With the end of the cold war, there emerged a very different sort of division in the world, namely that between the dominant West and the Islamic cultures, which seemed to be bitterly opposed to Western ideas and practices. The opposition between them was highlighted shortly after the cold war ended in some American books and articles and it seemed exaggerated at the time. One view was that the Americans needed to identify enemies since so much of their economy depended on production and sales connected with arms. Still, in the nineteen nineties, it was apparent that on both sides there was bitter hostility.

Such bitterness was quite unexpected because for many years Islam in itself had seemed allied with the West. Hostility developed between the United States and the Islamic countries because many of them had adopted a socialist outlook. This, in the context of the cold war and in view of the dominant economic model in America, seemed threatening. The United States, however, continued to be extremely friendly with the Islamic monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, which were much more devoted to the religion than the military-socialist regimes such as Egypt, Iraq or Syria.

Development of Islamic Fundamentalism

It was probably in Saudi Arabia that a form of militant Islam developed that was fundamentalist in outlook. It laid great stress on the basic teachings of Islam that made it unique. This also led to the fundamentalists asserting the superiority of Islam over other religions. Whereas elsewhere Islam had blended with the various civilizations it spread through, in Saudi Arabia it had preserved its original form.

It is now almost universally accepted that governments should act on behalf of their people and be responsible to them. People should have power over their governments. This, in fact, is what democracy means. The word ‘democracy’ is derived from two Greek words (demos and kratid) that mean ‘people’ and ‘power’ respectively.

Democracy is a very recent concept in most part of the world. Until about two hundred years ago, the government in almost all countries was in the hands of a single person, who was accountable only to himself. Kings, as they were generally called, may have felt sometimes that they should act on behalf of the people they ruled, but they were not accountable to them.

How this view of government changed so thoroughly in a short time is a fascinating story. The ground had been prepared for this over a long period, but the actual practice of democracy was hardly known, except for a few instances in the very distant past. In examining the development of political philosophy towards the general acceptance of democracy, we have to start again from the Classical Period. For convenience, we can again divide the process of development roughly into the same periods we looked at with regard to ‘Science and Learning’.

The Classical Period

Athenian Democracy: The first democracy we know of was the Athenian system. As mentioned before, Athens was a city state, which had a significant trading community. Initially it was ruled by a king, but as often happened in these small states, the rulers changed frequently. Most often, the changes occurred as a result of wars or revolutions.

This book is intended as a very basic guide for adult students to concepts and events that have contributed to the making of modern society. As the target readers are South Asians, the book looks fairly cursorily at what they could be expected to know already. Greater detail is provided with regard to areas which are comparatively neglected in the curricula currently in operation.

The fundamental concept behind the book is that there are certain facts about the way the world has developed which every educated person should know. Unfortunately, for reasons ranging from nationalism to incoherence, these have not been systematically presented to many school students.

In introducing them now, in the form of brief sketches that would make them easier to absorb, it was necessary also to challenge adult minds. The material is thus presented in terms of concepts that suggest the how, why and what of facts. Not only are facts presented, but students are also shown how they occur in sequence, how some events were caused or resulted from others, why various situations occurred at different times and in different places.

At the same time, it should be noted that theories should be challenged and students may present alternative interpretations. Such interpretations should also be based on facts and coherent arguments. In this respect, while I have tried to ensure that the facts presented here are accurate, students should be encouraged to check these for themselves, by using reference books and other such materials. They should also learn, first and foremost, to distinguish between facts and opinions. While facts can be established through study and experiment, opinions and interpretations are subjects for legitimate argument.

One of the main reasons for the world-wide dominance of the West at present is that much of modern technology was developed there. This, however, was not the case in ancient times. The decimal system of numbers, together with the concept of zero, was invented in India. The reason for these numbers from 1 to 9 and 0, to be known as Arabic numerals is that they were transmitted from India to Europe through the Arab world.

Again, the most important inventions of the Renaissance, the period in which Europe began its domination of the world, came to Europe from China. Printing and paper began in China, as did gunpowder. Yet, the fact remains that both these ancient civilizations, India and China, soon began to fall behind. Within a few hundred years of the Renaissance, Europe came to dominate the world.

This situation has continued to the present day, except that it is appropriate to use the term Western rather than European to describe the dominant influences now. The United States has now replaced European countries as the most powerful nation in the world. Of course, we should remember that the major part of the population of the United States, as well as the dominant culture there, are derived from Europe.

In order to understand this dominance and learn how other countries too can develop, we should study the various periods in which technology developed in Europe.

