Charles Kenny: Iron Curtain Call
[Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, and author, most recently, of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More. "The Optimist," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.]
Mikhail Gorbachev turns 80 on March 2, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, over which he presided, celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall. In the intervening years, Gorbachev has put out an album, filmed pizza commercials, and founded a string of failed political parties. And with the benefit of two decades' worth of hindsight, the legacy of Gorbachev's accomplishment, however staggering, might seem a bit equivocal, too: rich, stable democracies in most of Eastern Europe, but also the increasingly czarist antics of Vladimir Putin and a miserable assortment of collapsing economies and vicious strongmen throughout the 'stans. And global tensions, from the Middle East to the Spratly Islands, have hardly gone away.
But Gorbachev has left one unambiguous legacy: Thanks to his actions, the world is a less violent place than it used to be. That's in large part because the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union gave a considerable boost to the fortunes of democratization and multilateralism worldwide -- historical vectors that have produced a remarkable reduction in the amount of war in the world.
People have been killing each other since the dawn of humankind -- we may have eaten so many of our Neanderthal forebears that we drove them extinct. The advent of total war in the last hundred years brought this proclivity for violence to a bloody apex: Historian Niall Ferguson estimates that wars killed 800 times more people in the 20th century than in the 17th. But recently, our penchant for violence has dramatically reduced. Not only are murder rates well down, but so are war deaths....
...The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of superpower tensions ushered in dramatic global gains in respect for human and political rights. While the United States, as it did during the Cold War, has hardly shied away from supporting dictators when they were deemed to be geopolitically necessary, the number of countries that could be broadly considered democratic has doubled since the start of the 1980s. And democracies rarely go to war with other democracies, the thinking goes -- or at least they haven't since World War I. They are also less likely than autocracies to engage in mass killings....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
Mikhail Gorbachev turns 80 on March 2, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, over which he presided, celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall. In the intervening years, Gorbachev has put out an album, filmed pizza commercials, and founded a string of failed political parties. And with the benefit of two decades' worth of hindsight, the legacy of Gorbachev's accomplishment, however staggering, might seem a bit equivocal, too: rich, stable democracies in most of Eastern Europe, but also the increasingly czarist antics of Vladimir Putin and a miserable assortment of collapsing economies and vicious strongmen throughout the 'stans. And global tensions, from the Middle East to the Spratly Islands, have hardly gone away.
But Gorbachev has left one unambiguous legacy: Thanks to his actions, the world is a less violent place than it used to be. That's in large part because the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union gave a considerable boost to the fortunes of democratization and multilateralism worldwide -- historical vectors that have produced a remarkable reduction in the amount of war in the world.
People have been killing each other since the dawn of humankind -- we may have eaten so many of our Neanderthal forebears that we drove them extinct. The advent of total war in the last hundred years brought this proclivity for violence to a bloody apex: Historian Niall Ferguson estimates that wars killed 800 times more people in the 20th century than in the 17th. But recently, our penchant for violence has dramatically reduced. Not only are murder rates well down, but so are war deaths....
...The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of superpower tensions ushered in dramatic global gains in respect for human and political rights. While the United States, as it did during the Cold War, has hardly shied away from supporting dictators when they were deemed to be geopolitically necessary, the number of countries that could be broadly considered democratic has doubled since the start of the 1980s. And democracies rarely go to war with other democracies, the thinking goes -- or at least they haven't since World War I. They are also less likely than autocracies to engage in mass killings....