View source for UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 26 - The Eclipse of the West? - 01h 22m 33s

<!-- UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 26 - The Eclipse of the West? - 01h 22m 33s

{{Information
|university = UC Berkeley 
|course-code = HIST 186
|course-name = International and Global History Since 1945
|lecture = 26 The Eclipse of the West?
|instructor = Daniel Sargent
|semester = Spring 2012
|license = {{cc-by-nc-nd-3.0}}
}}

-->

== The Final Exam ==

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=0:00]]
<nowiki>[0:00]</nowiki>

Okay, it's about time to get going. So we've almost made it all the way to the end of the semester. At least I've almost made it all the way to the end of the semester. You all still have your final exams to write.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=00:13]]
<nowiki>[00:13]</nowiki> 

Probably final papers too. So it may feel to me like you know I've kind of reached the summit and am just coasting down, but for you the hill lies ahead. So...

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=00:24]]
<nowiki>[00:24]</nowiki> 

Let me try to talk you through the final exam, because I know this is something that you're curious about and I wanted sort of in this last lecture meeting just to have the opportunity, while I'm meeting with you all, to talk you through the you know basic expectations, the key details, the substance of the exam, and to take any questions that you might have.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=00:42]]
<nowiki>[00:42]</nowiki> 

So what are the key details? Well, the exam is going to be held on Wednesday, May 9th. That's one week on next Wednesday. So it's about thirteen days from today.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=00:55]]
<nowiki>[00:55]</nowiki> 

President Kennedy solved the missile crisis in thirteen days so you can prepare for your final exam in that time.(laughter from the class).

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=01:03]]
<nowiki>[01:03]</nowiki> 

The key detail which I want to underscore, double underscore, triple underscore is the time of the exam. The time of the exam is 11:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. The reason that I want to be so emphatic in making that point is that when I was putting the syllabus together I put down the wrong time for the exam.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=01:25]]
<nowiki>[01:25]</nowiki> 

I don't know why that is. You know maybe the registrar changed the information at some point and I did this very early. It's more likely that I just screwed up. But whatever the explanation there is a disconnect between the information that is on the syllabus and the information that you need to know.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=01:42]]
<nowiki>[01:42]</nowiki> 

Don't you know...go at the time that it says in the syllabus. Go at this....go at this time: 11:30 A.M. to McCone Hall --  room 141 McCone Hall. Do any of you know where McCone Hall is? (laughter from the class)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=01:58]]
<nowiki>[01:58]</nowiki> 

Do all of you know what McCone Hall is?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:00]]
<nowiki>[02:00]</nowiki> 

(student response)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:01]]
<nowiki>[02:01]</nowiki> 

I'm sorry?

(student response)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:02]]
<nowiki>[02:02]</nowiki> 

This room? We're in McCone Hall, right now? (laughter from the class). Okay, great. (laughter from the class). Is this 141 McCone Hall?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:09]]
<nowiki>[02:09]</nowiki> 

(laughter from the class) (student response)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:09]]
<nowiki>[02:09]</nowiki> 

Okay, it is?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:12]]
<nowiki>[02:12]</nowiki> 

Okay, great. So come back here on...(laughter from the class) Wednesday, May 9th at 11:30 A.M.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:18]]
<nowiki>[02:18]</nowiki> 

I had no idea that this was McCone Hall let alone that we're in the same room that you're going to take the final exam in. (laughter from the class)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:25]]
<nowiki>[02:25]</nowiki> 

But I guess we are. So...that's when and where. Those are really key details.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:31]]
<nowiki>[02:31]</nowiki> 

When and where...If anybody's not here, if you seen people from the class, you know, please just try to reinforce this point that the final exam is going to be at 11:30 A.M. not at the time it says in the syllabus. The syllabus is wrong.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:44]]
<nowiki>[02:44]</nowiki> 

So, I, we should send out an email to that effect too, or several emails.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=02:49]]
<nowiki>[02:49]</nowiki> 

Okay, that's enough on the logistics. What about the substance? What is going to be on the exam? When you come in here, and we distribute the exam rubric, what are you going to be asked to write upon?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=03:00]]
<nowiki>[03:00]</nowiki> 

This is going to be an essay exam. It's going to be quite a lot like the midterm in terms of the substance. I like to have midterms and exams that are more or less similar in terms of the expectations because that way you know what to expect with the final exam.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=03:13]]
<nowiki>[03:13]</nowiki> 

Well, there are going to be two essay sections. One is going to be loosely sort of grouped as asking you questions on the history of international relations. The second essay section will have to do with the global economy. So there are two essay sections and they're organized functionally rather than chronologically.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=03:33]]
<nowiki>[03:33]</nowiki> 

You're going to have a choice of essays from each section. We're going to give you at least two and if we can come up with them three questions in each section from which you can answer.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=03:42]]
<nowiki>[03:42]</nowiki> 

So you're going to have a choice of essays in each section, and you'll answer one essay question on the history of international relations. Another essay question on the history of the global economy.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=03:52]]
<nowiki>[03:52]</nowiki> 

You only answer one essay from each section. So even though there'll be four or five or six hopefully essay prompts you're only going to write on two of them. One from each section.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=04:03]]
<nowiki>[04:03]</nowiki> 

That should be clear enough, right. Okay, what are we looking for with your essays?  This is what you really want to know. What do you have to write in order to do well in this class?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=04:13]]
<nowiki>[04:13]</nowiki> 

We're looking for historical argument and analysis. Your essays should not just be recitations of fact. Not just names, dates, and events. What's really important is that you have a historical argument. All of the essay questions that I've given you, the essay questions that you answered in the midterm exam, the essays that you've answered for your three prompts -- what are they called response papers -- each of those essay prompts has invited you to develop an argument or an analysis of your own.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=04:41]]
<nowiki>[04:41]</nowiki> 

And the final exam is going to be exactly the same. The purpose is to develop a historical argument. Now of course it's important that you support that argument with appropriate evidence.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=04:52]]
<nowiki>[04:52]</nowiki> 

I was talking to a graduate student the other day who told me that he'd been reading a book about {{WPExtract|Roswell UFO incident|Roswell}} -- {{WPExtract|Area 51}} and all that. And apparently this book argues that Roswell, or the aliens in Roswell, were a Soviet plot. That Stalin created some flying saucer and tried to do this to scare the Americans in the early years of the Cold War.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=05:11]]
<nowiki>[05:11]</nowiki> 

Now that's an outlandish kind of argument, but if you want to make an argument like that then you need to be able to support it with evidence. I'll be curious when I read the book to see what a job the author does of supporting this kind of claim with -- with evidence because it seems a little outlandish to me.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=05:26]]
<nowiki>[05:26]</nowiki> 

But...there's obviously a you know [[wikt:synergy|synergy]] between the two things: argument and evidence, and your essay needs to have both. You need to have a cogent clear argument and you need to support it with suitable and appropriate historical evidence.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=05:40]]
<nowiki>[05:40]</nowiki> 

So you have to do both of those things. If you don't do both of them you're not going to be in the A range of grades. It's really essential to have analysis as well as supporting corroborating evidence. How should you accomplish this in just three hours? What would my advice be to those of you who are going to take the exam?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=06:00]]
<nowiki>[06:00]</nowiki> 

The first thing I would advise you to do is to take your time. We're giving you three hours to write two essays. The last time I taught this class, in the final exam, I had the students write three essays in three hours. The idea being that it takes about an hour or should take about an hour to write a final exam length essay.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=06:21]]
<nowiki>[06:21]</nowiki> 

Now I thought that last time the third essays that the students produced tended to be rather rushed. It took the students in practice a little bit longer than an hour to write an hour length exam. So what I want to do this time around is to give you more time. I don't expect you to take the full three hours.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=06:40]]
<nowiki>[06:40]</nowiki> 

I think you should try to aim to spend about an hour on the writing of each answer. So you have an extra hour built into the time which is being allotted for the final exam. What should you do with that time?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=06:50]]
<nowiki>[06:50]</nowiki> 

Well, you could, you know finish early and then leave and spend the time doing something more interesting. But I would advise you to spend the time thinking and planning. Spend the time outlining your essay -- thinking about what you're going to include. The purpose is not for you to write as much as you possibly can.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=07:06]]
<nowiki>[07:06]</nowiki> 

The purpose is for you to write something cogent, and analytically coherent. So take time at the beginning. Plan your essay. Outline your essay. Think about what argument you want to make and what kind of evidence you want to use to support it.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=07:19]]
<nowiki>[07:19]</nowiki> 

So far as the formal rules of the exam go this is going to be an open book examination. So you're going to be able to bring into the exam hall with you all of the books which have been assigned in the class, all of the notes that you've taken. We would...we -- no, I'm not going to say we would prefer, you're not going to be encouraged or permitted to look things up on the Internet during the exam.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=07:44]]
<nowiki>[07:44]</nowiki> 

That's the one stipulation which I make when I have an open book exam: is I don't want students to be looking things up on Wikipedia or other websites. So you can use resources that are you know class resources -- the books that we've assigned, your notes on the books, my slides from lectures, and so on, but you shouldn't be Googling for factual information.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=08:07]]
<nowiki>[08:07]</nowiki> 

I think for me that just goes a step too far in the direction of you know essays written by search engine, and I don't want that to happen in the final exam. How do we enforce that? Well, we have you know, myself and the GSIs will be here during the exam, and we'll politely remind anybody who wants to use Wikipedia that this is really not appropriate in this context.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=08:28]]
<nowiki>[08:28]</nowiki> 

I'm sure you probably use Wikipedia during the you know production of your final papers and your response papers -- that's okay. You know I don't have anything against Wikipedia or it's a good resource, but it's not the purpose of this exercise.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=08:43]]
<nowiki>[08:43]</nowiki> 

What about the writing of your exams? Where are you going to write these? Well, you can use blue books. That's what's conventional in a final exam. If you want to use blue books you need to remember to bring them.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=08:53]]
<nowiki>[08:53]</nowiki> 

If you prefer you will be permitted to type out your exams on a laptop computer. That's something which I've done in the past couple of classes that I've taught. It's worked very, very well in both cases. I've done this two times now and each time it's worked superbly.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=09:09]]
<nowiki>[09:09]</nowiki> 

The problem of the -- the obstacle that we have to surmount if we use laptop computers to write the final exams is that we have, we then have to figure out a way to get the documents from your computer to one of our computers.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=09:23]]
<nowiki>[09:23]</nowiki> 

