a world without meaning the crisis of meaning in international politics

A world without meaning

A World Without Meaning has been a major influence in French thinking about the wider impacts of globalisation on international relations. Particularly, it is a book that analyses the importance of the postmodern sentiment as a salient factor in international relations. Its translation into English is timely, and important. Richard Higgort, Director, Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick The end of the Cold War marked not only the end of communism but also the end of a way of thinking dating from the Enlightenment. With the emergence of a globalized world order, it has become increasingly difficult for us to make sense of the world we live in. In this provocative and incisive book, Zaki Ladi argues that as our world becomes ever larger, our ability to find meaning in it diminishes. With the end of communism came the end of the intimate alliance between power and ideology. No power in our globalized world can any longer claim to provide meaning. In despair we look back to old models (religious traditions, nationalism, ethnicity) to give us a sense of identity. But how effective are these old certainties in a globalized world in a permanent state of flux? Zaki Ladi is a Research Fellow at the Centre dEtudes et de Recherches Internationales, and Professor at the Institut dEtudes Politiques in Paris.

A World Without MeaningThe crisis of meaning in international politics

Zaki LadiTranslated by June Burnham and Jenny Coulon

First published in English 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Un monde priv de sens Librairie Arthme Fayard 1994 This edition Routledge 1998 This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Franais du Royaume-Uni. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ladi, Zaki [Monde priv de sens. English] A world without meaning: the crisis of meaning in international politics/Zaki Ladi: translated by June Burnham and Jennny Coulon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-16717-5 (hbk: alk. paper)ISBN 0-415-16718-3 (pbk: alk. paper) 1. World politics1989 2. Civilization, Modern1950 I. Title D860.L3513 1998 982515 CIP ISBN 0-203-98193-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-16717-5 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-16718-3 (pbk)

Does everything really have meaning? Arent there some empty spaces remaining, whose emptiness is perhaps their only meaning? Isnt there a gap there, a hole, between the image produced and the meaning it supplies or dissimulates?

Paul Zumthor, La mesure du monde (Paris: Le Seuil 1993), p. 15

Contents

Preface: itinerary Introduction: the divorce of meaning and power 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 The meaning of the Cold War The fall of the Wall: the end of the Enlightenment Out of step with time Universalism runs out of steam Europe and the crisis of meaning The loss of the link between nations Global social links (1): conflicts without identity Global social links (2): actors without a project Can Japan provide meaning? The regionalization of meaning Europe as meaning Asia, or regionalism without a goal America as a social power Conclusion: the post Cold War, a world of its own Notes Bibliography Index

vi 1 13 25 37 44 58 74 84 91 106 117 124 131 139 146 153 183 194

PrefaceItinerary

It is not original to say that the end of the Cold War has profoundly modified our view of the world. Nevertheless, the banality of this statement does not reduce the personal intensity of the feeling for someone who has chosen to organize his intellectual trajectory around the theme of globalization and the issues surrounding it. The East-West conflict has long constituted a real obstacle for me, confining me almost by default to something I knew less badly: North-South relationships. The end of the Cold War freed me too, in a certain way. It helped me to formulate much larger questions about the meaning of the world and by that route to gain easier access to certain territories with which I had had only weak links until then, either culturally (Asia) or intellectually (Europe). It is to intellectual, personal liberation that this book is dedicated. In my efforts I have benefited for more than ten years from the thoughts and the role models of people as diverse as Jean-Franois Bayart, Pierre Hassner, Guy Hermet and Jean Leca. They have, each in their own way, given me a taste for the open seas. I have also derived immense profit from exchanges with most of my colleagues or visitors at the Centre dEtudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI), who have been kind enough to participate regularly in the multidisciplinary seminars on international relations I have organized since 1990. They are too numerous to mention by name, but they will easily be able to recognize themselves. I also owe much to all the Temps Mondial team which, thanks to its indulgence, allowed me to get to know foreign territories and issues, to temper my natural but immoderate tendency to globalize my arguments and analy ses. Finally I must acknowledge my debt to Rachel Bouyssou, a special but exacting reader of this manuscript, as well as all the administrative team at CERI who know the affection I have for them. Do I need to add that, without the inestimable faith of Claude Durand, this book would have never seen the light of day? Paris-Vandoeuvres

IntroductionThe divorce of meaning and power

The end of the Cold War did not bury just communism. With the same enthusiasm and in the same spirit it buried two centuries of Enlightenment, two centuries of which in the end the Cold War constituted only its most intense historic period, its most vigorous geostrategic expression and its most complete ideological form. Our feeling of an exceptionally strong change in world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall is coupled with our equally enormous inability to interpret it, to give it meaning. Though all the upheavals we experience daily can have several meanings, nothing indicates they have a meaning, if by meaning we imply the triple notion of foundation, unity and final goal: foundation meaning the basic principle on which a collective project depends; unity meaning that world images are collected into a coherent plan of the whole; and end or final goal, meaning projection towards an elsewhere that is deemed to be better. With the end of the Cold War these three principles were dislocated from each other. Market democracy apparently triumphed, yet seems itself more incapable than ever of defending the debate over its foundation. Political, economic and financial disorders fit less and less readily into a common explanatory framework, though they have never been so interdependent. Finally, the need to project ourselves into the future has never been so strong, while we have never been so poorly armed on the conceptual front to conceive this future, which leaves a wide gap between the historic rupture that confronts us and our difficulty in interpreting it. These gaps are at the origin of the world crisis of meaning. It is to the damaging divorce they cause between the play of meaning and the play of power that this book is dedicated. A world without the Enlightenment At the end of the Cold War period, which came to an end without nuclear catastrophe but also without flamboyance, the dismantling of ideological, political, social and identification reference points was seen to be as pronounced among the former disciples of the Great Night of the social revolution as among those who fought step by step against the irreversibility of this event. Not only were the morose aesthetes of New Man left without bearings but so too were those who shared with them the cult of Progressgenerally without knowing it,

2 INTRODUCTION

or in the belief they were fighting them. Progress was an identifiable course, a movement towards a better world, upon which movement, memory, identity and, above all, the promise of a world that was qualitatively superior were supposed to converge.1 The loss of reference points and the dispossession of a principal meaning affect far more than just the former communist societies or just the continent of Europe. Because the message of the Enlightenment and its communist metastases had swarmed forcefully and loudly to the four points of the compass, the loss of meaning that followed the end of the Cold War was planet-wide; the crisis of meaning was universal. Moreover this proposition could easily be developed further when we consider that, outside the walls of the West, the end of the Cold War was probably more traumatic and very much deeper. The doubts it induced, the chasms it exposed and the fragilities it uncovered were sited well upstream of the Cold War, and their mental upheavals were notas in the Westattenuated by the benefits of material prosperity. The meaning, which in the East as in the South compensated in some way for material misery, has gone. It has left these societies bare. It is perhaps not by chance that countries as different as India, Algeria and the former Yugoslavia have, to varying extents, found themselves blocked, dislocated or disintegrated, even though the states they represented were at the front of the world stage hardly more than a decade before. In hindsight, world politics constituted for them not only a source of diplomatic approval but also a powerful way to sublimate internal fragility. Politics defined identity, whereas todayand on a world scale toothe problematic search for identity exposes a very undecided political activity. In Russia it is becoming clearer by the day that the collapse of communism which we interpret as an absolute breakwas a less drastic rupture than the loss of empire. In effect, since the meaning of the Russian nation was built only in relationship to its empire, the deprivation of empire has led to a deprivation of meaning for the Russian nation.2 Put differently, if we want to examine the loss of meaning following the collapse of the USSR, we must almost automatically look back not only to the beginning of the Soviet revolution but certainly to the fifteenth century too, when the Grand Duchy of Muscovy was the nucleus of the future Russian empire. This example makes it easy to understand that the loss of meaning linked to the end of the Cold War can be ascribed not just to that event, but to the chain of events it set off. It shows how inadequate are the muddled references to return to nationalisma quick exit from the bipolar ice agefor understanding the current situation. We are dealing with historical situations that are totally new. In China, though the context is completely different, the loss of meaning that followed the de facto collapse of communism puts the link between meaning and Chinese power not where the communists put itthat is, in 1949but rather in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Western powers started the economic and cultural disembowelling of the Celestial Empire.3 This planetary machine, which goes back in time to well before the Cold War, offloading on its

