A rchive Date
[ 25-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Russia ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2007/05/05/4155552.html
Yeltsin's moment in history
By SALIM MANSUR
Sat, May 5, 2007
The demise of Boris Yeltsin stirred memories of those who watched him in the summer of 1991 as the Soviet Union fell apart.
Yeltsin standing on top of a Soviet tank in Moscow, and rallying his people to herald a new history for their country by turning against the plotters of the anti-Gorbachev coup, was a defining moment in contemporary world history.
In December 1991 Yeltsin replaced Mikhail Gorbachev as the first democratically elected president, and then he launched the drive to turn Russia into an open market economy.
The dismantling of the Berlin Wall two years earlier had effectively ended the Cold War, and the democratic revolution in Russia for many on both sides of the historic divide held the tantalizing Kantian promise of "perpetual peace" spreading outward from a united Europe to other parts of the world.
The years since Yeltsin hoisted himself atop the Soviet tank have shown once again hard realities of politics have a life of their own. The Cold War's end did not heal the bipolar division of the world, instead this division multiplied and the expectations of peace was shattered in Europe's own backyard of the Balkans with the blood-soaked dismantling of Yugoslavia.
The Soviet Union was an empire in disguise, and its dissolution unleashed a chain of events similar to what occurred when other empires disintegrated as with the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.
Subject peoples clamoured for independence and statehood of their own, and then the order empires maintained was followed by disorder, wars, ethnic cleansing, partitions and rivers of tears.
The first order of business in politics, as the great 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes reminds us is before the "names of just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power." Power of course needs to be tamed and made bearable, and though this requires time absence of effective power is the prelude to anarchy.
The Cold War paradoxically provided for a structure of power - one-half tame and bearable as liberal rule, and the other-half untamed and brutal as totalitarian control - that provided for a certain order in world politics making for an uneasy peace.
The hard realities of politics can never be wished away. Idealism is a necessary antidote for cynicism, but idealism without the hard edge of realism is to get disarmed in confronting the hard realities of politics.
From Rwanda through Darfur to Iraq and Afghanistan the world has become inundated with the rising tide of disorder when order gives way and there is no substitute in its place.
The Cold War division was reflected inside the United Nations, and this division again made for order. Those who blamed this division as impeding the UN from functioning more effectively in spreading the ideals of its Charter, they failed or refused to acknowledge that this world body had no independent means to deal with the hard realities of politics apart from those made available by the great powers of the day.
Yeltsin's entrance into history was a very brief moment of elation that marked the end of the uneasy peace in world politics.
What followed has been post-Cold War anarchy. It will spread until some emerging state as a great power or a consort of states join with the United States to reconstitute peace, however uneasy, as a preference over anarchy which unattended will tend increasingly towards Hobbes's nightmare scenario of endless conflicts in much of the world.
You can e-mail Salim Mansur at smansurca@yahoo.ca
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