So we'll do this either by emailing the documents, which is the easiest way to do it, because you can all log on to AirBears here, and then just email your exam to your GSI. If that doesn't work then we'll be set up for you to transfer files via flash drive.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=09:40]]
<nowiki>[09:40]</nowiki> 

So if you want to work on your own computer then I strongly recommend that you bring a flash drive with you just as a backup in case you're unable to log on to AirBears for any reason; in case we have problems with the wireless Internet access and it turns out that you need to transfer your file via sort of a physical medium a flash drive would then be the most appropriate.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=10:02]]
<nowiki>[10:02]</nowiki> 

If you are concerned about the battery life on your laptop then I would recommend that you not only bring a power cable, and perhaps an extension cable too, but also that you come to the exam room early so as to find sort of space to sit down in proximity to a power, power point.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=10:23]]
<nowiki>[10:23]</nowiki> 

How many of you think that you will need power cables for the computer?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=10:28]]
<nowiki>[10:28]</nowiki> 

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=10:29]]
<nowiki>[10:29]</nowiki> 

Okay, that's good. That I think we can accommodate.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=10:33]]
<nowiki>[10:33]</nowiki> 

(student comment)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=10:38]]
<nowiki>[10:38]</nowiki> 

Okay, terrific. So we'll try to provide some power strips. You know we'll go even further than Starbucks does to accommodate your (laughter from the class) portable computing needs.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=10:48]]
<nowiki>[10:48]</nowiki> 

And that I think should, you know, make it possible for you to write your exams in what I hope will be as accommodating circumstance as possible. I'm sort of sorry about the fact that we have to take exams in this room. I'd rather that we had an honor system like some colleges do and you could just go away and write these in the library or somewhere more comfortable.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=11:07]]
<nowiki>[11:07]</nowiki> 

But this is one area where instructors don't have a whole lot of flexibility. You know sort of the requirements for exam conditions are laid down by the college, and you know we abide, we have to abide by them as you do as well.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=11:22]]
<nowiki>[11:22]</nowiki> 

Are there any questions about the final exam that I could usefully answer while I have you all together?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=11:31]]
<nowiki>[11:31]</nowiki> 

I can't believe that it's that cogent and clear, but maybe it is. Well, if you have questions then you know bring them up -- okay, great.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=11:39]]
<nowiki>[11:39]</nowiki> 

(student question)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=11:44]]
<nowiki>[11:44]</nowiki> 

Okay, no, that's a really good question. Will it focus on material covered after the midterm? The answer is no. The final exam will focus on materials covered throughout the entire course.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=11:57]]
<nowiki>[11:57]</nowiki> 

The reason for this is sort of embedded in the...weighting that we accord to the different evaluation components. If you go back to that table which is in the syllabus and see how much weight we're according to the midterm, the final exam, the response papers, and the final paper, you will probably notice that the midterm is not worth all that much as a fraction of your overall grade.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=12:20]]
<nowiki>[12:20]</nowiki> 

It's just worth 10%. That's because, you know, my sense of what the midterm ought to be is that the midterm should be a diagnostic. The midterm serves to give your GSIs a sense of how you're doing in the class. It serves to give you a sort of sense of what to expect on the final exam.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=12:37]]
<nowiki>[12:37]</nowiki> 

But I don't see the midterm as serving a you know central role in the determination of your final grades. I would prefer that the final exam be sort of the primary component of the examination portion of your grade. The final exam I think is worth what is it 35%? (comment from the class). 30%. Okay, so together the midterm and the final are worth 40% of your overall grade.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=13:03]]
<nowiki>[13:03]</nowiki> 

Most of that falls on the final -- not upon the midterm, which I think is appropriate. By the final you've had more time to get accustomed to writing the kinds of essays that we expect in this class. You're in a better position to perform well I think in the final that you are in the midterm. Having done the midterm gives you a sense of what to expect in the final.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=13:22]]
<nowiki>[13:22]</nowiki> 

So, for all those reasons the final will cover materials...sort of...that we've discussed during the entire course -- not just the materials that we've covered since the midterm.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=13:35]]
<nowiki>[13:35]</nowiki> 

The nature of the questions will be fairly broad ranging too. This is a point that I can usefully make. These are not going to be sort of narrow, specific questions dealing with specific personalities, episodes or crises; rather, the questions will be broader and somewhat more interpretive in nature.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=13:54]]
<nowiki>[13:54]</nowiki> 

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=13:56]]
<nowiki>[13:56]</nowiki> 

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=13:58]]
<nowiki>[13:58]</nowiki> 

(student question)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=14:03]]
<nowiki>[14:03]</nowiki> 

Yeah.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=14:05]]
<nowiki>[14:05]</nowiki> 

There's no need to print out materials that you want to bring in. You should feel free to access notes and slides on your computer.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=14:12]]
<nowiki>[14:12]</nowiki> 

We don't need to fell a tree just for the purposes of this final exam.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=14:18]]
<nowiki>[14:18]</nowiki> 

(student question)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=14:23]]
<nowiki>[14:23]</nowiki> 

Okay, great question. What are our expectations for citation?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=14:29]]
<nowiki>[14:29]</nowiki> 

In my view, and I'll let the GSIs weigh in if they want to as well, this is an exam, this is not a final paper, by consequence I don't expect footnotes. I actually think that it would be a little awkward, even peculiar, to have footnotes in an examination essay. If you're using direct quotation then you should just attribute in the text of your exam.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=14:54]]
<nowiki>[14:54]</nowiki> 

So if you're going to quote a historical figure, you know, if you're going to quote {{WPExtract|Deng Xiaoping}} then you should just do so, but there's no need to attribute a source.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=15:02]]
<nowiki>[15:02]</nowiki> 

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=15:03]]
<nowiki>[15:03]</nowiki> 

Obviously, you should always use footnotes and attribute when you're submitting a paper, or any sort of formal writing for an assignment, or for any other purpose. But an examination is somewhat different I think. What we're doing here is requiring you to produce under...context of sort of time pressure a cogent sort of analysis of a particular problem or question.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=15:30]]
<nowiki>[15:30]</nowiki> 

It's -- it's a different kind of exercise from a polished paper of the kind that would be submitted in any other context. So for that reason the normal rules about footnoting and attribution don't apply, but you should still provide, you know, sort of citation in your -- embedded within your text. So you attribute within the body of the text rather than sort of providing a formal footnote reference.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=15:55]]
<nowiki>[15:55]</nowiki> 

You know one way to think about this that might be useful...is to see the final exam as being an analogous in some ways to the oral examinations that graduate students take.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=16:07]]
<nowiki>[16:07]</nowiki> 

And let me just explain that a little bit. Graduate students in their third year in the history department at Berkeley take what's called either a comprehensive or an oral examination, and the purpose of this exercise is to sort of quiz the graduate student to see how they think on their feet -- how do they respond to broad ranging and provocative questions when posed by a faculty member.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=16:28]]
<nowiki>[16:28]</nowiki> 

This is a sort of crucial exercise in the development of you know a graduate student's career. The final exam serves a purpose for undergraduates that is a little bit analogous to that. We can't give you all sort of individual oral examinations at the end of each semester -- to do so would be logistically impossible.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=16:44]]
<nowiki>[16:44]</nowiki> 

But the final exam serves a similar kind of purpose. We give you big challenging questions and you respond to them as best you can in the very limited time that is allotted for the purpose. This is a different kind of exercise from the final paper.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=16:58]]
<nowiki>[16:58]</nowiki> 

The final exer -- paper is a research exercise. We give you plenty of time to write the final paper. You have opportunity to consult broad ranging sources -- to go the library and do independent research and so on.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=17:09]]
<nowiki>[17:09]</nowiki> 

That is not the final exam. The final exam is an exercise in thinking on your feet under conditions of limited time. The final paper is a research kind of exercise. So if you think about the difference between the two exercises then I think that should help to clarify what it is we're expecting you to do in the final examination.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=17:30]]
<nowiki>[17:30]</nowiki> 

Okay, are there any more questions about this?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=17:34]]
<nowiki>[17:34]</nowiki> 

(student question)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=17:40]]
<nowiki>[17:40]</nowiki> 

I don't think so. Is there an upper limit on the number of words that you can write? No, because we have a very strict time limit. You have to do this in three hours. I talked more about word limits when we had the midterm exam because the midterm exam was formally administered with the expectation that you would write it in just what -- two hours?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=18:02]]
<nowiki>[18:02]</nowiki> 

But because of the way in which we administer the midterm exam we didn't have any mechanism for enforcing that rigid time limit, so you know, a few words were probably spoken at that time about what would and what would not be a suitable length for your exam scripts.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=18:19]]
<nowiki>[18:19]</nowiki> 

This is different because we have a very limited sort of window of time in which you're all going to write these essays. By consequence you know there's no need to impose any kind of word limit because you're necessarily limited by the time in terms of how much you can write.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=18:37]]
<nowiki>[18:37]</nowiki> 

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=18:39]]
<nowiki>[18:39]</nowiki> 

Okay, good. Okay, one more question.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=18:41]]
<nowiki>[18:41]</nowiki> 

(student question)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=18:47]]
<nowiki>[18:47]</nowiki> 

What do I think is the best way to prepare? I think that the best way to prepare is to practice the exercise itself -- to practice writing examination essays.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=18:54]]
<nowiki>[18:54]</nowiki>

I think you want to be sort of conversant in the history with which we're dealing, so I think going back over notes, making sure that you've read all of the...assigned texts, perhaps preparing outlines of the history on which you're being quizzed is all very important to do. But I think it's really essential to practice the art of writing an exam answer in about an hour of time.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=19:25]]
<nowiki>[19:25]</nowiki> 

So I would encourage you to...look I can make available last year's -- actually, well, not last year's but the year before's, examination questions. I'll upload those onto bSpace today and then you can use those as models for practicing your answers for this year's final examination.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=19:43]]
<nowiki>[19:43]</nowiki> 

I think practice is absolutely invaluable. I mean that was how I prepared for all of my exams in college, which just by writing out exam answer after exam answer after exam answer. I had a different kind of experience from that which you have: all of my assessment was based upon timed examinations. I didn't have course work. I didn't have final papers. It was all, you know, essay exams.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=20:05]]
<nowiki>[20:05]</nowiki> 

So, I think that the form, you know, based on my own experience, I think that there's a utility to this mode of examination. It forces you to think under pressure and it forces you to produce something cogent and analytically cohesive within a short space of time.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=20:20]]
<nowiki>[20:20]</nowiki> 

This is the kind of exercise that you're going to have to do or that many of you are going to have to do in your future careers too. So I think it's a useful skill to cultivate and the best way to cultivate that skill in preparation for the exam itself is to practice. Like any skill practice is the way to acquire it.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=20:35]]
<nowiki>[20:35]</nowiki> 

Okay, is that all good on the exam?

