The focus on the dazzling pageant of progress

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Such illusions are just true enough to be dangerous. Of course there is strength in the liberal democratic idea, and in the free market. It is logical, too, that a world of liberal democratic states would gradually produce an international order that reflected those liberal and democratic qualities. This has been the enlightenment dream since the eighteenth century, when Kant imagined a "perpetual peace" consisting of liberal republics and built upon the natural desire of all peoples for peace and material comfort. Although some may scoff, it has been a remarkably compelling vision. Its spirit animated the international arbitration movements at the end of the nineteenth century, the worldwide enthusiasm for a League of Nations in the early twentieth century, and the enthusiasm for the United Nations after World War II. It has also been a remarkably durable vision, withstanding the horrors of two world wars, one more disastrous than the other, and then a long Cold War that for a third time dashed expectations of progress toward the ideal.

It is a testament to the vitality of this Enlightenment vision that hopes for a brand new era in human history again took hold with such force after the fall of Soviet communism. But a little more skepticism was in order. After all, had mankind really progressed so far? The most destructive century in all the millennia of human history was only just concluding; it was not buried in some deep, dark ancient past. Our supposedly enlightened modernity had produced the greatest of horrors--the massive aggressions, the "total wars," the famines, the genocides, the nuclear warfare. After the recognition of this terrible reality--the relationship of modernity not only to good but also to evil--what reason was there to believe that humankind was suddenly on the cusp of a brand new order? The focus on the dazzling pageant of progress at the end of the Cold War ignored the wires and the beams--the actual historical scaffolding--that had made such progress possible. It failed to acknowledge that progress toward liberalism was not inevitable, but was contingent on events--battles won or lost, social movements successful or crushed, economic policies implemented or discarded. The spread of democracy was not merely the unfolding of certain ineluctable processes of economic and political development. We do not know whether such an evolutionary process--with predictable stages, with known causes and effects--even exists.