Origin of the Collective Security System

During the critical early phase of the war in Europe, while the German Panzers were advancing steadily across western Europe, Prime Minister Churchill in his Atlantic meeting with President Roosevelt in 1941, suggested the desirability of a declaration on the formation of an international organization for security after the war. President Roosevelt was initially reluctant, wiser from the experience of President Wilson and the League of Nations after the earlier World War; he was skeptical of its endorsement by the Congress.

But such a declaration had the political attraction of motivating many of the states still outside the actual theatre of aggression by the Axis Powers, particularly many of the Asian and African colonies in the midst of their liberation struggle, to associate themselves with the war efforts of the Allied Powers. Some Axis Powers were also targeting their propaganda offensive directed at Asian nationalism. The Japanese Imperial Army, for example, was propagating the idea of an ‘Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’. President Roosevelt could not totally brush away the suggestion, less so since it was from the British Prime Minister, and no less a war hero than Winston Churchill.

The final Declaration of the Atlantic Charter envisaged ‘a peace affording all peoples security against aggression, freedom to choose their own governments, access on equal terms to the trade and to the raw materials of the world, improved labour standards, economic adjustments and social security, freedom from fear and want, freedom of seas’; and, it urged ‘all nations must come to the abandonment of force’.

The two seminal events of relatively recent times that have significantly influenced contemporary international relations are: one, the breakdown of the bipolar global system along with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; and, the other, the simultaneous terrorist strikes on the World Trade Centre in New York, and the Pentagon in 2001. They need some discussions in our present analysis, because, though separated by a decade, they indicate a comparable pattern suggesting some causal links with our central concern around realism and its hegemony in international relations. For example, the first event of 1991 eliminated the most serious challenge to the capitalist world market which, since then, has been more intensively globalised under a single hegemonic power. The second event of 2001 destroyed one of the main operational hub of the global market, and damaged its hegemonic power's military headquarters, in the process, denting the myth of invulnerability of the global system's only military super power.

A global system with a uniquely globalised market, influencing factors of production, consumption, communication, and life-style across the territorial boundaries of the sovereign states, but without a global sovereign, and a militarily vulnerable hegemonic power, is a new experience for the arguably fledgling global civil society; and full of imponderables for order and stability of the global system, as events across the world since 9/11 indicate. Consequently, the interface of international realism as the hegemonic ideology, and the new phase of globalisation ushered by it, needs to be explored for any projections of the future trends, and desirable policy interventions.

In many ways, this book sums up my perspective of international relations of my time, a subject that I have taught and lectured around for over thirty years, in India and abroad. This analysis is pegged around the quest for security, which has been the central concern of the era.

During my periodic visits to Europe, and to the United States for the first time as a Fulbright Professor in the late-eighties, I have often felt a little uneasy with some of the axiomatic assumptions of western scholarship in international relations and consequently, their theoretical generalisations. This has been particularly striking in the case of the many American scholars that I have inter-acted with, in my long professional career. In fact, the more high-profile they have been, the more I have found them asserting certitudes on global issues, which ab-initio appeared to be contestable to me. This experience was in sharp contrast to my student days in Heidelberg, where many young American draft-dodgers (unfortunately not Clinton or Bush) in the tumultuous ‘New Left’ era of the anti-Vietnam war protests, would gather in the university, escaping from the nearby Mark Twain and Patrick Henry villages in the US military base, to share with our cross-cultural group of students, over mugs of beer, so many things in common on Vietnam, on the world, and on life.

While I have not had any good reason to drastically change my views on many of those issues since then, I have often wondered how and why my generation of Americans, who shared so much with me in common in their youth, view the world so differently now?

Hegemony, as used in this analysis, refers, in the Gramscian sense, to the corpus of ideas, beliefs, and values representing the collective ‘commonsense of the epoch’. In this sense the corpus of ideas, beliefs, and values of the US power-elite, encompassed within the realist paradigm of national security, was successfully globalised by the post-war US foreign policy through its varied instruments of persuation and subversion. Never before in history, including within the Cold War global system, there existed a hegemonic power. But there were multiple tiers of contests for dominance within it: for example, between the realist paradigm and the collective security paradigm, each representing its corpus of ideas, beliefs, and values in their respective institutions; after the marginalisation of the UN system, between the ideological divide of the Cold War era; and, between them and the nonaligned, as also between the North and the South. It was only at the end of the Cold War that the United States emerged as the hegemonic power within the global system pursuing the interests of its power elite as its ‘national interest’, with implict primacy within the pecking order of the global system.

Conceptually, hegemony ought to be clearly distinguished from dominance, whether military, economic or technological. Dominance involves actual or threatened use of coercion; while hegemony assumes willing suspension of disbelief within the collective against the superior virtues and interests of the hegemone.