The headline of this article is borrowed from an essay that appeared in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, a periodical published by the US Council on Foreign Relations. The essay could possibly epitomise a phase in commentary and study that began to revise a quarter of a century of international relations literature since the collapse of the Soviet Union and in which the notion of “the end” prevailed, as in “the end of history,” “the end of geography” and “the end of economics” etc. Evidently that era of terminals has terminated and a new literature is emerging taking its cue from the idea of “the return” of something. Certainly the centennial of the eruption of World War I was an opportunity to pick up on the theme of “La plus ça change… ”. However, more than anything else these days it is the events in Ukraine that have caused many distant memories to resurface vividly and to sound the alarm that the world has not changed as much as many had imagined. The more sensible minded commentators have urged a pause for reflection and introspection so as to avert inadvertent consequences and the revival of cold or warm warfare that no one is prepared for or even intends. Last month, former Czech President Vaclav Klaus together with ex-Chancellor Jiri Weigl issued a brief paper entitled, “Let's Start a Real Ukrainian Debate.” The authors noted, firstly, that the Ukraine had no historical tradition of statehood and that its quarter of a century as a state was not sufficient to create one. Secondly, Ukrainian democracy, like other systems that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union or the breakup of Yugoslavia, or the Arab Spring for that matter, were not true democracies and cannot be classified as such merely because the West wishes them to be that way. Klaus and Weigl conclude with a caution — of the dire consequences of allowing misperceptions regarding Ukraine to precipitate developments that could lead to a new Cold War. Interestingly, Klaus, a dedicated member of Europe's centre right, knows that history cannot be warped in order to produce an “end” that has not occurred and he is realistic enough to suggest, even if he does not say so explicitly, that the collapse of the Soviet Union and breakup Yugoslavia may have been grave mistakes. History cannot be written twice, once as events happened and then again to fit a perception that the results were not happy ones. Perhaps the problem with the “return of geopolitics” and similar writings is that they rest more on familiar echoes from the past than actual events in the present. In the past, when the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires collapsed, the changes ricocheted throughout Europe and the Middle East. At the same time our planet would not have been able to sustain a population boom from a billion to more than seven billion within a single century had it not been for new inroads in the technologies of life, communications and transport, and even the technologies of war that made it impossible, at least for superpowers, which possessed nuclear arsenals, to make war on each other. Today, the consequences and fallout of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia cannot be ignored. But nor can we ignore that the Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union, that Putin and his colleagues do not espouse an ideology hostile to Western ideologies, that capitalism exists and periodic democratic processes are in place, and that Marxism has been consigned to the dustbin of history. The credibility of such issues in Russia is another matter. Is the capitalism there a sound and solid one or are there mafia connections? Is democracy possible with only two people (Putin and Medvedev) alternating power? Such questions pertain to the nature and degree of maturity of the system. What is certain is that this is not the system of the USSR that was based on Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist principles. Other changes have taken place in the Russian political and cultural structures, the result of which is that Ukrainians of Russian origin would find no great difference between becoming part of the Ukrainian state or joining their ethnic peers in Federal Russia. For example, there is no great gap between the democratic capitalist systems on the two sides and certainly nothing like the former divide between West Germany behind which stood the Western world and East Germany that had the grim world of the Warsaw Pact behind it. What does all this have to do with us? Several weeks ago in this column I raised the question of whether we were “one world” or “many worlds”. I argued that the two coexisted and that the “globalised world” and the “geopolitical world” with its specific national and other types of allegiances were moving in tandem. The process of globalisation, itself, was furnishing the instruments that were changing the particular consciences or frames of awareness of each human group. Twitter, Facebook and the like were performing the functions of pen and ink and the printing press when nation states first emerged. Now take the Arab world. It is rife with conditions moving from hot to seething and explosive. Iraq and Syria are examples of advanced stages in the fermentation process, although there are no guarantees that the less acute cases will reach these stages in the near future. Geopolitics has returned in full force to Libya making Cyrenaica strive for secession or at least autonomy in a federal system. Yemen attempted to pre-empt trouble by agreeing on the federal solution. Iraq adopted the federal system some time ago, but the reality is closer to secession. Given the inefficacy of central government institutions and the antipathies between the sects and ethnicities that do not believe they are connected with each other, the implosion into petty states is looming if conditions remain as they are. Still, when maps change due to the emergence of new political entities this does not mean the end of the world. It means a new reality has set in. There are two sides to this question that faces the current central authorities in the region. The first is the existence of numerous sects, ethnic groups, tribes and social configurations that vary between rural and urban parts of their countries. The second is that the Arab developmental heritage was not characterised by regional balance. The cost of uneven development was especially heavy in Sudan. Egyptians and other Arab peoples need to grasp the lesson before it is too late, because the mixture of the two facets above in these days of globalisation, media competition and populist demagoguery is an extremely combustible brew. Curiously, there is a certain recognition that this destructive brew exists, but there is a reluctance to acknowledge the geopolitical reality, perhaps because to do so would be akin to establishing a self-fulfilling prophecy. But worse, because of the hesitancy to acknowledge it, there is hesitancy to deal with it. This applies as much to the lands with plenty as it does to the lands of paucity, because no one wants to depart from what we are accustomed to. But the world of “many worlds”, where the tools of globalisation mix with geopolitics, is picking up a mad speed fuelled by demographic dynamics, and its volatility is mounting due to imbalances. The consequences will be extremely painful. When I read the Foreign Affairs article mentioned above I was reminded of Thomas Friedman who was at the fore of those armies of commentators who have excelled, since the “end of history”, in discussing the “new history”. But the world does not fall between a given beginning and a given end. Both — beginning and end — live intimately together in a single reality. Blessed be they who realise this truth.