INTRODUCTION 3

way all the heritage of the Enlightenment, has probably scarcely started work. The extension of the political decomposition process that we saw in action in the USSR and then in Eastern Europe, is accelerating even inside Russia and, more surreptitiously, reaching Western Europe (Belgium, Italy) and North America (Canada). A wide range of political actors are soliciting and reactivating collective memories everywhere in order to give meaning to their ambitions, whether sane or mad. However, if we consider the former Soviet Empire, only Georgia, Armenia and the three Baltic states can be categorized as nations in the proper sense of the term. The Ukraine is only partially a nation, while Byelorussia, Kazakhstan and the Islamic republics come close to national fictions. For these nations, it is easy to see that their strategy is not so much to stamp out the return to nationalism but to give meaning to a national lets live in our homeland, particularly difficult to define and to organize once the realizable assets of folklore identity are exhausted.4 That is why the growth of nationalisms is worrying. It is not just the political obnoxiousness of the themes they purvey, but the fundamental impossibility of satisfying them, of appeasing the passions of those who claim to have them. Because going back is impossible in an era of globalization, nationalisms tend to be becoming impossible to satisfy. Dissatisfied, they explore further each day the field of the infinitely small, exaggerating the value of the most minimal differences, even the most insignificant differences. The Yugoslav drama fits more within this context than that of the supposed cultural war. Until this force is matched with a project of meaning, it is very unlikely to die down or come to a halt. Yet the end of the Cold War started well. We saw an empire collapse and a Promethean ideology engulfed in no time at all and with a limited costin historical termsin human lives. Moreover this was absolutely the first time in the history of the international system that people had spoken of sketching out a new international orderas indispensable as improbablewithout this ordering being preceded by a major and brutal conflict between the great powers.5 It meant that the global ballet was no longer directed by the system of states alone, that the classic international system had given way to a world social system of imprecise contours and uncertain regulation. That is perhaps why, if the Cold War ended without military confrontation, it was less because the idea of peace had taken hold in the universal conscience than because the states, accustomed to settling the course of the world with cannon fire and diplomatic conferences, had run out of steam. But our growing uncertainties are not only about the architecture of world order, about the way in which things are going to happen. They refer to a more fundamental philosophical inquiry that can be summed up like this: is the crisis of meaning the crowning moment of the end of an issue of meaningwhich would let us assume we would eventually find a new oneor does it announce, more profoundly, the end of any issue of meaning, of any representation of our future that has a final goal?6

4 INTRODUCTION

No more centrality, no more final goals We noted earlier the gap between power and meaning. Perhaps that is the crucial point of the post Cold War. Our experience seems to be of an urgent, growing tension between, on the one hand, the projects of individuals, enterprises and nations in a space becoming globalized at an exceptionally rapid pace, and, on the other hand, the brutal death of what Koselleck calls the horizon of expectation, in other words that asymptotic line, that telos, which we try to attain and which we have been trying to attain since the Enlightenment.7 To put this in other terms, we are experiencing a real divorce between a pace of power that is intensifying and a meaning, which by becoming fragmented and no longer global, is flaking away, disintegrating and dispersing. As the conditions of entry to the path to power and staying on it become more difficult, the access route to global meaning is crumbling away. Following the death of the USSR no nation would today dare to take up except verballya risky bet on a new ideological transcendence. No state seems disposed to play the Timon (the leader), guiding us towards a new telos (final goal). Moreover, that is why the thesis of the unipolar world was and remains absurd, because the end of the Cold War tolled the bell for superpowers. We are well and truly without a Timon and deprived of a telos. There is no longer any Western centrality, even though Western modernity has never been so much present. Nor does collective action any longer have a final goal. This double absence (neither centrality nor final goal) poses a real challenge to the stability of the international system. Although the nation-states, traditional guardians of meaning over two centuries, have painfully lost authority under the hammer blows of globalization, they are far from the only ones to suffer from the end of the intoxication with collective meaning. Trade unions, churches, international associations and even multinationals are indisputably faced with the fragmentation of interests, feelings and interpretations. Even religions that wanted to take over the field of meaning left unoccupied by the collapse of secular ideologies have found their ambitions thwarted. In the West the normative and prescriptive character of the Christian message has come up against an individualism that regards prescription as an intrusion into private space.8 In the Islamic territory the claim of Islamists to synthesize meaning and power has faced major constraints. In making Islam a largely political fight, Islamists have desanctified religion by instrumentalizing it.9 Though we must acknowlede that Islamism is more a political, identification movement than a religious one, it is very tempting to compare it to communism, which it resembles in its totalitarian claims. It is distinct, however, on an essential point: it refuses to think concretely about modernism and does not put forward a project that might take on responsibility for it. Its strength remains its capacity to manipulate symbols accessible to all and thus to quench superficially the thirst for identification in Muslim societies.

INTRODUCTION 5

Unlike communism, which claimed to supersede capitalism, Islamism offers no horizon of meaning other than the rejection of modernity for Muslim societies. Nonetheless, it is nearer to fascism than to communism, if one accepts Robert Paxtons view that fascism is defined less in relation to an invariable theoretical model than to its practical capacity to play on the prowess of race, nation or community.10 Like fascism, Islamism combines three important characteristics: a totalitarian political claim, a global discourse about society in which the theme of exclusion is central, and a political and associational apparatus capable of taking under its wing social demands expressed by disadvantaged or underclass groups. But, like fascism, Islamism in power is a traitor to the social and moral rhetoric it claimed to incarnate. The example of Iran shows how the accession to power of an Islamic regime does not bring economic progress, a renewal of spirituality or a slowing down of individualization. It is hard to believe it could be different in Algeria.11 It is therefore too much to think Islamism could magically help Muslim societies overcome their identification crises. In this sense it might be thought that Islamic regimes are doomed to failure; which does not mean, however, that they will not grow in number or that they will not outlive their inevitable conflicts.12 It is simply to say that Islam will meet the same challenges and the same problems as other religions once it parades a claim to provide total, even totalitarian meaning. It is the fundamental reason why the thesis of the return of the religious is now inadequate for understanding world issues, including those in Islamic societies. The common basis for all these losses of meaning remains that of globalization. Yet this process, which we examine throughout the book, is soon revealed to be too vast and too unstable to be signposted easily or carved into new furrows. Because globalization has no virtue of prescriptioneven less of predictionbeyond market efficiency, it lends itself to all sorts of deviations that no actor can condemn as excessive or reprehensible. That is, globalization has only a vague family resemblance to the internationalism of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century, which corresponded to an aspiration born of painful memories and shared hope. People see globalization primarily as a constraint, which can be more or less rewarding (conquering the markets) or opportune (acquiring more easily some imported cultural goods), and only very rarely as hope. The great challenge of globalization thus stems from our difficulty in objectifying it, in interpreting it to ourselves, in investing ourselves in it personally, emotionally and collectively, other than from economic necessity. Globalization is a state; it is not a meaning. Moreover, no political, social or economic actor has volunteered an interpretation of it for us, by proposing a project that might help us experience it with serenity, enable us to integrate it into a collective project, to associate it with something positive. Globalization has thrown the state into confusion: the state has shown itself incapable of telling us if globalization constitutes something good, bad, dangerous or advantageous, even though the demand for meaning is very strong. The state has been reduced

