Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

party systems where different interests were represented by different parties,
or two-party systems where the two parties in question were themselves
coalitions of interests, but, in any event, politics in the advanced industrial
world had become a matter of compromise, adjustment and accommoda-
tion. In contrast with the immediate past, there were very few mass political
movements or parties whose aims involved large-scale social or economic
change; even in France and Italy, where large-scale communist parties had
survived, they had largely lost interest in revolution.
This is a snapshot of politics in the advanced industrial world but the
general assumption was that the developing world would, in the longer run,
take the same path. The international system into which these new nations
had been born or, in the case of older polities that had not been subjected to
direct imperial rule, into which they had now been admitted was, in its
origins, clearly European, and the expectation was that they would adapt to
it by becoming themselves, in their politics at least, rather more European.
Notions of state and nation-building and models of development all pretty
much assumed that the aim of the exercise was to make the non-industrial
world look a lot like the industrial world. Whether this could be achieved
within the capitalist system was a serious issue – the ‘structuralists’ dis-
cussed in Chapter 8 thought not – but most of the alternatives to capitalism
looked increasingly implausible. The critics of capitalist development mod-
els usually had in mind some kind of Marxist alternative, but those Marxist
regimes that did exist looked less and less plausible as alternatives to the
The International Politics of Identity
187

---

capitalist West. In the 1940s and 1950s there were many observers who
genuinely believed that communist planning methods had solved the
problems posed by the boom and bust pattern commonly observed under
capitalism, but by the 1970s it had become increasingly difficult to believe
that this was the case – the regimes of ‘really-existing socialism’ were very
obviously not providing the kind of material success to be found in the
capitalist West. Neither was it possible to argue that these societies were
more socially just than their competitors in the West; the terrifying repres-
sion of the Stalinist totalitarian era may have passed in Eastern Europe by
the 1970s and 1980s, but personal freedom was still very limited and the
regimes were widely perceived by their own citizens as lacking legitimacy.
In any event, in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, communist regimes in
Europe unravelled and were replaced by political systems that aspired to be
like the political systems of the advanced capitalist world. The reasons for
this collapse are complex and inevitably disputed; the impact of Western,
especially American, pressure, the internal dynamics of a process of change
that got out of hand, the role of particular individuals (Gorbachev,
Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan), the role of ideas: the list of candidates
for the role of prime agent of change is long and debates will continue, but
the key point is that communism as a system of rule fell apart. The kind of
convergence between East and West that many had envisaged as the proba-
ble outcome of the Cold War did not take place. Instead, the East adopted
the ideas of the West. The significance of this was immediately noted by
some of the more perceptive thinkers of the period. A key text here is ‘The
End of History’ a much misunderstood piece by the American political
philosopher and policy analyst Francis Fukuyama (1989).
This was a Hegelian analysis of the consequences of the end of the
Cold War which temporarily captured the Zeitgeist, attracted immense
media interest and led to a major book, The End of History and the Last
Man (1992). In essence, Fukuyama argues that in vanquishing Soviet
communism, liberal democracy removed its last serious competitor as a
conception of how an advanced industrial society might be governed. In the
early nineteenth century, the shape of liberal democracy emerged as a com-
bination of a market-based economy, representative institutions, the rule of
law and constitutional government. Since then there have been a number of
attempts to go beyond this formula, but each has failed. Traditional autoc-
racy, authoritarian capitalism, national socialism and fascism each failed in
wars against liberal societies. Liberalism’s most powerful enemy (and also
one of its earliest) was Marxian socialism, which held that the freedoms
which liberalism offered were insufficient and could be transcended –
specifically that political freedoms were undermined by economic inequality
and that ways of running industrial society without the market and via the
rule of the Party rather than representative government were viable.
188