"TWO DOWN, ONE TO GO":

Our Own Hundred Years’ War: The Second World War, the Cold War, and now the war on terrorism—all can be seen as part of a single, epochal struggle. (Clark S. Judge, Fall 2003, Hoover Digest)

From the fall of the Berlin Wall until the September 11 attacks, Americans believed they were living in a largely post-conflict world—the end of history as Francis Fukuyama titled his famous 1992 book. Humanity was embracing an enduring state of liberal democratic happiness, a world entirely broken from the bloody past. Since the September 11 attacks, a shadow of doom has run across this new-age portrait, but the belief that we are in an entirely new age remains.

Yet, viewed with a little more attention to history and less to the euphoria and hysteria of the moment, this new world appears hardly new at all. Instead the major conflicts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries appear to be chapters of a single story, of a single epochal struggle: a new hundred years’ war that is almost finished and will shape human institutions for centuries to come. [...]

The First World War led to the shattering of three imperial systems, and it is not too much to say that the world is still struggling with their demise and that of the international system of which they were so integral a part.

The three imperial systems were the uneasy German imperial brotherhood of Prussia-dominated Germany and Vienna-centered Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. From this perspective, the three major post-war struggles have been part of a single struggle about the character of the successor regimes and whether they or the democracies that prevailed in World War I—particularly the United States and Britain—would establish the norms of the international system that would eventually emerge. In World War II we dealt with Nazi Germany, the successor to the Germanic empires. In the Cold War, we dealt with the Soviet Union, the successor to the tsarist Russian Empire. Now we are grappling with those who followed the Ottomans. [...]

[T]he Second World War, the Cold War, and the current Middle Eastern conflict is not three distinct conflicts but a single hundred years’ war of a piece with World War I. The opening phase left three major political systems in ruins, all to be replaced with monster regimes led by gangster cliques that used terror, persecution of minorities, and the promise of glory through expansion to substitute for the legitimacy they entirely lacked. [...]

The position of the democracies in the post–World War I phases of the new hundred years’ war can be summed up simply: two down, one to go.

The degree to which Mr. Judge himself casts the Hundred Years War as simple mopping up after the breaking of the three empires suggests precisely how accurate the End of History metaphor is, despite his protestation to the contrary.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2003 9:36 AM