Just Finished Reading: The Coming Anarchy – Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D Kaplan

Consisting of a number of articles published in the mid to late 1990’s Kaplan’s book seeks to examine the consequences to world politics of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The conclusions he draws are not pleasant ones but, he asserts, rather based on a more realistic assessment of the way things work and the way things are. Drawing on his experience in travelling and reporting from places as various as West Africa and the Balkans Kaplan attempts to show that the world is in the process of falling back to a place that Medieval scholars would have felt at home in. A world where borders are both more porous and ill defined, a world made up of confederations of city states and barbarous hinterlands, a world where Democracy is seen as a failed ideology, a place where practical hard-headed politicians must ‘sup’ with the Devil to get things done.

As far as I am concerned Kaplan singularly failed to make his case. The collapse of the Berlin Wall certainly changed global politics but not I think in the way Kaplan asserts. He’s right that there seem to be a growing number of failed states especially in Africa though I doubt this is a particularly new development. The West’s colonisations of and withdrawal from African land in particular is at least in part responsible for this. The imposition of Western values and Western government failed to take hold in these often artificially created nations so it is hardly surprising that they are ‘failing’ in that sense. Kaplan is right when he says that Democracy cannot (and should not) be imposed on countries singularly not ready for it. Democracy is an out growth of economic and social change that many countries have yet to experience. It is not something that can be imported like the latest cultural craze. Two contrasting articles either bored me – one on Kissinger’s Foreign policy or intrigued me – one on Conrad’s book Nostromo as an aid to understanding ‘developing’ nations - and I think were examples of the worst and the best from this volume. The last section – entitled The Dangers of Peace – greatly annoyed me. Kaplan attempted to put forward the idea that long periods of peace are debilitating to society and inevitably lead to weak politicians and a distracted mass population and therefore should be avoided as much as possible. War, he is apparently saying, is good both for society and the common man. I thought that this was a particularly nonsensical argument and actually rather offensive. Unfortunately after enjoying very much his other work Warrior Politics I find myself both disappointed and dismayed by this depressing and overly pessimistic volume.