== The Question of Whether the West is in Decline ==

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=20:40]]
<nowiki>[20:40]</nowiki> 

Okay, let's pose some big and difficult questions in this last lecture.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=20:46]]
<nowiki>[20:46]</nowiki> 

Is the West in decline?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=20:49]]
<nowiki>[20:49]</nowiki> 

As we you know sort of work through this really big, really difficult question, is the West today in decline? I would like to invite you to, you know, sort of pose questions and make whatever comments you would like to make. You know this is sort of the last opportunity that we have to meet as a lecture class so please feel free to weigh in. Feel even more free than you might ordinarily feel to contribute because this is the last opportunity to do so.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=21:13]]
<nowiki>[21:13]</nowiki> 

It's also the last opportunity to pose you know sort of big questions that might usefully be answered in the context of the sort of lecture class.

=== The Ascendancy of the West in the Late 1990s ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=21:22]]
<nowiki>[21:22]</nowiki> 

Is the West in decline? Well, let's start this story back in the summer of 1998.

==== The United States in the Summer of 1998 ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=21:28]]
<nowiki>[21:28]</nowiki> 

Have any of you...direct memories or recollections of the summer of 1998? Okay, well, this was a [[wikt:sanctimonious|sanctimonious]] time as {{WPExtract|Philip Roth}} wrote in American life.<ref>The reference here is to {{WPExtract|Philip Roth|Philip Roth's}} novel {{WPExtract|The Human Stain|''The Human Stain''}} published in May of 2000 where one finds, "<nowiki>[The Lewinsky scandal]</nowiki> revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony." as mentioned by the [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/158039/the-human-stain-by-philip-roth/9780375726347/readers-guide/ The Human Stain Reader’s Guide from Penguin Random House].</ref> A time when the nation was at peace but preoccupied with the [[wikt:peccadillo|peccadilloes]] of a misbehaving president. It was a time of material abundance. The American economy was growing fast. It was a time when the United States was not at war.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=21:55]]
<nowiki>[21:55]</nowiki> 

Indeed the United States was enjoying the fruits of a post-Cold War peace dividend. Military spending had been reduced substantially from the heights that it reached in the 1980s. The country was enjoying sort of the fruits of peace and abundant prosperity. Indeed things were so good in America that the country could afford to be preoccupied with Bill Clinton and his sexual misdemeanors.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=22:17]]
<nowiki>[22:17]</nowiki> 

{{WPExtract|Clinton–Lewinsky_scandal|The Lewinsky affair}} seemed in the summer of 1998 to be the most serious, most urgent dilemma, that the United States had to worry about. Americans weren't worrying about foreign military challenges -- the rise of rival great powers. They weren't really all that worried about terrorism -- about the threat posed by a particularly militant idiom of Islam espoused by {{WPExtract|Al-Qaeda}}.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=22:41]]
<nowiki>[22:41]</nowiki> 

Rather they were concerned with sort of the moral conduct of their President. This was a peculiar moment in American life. A time when the United States was, in the words of French foreign minister {{WPExtract|Hubert Védrine}} -- a {{WPExtract|Hyperpower|hyperpower}} -- a ''hyperpuissance''. But in which Americans did not really seem particularly concerned about the larger world in which their hyperpower, as Védrine called it, had to be exercised.

==== The Larger West in the late 1990s ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=23:07]]
<nowiki>[23:07]</nowiki> 

Still the prospects for the United States and for the larger West looked in the summer of 1998 to be very good. Western institutions were marching eastwards. The states of the former Soviet Bloc as we've discussed we're being rapidly incorporated into NATO and into the European Union -- the EU.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=23:28]]
<nowiki>[23:28]</nowiki> 

China was in the process of integrating itself to the liberal economic order. In 1999 China would formally apply for membership of the World Trade Organization.<ref>One could visit the Wikipedia article: {{WPExtract|China and the World Trade Organization}}.</ref>

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=23:38]]
<nowiki>[23:38]</nowiki> 

Humanitarian interventionism was rapidly emerging as a means by which to spread liberal Western norms to warless and belligerent zones on the periphery of the globalizing international system. The {{WPExtract|NATO bombing of Yugoslavia|Kosovo intervention in 1999}} would of course, you know, sort of affirm the capacity of military methods to achieve humanitarian objectives.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=24:03]]
<nowiki>[24:03]</nowiki> 

In sum the summer of 1998 looks in retrospect like a sort of pinnacle of self-confidence for the West -- a moment in which Western ascendancy seemed to broker few challenges in which its future seemed to be assured indeed.

=== The Malaise of the West ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=24:22]]
<nowiki>[24:22]</nowiki> 

Today the prospects for the West look rather different. The West no longer looks so self-confident as it did in the summer of 1998.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=24:30]]
<nowiki>[24:30]</nowiki> 

Indeed the economic crisis, with which we concluded Tuesday's lecture, has hit Western countries especially hard. Countries of the developing world have been far less seriously afflicted by the economic crisis than have the countries of the West.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=24:45]]
<nowiki>[24:45]</nowiki> 

Western Europe and North America, in fact the United States to a much greater extent than Canada, have been particularly adversely affected by the economic crisis. Unemployment is high in the West.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=24:59]]
<nowiki>[24:59]</nowiki> 

Politics has in some contexts like Athens, and even in the United States, taken to the streets. The capacity of representative democratic institutions to command the confidence of the people whom they govern seems to be in question now -- perhaps in more serious question than at any other point in the postwar era.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=25:18]]
<nowiki>[25:18]</nowiki> 

We could ascribe other you know political {{WPExtract|Epiphenomenon|epiphenomena}} to a crisis of Western self-confidence -- even a crisis of Western ascendancy.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=25:27]]
<nowiki>[25:27]</nowiki> 

Just look at the news stories that have emerged over the past couple of weeks. In Sunday's election in France a candidate of the extreme right, {{WPExtract|Marine Le Pen}}, came third in the presidential election -- placing fairly close behind the current president of France {{WPExtract|Nicolas Sarkozy}}.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=25:42]]
<nowiki>[25:42]</nowiki> 

In Norway {{WPExtract|Anders Behring Breivik}} went on trial, I think earlier this week, or perhaps at the end of last week, for his perpetration in 2011 of a massacre that left some 76<ref>According to the Wikipedia article on {{WPExtract|Anders Behring Breivik}} 77 people were killed in the attacks.</ref> people dead -- the victims of a sort of violent sort of insurgency against what Breivik now characterizes as the forces of multiculturalism in Europe.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=26:04]]
<nowiki>[26:04]</nowiki> 

The [[wikt:recrudescence|recrudescence]] of political violence and political extremism seems in profound ways to be challenging to the stability of Western institutions, even Western societies.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=26:17]]
<nowiki>[26:17]</nowiki> 

What has been the role of political leadership in the West in the context of the crisis that has unfolded since 2008? I mean in key respects Western political leaders seem powerless. Western political institutions seem to be [[wikt:sclerotic|sclerotic]]. Since the financial crisis virtually every government in Europe that was in power in 2008 has fallen.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=26:39]]
<nowiki>[26:39]</nowiki> 

Major European countries like Italy and Greece are now ruled not by elected politicians but by unelected technocrats. In both countries elected governments have been replaced by placeholder governments staffed by sort of bureaucrats rather than be politicians who were elected into power by the people.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=26:57]]
<nowiki>[26:57]</nowiki> 

In the United States politics is characterized increasingly by partisan gridlock. It's been very difficult for American political leaders, since at least the election of 2008, if not earlier, to achieve bold reform.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=27:10]]
<nowiki>[27:10]</nowiki> 

The [[wikt:imbroglio|imbroglio]] that {{WPExtract|United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011|unfolded last summer over the debt ceiling}} is just one powerful example of the [[wikt:sclerosis|sclerosis]] that now seems to afflict Western representative institutions.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=27:22]]
<nowiki>[27:22]</nowiki> 

We could talk too about the political economy of...the Western industrial world which seems too to be in a situation of serious crisis. We might talk about something akin to a fiscal crisis of the public sector.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=27:37]]
<nowiki>[27:37]</nowiki> 

After all Western governments in Europe and in North America seem unable now to pay for the extensive welfare commitments which they've assumed in the decades since the...Second World War.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=27:48]]
<nowiki>[27:48]</nowiki> 

This fiscal crisis could be indicative of a deeper political crisis -- perhaps even a crisis of representative democracy. After all democracies seem to be well able of assuming fiscal obligations but less able to raise the revenues necessary to pay for those obligations.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=28:04]]
<nowiki>[28:04]</nowiki> 

This in a sense is the sort of fiscal crisis of the West as we're now experiencing it. And it has in turn led to a legitimacy crisis of representative democratic institutions.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=28:15]]
<nowiki>[28:15]</nowiki> 

In Europe the crisis of the West as we might construe it has....cultural and even demographic aspects too. The extremism that Breivik represents in Norway is a fringe phenomenon, but the rise of sort of anti-immigrant politics in Europe is a much broader phenomenon than that.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=28:34]]
<nowiki>[28:34]</nowiki> 

Marine Le Pen in France of course represents the rise of sort of an ugly you know politics of anti-Islamism that is increasingly powerful throughout the European continent.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=28:47]]
<nowiki>[28:47]</nowiki> 

In the United States today immigration remains sort of a heated political issue though I would argue that in the United States the politics around this issue are less intense and less ugly than they are in Europe.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=28:59]]
<nowiki>[28:59]</nowiki> 

One key distinction, right, has to do between the different kinds of attitudes that manifest towards legal immigration in the United States and Europe. And that's an important distinction to make.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=29:09]]
<nowiki>[29:09]</nowiki> 

In Europe it's not illegal but legal immigration that is increasingly in the crosshairs of the political forces of anti-immigration. In the United States there's still sort of wide consensus across the political spectrum as to the desirability of licit immigration; it's the issue of illegal immigration which has become more politically contentious.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=29:31]]
<nowiki>[29:31]</nowiki>

But there are similarities. In key respects then Western societies seem to be in the throes of crisis, at minimum a crisis of confidence, perhaps even more seriously a crisis of capability.

