More summer reading
An interesting review by David Sanger in the New York Times.Democracy, Limited
"When Bill Clinton was in the twilight months of his presidency, he made a compelling case that by integrating China into the world economy we would gradually undercut the viability of its authoritarian government. It was only a matter of time, he told an audience of American and Chinese students in March 2000, before a Net-savvy, rising middle class would begin to demand its rights, because 'when individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.'
"Five years later, in his second Inaugural Address, George W. Bush added a more martial edge to the prediction that democracy was on an unstoppable tear around the world. It was only 22 months after the invasion of Iraq. Describing a grander justification for his mission, Bush declared that in a post-Iraq world it would become the mission of the United States to defeat tyranny and spread his 'freedom agenda' around the world. Sovereign borders of authoritarian states, he made clear, would be no barrier.
"Robert Kagan [right], in a brief and wonderfully argued volume on how the world has a nasty habit of spinning off in its own directions, has a message for Americans of all political stripes: Good luck with that one. The cold war may be over, he declares in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, but anyone who thinks the result was really 'the end of history' — a consensus that liberal democracy is the future — should take another look. 'The world has become normal again,' Kagan says in the first sentence of what is less a book than an extended essay. Deeper in, he puts his argument more plainly: 'Autocracy is making a comeback.'..."Kagan’s title, of course, is designed to tweak Francis Fukuyama and others who, in a fit of optimism after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, declared not only the end to ideological struggle but 'the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.'...
Labels: concepts
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:07 AM
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