial Claims

China's rise as a major power constitutes one of the most significant strategic events of the post-Cold War period. Many policy-makers, strategists and scholars express significant concern over the implications of China's growing military and economic capabilities for the future security environment in Asia and beyond. Such concern derives in part from an anticipation of the systemic security problems that have historically accompanied the emergence of a new power. In the Chinese case, however, these anxieties are greatly compounded by the rapidity of internal change under way in China, the general lack of knowledge about Chinese strategic ambitions, the existence of many unresolved Chinese territorial claims, the intense suspicion and even hostility toward the West harboured by China's leadership, and China's internal political and social instabilities.

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