=== The Relative Decline of the West ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=29:47]]
<nowiki>[29:47]</nowiki> 

If we situate the West in larger sort of geographical context then the West is in the throes of what we might characterize as a striking relative decline. Decline we should remember is always relative. Decline has to do with the position of a nation or a society vis-à-vis its competitors in the larger world.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=30:08]]
<nowiki>[30:08]</nowiki> 

If we situate the West's decline in relative perspective then we see that it's very striking indeed. What this chart shows you is the West's GDP as a percentage of the entire world's GDP.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=30:19]]
<nowiki>[30:19]</nowiki> 

And this in a sense is the story of the postwar era. In 1950 the West was at the very pinnacle of its historical ascendancy. The West, which I define here as to include both the countries of Western Europe and the so-called Western offshoots, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, accounted for well over 50% of the world's GDP.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=30:44]]
<nowiki>[30:44]</nowiki> 

These societies dominated the global economy. Today that dominance is rapidly fading away.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=30:50]]
<nowiki>[30:50]</nowiki> 

What's particularly striking I think about this chart is the extent of the slippage that has occurred since the turn of the millennium. In 1995 the West still accounted for something like 47, 48% of the world's GDP.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=31:05]]
<nowiki>[31:05]</nowiki> 

Today it's more likely 38% of the world's GDP. The West in relative terms has slipped very dramatically just over the past decade. Of course this relative slippage has to do not only, or not even primarily, with the economic decline of the West; it has to do with the rise of the rest of the world.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=31:24]]
<nowiki>[31:24]</nowiki> 

It's not something that should necessarily trouble us. We might see this relative decline not as a story of Western slippage but rather as a story of rising affluence and prosperity elsewhere. In which case it is something to be celebrated.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=31:39]]
<nowiki>[31:39]</nowiki> 

Still change is clearly afoot so far as the relations between the West and the rest of the world are concerned. And this transformation, in the relative sort of situation of the West, is going to be our key concern in today's concluding final lecture.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=31:59]]
<nowiki>[31:59]</nowiki> 

So what is it that we should talk about when we talk about the relative decline of the West? Well, it would be useful I think to start off by defining what it is we're interested in explaining. What is this thing that we call Western ascendancy that seems today to be dramatically slipping and deteriorating?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=32:18]]
<nowiki>[32:18]</nowiki> 

We should start then by talking about the sources of the West's postwar ascendancy. What was Western ascendancy in the postwar era and what sustained is?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=32:27]]
<nowiki>[32:27]</nowiki>

Once we've done that we can talk about the challenges. What are the challenges to what, you know, I'm going to characterize as a liberal international order? -- the international order that the West built after the Second World War.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=32:37]]
<nowiki>[32:37]</nowiki> 

We can talk of both interior challenges and exterior challenges and I'll try during the course of today's discussion to be attentive to both.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=32:46]]
<nowiki>[32:46]</nowiki> 

When we talk about exterior challenges then China obviously looms large today as a rival sort of global hub to the West. What are the implications of China's rise for Western ascendancy? Are we today experiencing something akin to the return of geopolitics? These are really important questions and there questions which I'll try to get to before the hour is out.

=== Western Postwar Ascendancy ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=33:10]]
<nowiki>[33:10]</nowiki> 

But first let's return to the West's postwar ascendancy. When we talk about Western ascendancy in the context of the Cold War era -- what exactly is it that we are trying to describe? Well, the phenomenon is not only a phenomenon of sort of Western preeminence in the global economy  -- in the larger international system -- Western ascendancy also had to do, I will argue, with the remarkable stability that came to pass within the West itself in the decades after the Second World War.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=33:39]]
<nowiki>[33:39]</nowiki> 

Ascendancy was both an internal and a global phenomenon. It had to do with the stabilization of the West following the trauma that the Second World War inflicted. It also had to do of course with the legacies of a you know century and a half of European high colonialism experience that situated the West at the very top of the global economic pile.

==== Political Stability in the West ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=34:04]]
<nowiki>[34:04]</nowiki> 

Within the West postwar ascendancy could be explained in terms of internal political stability. And this is particularly striking when we situate the...Cold War decades in a larger historical context.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=34:18]]
<nowiki>[34:18]</nowiki> 

Remember that the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were a period in which Europe, the West, experienced substantial political turmoil and trauma. The rise of mass politics, the rise as we might have it of the left, was traumatic for Europe.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=34:34]]
<nowiki>[34:34]</nowiki> 

It produced revolutions. In {{WPExtract|French Revolution|1789 in France}} -- in {{WPExtract|Revolutions of 1848|1848 throughout Europe}}, in {{WPExtract|Paris Commune|1871 once again in France}}, and at the end of the First World War. The question of whether Europe might succumb to a sort of violent revolution, a left-wing revolution, a revolution of the working classes, seemed throughout much of the 19th and early 20th century to be an open question.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=34:56]]
<nowiki>[34:56]</nowiki> 

One of the accomplishment of the postwar era then would be the stabilization of European politics around a sort of social democratic center. The left's commitment to parliamentary methods would be crucial.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=35:10]]
<nowiki>[35:10]</nowiki> 

After the Second World War the forces of the left in Western Europe repudiated the revolutionary tradition. There would be no attempt to overthrow and transform the political status quo such as those attempts which you know had recurrently occurred during the 19th and early 20th century.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=35:28]]
<nowiki>[35:28]</nowiki> 

After the Second World War the European left became a stalwart of the political and social status quo. And I think this is one point that's really important to remember.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=35:38]]
<nowiki>[35:38]</nowiki> 

Radical and demagogic politics of all kinds were for the most part exiled after the Second World War. We could think for example about the experience of {{WPExtract|McCarthyism}} in the United States. {{WPExtract|Joseph McCarthy|McCarthy}} represented a sort of [[wikt:demagogic|demagogic]] force in American politics. McCarthy made outlandish accusations about the penetration of the federal government by the forces of Communism.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=36:03]]
<nowiki>[36:03]</nowiki> 

He argued that you know former Secretary of State {{WPExtract|George Marshall}} was a Communist agent. These were sort of lunatic and outlandish accusations.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=36:11]]
<nowiki>[36:11]</nowiki> 

But what happens to McCarthy? McCarthy ultimately was exiled from the political mainstream. The Senate passed a resolution of [[wikt:censure|censure]] and McCarthy was pushed aside. This was more or less what happened to political extremists elsewhere in the West during the early Cold War years.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=36:28]]
<nowiki>[36:28]</nowiki> 

Politics solidified around the center. Extremists of all kinds were marginalized and pushed aside. We could talk for example about what happened in Germany after the Second World War. In Germany, as politics stabilized around a sort of common you know set of commitments, to a democratic center, representatives of the far right would be exiled from the political mainstream.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=36:51]]
<nowiki>[36:51]</nowiki> 

The Nazi Party after the Second World War would be outlawed in Germany. Laws would be passed circumscribing radical sort of nationalist politics. Throughout the West politics stabilized during the Cold War around the center. And this would be important to ensuring not only the stability of the West but also its ascendancy in larger international context.

==== State Responsibility for the Welfare of its Citizens ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=37:16]]
<nowiki>[37:16]</nowiki> 

The stabilization of the political center of course would depend upon the state's assumption of new responsibilities vis-à-vis the welfare of its citizens. The state's commitment to social reform and the expansion of democracy would be crucial to the production of political stability in the postwar West.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=37:35]]
<nowiki>[37:35]</nowiki> 

Social democratic welfare states took on new responsibilities for meeting the material needs of their citizens. States provided health care as in the case of Great Britain. States provided expanded insurance for people who became unemployed or disabled during the course of their labor.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=37:52]]
<nowiki>[37:52]</nowiki> 

In countries like the United States in which political participation had been previously circumscribed along lines of racial exclusion the postwar state expanded the domain of democratic participation so as to include previously marginalized communities.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=38:08]]
<nowiki>[38:08]</nowiki> 

The story of civil rights in the United States is just the most sort of heroic example of this expansion of participatory democracy so as to include groups previously sort of oppressed and marginalized.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=38:22]]
<nowiki>[38:22]</nowiki> 

Of course democratic participation would not necessarily remedy age old economic and social inequalities and the struggle to correct these in the United States at least still goes on today.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=38:36]]
<nowiki>[38:36]</nowiki> 

But the basic vectors of the postwar years seems to be ones of expanding democratic participation and ones of expanding provision on the state's part for the well-being of its citizens.

==== Western Economic Strength ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=38:48]]
<nowiki>[38:48]</nowiki> 

The ascendancy of the West depended too upon the productivity and efficiency of the capitalist economy. This is a theme to which we've devoted substantial attention already in this class. But let me just reinforce the point today that capitalism's bounty in the postwar West is fairly broadly distributed.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=39:08]]
<nowiki>[39:08]</nowiki> 

At least until the early 1970s the West experienced...dwindling economic inequality. Ordinary people and affluent people moved somewhat closer together through the 1950s and 1960s. The broad distribution of capitalism's bounty became a source of stability for Western societies. Ordinary people were able to envisage themselves and their children doing better in the future than they had done in the past.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=39:34]]
<nowiki>[39:34]</nowiki> 

And this helped to underwrite the stability of the sort of centrist political stabilization that occurred after the trauma of the Second World War.

==== The International Order and Western Stabilization ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=39:43]]
<nowiki>[39:43]</nowiki> 

What were the international conditions that facilitated the West's stabilization after the Second World War? The United States played a crucial role. After the Second World War the United States took on unique responsibility for the sustenance of stability in the international system as a whole.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=40:02]]
<nowiki>[40:02]</nowiki> 

At least in that portion of the international system where the United States predominated. American leaders exercised power for the most part with responsibility. They provided material assistance to Europe to facilitate Europe's postwar economic recovery.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=40:20]]
<nowiki>[40:20]</nowiki> 

And they took on responsibilities for defending Europe not only against the Soviet Union but also against itself. The United States intervened in Europe in ways that helped to solve the security dilemmas that had racked Europe for centuries.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=40:35]]
<nowiki>[40:35]</nowiki> 

Specifically in more recent decades the problem of German power and the question of how to contain it. American hegemony, as we might call it, provided an answer to this basic security dilemma that Europe had long struggled with.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=40:51]]
<nowiki>[40:51]</nowiki> 

At the global scale international institutions provided a [[wikt:modicum|modicum]] of stability for the global system as a whole. We could talk about political institutions: The United Nations. The United Nations did not solve the world's ills but it at least provided a forum in which adversaries were able to dialog about issues over which they disagreed.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=41:10]]
<nowiki>[41:10]</nowiki> 

The Soviet Union and the United States seemed to treat the Security Council of the United Nations more often as a debating chamber than as a forum in which you know sort of common ground could be achieved. But it nonetheless mattered that the superpowers were arguing in the Security Council rather than fighting a sort of direct conflict between themselves militarily.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=41:33]]
<nowiki>[41:33]</nowiki> 

The economic institutions created in 1944, the so-called {{WPExtract|Bretton Woods system|Bretton Woods institutions}}, also served to stabilize the international system -- specifically here the international economic system. Bretton Woods would provide for the restoration, the gradual restoration, of international trade even while accommodating the growth of public sector economics after the Second World War.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=41:54]]
<nowiki>[41:54]</nowiki> 

The whole system seemed to operate according to...a sort of coherent logic -- a logic of building sort of liberal democratic nation-states within the context of a cooperative increasingly interdependent global community.

