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How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War
When the Berlin Wall was stormed and the Soviet Union fell apart, the West and above all the United States looked like the sole victors of history. Three decades later, the spirit of triumph rings hollow. What went wrong?
In this sequel to his award-winning history of neoliberal Europe, the renowned historian Philipp Ther searches for an answer to this question. He argues that global capitalism created many losers, preparing the ground for the rise of right-wing populists and nationalists. He shows how the promise of prosperity and freedom did not catch on sufficiently in Eastern Europe despite material progress, and how the West lost Russia and alienated Turkey. Neoliberal capitalism also left the world poorly prepared to cope with Covid-19, and the pandemic further weakened the Western hegemony of the post-1989 period, which is now brutally contested by Russia’s war against Ukraine. The double punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945 has brought to a close the age of transformation that was inaugurated by the end of the Cold War.
This penetrating analysis of the disarray of the post-1989 world will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to understand how we got to where we are today and the tremendous challenges we now face.
In this sequel to his award-winning history of neoliberal Europe, the renowned historian Philipp Ther searches for an answer to this question. He argues that global capitalism created many losers, preparing the ground for the rise of right-wing populists and nationalists. He shows how the promise of prosperity and freedom did not catch on sufficiently in Eastern Europe despite material progress, and how the West lost Russia and alienated Turkey. Neoliberal capitalism also left the world poorly prepared to cope with Covid-19, and the pandemic further weakened the Western hegemony of the post-1989 period, which is now brutally contested by Russia’s war against Ukraine. The double punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945 has brought to a close the age of transformation that was inaugurated by the end of the Cold War.
This penetrating analysis of the disarray of the post-1989 world will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to understand how we got to where we are today and the tremendous challenges we now face.
271 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 25, 2023
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January 29, 2025
How the West Lost the Peace is an example of the stakehouse analogy - where the meal isn't necessarily bad, but it's not what you expected/ordered. Because on one hand, the book does a good job of detailing certain subject matter, such as neoliberalism, and especially when it comes to Italy of all places. On the other hand, the book isn't listed as a book about neoliberalism, and when it comes to the subject of the West losing the peace (or alternatively, Fukuyama's infamous "end of history" prediction), there isn't that much that's detailed - certainly the EU's strained relationship with Turkey and Russia, and the latter's invasion of Ukraine, but it's not so much detailing a loss of peace, more just a series of events that, while historically true, aren't always immediately pertinent.
If the book's argument is that neoliberalism is responsible for the West's decline, that isn't too unreasonable an argument (certainly it deals with the rise of the far right and populists, while the left has moved to the centre in the light of communism's collapse), but the neoliberal shift is generally understood to have begun well before the end of the Cold War - certainly at least as far back as Thatcher and Regan, arguably even earlier. That might be relevant to Cold War ideological clash, but it feels more tangental to the subject matter at hand.
Course, I could be wrong about this, certainly I'm not qualified to give some in-depth analysis as to the West's collapse in the decades following the Cold War, but ultimately, I don't think this book is going to give many satisfying answers; at least not for the question at hand.
If the book's argument is that neoliberalism is responsible for the West's decline, that isn't too unreasonable an argument (certainly it deals with the rise of the far right and populists, while the left has moved to the centre in the light of communism's collapse), but the neoliberal shift is generally understood to have begun well before the end of the Cold War - certainly at least as far back as Thatcher and Regan, arguably even earlier. That might be relevant to Cold War ideological clash, but it feels more tangental to the subject matter at hand.
Course, I could be wrong about this, certainly I'm not qualified to give some in-depth analysis as to the West's collapse in the decades following the Cold War, but ultimately, I don't think this book is going to give many satisfying answers; at least not for the question at hand.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review