The Zone of Interest

Current world history has disconfirmed liberal post-Cold War visions. Interstate wars and furious mass violence are back, and we have entered a new perilous era of competition between “great powers”

- Philip Golub

THE contemporary world picture stands in sharp contrast with Western post-Cold War imaginings of a long peace, brought about by the end of great power rivalry, globalisation of capitalism and the spread of liberal-democratic political frameworks.

Francis Fukuyama famously and quite erroneously proclaimed the “end of history” and the definitive historical triumph of western liberalism. “Soft Power”, a nebulous concept coined by Joseph Nye, became all the rage in academic and journalistic circles. Some scholars announced the coming end of wars of conquest.

According to evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker, war was “going out of style”, evidenced in what appeared to be a long-term decline of institutionalised mass violence. Three factors explained the supposed trend: the futility of war under conditions of deepening global interdependence (war “does not pay”); the “emergence of an international community regulated by norms and taboos”; and, most significantly, a “growing (moral) repugnance towards institutionalised violence”.

A similar argument had been made a hundred years earlier by the British liberal writer Norman Angell, a few years prior to the outbreak of the First World War. In his well-known 1910 essay,