A Purist’s perspective is necessary in negating the worst excesses of Idealism, as is the latter necessary in doing so for the former. Such paradigmatic vibrancy can only be a good thing for Postcolonialism and the self-critical arena that this has created means that the approach will go from strength to strength in its project of postcolonialising the dominant mode of Orientalism.
Britain would have moved towards Free Trade in 1846-1860 even if the Irish Potato Famine had not occurred, due to the inability of the protectionist system to benefit the British economy in any significant way encouraged many to consider the alternative approach, namely free trade.
Hamas ultimately wishes for the end of Israel and the liberation of Palestine, but it thinks almost exclusively in short term goals and is open to the possibility of entering into negotiations. The dominant view in Israel seeks to stop Hamas getting any more of a foothold in Palestine than it already does, doubting the sincerity of its elements of moderation.
Oscillating between isolationist, export substitution, and an all-out embrace of globalization’s manifold levers, being both Dragon and Phoenix, in spite of having suffered subordination to politically assertive empires from 1850 to 1950 and having notoriously “missed” the Industrial Revolution, China is resuming its otherwise ancient status of world innovator and economic superpower.
France has attempted to maintain a hegemonic foothold in Francophone Africa to serve its interests and maintain a last bastion of prestige associated with past mastery. Do these relations retain an essentially colonialist character?
Rather than acting as a collective security system, the UN Security Council mostly remained divided throughout the Cold War and efficient UN action was often hindered by superpower conflict. Yet, undoubtedly the Cold War world was better off with the UN than without it.
Hitler imagined the nation in purely ethnic terms, the German Volk with the Aryan core at the top of the genetic pool. However, nationalism is too thin an ideology to be Hitler’s only political thinking and he uses the ideas of Social Darwinism, fascism and militarisation to thicken out his personal ideology.
The American-Russian relationship is best described as going from Cold War to Cold Peace, as articulated by the then Russian President Yeltsin. The 1990s essentially brought about a period in which the US sought to manage the uncertainties that the new world order was presenting.
Russia has made a concerted attempt to become an ‘independent regional power’ since the demise of Yeltsin, with limited results in Eastern Europe, but with greater success in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Russia’s behaviour has been entirely predictable. Nonetheless, as China looks set to challenge Russian power in Central Asia in the future, Russia’s response remains unclear.
In four books from 1997 to 2008 Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined a comprehensive American foreign posture around the geopolitical grail of Central Asia. Since 1945 the United States has been largely defined as the first non-Eurasian thalassocracy to prevail in the Great Game, yet for how long?
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