==== Cold War Division in the Postwar Era ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=42:09]]
<nowiki>[42:09]</nowiki> 

Of course the achievement of stability within the West depended to some extent upon the existence of a larger sort of Cold War division. The division of the world between East and West provided a context in which the United States you know choose to deploy resources to facilitate the stabilization of its West European allies.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=42:30]]
<nowiki>[42:30]</nowiki> 

Its you know questionable whether the United States would have been so proactive in intervening economically to aid Europe in the absence of a Soviet threat. So it may ironically have been that the division of the international system between East and West was a necessary condition for the stabilization of the West unto itself. That's a possibility that you should give some consideration to.

==== Conclusion: Western Postwar Ascendancy ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=42:52]]
<nowiki>[42:52]</nowiki> 

Still the system seemed fairly stable: internationally and internally. Within the nation-states of the West centrism and stability prevailed. At the international scale the United States provided over the West throughout the era of the Cold War as a benign hegemon -- as a power on which the other Western countries could depend for the provision of security and where necessary economic assistance.

=== Dilemmas in the West ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=43:18]]
<nowiki>[43:18]</nowiki> 

Since the end of the Cold War this stability has in sort of key respects become unstuck. I already mentioned the results of last Sunday's election in France as an example of this. In France's election of course the political center seems embattled. Sarkozy has himself had to tack fairly vigorously towards the right so as to keep on board disaffected voters who might otherwise vote for Marine Le Pen -- the representative of the {{WPExtract|National Rally (France)|French National Front}}.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=43:49]]
<nowiki>[43:49]</nowiki>

On the left the sort of -- the radical sort of anti-globalization candidate {{WPExtract|Jean-Luc Mélenchon}} has similarly attracted votes away from the mainstream socialist party of {{WPExtract|François Hollande}}.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=44:04]]
<nowiki>[44:04]</nowiki> 

So politics sort of manifests some symptoms of destabilization even political polarization today. But underlying this are serious structural dilemmas which the West had today to confront.

==== Accumulation of Public Debt ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=44:20]]
<nowiki>[44:20]</nowiki> 

Let's think about the accumulation of public debt as a symptom of crisis. We talked on Tuesday about the accumulation of debt in the United States after 2001. But we could make similar sort of observations with regard to Western Europe as well.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=44:37]]
<nowiki>[44:37]</nowiki> 

What this map shows you is the debt to GDP ratio for the entire world shaded onto a map. This is taken from 2009 so it's fairly representative of where things stand today. Countries that are shaded in green are countries that have low debt to GDP ratios. Countries whose public finances are fairly solvent.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=44:58]]
<nowiki>[44:58]</nowiki> 

And you can see that China is...a country that falls into this category as is Russia. Countries that are shaded in red and to a lesser extent orange are countries that have unfavorable debt to GDP ratios. Countries who are, to put it crudely, in hock to lenders because they've been unable year in year out to balance their budgets.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=45:21]]
<nowiki>[45:21]</nowiki> 

Well, which countries stand out on this map of the world as being particularly indebted? It's...the countries of the West. The United States and Western Europe and Canada where sort of the public finances appear to be most unstable.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=45:38]]
<nowiki>[45:38]</nowiki> 

(student question)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=45:42]]
<nowiki>[45:42]</nowiki> 

No.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=45:43]]
<nowiki>[45:43]</nowiki> 

No, I mean Iceland's economy is still in a very serious situation.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=45:47]]
<nowiki>[45:47]</nowiki> 

How do we explain this? Well, it's complicated. We could emphasize the structural propensities of democracies to favor deficits over surpluses, to favor consumption over productive investment. This might be one explanation.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=46:02]]
<nowiki>[46:02]</nowiki> 

At the same time we should note that the indebtedness of the West is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. It's something that can be explained in terms of a ten to twenty year time frame rather than a time frame that takes us all the way back to the origins of the postwar era.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=46:18]]
<nowiki>[46:18]</nowiki> 

(student question)

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=46:26]]
<nowiki>[46:26]</nowiki> 

No, that's a great question. Why are these countries so indebted? Is it because they've paid for social programs or it is because they've paid for military spending? Apart from the United States where military spending remains more substantial it's social programs in Europe and Canada that have consumed the bulk of public largess.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=46:45]]
<nowiki>[46:45]</nowiki> 

The United States is a little different. Social spending today accounts for much more as a fraction of federal spending than does military spending. But the United States of course waged two very expensive wars over the past decade which it -- which together have exacerbated the debt crisis that the federal government faces.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=47:03]]
<nowiki>[47:03]</nowiki>

So it's a combination in the United States of military and social spending that explains why this country is so indebted. Elsewhere the consequence -- the causes of gross indebtedness have more to do with social spending.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=47:16]]
<nowiki>[47:16]</nowiki> 

Of course we shouldn't indict social spending as the cause of all ills. The problem is not social spending as such. The problem is social spending that is not paid for by tax revenues. And this is where we might think about the structural deficiencies of democracy. It's very easy for elected leaders to spend money on welfare programs.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=47:36]]
<nowiki>[47:36]</nowiki> 

Or to spend money via tax cuts for the wealthy. It doesn't really matter what you spend money on. It's easy to do it. Voters like government expenditures. What voters like don't vote so much is governments raising revenue via taxation. So the question of whether democracy is structurally predisposed towards fiscal crisis is an interesting question that we should you know consider.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=47:59]]
<nowiki>[47:59]</nowiki> 

Is it the case that you know countries in Western Europe for example have expanded public welfare provisions so as to sort of...establish and assure their own legitimacy and their own popularity while at the same time resisting collecting the tax revenues that would be sufficient to make these programs politically -- sorry fiscally sustainable over the long term.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=48:23]]
<nowiki>[48:23]</nowiki> 

This is a difficult question and you could point to examples of countries which have managed to sustain very expansive welfare states while remaining fiscally solvent. Sweden is a good example. Sweden is not one of the countries of the West that is grotesquely indebted today. And that's because the Swedes have raised the revenues via taxation that are necessary to pay for expansive social commitments.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=48:45]]
<nowiki>[48:45]</nowiki> 

So we shouldn't blame social spending. The issue at hand is an imbalance between expenditure on the one hand and revenue collection on the other.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=48:54]]
<nowiki>[48:54]</nowiki> 

Still it's clear enough when we look at this map that Western countries have assumed commitments that they can barely afford to sustain. Western societies today are fairly grotesquely indebted.

==== Crisis of Democracy ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=49:10]]
<nowiki>[49:10]</nowiki>

We could talk too about something akin to a crisis of democracy itself. To substantiate this we might point to the declining repute of politicians throughout the West. I think that Barack Obama is by some margin the most popular public official anywhere in the Western world today. And his approval ratings are what about 45%.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=49:34]]
<nowiki>[49:34]</nowiki> 

So that tells you that elected officials outside of the United States do not have a particularly high repute with their own voting publics at this point. And indeed virtually every time since the financial crisis hit that an election has been held in the West the party in power has been evicted. If Obama is able to cling on through November's election then it will be a remarkable feat.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=49:59]]
<nowiki>[49:59]</nowiki> 

Because in the present context virtually every other incumbent to face reelection since the financial crisis hit has been defeated. And this is illustrative of a mood of profound disaffection in the West writ large.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=50:14]]
<nowiki>[50:14]</nowiki> 

We could also point to rising political polarization, the resurgence of political extremes, particularly in Europe, where representative democracy gives more opportunities for political extremes to win representation in the legislature.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=50:31]]
<nowiki>[50:31]</nowiki> 

In the United States and Great Britain by contrast, politicians are elected to parliament in the British case, and to Congress in the US case, on the basis of winning sort of large constituencies -- parliamentary constituencies in Britain and electoral districts in the United States.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=50:48]]
<nowiki>[50:48]</nowiki> 

The so-called {{WPExtract|First-past-the-post voting|first past the post system}}<ref>One could also visit the Wikipedia article {{WPExtract|Electoral system}} which has a color coded map showing different political systems in different countries.</ref> that prevails in Britain and the United States makes it harder for representatives of sort of fringe political movements to win office. In continental Europe by contrast representatives to parliaments are in general allocated on a sort of basis of proportional representation. So parties win seats in the parliament according to their share of the total national vote.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=51:15]]
<nowiki>[51:15]</nowiki> 

So for example a far right-wing party that wins 15% of the vote will receive 15% of the seats in the parliament. This is what's happened in the Netherlands and it explains why sort of a right-wing anti-immigrant party now controls a substantial portion of seats in the Dutch parliament.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=51:30]]
<nowiki>[51:30]</nowiki> 

In the United States, or Britain by contrast it's entirely possible for a party to command 15% of the vote but to win nothing in terms of political power. So the configuration of the democratic system has some you know sort of role to play in defining opportunities for critics of the political center to win power and influence but in...North America as in Western Europe we could sort of identity specific symptoms of political polarization today.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=52:05]]
<nowiki>[52:05]</nowiki> 

==== Extremism from the Political Wings ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=52:10]]
<nowiki>[52:10]</nowiki> 

We can identity sort of manifestations of extremism and radicalism on both the left as well as on the right. Let's talk first of all about the left. Well, I already mentioned Jean-Luc Mélenchon -- a sort of radical anti-capitalist -- anti-globalist -- who has done pretty well in the French elections. He came fourth just behind Jean -- behind Marine Le Pen.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=52:32]]
<nowiki>[52:32]</nowiki> 

