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Discuss: Instability in the post-Cold War World: collapsed states, rogue states, terrorism, religion and the 'clash of civilisations.'

In the wake of the conclusion of the Cold War, both political leaders and common people alike breathed a collective sigh of relief, as the conventional wisdom of prognosticators both amateur and professional held that a great new era of peace and prosperity would be seen after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This was not to be so. Within a few short years, numerous nation-states had either collapsed, become so-called 'rogue states,' become sponsors of or harbors for global terrorism on a scale never before seen, and the entire global political alignment reoriented itself around a new struggle. Instead of the two political magnetic poles being capitalism vs. communism, they became Western values vs. fundamentalist Islamic values. The world as we know it in 2005 is perhaps no safer than it was when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The promise of globalization, the use of technology to bring the world closer, has in fact magnified the cracks in our foundation and the profound ideological divides that illustrate that perhaps globalization as a term is actually a misnomer; many people, especially critics of cultural imperialism, have defined globalization as Westernization, especially in an Americanized form. (Baylis and Smith, eds., 1997, p. 14). It is the reaction against this trend by conservative Muslims that defines the new global political-cultural reality. But how did we arrive at this point after the end of the Cold War, with all the accompanying promise of peace?

In Eastern Europe, it was commonly assumed by many Western idealists that with the end of the iron influence of Soviet Union - indeed, the end of the Soviet Union itself -nations would rush to embrace democracy and flourish accordingly. What these idealists failed to take into account were the underlying ethnic tensions in many countries, which predated Communist ideology by hundreds of years and had merely been in hibernation. A prime example of this was the (now) former Yugoslavia, an arbitrarily stitched-together patchwork quilt of varying ethnic and religious identities held together by the dictatorial rule of Tito from the end of World War II to 1980. It was Tito's personal ruthlessness and the centralized control of the Communist economy that kept ethnic and religious tensions from boiling over within the six republics (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro), as well as two semi-autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina) comprised Yugoslavia. At the heart of these ethnic conflicts was a deep-seated religious animosity between Muslims and Eastern Orthodox Christians dating back some 700 years. A series of weak leaders with neither the vision nor political clout wielded by Tito allowed the flames of ethnic and religious hatred to re-ignite, culminating in the election of a Serb, Slobodan Milosevic, to the presidency in 1990 on an inflammatory Serbian Nationalist platform. Yugoslavia soon disintegrated in a bloody a civil war that dragged on in a variety of incarnations for nine years, and offered the world a showcase of some of the most grotesque human rights violations (including the infamous 'ethnic cleansing') seen in the Western world since World War II. When U.S. and NATO airstrikes against the Serbians in 1999 ended their latest ethnic misadventure in Kosovo, Milosevic's political power was finished and he voted out of office in 2000, despite his attempts to rig the election. He was arrested and sent to the Hague for war crimes in 2001. When the dust settled, millions of former Yugoslavs had been killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes, and what was once a united, thriving nation that hosted the Olympics in Sarajevo was a fragmented afterbirth of awkwardly drawn independent states: Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, the Bosnian Serb Republic, the Muslim Croat Federation, etc. The religious foundation of this long, awful civil war - the conflict between Islam and Christianity - was a harbinger of a global conflict between these same powerful forces that would see its climax on September 11, 2001.

Elsewhere around the world, several volatile countries reacted aggressively to no longer being defined by, manipulated by, and caught between the ideological and pseudo-military struggle of Communism and capitalism. In the case of Iraq, the genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein grew bold and elected to annex Kuwait in 1990, resulting in the 1991 Gulf War, which featured an uneasy ad hoc alliance of Western nations with Islamic countries of the Middle East to defeat Hussein's territorial grab. Peculiarly, Hussein was left in power after his crushing defeat at the hands of this coalition, giving him ample time and opportunity to continue his genocidal ways and also continue pursuing his programs for developing weapons of mass destruction. In the end, there was little net change in the region except for a semi-permanent American military presence in the region, most notably on Saudi Arabian soil. This was considered a grave insult to many Islamic fundamentalists, who viewed Saudi Arabian territory (which contains the Muslim holy city of Mecca) as sacrosanct and the presence of Westerners - most notably Americans (termed 'infidels')- an unforgivable offense that inspired and organized a new generation of anti-American terrorists being trained in yet another nation which had been a pawn of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union - Afghanistan.

