Breaking the Cycle Of the 20th Century

The present day global landscape is one of profound crisis, which could end either in the death of humankind or in the breakthrough to a new civilization. -- Mikhail Gorbachev

The 20th century, with all its tragedies and triumphs, is over. Now, at last, we can look back on its totality and reflect upon its political experiences. As we do this, two questions of singular importance arise: Is there any coherent meaning in the happenings of this period? Are there messages that illumine our passage to the future? The quest for answers, if there are any, must surely begin with an examination of the context and conditions that made this time such a powerful moment in the human experience.

In 1922, Winston Churchill announced an anticipatory verdict: "What a disappointment the 20th century has been ... how terrible and melancholy is the long series of disastrous events which have darkened it." Almost simultaneously, the British polymath H.G. Wells looked at the shape of things to come and declared: "We are hardly in the earliest dawn of human greatness. ... Presently our human race will have to realize our boldest imaginations. ... The children of our blood will live in a world made more splendid and lovely than that which we know, going on from strength to strength in an ever-widening circle of adventure and achievement." Whose vision of the century was more prescient: Churchill's or Wells'? In fact, they were both correct.

Throughout the century, humanity and barbarity have walked hand in hand. More than 200 million individuals have perished in violent military or political conflict.

A larger number probably starved to death in preventable famines. Genocide and its handmaiden, ethnic cleansing, continue unabated -- monstrous acts of deliberate and collective murder. Many culturally commonplace brutalities, such as female genital mutilation, are reportedly expanding. Yet, larger numbers of people do live longer and live better than their ancestors ever did. Around the year 1900, only about 10 percent of the global population could read and write. Now, almost 60 percent can and we are well within reach of universal literacy in the early 21st century. The Internet brings knowledge to the most primitive backwoods. And any massacre anywhere arouses an outcry everywhere: Slaughter has not disappeared, but it is increasingly condemned, not condoned. Who, then, will be the archetypal figures of our age: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin or Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa?

In many ways, these contrasts and contradictions are not historically exceptional. Every age has had its compassion and its cruelty, although the scope and scale of events in our era has been much larger than before. What really separates our century from the rest of history, what makes it so distinct, is technology and its dispersal throughout the world. Nuclear energy, satellites, rapid medical advances, biogenetic leaps, the computer and communications revolutions -- these are peculiar to our time. People, things, and information move as they never did before on, above, or below the surface of the earth. The invention of electronic media and their global spread is a vital landmark -- surely ranking equal in importance to the discovery of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Such markers come infrequently, but when they do there is a fundamental change in how people look at life and how they want to live. And there is no going back. We have all become children of Pandora, and the planet is her box.

Cycles of War and Peace This unique condition has produced a unique consequence -- something which has no equivalent in human history. There are, of course, many unusual features in the macro-political ethos of the 20th century. But what most specially defines it and has been largely unnoticed is a recurring pattern of events. An examination of 20th century history suggests that this is a cycle with certain specific features -- a cycle which has repeated three times in 100 years. This cycle, with its remarkable replications, is the flywheel of the international political economy in modern times. Its footprints appear in an order which unfolds somewhat like this:

- The cycle begins with a series of small local or regional conflicts. These are curtain-raisers of the progression. In the first cycle, during the early part of this century, such conflicts began in the Balkans. At the start of the second turn of the cycle, in the 1930s, these small wars included the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese assault on China, and the Italian attacks on North Africa. The third sequence, in the late 1940s, begins with similar events -- the Greek Civil War, the Berlin Blockade, and the initial Korean part of the Korean War.

- Then, the next stage of the cycle evolves. These small outbursts escalate into larger disputes which draw major powers into prolonged battles. Vast numbers are destroyed and displaced in the big-time struggles. Witness World War I in which about 20 million died, World War II in which about 50 million died, and the Cold War -- essentially 40 years of combat in which around 40 million died in 130 local and regional wars, of which Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Central American conflicts are the best known.

- These great and costly struggles have been won by powers which espouse values of freedom and democracy. In short, the "bad guys" lose: the Central Powers in World War I, the Axis in World War II, the Soviet Union in the Cold War. A short period of triumphalism takes place during which the winners attribute all virtue to themselves.