In the French elections the rise of sort of anti-liberal left and anti-liberal right has proceeded more or less in symmetry. We could make a similar kind of observation if we looked at German politics today. Today in Germany the party of the left, {{WPExtract|The Left (Germany)|Die Linke}},  as it is known, has become a serious sort of challenge to the centrist {{WPExtract|Social Democratic Party of Germany|Social Democratic Party}}<ref>One could also visit the Wikipedia article: {{WPExtract|List of political parties in Germany}}.</ref>. Die Linke now commands sort of low double-digit support in German elections. What's striking about this is that the party is a hardline sort of anti-liberal left-wing party.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=53:06]]
<nowiki>[53:06]</nowiki> 

It's a party that has grown out of the shell of the former East German Communist Party and now opposes sort of globalization, capitalism and European integration.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=53:17]]
<nowiki>[53:17]</nowiki> 

The resurgence of the right in Europe has been no less striking, in some ways more striking, than the resurgence of the left. We could point to the rise of hardline nationalist parties in France, the [[wikt:Benelux|Benelux]] countries, and also in Scandinavia. Germany is a somewhat different case because the hardline right is controlled by law. It's prohibited from seeking election because of laws that have to do with the specific legacies of National Socialism in Germany.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=53:44]]
<nowiki>[53:44]</nowiki> 

Similarly, or I should -- in Britain the hardline right has less actual political representation in Britain, as I've already emphasized, as a consequence of the electoral system, rather than a consequence of laws that prohibit right wing nationalist parties from seeking office.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=53:59]]
<nowiki>[53:59]</nowiki> 

But in English street politics or British street politics, as the illustration in this slide suggests, the influence of the sort of hardline anti-immigrant right is today felt more powerfully than in decades past.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=54:14]]
<nowiki>[54:14]</nowiki> 

Intriguingly there are some points of common ground between the illiberal right and the illiberal left in Europe today. Both the illiberal right and the illiberal left line up against the forces of globalization. They both stand for the nation, for the autonomy and independence of the nation, in an integrating world.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=54:34]]
<nowiki>[54:34]</nowiki> 

Both oppose themselves to European integration. Both the illiberal left and the illiberal right are opposed to what we might you know see as one of the most constructive accomplishments in postwar Europe -- namely the achievement of the European Union and an integrated single European market.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=54:50]]
<nowiki>[54:50]</nowiki> 

This is an accomplishment that the political fringes on both sides rail against. How far can this lead? What might be the consequences of Europe's political polarization?

===== The Case of Hungary and Viktor Orbán and Fidesz =====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=55:02]]
<nowiki>[55:02]</nowiki> 

Here the experience of Hungary serves maybe as a salutary warning of some kind. In Hungary the ultraconservative {{WPExtract|Fidesz}} party is now predominant. At the beginning of this year it introduced a new constitution which substantially limited the freedom of democratic institutions including the media in the interests of sustaining its own power.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=55:24]]
<nowiki>[55:24]</nowiki>

This is a sort of very conservative quasi-authoritarian party that has redefined the constitution so as to preserve its own ascendancy through sort of pseudo-democratic means.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=55:35]]
<nowiki>[55:35]</nowiki> 

Electoral districts have been {{WPExtract|Gerrymandering|gerrymandered}} so as to try to assure sort of a permanent parliamentary majority for the Fidesz party.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=55:44]]
<nowiki>[55:44]</nowiki> 

The European Union is concerned by this. It's concerned by the new Hungarian constitution, but it's not altogether clear what European institutions can do to restore democracy of a more authentic kind in Hungary. Rather Hungary suggests the capacity of democratic institutions to slip over time and under the influence of anti-democratic political leaders in more sort of authoritarian directions.

===== Consequences of Political Extremism in Europe and Elsewhere in the World =====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=56:09]]
<nowiki>[56:09]</nowiki> 

The hostility to immigrants from the Muslim world is one of the most you know sort of powerful symptoms of Europe's political polarization and arguably destabilization today.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=56:22]]
<nowiki>[56:22]</nowiki> 

It's no exaggeration to say that hostility to Muslim immigrants animates the European right today as nothing else does. This in itself is really, really interesting. It suggests that Europe remains racked by the kinds of religious and cultural conflicts and grievances that it seemed in the early postwar decades had been left in the past.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=56:44]]
<nowiki>[56:44]</nowiki> 

What the consequences of this will be, where it might lead in the future, is very difficult to tell. But throughout Europe the sort of question of where exactly the lines of inclusion and exclusion should be drawn remains a highly contested question. And here you see sort of a powerful disjoint between Europe-wide institutions like the {{WPExtract|European Court of Human Rights}}, that stand for sort of a universalistic approach to inclusion and citizenship, and the politics of extremism which try to define the nation in terms of ethnic and cultural and linguistic exclusivity.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=57:17]]
<nowiki>[57:17]</nowiki>

These are serious dilemmas that Europe is only beginning to, to grapple with.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=57:23]]
<nowiki>[57:23]</nowiki> 

These dilemmas are not necessarily unique to Europe though. In Europe Islamophobia is a particularly ugly manifestation of them, but similar dilemmas can be identified elsewhere in the world -- in the United States and even outside of the West entirely.

== The Secularization Hypothesis and the Reassertion of the Influence of Religion ==

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=57:39]]
<nowiki>[57:39]</nowiki> 

When we talk about the resurgence of tribal and ethnic cleavages in modern societies we may sort of call into question some of our own presumptions about secularization. What is {{WPExtract|Secularization|secularization}}? Well, secularization is a hypothesis. It's one of the most influential hypotheses in you know modern sociology.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=57:59]]
<nowiki>[57:59]</nowiki> 

The secularization hypothesis holds that societies, as they modernize, will become less religious -- less beholden to distinctions of sort of religious identity and particularity. Modernity according to many of the most influential sociologists in the canon -- {{WPExtract|Karl Marx|Marx}}, {{WPExtract|Émile Durkheim|Durkheim}} and {{WPExtract|Max Weber|Weber}} -- will over time produce a gradual secularization of societies.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=58:26]]
<nowiki>[58:26]</nowiki> 

Individuals in modern societies, Durkheim argued, will become sort of less dependent upon the psychological crutch of religion. This has been a very influential hypothesis: the secularization -- the secularization hypothesis.<ref>"Secularization hypothesis" is a redirect to the Wikipedia article titled {{WPExtract|Secularization}}. The article doesn't mention the term "secularization hypothesis" but uses the term "secularization thesis" to refer to, "the belief that as societies progress, particularly through modernization and rationalization, religion loses its authority in all aspects of social life and governance."</ref> Developments since the 1960s however have called the secularization hypothesis into question.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=58:47]]
<nowiki>[58:47]</nowiki> 

You might consider the perspective of {{WPExtract|Peter L. Berger|Peter Berger}} -- one of the most influential sociologists of our time. Some of you have probably had the opportunity to read Berger in sociology classes.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=58:59]]
<nowiki>[58:59]</nowiki> 

In the late 1960s Berger published a book, ''The Sacred Canopy'', which represented a very bold articulation of the secularization hypothesis. Modernity, Berger argued, was gradually rendering religion obsolete.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=59:13]]
<nowiki>[59:13]</nowiki> 

Well, since then Berger has recanted. He's published a book more recently called ''The Desecularization of the World'' that repudiates the secularization hypothesis and sees religious particularism as a force that will remain powerful long into the future.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=59:29]]
<nowiki>[59:29]</nowiki> 

What specific developments could we point to that might be illustrative of this? At least sort of in societies with which we're familiar? Well, we could talk about the rise of Christian Evangelical<ref>One could visit the Wikipedia article on {{WPExtract|Evangelicalism}} and also see historian {{WPExtract|David W. Bebbington}}'s four feature definition of evangelicalism called the [[wikipedia:David_W._Bebbington#Bebbington_quadrilateral|Bebbington quadrilateral]]: biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism.</ref> {{WPExtract|Fundamentalism|fundamentalism}} in the United States. This is a sort of familiar theme. We don't need to dwell -- you know, probe too deeply into it because you're all familiar with the sort of manifestations of religion as a force in American politics.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=59:53]]
<nowiki>[59:53]</nowiki> 

It should suffice to say that this force is probably more powerful today than it was thirty or forty years ago. How are we to explain this? Does the resurgence of religion as a political force in the United States have to do with deep structural social or economic changes? Perhaps.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:00:08]]
<nowiki>[1:00:08]</nowiki> 

It may also have to do with the capacity of religious political leaders for organization and mobilization. We could point to the efficacy with which groups like {{WPExtract|Focus on the Family}} have asserted themselves in the political arena as one sort of explanation for the resurgence of religion's influence on politics.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:00:26]]
<nowiki>[1:00:26]</nowiki> 

So I don't want to sort of offer an answer to this question I just want to lay it out there on the table. We could see the resurgence of religiosity in American political life as a symptom of very deep seated structural changes. We could alternatively see it as an accomplishment of particular leaders and movements who have deployed religion with special aptitude as a tool of political mobilization.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:00:49]]
<nowiki>[1:00:49]</nowiki> 

Still, there are similar movements and developments elsewhere to which we might point if we wanted to rebuke the secularization hypothesis from a broader range of vantage points.