6 INTRODUCTION

to formulating that trivial response of appeasement to which we are all reduced: it depends. In more formal terms, it could be said that globalization has largely dispossessed the state of its power for objectifying the social reality of the world. The state no longer reduces uncertainties. From a time when it used to try to make its meaning prevail over that of others, and to eliminate those who wanted to dispute its monopoly of meaning, the state has moved to a position in which it tries to preserve its residual power by subsuming some of its activities within the market game and by giving up certain arbitration functions that people, nevertheless, still expect it to do. In some cases it has reacted defensively, preferring to conserve its power, to the detriment of its legitimacy, by abandoning tasks it lacks the power to redefine. Globalization appears to be the first great historical process the modern state has not succeeded in objectifying, which means we cannot dissociate the crisis of the state from the crisis of meaning. It is as if this accelerated globalization, this uprooting, both territorial (loss of national reference points) and ideological (loss of final goal) were projecting us into a shapeless planetary space that no expectation could dominate. It is this space we shall call world time.13 World time is thus the time both of globalization and of the post Cold War, as if the two-bloc strategy, by sanctifying military force and national territory, had partly frozen or, at any rate, slowed down the progress of globalization.14 As actors in world time, we no longer try to move towards a goal, to cross the gap separating experience from expectation. We are constrained by the weight of necessity, though not that of a final goal, to move, to circulate and to communicate over a world space in which not only have expectations ceased to exist but, in addition, the field of experience is constantly reploughed by the speed with which our practices, our knowledge and our jobs become obsolescent. The gap that separated experience (what we have done) from expectation (what we aspire to), giving meaning to collective projects, no longer exists, as if our individual or collective projection in world timedominated by the principle of instantaneousnessmade even the notion of project out of date. Projection would contrast more and more with project as future does to becoming. Political actions no longer find their legitimacy in a vision of the future, but have been reduced to managing the ordinary present.15 Of course one could speculate that the disappearance of expectations would free creativity, favour diversity, stimulate inventiveness and enrich more generally the field of our experience. But it cannot be taken for granted that empiricism and gradualism will limit the profound doubt that social actors harbour about the meaning of their action. It cannot be taken for granted that social do-it-yourself, towards which we are moving for want of anything better, can dispense societies from a paradigm of transformation, especially when they all show a deep need for change and renewal. Thus the crisis of meaning is expressed by this disquieting gap between the expectation of change (we must start again on new foundations) and the

INTRODUCTION 7

ideological discredit of grand schemes for social transformation with the end of the Cold War (no-one believes in grand ideas any more). We can therefore state immediately that the central question posed by the end of telos, by the end of the grand narratives (Lyotard) and by the uninspiring declaration of a low ideological tide (Morin) is very unlikely to condemn us to live in a world of great ennui, as Schopenhauer thought in a different era. On the contrary, individuals, businesses and states are required daily and almost automatically to project themselves towards the future and into the world. The real question is more about how we shall manage to project ourselves in this involuntary way into globality, when we do not have an end in view or images of the world (Heidegger) in our heads.16 The centres of power no longer claim to provide meaning What makes the decoupling of meaning and power so relevant today is primarily the fact that it concerns us all. It affects the societies of the North as much as those of the South, individuals and companies as much as states. Under one hat or another we are all obliged to project ourselves into the future in order to preserve, in a way, our pasts. In industrial societies, individuals discover increasingly that the overall prosperity of their nation is no more a guarantor of their personal economic security than economic growth assures them of a guaranteed job. There is no better social illustration of the divorce between power and meaning. Our subjective representation of powerequated to success but also to stability is less and less meaningful in our own eyes. Of course, the phenomena of declassing and exclusion do not have a direct causal relationship with globalization or with the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, world timemeaning the intersection of globalization and the end of the Cold Warexacerbates what this declassing represents. First, globalization gives rise in all professionsfrom customs officers to the golden boys of the City to a general feeling of social precariousness. Second, because the loss of the end goal has taken with it the social and political promise of a better future, guaranteed by the welfare state or through battles fought according to stable, codified rules (militancy, strikes, elections),17 it is up to individuals to take on responsibility for a double defection: that of the protector state and that of the promised time, to insure against their exclusion. To achieve that they have to participate constantly, actively and rapidly in world time by learning foreign languages, integrating themselves into international professional networks and acquiring new techniques. But there is no indication that this self-imposed projection will necessarily result in the definition of a project. In the crucial area of savings, the cracks in the welfare state do not automatically lead to individuals substituting for the state. In other words, the states incapacity to read and foretell the future for their citizens, for instance through social security policies, does not immediately lead those citizens to make up for the deficiency, either directly or totally. On the contrary, the forces of financial globalization lead

8 INTRODUCTION

savers to manage the fruits of their labour in a volatile way, by looking for highrisk, optimal investment rather than accepting the prospect of a minimal investment income over the long term.18 As it happens, globalization is widening the field of action of individuals (investing money on the world scale), but simultaneously constraining their horizon to short-term management. Here again, the projection of individuals into the future and into the world is far from helping define a project, because there is a disconnection between projection in space and projection in time. Urgency or the active negation of utopia The decoupling of meaning and power is also experienced by companies, even when they are at the forefront of globalization and involved in the monopolistic conquest of new markets (in search of power). Two changes attest to this. The first derives from the fact that globalization is no longer the privilege of an aristocracy of pioneer firms, but a mass process.19 Globalization is no longer a courageous epic but a universal constraint. Thus even the concept of a multinational, object of so much fine taxonomic argument in the last twenty years, is faced today with a serious loss of meaning. The second change results from the modification to the meaning of globalization. In the past, projection to the international scale was experienced as the outcome of a smooth process of maturing at home. Promotion to the international plane was achieved at the end of an apprenticeship duly carried out at the national plane. Companies were given an international blessing on the basis of their national experience. They conformed to a scenario, they followed the signposts. Economic internationalization occurred first through exporting their products, then by controlling the foreign distribution networks for these products, and finally by physical location beyond their own borders. Nowadays, this steady route and predictability, for companies as for other actors in the international system, are being called into question. To survive, the company must from the start think about itself in an international context by identifying its trump cardsits comparative advantagesby warding off its enemies using the tactic of alliance formation and, especially, by acting as rapidly as possible so as to be ahead of its competitors. Global projection and rapid execution have become the basic elements of economic competition, even if choosing between national and global strategies has been shown to be difficult and complicated to think about and carry through.20 Two-thirds of alliances between firms today are stimulated by the imperatives of conquering wider markets (space) or reducing the interval between innovation of a product and its commercialization (time).21 But, even here, this dual strategy enlightens us more about the paths of power than about its goals. As economic globalization intensifies it tends for several reasons to become less transparent. The first stems from the fact that the processglobalization seems permanently ahead of its interpretation. The representation of the reality is

INTRODUCTION 9

in perpetual motion, lagging behind the reality itself. In other words, even businesses, which one might consider to be the favoured carriers of the meaning of globalization, are not capable of responding to this expectation. Businesses are as much the creatures of technological change, which is the motor of globalization, as they are its creators. When they invent products whose expectation of life turns out to be shorter than the time necessary to invent them, firms only appear to be making deliberate choices. But this escalation of the bidding caused by the compression of time is guided less by an end goal than by the need to anticipate the competition.22 The close link between loss of meaning and acceleration of the pace of change is reflected even more strongly in financial globalization. Financial markets, by the way they are constructed, integrate equally well interest rate movements, economic performance, political choices and even rumours. Yet the confusion between objective and subjective, the short term and the long term, is not by nature helpful for constructing durable collective representations of globalization. Moreover, this process does not lend itself to a stable interpretation: an economy reputed to be strong when the markets open can find itself perceived as weak or vulnerable by the time they close. Even the notion of a strong currency is devitalized or devalued by the logic of globalization; either because the strong currency in reality needs to be protected by high interest rates to maintain its parity and reputation (the case of the German mark; its strength is no longer self-evident); or because strong currency as an idea tends to be a competitive handicap or paid for at high social cost (the French currency demonstrated this tendency when merely the idea of a strong franc was becoming internalized in French societyas was the case with nuclear deterrence). Finally, the acceleration of the circulation of nonmaterial wealth is accompanied by what one could call a certain social viscosity. In other words, the faster the wealth circulates, the fewer the actors involved in these transactions. Thus all the actors in the global social game project themselves into the future not to defend a project but to prevent their exclusion from an anonymous game. There is no longer any distance between what one does and what one aspires to. This confusion is of great concern because it appears to give states authority to be free of political perspectiveas expressed most tragically in the Yugoslavian crisis. The end of utopia has brought the sanctification of emergency, elevating it into a central political category. Thus our societies claim that the urgency of problems forbids them from reflecting on a project, while in fact it is their total absence of perspective that makes them slaves of emergencies. Emergency does not constitute the first stage of a project of meaning: it represents its active negation.

