The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century

183 Pages·2016·1.46 MB·English

by  Jennifer Welsh

THE MASSEY LECTURES SERIES
The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the
University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former
Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major
contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.
This book comprises the 2016 Massey Lectures, “The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and
Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century,” broadcast in November 2016 as part of CBC Radio’s Ideas series.
The producer of the series was Philip Coulter; the executive producer was Greg Kelly.
JENNIFER WELSH
Jennifer Welsh is Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute in
Florence (Italy) and a Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford. From 2013 until 2016, she was
the Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Responsibility to Protect. She co-
founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, and has taught international relations at
the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the Central European University (Prague). Welsh is the
author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on international relations, the changing character
of war, and Canadian foreign policy. She was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, and is of Metis
descent. She now lives in Italy, with her husband and two children.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
At Home in the World:
Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century Chips & Pop:
Decoding the Nexus Generation (co-author) Edmund Burke and International
Relations
The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity
Prevention (co-editor) Just and Unjust Military Intervention:
European Thinkers from Vitoria to Mill (co-editor) Humanitarian Intervention
and
International Relations (editor)
THE RETURN
OF HISTORY
Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century
JENNIFER WELSH
Copyright © 2016 Jennifer Welsh
and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Published in Canada and the USA in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
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Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do
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House of Anansi Press
www.houseofanansi.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Welsh, Jennifer M. (Jennifer Mary), 1965–, author
The return of history / Jennifer Welsh.
(The Massey lectures)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0130-8 (hardback).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0132-2 (mobi)
1. History—Philosophy. 2. World politics—1989–.
3. Civilization. 4. Regression (Civilization). 5. Progress.
I. Title. II. Series: CBC Massey lectures series
D16.8.W45 2016 901 C2016-901577-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932422
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover images: © Shutterstock
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace ownership of copyright materials. The publisher will gladly rectify any inadvertant
errors or omissions in credits in future editions.
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and
the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
For Eleanor and Max,
and the history they will make.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: The Return of History
Chapter 2: The Return of Barbarism
Chapter 3: The Return of Mass Flight
Chapter 4: The Return of Cold War
Chapter 5: The Return of Inequality
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
“History repeats itself because no one was
listening the first time.” — Anonymous
ONE
THE RETURN OF HISTORY
IT IS THE CONCEIT of almost every generation to think that it is living in
extraordinary times. For my parents’ generation, it was the trauma of the Second
World War and the miracle of post-war reconstruction. For my older siblings, it
was the protest movements of the late 1960s and the triumph of civil rights and
women’s equality. And for my generation, it was the end of the Cold War.
In the autumn of 1989, it was difficult not to believe that something
monumental was occurring on the global landscape. The stirrings in Eastern
Europe were not isolated accidents, but seemed part of a larger process — whose
trajectory was still uncertain. I was a graduate student at the University of
Oxford, and when the images of East Germans chipping away at the Berlin Wall
flashed across the television screen on November 9, I jumped aboard a flight to
Berlin with some of my classmates to witness, first hand, the deconstruction of
an empire. When we arrived the next day, the party atmosphere along the Wall
had exploded. Lufthansa flight attendants with trays were handing out canapés to
those gathered, and U.S. television anchormen, fresh from their overseas
journey, were hoisted on makeshift platforms to report “live from the scene.”
The most astute Western observer of those heady days, British journalist and
writer Timothy Garton Ash, described that period in November as “the greatest
street party in the history of the world.”1 And so it was. It was estimated that
close to two million East Germans crossed over into West Berlin the weekend
after the Wall fell — most of them to spend the welcome gift of 100
Deutschmarks they received from the West German government. I came home
with my own piece of the Wall, painted with graffiti, as well as a euphoric sense
of being at the centre of history.
The collapse of communist regimes was so rapid that scholars and journalists
scrambled to keep up. The revolutions that had begun in Poland and Hungary,
and spread to Germany, sparked upheaval in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and
Bulgaria. The wave eventually spilled over into the Soviet Union itself, where
suppressed nationalism in the Baltic region — Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania — and in republics such as Armenia and Georgia, exploded into calls
for independence. The deteriorating Soviet economy only heightened these
nationalist sentiments and led successive constituent republics of the Soviet
Union to create their own economic and legal systems. Though the genie was
already out of the bottle, communist hard-liners in the Kremlin tried to reverse
the changes by staging a coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev in the
summer of 1991. The effort was thwarted by the president of the Russian
republic, Boris Yeltsin — with the help of the army — but the communist
regime in Moscow was mortally wounded. Any remaining authority it had
quickly evaporated. The Soviet Union was officially disbanded on December 26,
1991, ending its reign as the world’s largest and most influential communist
state.
In the midst of these tumultuous events, the American political commentator
Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous article entitled “The End of History.” His
central claim was that the demise of the confrontation between East and West in
1989 constituted much more than the end of the Cold War. It also signalled the
endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural and ideological evolution and the
“universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.”2 As a consequence of liberal democracy’s victory, and diffusion,
he predicted, we would see the waning of traditional power politics and large-
scale conflict, and the path toward a more peaceful world.
A decade later, the end of the Cold War and the subsequent increase in the
number of liberal democratic states was indeed accompanied by a marked
decline in both interstate and ethnic wars, as well as the number of refugees and
displaced persons. During the 1990s, the former superpowers collaborated on the
reunification of Germany and disengaged from their proxy wars in Africa. The
United States also scaled back its military presence in Europe and led the charge
to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include states that
were formerly part of the Soviet bloc. Societies in Central and Eastern Europe
and the Baltic region embraced democracy and were drawn into the orbit of the
expanding European Union (EU) — which had begun as a free trade and
customs area, but after the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 created a
common currency and strengthened political cooperation in areas such as foreign