=== Hindu Muslim Conflict in India ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:01:00]]
<nowiki>[1:01:00]</nowiki> 

We could talk for example about India. India is a country that has long been afflicted by a history of communal violence. Riots between Hindus and Muslims in India occurred even before the British colonization of South Asia. But it's certainly true that the British colonial state [[wikt:reify|reified]] and essentialized the distinction between Hindu and Muslim in ways that inhibited {{WPExtract|Syncretism|syncretic}} religious practice and accommodation and so on.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:01:26]]
<nowiki>[1:01:26]</nowiki> 

Since India became independent in 1947 the question of the relationship between religious identity and the state has remained a fraught question. It has been in some ways an international question. The state of Pakistan after all was formed in 1947 as a state for the Muslims of South Asia.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:01:47]]
<nowiki>[1:01:47]</nowiki> 

One Implication of this might have been that India would be a  state for the Hindus of South Asia. The Indian nation-state never accepted this logic. The {{WPExtract|Indian National Congress|Congress Party}} that dominated Indian politics from the 1940s through to the 1990s insisted that India was a multi-religious, multiethnic society, that the Indian state made no particular differentiation among its citizens according to religion.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:02:08]]
<nowiki>[1:02:08]</nowiki>

Secularism and multiculturalism were from the outsets foundational commitments for the Indian republic.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:02:15]]
<nowiki>[1:02:15]</nowiki> 

Nonetheless India since the 1980s has also experienced the stirrings of religious politics -- of what are known in the South Asian context of as communal politics. The rise of communalism in India has had to do with the mobilization of both Hindu and Muslim extremists.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:02:33]]
<nowiki>[1:02:33]</nowiki> 

One issue that was particularly powerful as a mobilizing force for Hindu extremists was the existence of a mosque -- the {{WPExtract|Babri Masjid|Babri Mosque}} in {{WPExtract|Ayodhya}} constructed on a site that Hindus held to be the birthplace of the god {{WPExtract|Rama|Ram}}.<ref>One could also visit the Wikipedia page on {{WPExtract|Demolition of the Babri Masjid}} and the article on the {{WPExtract|Ayodhya dispute}}.</ref>

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:02:52]]
<nowiki>[1:02:52]</nowiki> 

The campaign to demolish this mosque and to establish in its place a Hindu temple became in the 1980s sort of the primary sort of node of political mobilization for the forces of political Hinduism or {{WPExtract|Hindutva}} as it's known in sort of the South Asian context.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:03:09]]
<nowiki>[1:03:09]</nowiki> 

One of the most important beneficiaries of the rise of political Hinduism in South Asia has been the {{WPExtract|Bharatiya Janata Party}} or the BJP -- a party is that the sort of representative in national and regional politics of political Hinduism.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:03:24]]
<nowiki>[1:03:24]</nowiki> 

The BJP won its first nationwide election in 1998 -- formed its first nationwide government under the leadership of {{WPExtract|Atal Bihari Vajpayee}}.  A couple of years later in 2002 a series of major communal riots took place in {{WPExtract|Gujarat}}. The riots began when a group of militant Muslims attacked a train load of militant Hindu pilgrims who were returning from a pilgrimage to the Ayodhya site where the mosque had been demolished a few years earlier.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:03:54]]
<nowiki>[1:03:54]</nowiki> 

After this attack on a train there were retaliatory attacks by Hindu extremists on Muslim communities leading to hundreds of deaths in the state of Gujarat. This was a very ugly explosion of communal violence of the sort of internal religious and ethnic tensions that have you know racked India in recent years.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:04:13]]
<nowiki>[1:04:13]</nowiki> 

Despite the explosion of communalism in the early 21st century the Congress Party did win election -- reelection I think in two thousand and -- I think it was 2003 or 2004 -- you'd have to look that up on Wikipedia.<ref>According to the Wikipedia article {{WPExtract|List of Prime Ministers of India}} {{WPExtract|Manmohan Singh}} became Prime Minister of India in May of 2004 and he remained in office until May of 2014 at which point {{WPExtract|Narendra Modi}} of the {{WPExtract|Bharatiya Janata Party}} became Prime Minister.</ref>

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:04:29]]
<nowiki>[1:04:29]</nowiki> 

But the point is that the communal wave seems in India to have subsided somewhat since its high point around the turn of the 21st century. Still religious communalism remains a potent force in Indian political life. It's unlikely that we've seen the last of it.

=== The Rise of Militant Islam and the 9/11 Attacks  ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:04:48]]
<nowiki>[1:04:48]</nowiki>

On a global scale of course the rise of political Islam -- militant Islam -- Islamism -- call it what you will, there are complex implications to the terminology which I don't want to get too deep into today,<ref>There is a section in the Wikipedia article on {{WPExtract|Islamism}} on the issue of [[wikipedia:Islamism#Terminology|terminology]].</ref> has been one of the most striking examples of religion's reassertion since the 1970s as a powerful political force.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:05:09]]
<nowiki>[1:05:09]</nowiki> 

What is Islamism? If we are to call it that. We could describe it succinctly as a fusion of a radical version of Islamic theology with a cogent political agenda -- a radical political agenda to boot.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:05:25]]
<nowiki>[1:05:25]</nowiki> 

Islamism constitutes a sort of transnational movement. It's not a movement that is confined to any single individual nation-state. It has at the same time a sort of anti-modernist agenda.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:05:38]]
<nowiki>[1:05:38]</nowiki> 

Is...What is the relationship of militant Islam -- Islamism to globalization? This is a really interesting question. Insofar as globalization constitutes a force that sort of disseminates and expands the scope of liberal modernity -- this is how Benjamin<ref>Speaker said "Friedman" here, but likely meant "Barber" as in {{WPExtract|Benjamin Barber}} who wrote the book {{WPExtract|Jihad vs. McWorld|''Jihad vs. McWorld'}}</ref> defines it in the {{WPExtract|Jihad vs. McWorld|''Jihad vs. McWorld'}} article which you've read. This is how {{WPExtract|Thomas Friedman|Tom Friedman}} defines it in {{WPExtract|The Lexus and the Olive Tree|''The Lexus and the Olive Tree''}}. We could see Islamism as a force that is opposed to globalizationism, as a force that represents particularism against the integrative forces of liberal modernity.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:06:15]]
<nowiki>[1:06:15]</nowiki>

This I would argue would be too simple. It would perhaps be more accurate to see Islamism as an alternative kind of globalization -- as a force that is counter-globalization as much as it is contra-globalization.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:06:30]]
<nowiki>[1:06:30]</nowiki> 

{{WPExtract|Osama bin Laden|Bin Laden}}, after all, one of the most influential representatives of Islamism in recent decades...did not simply seek to win power within sort of an individual nation-state; rather, bin Laden put forward a radically alternative vision of what globalization should look like.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:06:47]]
<nowiki>[1:06:47]</nowiki>

He argued for a sort of approach to globalization that drew upon the accomplishments of Islam in the 12th and 13th century. He sought to sort of reintegrate the communities of the Muslim world into a religiously defined whole.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:07:01]]
<nowiki>[1:07:01]</nowiki> 

He sought to make religion, rather than sort of capitalism or liberalism, the force around which a counter-globalization might be organized. This was of course a radical and sort of lunatic vision; the plausibility of its realization was close to zero, but radical Islamism of the bin Laden variety nonetheless exerted a powerful influence on the world's international politics in the last decade of the 20th century and even more so in the first decade of the 21st century.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:07:33]]
<nowiki>[1:07:33]</nowiki> 

So though this is a fringe fringe movement. It still behooves us to ask where did it originate? Where did it come from? How do we explain the origins of radical bin Ladenism? We could probe for the deep intellectual origins. We could take the story back all the way to the 19th century -- to the rising influence of hardline {{WPExtract|Wahhabism|Wahhabi}} clerics on the Arabian peninsula.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:07:52]]
<nowiki>[1:07:52]</nowiki> 

To do that might be a stretch. More proximate deep origins might be located in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s -- in the sort of formulation of a distinctive idiom of radical political Islam by {{WPExtract|Sayyid Qutb}} the Islamist writer and political activist who defined his own career sort of in opposition to the secular nationalist state that governed Egypt -- that governed Egypt after the 1930s.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:08:22]]
<nowiki>[1:08:22]</nowiki> 

Certainly radical Islamism has defined itself as much in opposition to secular nationalism in the Arab world as it has defined itself against the West. The intellectual origins are very complex and they need to be understood in terms of local contexts as well as global ones.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:08:41]]
<nowiki>[1:08:41]</nowiki> 

We could also point, if we seek to explain the rise of bin Ladenism as a phenomenon in the modern world, to its more proximate political and economic origins. The infusion of oil money to the Middle East since the 1970s has had consequences for the politics of religion.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:08:56]]
<nowiki>[1:08:56]</nowiki> 

The Saudi Arabian state in an effort to buy off its domestic religious extremists has pumped money into the propagation of a hardline Wahhabist variant of Islam. A development which has had sort of consequences for the larger global Islamic community.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:09:12]]
<nowiki>[1:09:12]</nowiki> 

The {{WPExtract|Soviet–Afghan War|Afghan War in the 1980s}} was...undoubtedly a very important sort of mobilizing focus for the forces of radical Islamism. Osama bin Laden sort of established himself as an important Islamist leader during the Afghan War. Using family money he went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union -- establishing himself for the first time as a jihadi -- as a religious warrior.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:09:34]]
<nowiki>[1:09:34]</nowiki> 

It's from this point that we should sort of locate the organizational origins of {{WPExtract|Al-Qaeda}} as a sort of transnational terrorist group.

==== The 9/11 Attacks ====

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:09:43]]
<nowiki>[1:09:43]</nowiki> 

Why did the mobilization of Al-Qaeda, coming out of the context of the Afghan Wars of the 1980s, lead to an attack upon the United States in 2001?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:09:55]]
<nowiki>[1:09:55]</nowiki> 

This is a really difficult question to answer. Why is the United States an enemy to radical Islamists of the bin Laden type?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:10:04]]
<nowiki>[1:10:04]</nowiki> 

Well, part of the answer probably has to do with the associations between the United States and Arab regimes. Regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia that are not necessarily especially democratic -- Egypt of course is changing in the present moment -- but which have historically been unfriendly to the aspirations of radical Islamism.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:10:26]]
<nowiki>[1:10:26]</nowiki> 

It's the association between the US, and you know Saudi Arabia for example, that led bin Laden to focus on the United States. In part it was because the US is easier to assault, bin Laden calculated, than Saudi Arabian which maintains a much more elaborate national security state at home than does the United States.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:10:43]]
<nowiki>[1:10:43]</nowiki> 

We might also point to the fact that the United States is, in the world of the early 21st century, the preeminent representative of liberal modernity. Insofar as radical Islamists have defined themselves against liberal modernity than the United States might represent its paramount sort of exemplar.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:11:01]]
<nowiki>[1:11:01]</nowiki> 

Still explanation will probably will have to wait for expanded historical perspective. We can still talk about how the 9/11 attacks happened. In the late 1990s, {{WPExtract|Khalid Sheikh Mohammed}}, who's now going to be put on trial,<ref>According to Wikipedia as of May 2019 the trial was still going through the legal system. See the section on  [[wikipedia:Khalid_Sheikh_Mohammed#Trial_for_role_in_World_Trade_Center_attacks|the legal proceedings in the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed article]].</ref> concocted the idea of attacking skyscrapers in the United States with civilian airliners.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:11:24]]
<nowiki>[1:11:24]</nowiki> 