10 INTRODUCTION

The loss of a symbolic representation of our future Of course, our perception that time is accelerating is probably not new, and therefore the gap in meaning and power perhaps represents a recurrent, even permanent problem. Sociology has helped us recognize the existence of social times with differentiated rhythms, and that, in a certain way, the divorce of meaning and power is a penalty for the time-lag between our social, cultural and historical representations of reality and the reality itself.23 That being so, two realities reinforce the tension and the lasting divorce between power and meaning. At the start of the twentieth century, the birth of universal time and the progressive universalization of the telephone and car led to a collective perception of the acceleration of time and a necessary renegotiation of the relationship between people and space. We then saw a parallel development in literature, the arts, music and linguistics of modernist choices that bolstered the promise of progress and the rational planning of the ideal social order that would result from it.24 In other words, the accelerated projection towards the future was backed up by a teleological promise that both made it more supportable and, for some, really aroused their enthusiasm.25 Today there are no celebrations over the losses of meaning that followed the end of the Cold War and the acceleration of globalization.26 On the contrary, wherever these phenomena are found the social actors will harbour deep doubts about their capacity for action, in part because they no longer have a global perspective into which they can slot their present and future choices, in part because the fragmentation of reality appears so great they feel they have no grasp on it, no lever by which to actleading to the strong appeal of the theme of emptiness and impotence we find in literature and television documentaries. Under these conditions it is easy to understand that appeals to pragmatism, realism and empiricism are useless for tackling the crisis of meaning; on the contrary they help to intensify it, since the collective lack we suffer derives from the absence of a symbolic representation of our destiny. The crisis of meaning is translated into an unhappy gap between concept and reality, whereas the characteristic of a collective project is precisely to link a global and necessarily abstract representation of the world and of objects to tangible realities. When in the 1960s Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber expressed alarm, in Le Dfi amricain, about the arrival in force of American multinational firms in Europe, and about Europe being dispossessed of its politics, economy and identity, he gave meaning to his prophecy by assigning it a kind of adversaryAmerica and a projectAmerican liberalism.27 Meaning and power were not only identified but fundamentally coupled together. The phenomenon of multinationals belonged, one could say, to a choice of society, a political game that could incorporate other political contests, that fed on other partisan emotions. To refuse American multinationals had a triple meaning: on the

INTRODUCTION 11

political front (defence against encroachment of sovereignty), on the ideological front (rejection of American liberalism), and on the cultural front (slowing down the Americanization of society). Today this tripartite grouping is less than certain. The spread of the multinational phenomenon has stripped it of all political content and emotional force. As for identifying this process with a country, the fluid, intangible play of fusions and acquisitions makes it useless. Neo-liberal theory, which might have served as a conceptual matrix for economic and financial globalization, threw in the towel in its turn. It showed itself unsuitable for understanding and interpreting the phenomenon of globalization. The tools of analysis it possessed for defending and promoting the market economy (a defined territory, stable factors of production, national currency, a workforce that did not cross frontiers, comparative advantages fairly insensitive to changes over time) no longer withstood the reality of a world in which technological change ignored the frontiers of time and space.28 The divorce of meaning and power has extended to the economic field, a field that invades our lives and imprints its rhythm on our experiences. It is as if meaning was hidden even where we were sure we would find it. But perhaps it is a paradox only in appearance. If liberal theories were made suddenly obsolete by the scale of the globalization phenomenon, whereas the end of the Cold War should logically have put them on a pedestal, it is probably because they and their anti-liberal homologuesthough with some nuancesdrew their resources from a common well, and ordered their weaponry from the same arsenals, under the illuminated sign of linear Progress commanded by the nation-states. The Enlightenment also left its mark here.29 We should not therefore be surprised to see that all businesses today are subject to the imperative of changing their interpretive paradigms, of defining a new identityin the same way as individuals and stateseven though the logic of the market and the political legitimacy of business have never been so greatly extolled. It is as if economicssupreme stage of powerhas not managed to satisfy itself or to ensure its normative hegemony over the ensemble of representations of society.30 The centres of powerwhether states, companies or individualscan no longer offer meaning to us. It is really here that the major difficulty exists in organizing the post Cold War. Though all actors in the international system are facing, not without difficulty, the crisis of meaning, none has aspired to reconstruct a global meaning, to erect a flashing beacon behind which other actors could line up. It is true that power games, political rivalries and the quests for prestige are unlikely to disappear from the world social scene. But intensifying them would not generate a collective meaning. Powerunderstood in its widest senseis conceived and experienced less and less as a process of taking over responsibilities, and more as a game of avoidance: avoidance of collective engagement by individuals, avoidance of social responsibilities by companies, avoidance of planetary responsibilities by states. Social actors avoid taking on their own responsibilities or some responsibilities because, in the absence of a project of meaning,

12 INTRODUCTION

responsibilities are measured only in cost terms. This tactic of avoidance, which allows the debate on foundations to be evaded, is leading Western societies to feed on the theme of the unknown, because there really is a drying-up of references that could be the basis for constructing a new social or global order. This situation has three consequences: the first is to weaken Western democratic societies. They are no longer in a position to debate their founding principles and thus their legitimacy, and by the same token find it difficult in the international sphere to engage in debate with those in Asia or in the Muslim world who pose a clear challenge to the theme of democratic globalization. The second consequence of this crisis of meaning is to think about the transmission of identities and values in terms that are narrow, even reactionary, as though those deploying going back themes (religion, nationalism, ethnicity) knew that going back would not be so easy to organize once they were in contact with the complexity of the reality or the constraints of power. Finally, the difficulty in positioning ourselves in relation to a strong reference point has led to a sort of immobility, of suspicion at any encounter with the idea of transformation, as if the idea of transformation and, especially, social transformation (already disqualified by the death of communism) appeared to contradict the imperative of transmitting identity. Transmission (of identities) and transformation (of societies) were thought and lived in antinomic terms, which goes a long way to explaining why the political forces that traditionally organized around the fight for social transformation found themselves so ill at ease in confronting problems of identity. The divorce of meaning and power seems set to continue.

1 The meaning of the Cold War

The more the Cold War fades into the distance, the more we shall be obliged to think of it, re-read it and reinterpret it not only geopolitically but also in cultural terms. We shall discoverdoubtless risking over-rationalization of the past how original this moment in history was in the way it was able, over an exceptionally long period, to reorder the main world issues around a battle for the appropriation of meaning. Within half a century the Cold War managed to encompass very large-scale political, economic, social and cultural transformations: the decolonization of the Third World, the growth in economic power of Japan and Germany, the Sino-Soviet split, and the proliferation of bloody regional conflicts. It also managed to incorporate economic and sociological realities as fundamental as the decline of the industrialization strategy to the advantage of the service sector, the erosion of the Keynesian model, the blossoming of individualist values, the development of mass culture and the subsequent atomization of demands.1 A tragic system But this moment in history was not restricted to channelling the shifts in world power or conscientiously fanning regional conflicts. It enabled the pursuit, strengthening and perhaps completion of the long, slow, linear process of the historical transfer of meaning that, over the centuries, had fixed itself in succession on religion, nationalism and finally ideology, that great mythogenous factor of the twentieth century.2 Indeed, it managed to combine two absolutes: meaning, symbolized by the ideological combat between two universal and competing value-systems; and power, carried by the absolute weapon, the nuclear bomb. Between 1917 and 1945, all the seeds of an ideological confronta tion had unquestionably been sown. At the same time as the Bolsheviks were seizing the Winter Palace, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, was already drafting the contours of a new order that could raise aloft the flag of democracy in the world.3 But the conflict taking shape still lacked a geopolitical structure that could put it into practice and give it dramatic intensity.

