Chapter 8 - Conclusion

Summary

With the end of Cold War I in 1989, a new paradigm of international politics took shape. This was a world without the challenge of a communist superpower and its associated conception of world order. Instead, the world order associated with the Political West appeared to triumph, but the fruits of that putative victory contained some deadly toxins that would corrupt the triumphant order itself. It remains to be seen just how lethal this will be, but we can already see one of the outcomes in the form of Cold War II. As described in this book, a whole culture is associated with cold war as a form of international politics.

The inter-cold war paradigm, what we can call the postcommunist model, was characterised by a number of key features. First, the interpellation of the Political West, variously presented as the liberal international order, rules-based international order or Atlantic power system, between the Charter International System and the practices of international politics. The Political West effectively usurped the privileges and prerogatives that should properly belong to Charter institutions, above all the UN, its agencies and the whole body of international law that it has spawned. Second, this entailed the displacement of the fundamental Charter principle of sovereign internationalism, where states meet as normative equals and unite in various multilateral formats to resolve problems of mutual concern. Instead, the ideology of democratic internationalism was advanced, which introduces not only sovereign inequality but also an inherently didactic, if not outright interventionist, dynamic into international affairs. The allegedly more advanced societies bring enlightenment, by book or by crook, to the more backward. Third, the absence of a peer competitor encouraged neoconservatives to forge a grand strategy based on permanent US dominance, requiring the imposition of constraints on potential competitors. In the first instance, this applied to Russia and was then extended to China. At the same time, the rise of economic neoliberalism from the 1970s provoked the radical transformation of social orders into market states, with wrenching domestic consequences.