- The victories arouse high expectations. Foremost among them are hopes for a new era of democracy and prosperity, freedom and economic well-being. President Woodrow Wilson believed that the world was made "safe for democracy." President Franklin Roosevelt thought that "democratic processes" would flourish everywhere. President George Bush proclaimed a New World Order founded on "democratic principles and institutions and values." Many of their contemporaries enthusiastically echoed these sentiments.

- The end of major conflicts also provokes the collapse of empires: the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Czarist Russian empires after World War I; the colonial empires of Europe after World War II; the external and internal Soviet empire after the Cold War. A kind of global reorganization takes place with many new small and medium-sized states evolving and sovereign boundaries being redefined. Witness the Versailles states after World War I, the Third World nations after World War II, over 20 successor states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia after the Cold War. Everyone makes commitments to sustain their independence, invariably embracing the rhetoric of democracy and liberty.

- At this moment in the cycle, important new economic manifestations appear -- the communist economy after World War I, the European welfare state after World War II, the emerging capitalist markets after the Cold War. Each of these expressions offers the promise of equity and prosperity for all.

- The winners of the great wars hasten to establish or revive international institutions to prevent future catastrophes and to underwrite global prosperity through global cooperation. Thus were born the League of Nations and the Bank of International Settlements, the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank, and most recently an attempt to energize the United Nations and establishment of the World Trade Organization.

- Soon, however, the cycle moves into a darker phase -- negative developments begin to undermine the high hopes of global freedom, prosperity, and institutional effectiveness. Frightening, autocratic, and expansionist ideologies arise -- fascism after World War I, international communism after World War II, ethnic nationalism and fundamentalism after the Cold War. International peacekeeping structures prove unable to contain them and decline in credibility. At the same time, large parts of the global economy also begin to falter, causing considerable human misery and social turmoil. Governments attempt emergency renovations or restrictive attempts to alleviate the evolving disorder. Thus, the coming of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the fascist economic experiments in Italy and Germany, and the New Deal in America in the 1930s. So, too, the reinforcement of the European welfare state and the beginning of foreign aid programs in the 1950s. Currently, the quest for regulatory and reform mechanisms to arrest the economic slide in emerging markets. These efforts do not always work.

- As political and economic deterioration sparks various tensions, the cycle now enters its final phase and completes its rotation. Once more, small regional disputes and wars erupt. Take a close look at Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, the Indo-Pakistan border, Chechnya, and several West African countries today. Then, it all begins again with big power involvement in these situations. History begins to walk in the same tracks, the cycle takes another turn and all hell breaks loose.

This re-statement of sequences is a reminder of uncanny parallels in the political record of the 20th century. Of course, not everything around the world can be explained by such repetitive patterns. There is no karmic inevitability or perfectly identical symmetry in all this. However, I suggest that there are sufficient similarities to indicate that global high politics and macroeconomics over the last century do fall into some clearly defined recurrences with many common features.

Indeed, if there is even a semblance of credibility in my argument about cycles, we now confront a major question -- perhaps the authentic big question of our moment: Do we have to repeat 20th century history and pass through still another cycle, or can we break out of the pattern and create a new future? Is trend destiny or can we bypass history?

A Fourth Cycle? A decade or so ago, at the conclusion of the Cold War, history presented us with an unusual condition -- a clean stage on which to design a brave new world. The old ideological cobwebs and hangups had been swept away: Communism, anti-communism, nonalignment faded into irrelevance. For a few years, things appeared exceedingly positive. Peace agreements, arms control treaties, collective responses to cross-border aggression were symbols of the early 1990s. A cluster of global conferences, town meetings of the world sponsored by the United Nations, such as the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, prepared a new planetary agenda. Ideas of internationalism, interdependence, global community and sustainable development dominated practical discourse. Democracy, the ideological victor of the Cold War, was expanding rapidly: Even the stalemate in South Africa was peacefully resolved. Globalized electronic capitalism captured the economic imagination of nations and about three billion people were baptized into the market -- and this seemed to assure a future of expanding prosperity. It looked like the springtime of nations.

Soon, however, this proved a false dawn. These constructive evolutions were challenged by several barbaric forces. Onto the world stage marched resurrected specters from the past and dreadful fresh horrors -- ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and transnational crime cartels. Most of the past decade has been a great global struggle between the positive elements liberated by the end of the Cold War and these instruments of fear and disorder. Do we see brewing another titanic battle for the human prospect?