14 THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR

American power was just emerging, while Russia had been bled white. The rivalry between the two continental empires, forecast by de Tocqueville long before the Russian Revolution, was showing only its first symptoms. Their confrontation did not yet have a large enough battleground or adequate symbolism. Conversely, the East-West conflict died down after 1989 despite the continued presence of some impressive nuclear arsenals because, once the use of these weapons was no longer linked to a precise doctrine of deployment, as it had been during the Cold War, it was difficult to make them real instruments of power. It is as if the absolute weapon needed an absolute truth, and therefore an absolute meaning, for its potential use to be felt as legitimate or, at least, less intolerable, as though military power required an end to make sense. Power is nothing when it has lost meaning. The historic originality of the Cold War surely derives from the totally new capacity acquired by two Timons (supreme leaders) to provide themselves with the most modern weapons of mass destruction while simultaneously justifying their planetary confrontation with a teleological perspective. It was the meeting point of mass production, mass culture and weapons of mass destruction.4 Consequently, it could be seen as the most complete and most formalized attempt to add meaning to power, to synthesize world order. This interlinking had the simultaneous effects of magnifying the confrontation and dramatizing what was at stake. By magnifying we mean loading it with a strong emotional content, making it a subjective experience, once the rivalry between two supreme powers started to look less like a private fight between two proud, narrow nationalisms and more like testing out two competing universalisms that each offered the key to modernity. At the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959, at the height of the Cold War, there was a fairly lively exchange of views between a mischievous Khrushchev and Vice-President Nixon, as he then was, on the comparative merits of American and Russian kitchens. The anecdote demonstrates a strong symbolism that the Soviet Unions subsequent economic setbacks led us to forget: both systems claimed to be bringing modernity to every sphere, including urban planning and interior design.5 Until the end of the 1960s the Soviet challenge seemed to the West to be not just military but global. The USSRs ability for more than twenty years to deliver a rate of economic growth twice that of the United States fuelled a fear that it was catching up, a fear encouraged by Khrushchevs propaganda.6 This fear was bolstered by the USSRs early breakthrough in space and by the perception however faint and understated in the Westof the greater suitability of the Soviet modelsturdy and exportable, ready to useto the needs of deprived and politically fragile societies in the emerging Third World. Because Sovietism offered a global meaning, a synthesized representation of the world and its objectives, liberalism was for a long time required to produce a symmetrical counter-discourse, to try to export Locke to check Marx.7

THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR 15

Magnified by the global character of what was at stake, the Cold War was turned into a drama by the rigidity of the game of nuclear deterrence, which left armed confrontation little room for manoeuvre between permanent tension and nuclear fire. It is true that for reasons linked to the evolution of military technology and cyclical variations in East-West relationships, the dramatic representations of the Cold War were not always the same. At the end of the 1960s the relative dtente of Soviet-American relations led to less dogmatic interpretations of the Soviet system, while the development of precision weapons helped raise the deterrence threshold.8 But it is striking that from the late 1970s Western representations of the totalitarian system generally went back to what they had been in 1947, giving in retrospect an appearance of a relatively homogeneous moment, of a block.9 The dramatization of the conflict because of the nuclear factor helped reinforce the political and indeed social cohesion of each block, most curiously in the pluralist Western camp. Because nothing had been permanently decided, mobilization was obligatory. Because the balance could always tip either way, moral rearmament remained on the agenda. From this point of view the Cold War well and truly constituted a tragic system in Steiners sense, that is, a drama that had an assigned end which did not exclude the possibility of a fall or a collapse. Since the French Revolution, he wrote in Les Antigones, all the great teleological systems have been tragic systems, for they are all metaphors for the premise of the fall.10 Far from harming the cohesion of the block or group, the premise of the fall justified permanent tension, continual mobilization, and the repression of major domestic opposition. This dialectic was consubstantial with the communist system, until the end of Stalinism at any rate. But, at a lower level that respected pluralism, it was also a characteristic of Western societies. During those years the United States did not escape the development of a culture of social stability, even of cultural conformity that Elaine Tyler May was right to call internal containment.11 Thus there was within each camp a constant, fluid circulation between meaning and power. They fed off and reinforced each other, accentuating the effect of global symmetry between the blocks. This linkage of meaning and power was expressed in a variety of ways, as shown below. Meaning as a source of power The will and capacity of the two Timons to provide meaning indisputably added to their respective power. To provide meaning was to convey explicitly their claims to be able to decode, advance and disseminateto decode the world; to advance beyond present reality, neither halting nor resting (Hegel), seeking an end that is deemed better; and to disseminate it to others, not because of plain, simple national ambition, but because of a claim to universalism. To provide meaning is fundamentally to make the world a problem to be studiedas


Edgar Morin put it so well in relation to Europeand to advertise a claim to universal validity (Habermas).12 It also challenges the disjunction between the plan for oneself and the plan for others, the Good for oneself and the Good for others. The Cold War was thus a sort of teleological issue superimposed on a geopolitical structure. To take Isaiah Berlins definition of teleology, it was a framework within which everythingor almost everythingwas to be understood and described. In particular, inexplicable events did not result from shortcomings in the framework posited, but from our inability to discover the real purpose of those events.13 Thus, if we had misguidedly interpreted a minor ethnic convulsion in Africa as an exclusively endogenous phenomenon, we would be pitied and called to order for not having grasped or appreciated the wider ramificationswhether symbolic (ideology) or material (arms consignments)that linked these microconflicts to megahistory. In the same way that the French Revolution opened the door to the historicization of the Individual, the Cold War historicized the young nation-states, with all the manipulations this appropriation made possible. The claim to offer meaning generated as a reflex action a strong demand for meaning, which quite naturally helped the USSR and America to hoist themselves even higher up the ladder of nations. This effect was particularly true of the USSR and, to a smaller extent, of Maoist China. In fact the Soviet model of the absolute state was very attractive to Third World regimes because it not only offered practical recipes for keeping power, but also gave it legitimacy, placing it within a larger, global context.14 The Cold War was thus able to quench the thirst for universalism in the most deprived states. The Somalia of the 1970s, which so unexpectedly obliged both Russians and Americans to court it, had a different appearance from the Somalia of 1992 that greeted American troops, who opened the road to humanitarian aid. It is not a total coincidence that the regime of Siad Barre and the Somalian state foundered in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. In the name of meaning, and because of their respective strength, East and West simultaneously laid out a planetary system of meanings, according to Raymond Boudons definition of ideology: rallying signals and identification symbols.15 These signals and symbols signposted a global ideological market in which political models fully competed but increased their attractiveness by a recourse to ideological dumping.16 In fact, neither East not West, during forty years of Cold War, batted an eyelid at the actual use their allies made of their modelsexcept in Europe. In what was the Third World, the Russians were primarily concerned with keeping up appearances, while the Americans encouraged democratic forces only sporadically. Even in the economic sphere, the use made of the market economy label was never seriously regulated including in Southeast Asia.17 We need to remind ourselves of these salient facts precisely because the end of the Cold War brought about the disappearance of this ideological competition and, consequently, of political models that had not only enabled fragile states to


find their place in the world, but also promoted their internal political integration through this access to the universal. It is probably not by chance that the countries or states now tearing themselves apart (India, Algeria), or fragmenting (Yugoslavia) were in the 1960s and 1970s champions of non-alignment; in other words, of the instrumentalization of the East-West conflict. At that time a purely geostrategic interpretation could be put on that game: small countries were increasing their room for manoeuvre by playing and replaying on the active rivalry between the two camps. With hind-sight, this diplomatic posture can be seen to have exercised what was perhaps an even more vital political function: this projection into the planetary game was a source of internal political cohesion because it allowed the state a central role.18 The equalizing power of meaning By supplementing the power of states, meaning exerted a formidable equalizing force on this very power. In other words, meaning constituted an exceptionally good resource for the group of international actors who compensated for their handicaps by manipulating symbols exposed by the Cold War. This effect was very valuable for the Third World, as we have just seen. But, even more fundamentally, it was the USSR that derived the most decisive advantage. Because the USSR was geographically impressive, militarily threatening and ideologically persuasive, it managed fairly quickly to create an almost perfect symmetry between the two camps, even though economically American power was twice as large as that of the USSR.19 It was meaning especially that made a power of the USSR, in the style of Hegels Reason, by producing the (political) circumstances for its own fulfilment.20 France, through the double-game of its nuclear weapons and claim to universality, was to be one of the biggest users during the Cold War of the resource of meaningto enhance its power and conceal the weaknesses of that power. It not only postulated the theory of the equalizing power of the atom that the possession of nuclear weapons, even in small quantities, is sufficient to dissuade the enemy from attackingbut also the theory of what could be called by analogy, the equalizing power of meaning: that asserting your will and propounding a message to others is sufficient to be on equal terms with the great. This over-valuation of meaning gave rise to a typically French dialectic between role and rank, analysed so well by Alfred Grosser. This specialization in what Valry called the sense of the universal led to a sort of over-development of rank compared with role, a supercilious and narcissistic fixation on a global order of precedence. The important thing was no longer so much the role, that is, the achievement of French objectives, as the way it portrayed its place in the world and the image it presented to others. The essential was the rank: rank as proclaimed rather than rank as acknowledged by the outside world.21 The Cold War therefore dramatized international relations by conceding an essential place to the posturing of state actors. For this reason, though humanitarian action