This was a plot that won support from Osama bin Laden, the primary sort of entrepreneur behind Al-Qaeda, and with relatively limited funding, about half a million dollars, the whole plot was orchestrated in a fairly short span of time.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:11:38]]
<nowiki>[1:11:38]</nowiki> 

What's particularly interesting, I think, when we think about the larger issues that are involved, is the facility with which a very small number of radical extremists were able to leverage the weapon -- you know sort of the infrastructure of liberal modernity consumer, sorry, civilian airliners in this case against the United States.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:11:58]]
<nowiki>[1:11:58]</nowiki> 

Airplanes on which the liberal sort of economy depends, for its integration and functioning, were turned in, on the morning of 9/11, into weapons of war. In a sense what bin Laden accomplished through the attacks was to turn sort of the infrastructure of liberal modernity against itself -- to attack the West from within as it were.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:12:24]]
<nowiki>[1:12:24]</nowiki> 

What have been the consequences of this attack? We can all attest to the sort of transformations in internal security procedures which have occurred in the United States since 9/11. The consequences of 9/11 for American foreign policy of course you know are -- that's a complex issue but one which merits attention.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:12:42]]
<nowiki>[1:12:42]</nowiki> 

Did 9/11 sort of push the United States into waging a war in Iraq that has not necessarily served the national interests of the United States? It's probably too soon to tell. We'll have to wait for the documentation to emerge. That's the easy answer that the diplomatic historian can offer. It's too soon to tell.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:13:02]]
<nowiki>[1:13:02]</nowiki> 

Still it would be too, it would be wrong I would argue, to see Islamism as representing an existential threat to the ascendancy to the West. This is an argument that anti-immigrant extremists in Europe like to make. It's certainly the argument that Breivik has made on the stand in Norway. But it's an argument that I think exaggerates the influence and consequence of radical Islamism beyond all you know sort of realistic perspective.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:13:33]]
<nowiki>[1:13:33]</nowiki> 

One alternative vantage point on this is offered by the {{WPExtract|Arab Spring}} which has unfolded over the past two years. What has happened in the Arab Spring is in some ways surprising in other ways...transformative. But what's you know very clear, even in this early stage of the political revolutions that are presently sweeping the Middle East, is that radical Islamism has not been the principle beneficiary.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:13:59]]
<nowiki>[1:13:59]</nowiki> 

Bin Laden, by the time of his death, a little bit less than a year ago, seems to already be wholly irrelevant to the politics of the Middle East -- to the politics of the region that he above all sought to lead and transform.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:14:15]]
<nowiki>[1:14:15]</nowiki> 

The Arab Spring has offered a decisive repudiation of Al-Qaeda. It doesn't seem clear that the future for the Middle East is {{WPExtract|Jeffersonian democracy}} but it certainly does not seem that the future for that region is going to be fundamentalism of the bin Laden variety.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:14:30]]
<nowiki>[1:14:30]</nowiki> 

What the future may hold is difficult to tell. But it would be hard I think in the perspective of recent events to see the Al-Qaeda narrative, the narrative of irrevocable and insurmountable hostility, between the West and the forces of...radical Islam as being a sort of realistic guide to the future.

== Geopolitics in the 21st Century ==

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:14:50]]
<nowiki>[1:14:50]</nowiki> 

When we talk about challenges that may face the liberal world order in the future it would be more realistic I would suggest that focus upon the world of nation-states -- to focus in particular upon the role of the great powers.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:15:04]]
<nowiki>[1:15:04]</nowiki> 

The liberal world order since 19 -- after 1945 -- was a world order that was orchestrated and existed primarily amongst nation-states. Nation-states were bound together via common institutions -- the United Nations and Bretton Woods -- the United States at least within the West played a vital role in orchestrating the whole.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:15:23]]
<nowiki>[1:15:23]</nowiki> 

The Cold War was of course essential to the orchestration of the postwar West -- to the postwar Western alliance. Division in a sense was a glue that held the whole thing together. That is to say the world's division between communism and capitalism worked to hold the nations of the West in a sort of common military political and economic alliance.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:15:43]]
<nowiki>[1:15:43]</nowiki> 

After the Cold War the liberal world, the scope of the liberal world order, expanded. It expanded in the 1990s to incorporate the states of Eastern Europe. It expanded perhaps to include countries of the former Soviet Union itself too. Whether Russia is a part of this liberal world or not is a difficult question to answer today.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:16:05]]
<nowiki>[1:16:05]</nowiki> 

Whether the liberal world has expanded to include China is however the most urgent and important question of all. For when we talk about geopolitics, when we talk about international relations, when we talk about the great powers -- it is at least in the past decade China's rise that has been the most striking and consequential transformation of all.

=== The US and China in the 21st Century ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:16:24]]
<nowiki>[1:16:24]</nowiki> 

Does China's rise represent a threat to the liberal world order as it is presently constituted? This is the most difficult question to answer. There are sources of tension between the West -- between the United States and China. These are easy to point to. We could point to the competition for finite resources such as energy. We could point to a struggle for influence in developing countries in Africa and Latin America for particular. We could point to the military balance in East Asia.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:16:54]]
<nowiki>[1:16:54]</nowiki> 

What kind of international system exists in East Asia? What kind of international system does China aspire to build in East Asia? Will Chinese leaders seek to reconstitute East Asian international relations on a kind of tributary system in which China exercises a dominant role as a regional hegemon.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:17:12]]
<nowiki>[1:17:12]</nowiki> 

There's certainly rich historical precedent for this if we take the story back far enough. On the other hand China's leaders have in public statements committed themselves to {{WPExtract|Westphalian sovereignty|Westphalian}} norms -- to the idea that the international system should be constructed as an international system of sovereign equals.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:17:27]]
<nowiki>[1:17:27]</nowiki> 

Whether China's choices and conduct in future years will be commensurate with you know such declarations of commitment to Westphalian expectations is difficult to predict.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:17:39]]
<nowiki>[1:17:39]</nowiki> 

There are sources of conflict in East Asia that may ultimately be definitive of future relations between China and the West -- between the United States and China in particular. Some of the most obvious sources of potential conflict in East Asia include Korea, Taiwan and the maritime disputes that have unfolded in recent years over contested territorial points in the South China Sea.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:18:03]]
<nowiki>[1:18:03]</nowiki> 

What is the role of the West in East Asian's sort of fraught geopolitical development? Well, the US is increasingly being drawn into East Asia as a kind of offshore balancer. This has been one of the most striking developments of recent years. The {{WPExtract|Rapprochement|rapprochement}} between the United States and Vietnam for example over the past decade can probably be understood only in relation to China.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:18:27]]
<nowiki>[1:18:27]</nowiki> 

Why has Vietnam sought expanded military ties with the United States in recent years? Well, the answer probably has something to do with Vietnam's proximity to an empowered and increasingly ambitious Chinese superpower.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:18:40]]
<nowiki>[1:18:40]</nowiki>

Similarly the rapprochement between the United States and Myanmar in recent months may well have something to do with the role of China in the region. Whether Myanmar is working to establish a new kind of relationship with the United States as a counterbalance to China is one sort of hypothesis.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:18:58]]
<nowiki>[1:18:58]</nowiki> 

Is conflict inevitable between the United States and China? This is a very, very difficult question to answer. The Cold War may have lessons to teach us but whether the Cold War can teach us anything depends largely on how we define the Cold War. Was the Cold War an inevitable function of the division of power in the international system between the United Nat -- between the United States and the Soviet Union?

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:19:20]]
<nowiki>[1:19:20]</nowiki> 

If it was, if the balance of power made the Cold War inevitable, then the prospects for China and the United States today may not be altogether positive.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:19:30]]
<nowiki>[1:19:30]</nowiki> 

On the other hand if the Cold War was primarily an ideological construction, if it had to do primarily with the Soviet Union's unwillingness to live in the liberal world order that the United States sought to build after the Second World War, then the prospects for China and the United States today may be somewhat more encouraging.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:19:50]]
<nowiki>[1:19:50]</nowiki>

China, at least since 1978, has at least demonstrated a committed willingness to inhabiting the liberal international order that the United States has worked to build and orchestrate since the Second World War.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:20:01]]
<nowiki>[1:20:01]</nowiki> 

China has grow prosperous and powerful within the context of an integrating globalizing liberal international system. Ideological differences maintain -- endure -- China is not democratic like the United States is.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:20:14]]
<nowiki>[1:20:14]</nowiki>

China is not so multicultural as the United States is. The rule of law in China is weaker than it is in the United States. Yet for all of these differences immense ties of common interest and common interdependence abound -- economic ties most obviously.

=== The Three Great Economic Powers of the 21st Century: China, the United States, and the Republic of India ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:20:31]]
<nowiki>[1:20:31]</nowiki>

What is not in doubt however is the pattern of the global economy in the future. When we project economic growth into the future we see a clear pattern which will likely be the key to the geopolitics of the 21st century.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:20:44]]
<nowiki>[1:20:44]</nowiki> 

Three powers will likely exceed all of the rest in terms of their share of global wealth and ultimately of global power too. China, the United States, and the Republic of India will likely be the three preeminent superpowers of the mid-21st century.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:21:02]]
<nowiki>[1:21:02]</nowiki> 

What this will mean for relations between them: it's simply too early to tell. Whether China and the United States will be able to sustain an amicable and interdependent relationship -- that's one possible hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis is that the United States and India will form a balancing alliance against China.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:21:24]]
<nowiki>[1:21:24]</nowiki> 

These two powers, which together would amount for more of the world's economic production than China will, may end up forming something akin to a new Western alliance -- an alliance aimed at containing and controlling China's influence in world affairs.

=== The Decline of the West and the Geopolitics of the 21st Century ===

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:21:39]]
<nowiki>[1:21:39]</nowiki>

What is doubtlessly you know self-evident from the experience of the past decade however is that the ascendancy of the West is in a long term historical process of decline. The Western ascendancy that looked so secure in the middle of the 20th century is today rapidly diminishing.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:22:00]]
<nowiki>[1:22:00]</nowiki> 

The geopolitics of the 21st century will be global geopolitics. The 21st century will not be a Western century as the 20th century was. The United States may of course remain a paramount player in the global system but the system will be truly global. It will not be understood from any single vantage point but will need to be engaged and comprehended as a whole.

[[File:{{PAGENAME}}.ogg|500px|start=1:22:21]]
<nowiki>[1:22:21]</nowiki> 

And that seems like a suitable note on which to conclude a series of lectures on international and global history since 1945. So thank you once again for your patience.

== References and Notes ==

<references/>