In recent years, the balance has largely tilted towards the negative. Circumstantial evidence suggests that we are entering the early stages of a fourth turn of the 20th century cycle. Little wars splutter in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, all over Africa, and in parts of South Asia. Tensions grow in the Taiwan Straits and on the North-South Korean divide. Larger nations such as the United States, Russia, China, and Great Britain are becoming involved. Fearful ideologies are gaining ground. International peacekeeping systems are not working well -- the United Nations Security Council shows the same irresolution that paralyzed its predecessors during the Cold War and in the time of the League of Nations. Segments of the global economy are in deep trouble: About one quarter of the world's population was suddenly plunged into recession in 1997 and 1998. If trend is destiny and the sequence follows its past path, some kind of world war will, in due course, again come upon us. And if it does, it will come with a velocity and virulence like no other -- sneak attacks with weapons of mass destruction, terrorist onslaughts, religious crusades, perhaps impoverishing trade rivalries and worldwide crime waves.

The Message of History How can we prevent this apocalyptic vision from hardening into reality? How can we hold back the cycle from its fourth and maybe fatal rotation? The antidote is in the infection. The political experiences of the 20th century, those very experiences that provide evidence of repetitive formations, send us signals and instructions which could help us to evade, moderate, or bypass the worst of another cycle.

One of these messages is that liberal democracy is a possible prophylactic against some cyclical disasters. It is obviously good to strengthen democracy at home and abroad for all the conventional reasons -- liberty, popular representation, and so on. But modern liberal democracy has three other features important in our context of cycles:

- First, democracies do not often go to war with other democracies. A more democratic world would be a less troubled world.

- Second, democracy ventilates important modern issues and brings them into the public arena. For example, human rights and women's rights and environmental questions. If repressed, as they always are by authoritarian governments, these concerns will explode into violence. Such massive social disruptions could give thrust to the cycle and accelerate its destructive trail.

- Third, as economic Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has pointed out, famine is most frequently generated by a lack of freedom, not a lack of food. Famines and upheavals associated with them often begin the chain reaction that ignites cyclical disturbances.

Thus, it is possible to conjecture that sustaining and expanding democracy could well prove a buttress against the onward progression of cycles. It is encouraging that in recent years, for the first time in human history, more than one-half of the world's people live in some form of democratic governance.

The Triumph of the Market? Yet democracy and its consequences do not germinate in a vacuum. In many newly democratizing countries, economics will have a major influence on the future of freedom. Until mid-1997, it seemed as if the current globalized form of electronic capitalism would be the seedbed of democratic deliverance. In demonstrating the virtues of choices in the marketplace, it would inspire an increasingly liberated polity. This capitalist deliverance was manifest in East and Southeast Asia. The blooming of apparently populist capitalism seduced other regions -- in Asia, in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, in parts of Africa -- into the market. But the ebb tide has come fast. With the fast-spreading currency collapses and ensuing economic slowdowns in East Asia, Russia and elsewhere in 1997-1998, post-Cold War capitalism faced its first serious crisis since it emerged as the prevailing global economic order. The challenge is to avert a meltdown of emerging markets with fearsome contaminating consequences for all.

Here, too, we can learn from earlier 20th century events. Capitalism or modern market economics without regulatory and humanizing mechanisms contains the seeds of its own destruction. It took the New Deal to save American capitalism during the Great Depression. It took the welfare state to save European capitalism after World War II. Now we have to find methods and structures to regulate contemporary globo-electronic capitalism and cushion its heavier impacts. Capitalism has served most of the residents of the older industrial countries quite well. But its recent expansion into societies with few, if any, social safety nets has exposed millions of workers to the ups and downs characteristic of market economics. These millions, whose expectations were raised in South Korea and Indonesia and Thailand and Russia and Brazil and elsewhere, will surely not be pushed back into poverty, or wrapped into economic straitjackets designed by the IMF, without protesting violently.

If modern capitalism is to be preserved as a worldwide system, it will not be rescued by IMF bailouts and other short-term Band-Aids. It must be redeemed by changes and reforms that soften its downswings and restore its credibility by broadening its benefits. If not, the upheavals, already visible in Indonesia and likely to come to Russia, will put an end to both emerging markets and emerging democracies. Robust measures will then be required to restore stability, and dictatorships of the left or the right will again be the order of the day. This, however, need not be so.