appears to be a new product of the post-Cold War period, its intensive, even intemperate, use by France was set within an action plan that systematically exploited its available resources of meaning to make up for the weaknesses in its power. America during the Cold War was in a very different situation from the USSR, France and the Third World, in that it had possessed considerable power at the end of the Second World War. Therefore it cannot be argued that its claim to provide meaning was to compensate for a deficit of power. That said, the Cold War and the ideological rationale that supported it reinforced the internal cohesion of American society and, notably, conferred prerogatives on the federal government it would have otherwise not have acquired. Until the Second World War, as Richard du Boff points out, the lower-tier authorities (the federal states and local councils) spent between them two to three times as much as the federal government. Federal expenditure then increased steadily so that in the 1950s and 1960s it was higher than that of the states.22 Du Boff adds that it was the military budget, and thus the Cold War, that caused federal government to expand, because it represented four-fifths of federal government purchases. Federal expenditureas a percentage of GNPwent from 18.8 per cent in 1940 to 26 per cent between 1955 and 1959, and reached 34 per cent in 1984, on the eve of Gorbachevs arrival in power.23 The Cold War provoked not just a reinforcement of the role of federal governmentin a country historically reluctant to deploy government actionbut, more fundamentally, a legitimation of its action. Thus Cold War imperatives hastened the advent of a sort of military Keynesianism that not only had an impact on the whole of the economic machine, but also legitimated government economic intervention in reducing regional inequalities, through the placing of military orders in zones that were economically backward or hit by unemployment.24 Certainly it would be too much to see this legitimation of the state just as a mechanistic consequence of the Cold War. The duty laid on the state to encourage economic growth and full employment owes much to the penetration of Keynesian ideas.25 But it would be difficult not to link the ideological triumph of Keynesianism to the rise in social aspirations in Western countries brought about by ideological pressure, direct or indirect, from the Soviet Union: direct in that the politico-ideological threat of the USSR obliged Western governments to reinforce the social fabric of their societies; indirect through the pressure exerted in numerous European countries by communist parties and their trade-union appendages. In other words, by osmosis as much as from necessity, the American federal government played a central role during the build-up of American power during the Cold War and its projection in the world. Even in this reputedly liberal country, the state played its full part in ensuring the coherence of meaning and power.26


The fundamental origins of the Cold War What gave the Cold War so much coherence was its capacity, as a teleological system, to make not only the contemporary world but also its history objects of debate. In hindsight it seems to have succeeded in compactingwhile at the same time siftingthe successive strata of what is called the philosophy of History. Through debates on the comparative merits of free enterprise and the socialization of the means of production, and on the relevance of Soviet or American models to deprived countries, the great issues of the philosophy of History acquired a realist political expression, an intelligibility that went beyond philosophy circles and the geographic boundaries of the West, a practical and political translation to an horizon of meaning. It seemed possible to reduce the philosophical incompatibility between theodicy and praxis, between theory and practice.27 With the emergence of two superpowers saturated with universalism and animated by what Leibniz called consequential willin other words, the ambition to do everything at the same timeissues in the philosophy of History gave at times the impression of interacting with those of contemporary history.28 For example, to call yourself progressive in the 1960s not only had more or less the same political significance in Paris and Conakry but, moreover, referred back to a clearly identifiable past, that of the Enlightenment. Through mechanisms for joining or identifying, a meaning could be found immediately for individual or collective action. The reserves of meaning were available, and it was convenient to capture them to make use of them. And this tactic suited individuals and social movements as well as states. Its universal application did not lead always to rejecting specificities or internal dynamics, but to rebutting the idea that these things could in one way or another escape the Cold War. The vitality of the latter as a teleological-strategic system resided less in its capacity to block peoples inventiveness, the profusion of social practices or the diversity of states self-interest than in its aptitude for binding them into a system of meaning. Thus it conformed to the definition of Leibnizs monad by Ernst Cassirer: The monad is not an aggregate but a dynamic whole, which can manifest itself only in profusionand which, while differentiating itself infinitely in the expressions of its force, is preserved as a centre of unique, living force the individual cannot be thought about in general or perceived clearly or indistinctly except by this reference and connection to the universal. In sum the individual cannot be conceived of other than by the way in which it is, so to speak, bounded by the universal.29 This identification of contemporary history with History, this adherence to a teleological representation of the world, does not stem from ideology alone, but also, fundamentally, from the fact that it was backed by continuous, and what might be called universal, material progress at an unheard-of pace. The Cold War years were years of exceptional growth in West and East but also in the Third World. The strong and widespread growth in which the Cold War bathed


made the teleological promise credible, giving it a tangible character. There was thus every reason to adhere to the meaning proposed by the great ideological systems, once they were given a concrete, material significance by a continual rise in the standard of living. Levinas wrote that, with Hegel, concepts took to the streets. Before him, Goethe said to Valmy that, with the birth of the nation-state cemented by conscription, History became the affair of John Brown, that is, of everyone. With the Cold War it could be considered that the philosophy of History came to share the ordinary business of nation-states, even if this popularization opened by the French Revolution, pursued by the Russian Revolution and completed by the decolonization of the Third World led inexorably, under the fire of political action and diplomatic jousting, to converting concepts into bibles, and theoretical arguments into indigestible off-the-peg thoughts.30 Cassirer wrote of Enlightenment thought that it was characterized in the eighteenth century by its capacity to reduce the complex to the simple, and diversity to a fundamental identity.31 The Cold War incontestably inherited this system of interpretations by making it seem that the reductionism in which it was engaged was not an intolerable simplification but rather a quick way to the Universal and to History on the march. Certainly there never was one single philosophy of History if that means thinking of History as the answer to questions that humanity asks itself, elevating the relative to the absolute.32 From St Augustine to Marx, by way of Vico, Herder, Lessing, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, attitudes to sense, telos and ultimate ends have been interpreted and systematized according to widely different methods and rhythms. Marxism sought to invert the Hegelian view. Hegel opposed Kant. Kant was severely critical of Herder, who, in turn, did not spare Turgot or Voltaire.33 Along the same lines, Luc Ferry emphasized that in reality we had to wait for the French Revolution before the philosophy of History came to value practice as an instrument for transforming the world. And it was with SaintSimonism and Marxism that historical reality was thought not only to be completely rational, but also perfectly able to be grasped by one or more conscious wills.34 Over the centuries there had been a long, slow, tactical transfer of global meaning, which churches and states appropriated to themselves as a basis for power or domination. Of course, this transfer of meaning can seem purely metaphorical, and what we have seen may be less a transfer of meaning than a transfer of images. But was not the secularization of philosophy, religious in origin, also a substitution of images, a slippage from the perfectus of the Church towards the secular progressus, as Koselleck noted?35 Was not the production of images, allegories and symbols also one source of the production of meaning for individuals, for societies and for international society? In contrast, is not the shortage of world images today a major source of the loss of meaning in the post-Cold War period? On this hypothesis, the Cold War is characterized both by the effectiveness of these Timons on the diplomatic-strategic front and


