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De Terugkeer Van De Geschiedenis: De Liberale Democratie En De Opkomst Van Het Nationalisme (2008)

by Robert Kagan(Favorite Author)

3.6 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

9023428684 (ISBN13: 9789023428688)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

De Bezige Bij

review 1: Eh. The book is well written and researched. As other readers commented, Kagan points out some obvious trends. At times, I felt I was reading some recycled, self serving Us vs THEM cold war era dreck. I do like his sober minded analysis of America's declining worldwide clout. I enjoyed his 2007 work "Dangerous Nation" much, much more. DN is a must have on the book shelf for anyone interested in tracing the arc of America's (aggressive) foreign policy. It ends with the on-set of the Spanish-American War. I hope he gets the sequel out soon.
review 2: There are a great many books on current geopolitics available at this time to the general reader. This is one of the more interesting. Kagan differs from others that I've read. He believes the drift of nations is ... moregenerally toward liberalism. But in the post-Cold War world the powerful nations are more able to express their individual cultural traditions, religions, and nationalism. Because these nations no longer stand in the hulking shadow of Soviet-American conflict, this has allowed a new era of great power competition to emerge which resembles the rivalries prior to the world wars. The return to history Kagan refers to is this return to great power competition. Presumably the end of dreams is the failure of great power cooperation for peace and security. Maybe the most important word in the book is autocracy. It's those nations who have deep centralization of governmental power (near dictatorships) while practicing capitalism and economic health who've replaced the Cold War communists as the primary rivals of the liberal democracies. It's along the borders of those countries that the fault lines of potential conflict lie. Russia and China are the most important, of course, but the world is full of autocratic nations with whom the liberal governments deal with varying degrees of success or frustration, like Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Eventually, he thinks, this divide between autocracy and democracy will erupt in armed conflict. Kagan, like every other geopolitical pundit, also addresses the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. But he sees it as the last holdout against a tide of modernity and liberalism which will inevitably overwhelm an Islamic world already generally receptive to western ideas and culture. Fundamentalism will fall by the wayside in the rush toward modernism. Another--to me surprising--idea Kagan puts forth is that the general distrust of the American global hegemon was caused not by conservatives who tend to be more isolationist-minded but by liberals who were more aggressive about projecting the liberal democratic agenda worldwide. This is an interesting book. It's tiny but its ideas are big. less

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