It is well within the province of capitalist ingenuity to fashion salvific mechanisms that will correct and modify the working of contemporary international economics. This is not a new task. It has been undertaken in the past and many of today's captains of finance are calling for such efforts. The question is whether those measures can be taken fast enough, and with sufficient wisdom. We need to keep in mind that a market economy may be desirable, but a market society is not.

The Death of Utopia There are other instructive messages which come to us from the annals of our century. One of them concerns the outsized ambitions of nations and leaders. The 20th century is the graveyard of these inflated aspirations. Territorial imperialism, long the yardstick by which the greatness of states was measured, has virtually disappeared. At least 12 major empires, some hundreds of years old, have crumbled during the last 100 years.

Planned utopias and totalitarian ideologies have been tragic failures. Each turn of the cycle has destroyed ideas and systems which dominated their times -- hereditary absolutism in the wake of World War I, fascism and colonialism in the wake of World War II, communism in the wake of the Cold War. Will democracy and capitalism meet the same fate in another cyclical passage? The predicaments of those who overstretched and overreached are warnings which the big powers of today and tomorrow will do well to heed. Generally, they will not; national ambition has historically overwhelmed reason. But something new is taking place. In every country there are now whistle-blowers and non-governmental activists who are energizing civil society in innovative ways. The imperatives of the state, involvements that fired our cycle, are under unprecedented scrutiny.

The arrival of economic suprastates, symbolized by the Euro, is another possible brake on the egos of states and leaders. As financial sovereignty is transferred to a higher multinational authority, for the first time breaking the link between great currencies and great powers, the political sovereignty of participating nations is reduced. The Western European process has brought five decades of peace to a region that was afflicted with almost continuous war in the preceding millennium. As the notion of regional economic integration advances, and there are signs of similar developments in South America and Southeast Asia, the opportunities for extravagant ambitions are reduced. All these are hopeful signs, but are they hopeful enough? We will surely have an answer within the next decade or so.

Is Trend Destiny? Another lesson that can help us face the future comes from the responses of countries to world challenges in the 20th century. The big winners in our time are those who have constructed genuine international partnerships and alliances. World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and even the Gulf War were won by those who built cooperative coalitions (in contrast to coercive coalitions). In recent decades, economic rewards have come to nations which forged common markets or crafted trade agreements or encouraged foreign investments and joint ventures -- measures which are in themselves kinds of collaborative alliances. Today, it is almost impossible to achieve progress in world politics or economics by going it alone. No state, however formidable, can police the world by itself or remain prosperous in isolation. Cooperative alliances, coalitions, and partnerships are the secret of 20th century success -- a truth now more valid than ever.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of cross-border aggression. In past centuries and in the early part of this one, initiating war was profitable. This was how rich empires were created. But in the second half of the 20th century wars have become ruinous for the provocateur or the invader. Recall what Afghanistan cost the Soviet Union, what Vietnam cost the United States, what Suez cost the British, what war in the Falklands cost Argentina, what the invasion of Kuwait cost Iraq -- and this is merely a short tally. Wars of international aggression are now the quickest way to national ruin. In the words of Shimon Peres, the hunting season in world affairs is over. As this realization spreads, it should restrain the recklessness of nations and become a circuit-breaker on our 20th century cycle.

Someday, it may even grow to embrace internal conflicts which have become such a popular substitute for external conflicts. The last year of the century saw reluctant -- but eventually significant -- international interventions in the internal bloodbaths of Kosovo and East Timor. This may be the beginning of a trend in a most difficult area, where sovereignty of states confronts larger humanitarian interests.

These are a few selective lessons and thoughts which can perhaps point the way to avoiding the drama of another cyclical sequence -- enabling us to break the cycle and make it exclusively a 20th century phenomenon. The near-term perspective suggests that a fourth cycle has just commenced. Yet, if we are attentive to the signals of history, the outcome is not inevitable, and we may be able to grow in human freedom and dignity without the catastrophes of the century which has just expired. This is why our time, our turn of the century, is a moment of such extraordinary historical significance -- a moment that challenges statesmen to transcend the cycle that has dominated the century past. To fail in such an endeavor is to consign humankind to a rerun of its recent, tragic history.

Ralph Buultjens is a professor at New York University, and the former Nehru Professor/Professorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge.