The Present Danger

__"Global Utopias and Clashing Civilizations: Misunderstanding the Present" by John Gray, in International Affairs (Jan. 1998), Chatham House, 10 St. James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE, England.__

The end of the Cold War has trans-trayed by two prominent scholarly prophformed the world—but not in the ways por-ets, contends Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. What is different—and dangerous—today, Gray maintains, is "the new weakness of states."

Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1992 prediction that liberal democracies will eventually prevail everywhere is unlikely ever to come true, Gray argues. He offers one simple reason: it is not whether a government is a liberal democracy that determines its legitimacy, but whether it meets the most fundamental needs of its citizens, namely, protection from "the worst evils: war and civil disorder, criminal violence, and lack of the means of decent subsistence."

And contrary to Samuel Huntington’s 1993 "clash of civilizations" thesis, wars are still "commonly waged between (and within) nationalities and ethnicities, not between different civilizations," Gray observes. "[The] old, familiar logic of territories and alliances often impels members of the same ‘civilization’ into enmity and members of different ‘civilizations’ into making common cause." After armed conflict broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1988, for instance, such logic drove Iran to side with Christian Armenia, not Islamic Azerbaijan.

Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s "apocalyptic beliefs" only encourage the disabling illusion "that the difficult choices and unpleasant trade-offs that have always been necessary in the relations of states will someday be redundant," Gray says. But they are unavoidable, he declares. "Advancing democracy does not always foster political stability. Preserving peace does not always coincide with the promotion of human rights."

In a variety of ways, Gray argues, the end of the Cold War rivalry has dangerously undermined the legitimacy of states. Some states, deprived of their strategic value, must make do without the outside support that previously sustained them. In other nations, such as Italy and Japan, the disappearance of Cold War imperatives has led to the disintegration of long-established political arrangements.

Economic globalization, encouraged by the collapse of the Soviet Union, has made it harder for governments of all kinds to limit the economic risks to their citizens that come with free markets, creating "a new politics of economic insecurity." Thanks in part to the unregulated trade in arms in the global economy, Gray notes, many modern states are unable to maintain a monopoly on organized violence. "Today wars are often not fought by agents of sovereign states but waged by political organizations, irregular armies, ethnic or tribal militias and other bodies."

"We have inherited from the totalitarian era a reflex of suspicion of government," Gray concludes. "Yet no political doctrine could be less suited to the needs of our time than that which is embodied in the cult of the minimum state."