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A World in Transition
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19788 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
4,887 Words |
| Author
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Michael Vlahos
Michael Vlahos is the outgoing director of the Center for the
Study of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. State Department. He has
been director of Security Studies at the Johns Hopkins School
of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of several
books, the most recent of which is Thinking about World Change. |
"The Cold War is over."
This is the popular phrase used since 1989 to describe the passage we have made from one world, one reality, to another. But the world since 1945 was only highlighted, not defined, by the U.S.-Soviet competition. And the end of that competition is only one point on the wider compass of world change.
The first and essential recognition we must come to is that we are in the midst of a world in transition, a historical bridging time. This is not the new world. We have departed from a reality that held us for fifty years, but the defining forms, the spirit of the age, and the power relationships of the new world can today only be glimpsed.
The second recognition involves reexamining for a moment the defining essence of the world we are leaving. If it was not simply the Cold War, then what was it? Are we losing more than just the "evil empire?"
The dominant metaphor undergirding the postwar world was America's vision of a universal world culture, of a belief system in its own image. The Soviet enemy was integral to sustaining the energy and authority with which the United States pursued this vision, and the willingness of those threatened by the Soviet idea and its power to accede to an American vision.
In effect, this American effort was a pulse within the historical rhythm of humankind, between the convergence and divergence of cultures. The United States actively promoted cultural convergence for fifty years through the framework of a cosmopolitan political-military-economic association called the "Free World," and the institutional symbolism of the United Nations. How did it work out?
Humankind has evolved as a galaxy of separate groups that crafted their own separate realities. History is really the process of mingling and fusing these groups' realities into larger and larger worlds. The American effort to assert a universal culture has not been the first, although our sense of the known world finally includes all people. The question regarding earlier pulses toward universalism is how these surges lost force, and why cultures brought together under the same tent finally departed, to go their own way. The ancient Greek effort to build a universal culture is worth revisiting from this vantage.
THE FIRST UNIVERSAL SURGE
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