by its ability to root its teleological projection in history. In other terms, it enabled the actors to formulate a project which fed off images rooted in the past but was also very easily brought up to date. The present, the living experience, ensured a strong, natural liaison between a rooted past and an idealized future. But that does not mean the Cold War actors mechanically or deliberately constructed world images extracted beforehand from the stock of the philosophy of History, but rather that certain symbols were even stronger because they were inscribed in a continuum whose origins went back to sources in the philosophy of History Though the Cold War was a conflict, it was, too, a system of symbols common to the two blocks and inherited from the ideology of Progress. Thus in the symbolism of the Cold War we find images whose origins go back to the founder of the philosophy of History: Saint Augustine. The strongest image is without question that of Progress, of which the Greeks were not conscious. The same Father of the Church gave History responsibility for time, which is given a meaning, a value and a direction.36 With Augustinianism, history was for the first time made temporal It did not stop being that until the end of the Cold War. By corollary, Augustinianism introduced too the essential notion of a route, of progress between a point of departure and a point of arrival. The civitas humana, the earthly state, was only a preparation for a superior state, the true reality which is the city of God, located beyond time.37 In Saint Augustine we find, as later in Hegel, an end of History. But in Saint Augustines eyes it signals the triumph of God.38 Thus in his work there is the central notion of expectation, turning the future into the present and giving an essential place to becoming.39 To say expectation is necessarily to say telos, even if the transcendence it craves is exclusively religious and implies human passivity. There is thus in political Augustinianismsummarized here extremely briefly the idea of time oriented in a progressive sense, with a before and an after, during whose course the individual progresses in knowledge, a knowledge which will not be revealed, but discovered gradually in successive stages.40 Time has a value and a cumulative meaning, in contrast to Plato, for example, for whom time created nothing because it was all but forgotten.41 This idea of progress was deemed all the more resonant because it had a counterpart: the fall. The metaphorization of the premise of the fallmentioned earlier in reference to the modern ideological systems deriving from the French Revolutionwas clearly present in Augustinianism. The strength of this premise and its retranscription in modern ideologies was that it was forged on the basis of a binary principle of opposition between good and evil, in which the opposing city struggles with the City of God. History is not a triumphal ode, which step by step leads us toward the promised horizon. To be able to think this complex reality we need to be given a polyphonic image: two concurrent themes are superimposed at all times, intercrossing and vying with each other: yes, there really is the city


of God building itself little by little but its progress is achieved through a thousand struggles, persecutions, difficulties without number.42 To this binary principlewhich we find secularized again in the great ideological and political combats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesthe Enlightenment added the principle of coherence, of the synthesis of reality and meaning.43 The Cold Warfirst and only great polarization of modern History thus did no more than transfer these contributions to the strategy of conflict to the field of inter-state relations. The aesthetic of the Cold War We should add a connected fact that stems from the common bases of the two opposing systems, and their shared need for an end. A modernity incarnated by the state was, as noted earlier, behind East and West. Because of its pluralism the West was able to go through an evolution in the idea of modernity whether sociologically, culturally or economically. It entered postmodernity even before the Cold War was complete. During the course of this period the social and cultural changes of the West were considerable. The East stayed in a fixed state of modernity, a prisoner of its monolithic nature. Material forms or customs which the West long ago thought outmoded seem still to be there in the East, petrified by communism. But, setting aside this essential difference, it is evident that both East and West fully adhered to the theme of Progress expressed in the blind cult of productivity called Fordism, and its corollary, Taylorism.44 When the father of the automobile, Taylor, asserted at the beginning of the twentieth century: In the past, man came first; in the future, it will be the system which arrives first,45 the jubilation that such a proposition caused among the Bolsheviks can easily be imagined, as they discovered the advantages of instrumentalizing this model in two stages. First, they carefully removed any reference to the pluralist American system, thus decoupling democracy and technology. Second, they used it in a typically Russian context to militarize production and discipline citizens. Gramsci was not fooled, even in the depths of his prison. He gave a definition to Fordism that could, word for word, be given to Sovietism: Creating a new type of worker, a new man, was the greatest collective effort ever undertaken, at an unparalleled speed and with an awareness of the objectives previously unknown in History.46 Over the years and decades, the system was developed, refined and propagated. It experienced its apogee in the two decades after the Second World War, that is, at the height of the Cold War. Far from being treated as a simple system of production, Fordism was exalted as a true way of life founded on mass production and consumption. David Harvey, in some excellent pages on this topic, noted that Fordism also created, in East and West alike, a certain art form that synthesized modernity, mass and


authority, such as Le Corbusier expressedto the point of caricaturein his architecture. Even though Le Corbusiers career did not of course coincide with the Cold War, he symbolized in effect the family look, the intermingling demonstrated in the creations of East and West. He expressed a sort of aesthetics of telos, dominated by the ideas of centrality, exemplariness, social distribution, a desire for collective transformation, a permanent alliance of mass and meanings, of meaning and power. In his work could be seen a claim to integrate within a single project experience and expectation, ideas and procedures, practical responses and aspiration to a sort of symbolic elevation. The famous need for a tower has resisted the end of the Cold War, as shown by the construction at La Dfense of a new tower with aspects of Babel and in colours that dissolve into the depths of the sky. All translation of architectural innovation derives from public commissions, in other words, from the state. Only the state seems sufficiently strong, financially and symbolically, to give meaning to mass civilization. Architecture is a voluntarist representation, a transposition of production norms and their constraints into living space. It must be a sprig of the old town at the same time as it brings it air, light and space, and it expresses a fascination for progress, mechanical things and rationalism.47 This voluntarism goes further because it talks of teaching the inhabitants to inhabit.48 Architecture wants to involve people and involve itself in their goals without conceding one ounce of the power it has to lay down norms, to present the Truth. To provide meaning it has to be simplified, pared down so that everyone can understand it, and at the same time exhibitionist to answer the need for prestige, for radiating statist symbols. Architecture has no purpose except as part of a preconceived view of Progress. The ville radieuse, as imagined by Le Corbusier, expressed this ambition, an ambition fully shared by Russian architects before and during the Cold War. Finally, behind the absolute quest for modernity comes the need for edification. Architecture aspires to change lives, to make concrete a promise, to overcome confusion and chaos.49 The closeness of the models of East and West is expressed best and most clearly in France, because its internalization of the revolutionary theme of Progress combines with the historical weight of the state in the social field, according to Michael Schneider: Political, revolutionary and democratic France, and the intellectual France which amused itself with the opium of Marxism more than did any other intelligentsia, adhered for nearly two centuries to the dogma that history has meaning, progress and end. According to the dominant positivist philosophy, this meaning can be scientifically known. Finally, the propertied monarchism that remains confided the task of accomplishing this meaning historically to the State, giving its created intervention the title deeds, to say the least. Far from being what Althusser saw in History


a process without object or end(s)French intellectual and cultural history was conceived as progress, which was assigned an end, and incarnated in an object, the State.50 This claim of the state to play the guardians of meaning, to guarantee access to telos, hardly enters into the crisis of meaning, which knocked France harder perhaps than any other Western country, even apart from its intrinsically weak capacity for power. Of course, estab lishing the weakest causal relationship between the exhaustion of the Fordist economic modelto which we shall return the rejection of avant-garde aesthetics, and the end of the Cold War, would be simplistic; that is not our fundamental proposition. The important point is to see that the end of the Cold War revealed, accentuatedor coincided witha profound movement, which called into question all globalizing, linear and forerunner conceptions, and that the way out from telos goes well beyond sanctioning the failure of the Marxist course.