In 1980, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in part to solidify its own security in the region against a growing American influence in the Middle East, as well as to solidify control over oil interests in Afghanistan. The Afghani people, hardly strangers to imperialist conquerors of all stripes and shapes, rose up in a spirited fashion to battle the Soviet invaders, resulting in a bloody nine-year war that drew unfortunate and grisly comparisons to the United States' ill-fated intervention in Vietnam. The resistance was organized largely by mujahedeen, or Islamic holy warriors, who viewed the Soviets as godless infidels. They were all too happy to receive economic and military assistance from the United States, whose President Ronald Reagan dubbed them 'freedom fighters.' Most notably, the U.S. supplied them with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, known as Stingers, which enabled the mujahedeen to shoot down vast numbers of Soviet helicopters and aircraft and which are credited with helping turn the tide in favor of the insurgency. The war became increasingly expensive and futile for the Soviet Union, and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Soviet misadventure there in 1989.

In the vacuum following the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan did not spontaneously coalesce into a peaceful democracy, but rather soured into a loose coalition of feuding tribal lords who were finally united under the strict, repressive fundamentalist rule of the Taliban, an Islamic sect which came to power in 1996. It is in this fetid environment that the political passions of a former mujahedeen, Saudi-born Osama Bin Laden, came to practical fruition.

Bin Laden was particularly incensed, as alluded to before, by the presence of the American military in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia. Deeper, though, was his resentment of the United States and other Western nations for their consistent alignment with and support of Israel with respect to the Palestinian question. Bin Laden's increasingly vitriolic, radical fundamentalist brand of Islam was the perfect symbiotic match for the Taliban, who offered sanctuary to his radical paramilitary terrorist organization, known as Al Qaida, providing them with space to establish and operate training camps in which thousands of would-be terrorists were schooled in the ways of jihad, or holy war, and indoctrinated accordingly with hatred for all things Western, particularly American. Al Qaida was well-funded, ambitious, and well-organized, and for the first time in history, the aims of a terrorist organization were global, not local. Al Qaida's goals were not simply the removal of an American military presence from Saudi Arabia and U.S. sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians; Bin Laden wanted nothing less than to strike a crippling blow, or at least an endless series of enervating wounds, to the moral corruption embodied by Western nations and Western values. A series of successful terrorist attacks around the world represented the latter; the infamous and spectacular attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, represented the former. In the space of one day, global politics experienced a comprehensive realignment, crudely but effectively embodied in the declaration by U.S. President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the attacks: You're either with us or you're against us. And thus a new political-culture bipolarity was born: instead of capitalism vs. Communism, it became the West vs. Islam.

Even without Bin Laden and Al Qaida, this clash of civilizations between Islamic and Christian values was, arguably, inevitable. Islamic culture has deeply rooted and fundamental differences with Western cultures; theocracy vs. democracy, a marked difference in attitudes towards women; and a clash of values between the free-thinking materialism inherent in capitalism and the asceticism of conservative Muslim values. The huge collective total populations of Muslim and Christian peoples around the world, combined with the global strategy of Al Qaida, makes it impossible to contextualize this conflict on a country-by-country basis or through the prism of other struggles, such as that of Communism vs. capitalism. It is in fact due in large part to the myopia of the United States, in its obsession with defeating Communism, that the burgeoning anti-Western sentiments of fundamentalist Islamic forces went either unnoticed or were dismissed as irrelevant, when in fact a global analysis without the red-colored glasses, if you will, of the Cold War era, would have revealed the next source of global conflict.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• John Baylis and Steve Smith, eds. The Globalization of World Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997

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