2 The fall of the WallThe end of the Enlightenment

If we had to sum up the total disillusionment created by the end of the Cold War in one salient sentence, we might say: We thought we saw the great work of the Enlightenment coming to fruition, whereas in fact everything seems to indicate it was brought ruthlessly to an end. If we consider the various interpretations of the post Cold War that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not difficult to see how much they borrowed, either implicitly or explicitly, from three propositions, three great principles of the Enlightenment:1 the fall of communism deals out a radically new hand in the relationships between nations (the idea of new times); the era opened up by the end of communism can be considered as qualitatively superior to the era that went before, since it is built on aspirations founded on freedom (History has a meaning); the fall of communism expresses the ability of the common people to make History for themselves by rejecting the political system that took it away from them (It is people who make History). For as long as the reality of the world seemed superficially to match these three principles, there was no reason not to continue working within the blueprint of the Enlightenment. But when we realized that the paths towards the deconstruction of communism were not all qualitatively superior, we understood that not only was the completion of the Enlightenment not guaranteed but, moreover, our own reference points (those of the Enlightenment) were useless for understanding such a new type of reality. The conceptual poverty that marks the post-Cold War period was then inevitable. Of the three principles of the Enlightenment that provided a framework for the message of the new world order, the firstthat it is a radically new erais probably the one which was best founded. Here, the false interpretation was not a result of overestimating the change induced by the end of the Cold War, but of underestimating its radical nature by reducing the change to just the end of communism. But, though the death of communism is fundamental to understanding the end of the Cold War, it is increasingly less pertinent to

26 THE FALL OF THE WALL

understanding the post-Cold War world. This world therefore is becoming a world in itself, an autonomous reality, in much the same way, of course, as was the post-1945 world. This essential difference needs to be stressed as the one way we can understand the main paradox of the post Cold War: on the one hand, there is a global consensus as to why the communist system failed and, on the other, a lack of common reference points for living in the new era. In effect the Cold War system had exaggerated the idea of Progress, as something being brought by the two superstates. When this double dyke was pulled down it brought with it in one fell swoop a questioning of the great ideologies and a growing challenge to the superstates as regulators of the international system. If we accept this hypothesis, the post Cold War can no longer be seen as deriving from one single point of rupture, the end of communism, but from two upheavals it set in train: the crisis in teleological systems and the crisis in the international system that had been guaranteed, first and foremost, by the superstates. Highlighting this double crisis makes it easier to go on to examine what brought about the failure of the new world order, a failure which rested on precisely that concept of a world project promoted by the dominant powers in the international system. If the new world order has not seen the light of day, it is perhaps because its emergence was linked too closely to the end of the great ideological battles, whereas the exhaustion of the ideological dynamic carried within it the seeds of a delegitimization of the notion of projectand, a fortiori, of a collective project. It thereby revealed that the two superstates sole responsibility for the new path of the world was historically exhausted. The idea of a new world order was the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Hegelian spirit in that it gave a leading place to the idea of will conveyed by the states.2 Thus, in place of a new world order, we are experiencing a world time in which three processes reinforce each other: ideological deconstruction; strengthened globalization; and acceleration of the technical change noted since the start of the 1990s; in other words, since the end of the Cold War.3 If the radical nature of the change introduced by the end of the Cold War seems unquestionable, the perception of the post Cold War as a qualitatively new era today seems singularly over-optimistic. No-one, for example, could interpret the tearing apart of Yugoslavia as beneficial, or see in dismembered Bosnia a sign of a new era preferable to that of Titos Yugoslavia. Here too the main ways in which the post Cold War is presented suffer from an optimistic, mechanistic vision of international reality, a vision the Manichean over-simplification into good and evil, inherited from the Cold War, only serves to strengthen. For example, we tended to think all aspirations at the time of liberation were democratic aspirations, by assuming to be transitory what Pierre Rosanvallon calls democratic dissymmetry; in other words, the delay between the development of a political anti-establishment campaign in the name of democracy and the construction of democracy itself, that is to say the long, slow and uncertain setting up of the institutions and procedures of constitutional states. Simultaneously, market democracy, which had been thought unsurpassable, was

THE FALL OF THE WALL 27

revealed to be fragile and vulnerable, not only in Eastern Europe and Southern nations but also in the developed societies of the West. One explanation for this reversal depends, as we saw above, on seeing the inheritance of the Enlightenment in the most optimistic events. It was of course predictable that the rapid, peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union would fuel historical optimism. Louis Dumont, who was interested in the circulation of idea-values in the worldwhat we call world timeemphasized the spectacular and volatile nature of grand planetary ideas.4 In its first stages the impact of a new idea from outside is powerful, taking those who experience it almost unawares. Thus it was felt that the collapse, one after another, of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe would spread inexorably to the best-guarded bastions such as East Germany and Romania. The movement grew in volume and in political credibility when the challenge to communist systems seemed to have a contagious effect on all authoritarian regimes, especially under the decisive influence of the media. Thus we saw the Ceau escu effect spread throughout Africa. To the four corners of the world it gave a power of attraction to the extension of the fight for democracy that was difficult to control: if a dictator as powerful as Ceau escu could disappear so easily, the petty tyrants in Africa would slip away even more quickly. At least, that was what we might have imagined. However, the fragile nature of this planetary legitimization was underestimated. We did not take account of the ability of local times to adopt world time so indirectly as to empty it of meaning, rather than by taking it head on. Certainly there is no systematic, global opposition today to world time, understood as meaning the conjunction of democracy and market. Indeed Islamic and Asian systems, though increasingly rejecting the Wests claim to universalize democracy, do not oppose the imperatives of the market. But, by rejecting a necessary linkage between democracy and market, they challenge the existence of world time and contest its claim to be a legitimate issue for the whole world. In addition, the rejection of a political structure such as market democracy does not need a theoretical basis to be effective. On the contrary, the survival of authoritarian regimes relies increasingly on formal concessions to world time. Thus, when elected heads of state in Peru or Guatemala suspend parliament in order to fight terrorism, drug traffickers and corruption, international mobilization is infinitely more difficult to organize than in the case of regimes that are more clearly anti-democratic;5 all the more so in that external pressure cannot be sustained at a high level for ever. What Dumont calls a resurgence of local time soon starts to operate and, depending on the particular country or culture, swallows, transforms or contradicts world time. Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it is precisely this process which can be seen in Africa or the Arab world. In fact, the advance of democracy in these societies since 1989 is very limited, while all the regimes in these two areas seem to have become extremely fragile following the collapse of communism. Syria,

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for example, still plays a key role in the Middle East, although the end of the Cold War was expected to lead to the end of the Syrian system.6 In Africa, the regime in Zimbabwe bears witness to an amazing capacity for survival, despite the death of the two political resources on which its political legitimacy was founded: the model of scientific socialism and the foil of a racist South Africa. The case of China is even more spectacular in that it had to undergo both the de-legitimization of the communist system and the regional economic pressure of the new Asian powers. Now we are seeing the emergence of market authoritarianismmarket Leninismwhich no-one could reasonably believe would lead inevitably to market democracy.7 Although the events which took place in Tiananmen Square highlighted the existence of Western-style democratic protests in that country, we can be under no false illusion about how deep democratic values really go. This assertion does not mean we have to fall into the trap of cultural relativity (the Chinese are not ripe for democracy), but we have to understand that the path or conversion to market democracy will never be ensured by a sort of historical necessity What does this mean? Simply that democracy never gains ground because it is a good thing in itself. To be constructed and take root it needs to be supported by experience that demonstrates in a very practical way that it is superior to any other political state. In other words, it will succeed in China only when it starts to be identified with order. For that to happen it must be possible to envisage political institutions in a position to manage that order. But although historically Chinese philosophy considered power and morals, it never envisaged institutions capable of ensuring political regulation.8 It is perhaps because of this philosophical gap, rather than a sort of cultural unsuitability for democracy, that the Chinese democratic structure is so fragile. This hypothesis is probably not the only one that ought to be taken into account, but it seems to have at least one merit: it goes beyond the static and sterile debate between those who see in the resistance to democracy the alibi of this very authoritarianism, and those for whom democracy is decidedly too perishable to be exported to faraway countries. In the case of China, this construction superseded Yi Fang, Jiu Luan, that is, the idea that all deregulation leads to dislocation and chaos. For the Chinese there is only one absolute relationship, notes Franois Jullien: that which links order to disorder.9 So long as democracy is not considered to be the best means of restricting the social deregulation currently taking place, its chances of acclimatization in China will be limited. From this viewpoint, neither loud denunciation of human rights violations nor mediocre commercial compromises with the Chinese powers will have a decisive influence on the course of events. The unforeseen opposition to market democracy The challenge of historical

a world without meaning the crisis of meaning in international politics

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