Al Mayadeen English

  • Ar
  • Es
  • x
Al Mayadeen English

Slogan

  • News
    • Politics
    • Economy
    • Sports
    • Arts&Culture
    • Health
    • Miscellaneous
    • Technology
    • Environment
  • Articles
    • Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Blog
    • Features
  • Videos
    • NewsFeed
    • Video Features
    • Explainers
    • TV
    • Digital Series
  • Infographs
  • In Pictures
  • • LIVE
News
  • Politics
  • Economy
  • Sports
  • Arts&Culture
  • Health
  • Miscellaneous
  • Technology
  • Environment
Articles
  • Opinion
  • Analysis
  • Blog
  • Features
Videos
  • NewsFeed
  • Video Features
  • Explainers
  • TV
  • Digital Series
Infographs
In Pictures
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • Asia-Pacific
  • Europe
  • Latin America
  • MENA
  • Palestine
  • US & Canada
BREAKING
Israeli media: A senior European Union official hinted that 'Israel' would be held accountable for violating international law in Gaza
Al-Qassam Brigades spokesperson Abu Obeida: The losses incurred by the occupation today in Khan Younis and Jabalia are an extension of a series of top-tier operations
Al Mayadeen's correspondent in South Lebanon: The invading Israeli force is digging a trench and erecting earthen berms, amid detected activity suggesting preparations to install espionage equipment
Al Mayadeen's correspondent in South Lebanon: An Israeli force breaches the "technical fence" in the Wazzani area
Israeli media: 4 Israeli soldiers killed in the Gaza Strip
Gaza Government Media Office: Starved citizens are tempted to head to American-Israeli centers and then are deliberately shot
Gaza Government Media Office: The toll at US-Israeli aid distribution centers is as follows: 110 martyred, 583 wounded, and 9 missing
Gaza Government Media Office: 8 starved civilians were killed and 61 others were injured by the gunfire of Israeli occupation forces and an American security company in Rafah
Al Mayadeen's correspondent: Three martyrs, injured in Israeli drone strike on phone charging station west of Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
Al Mayadeen's correspondent: Four martyrs, dozens of injured as IOF open fire on civilians near GHF facility west of Rafah, southern Gaza.

Thirty years on, the western ‘liberal international order’ looks set to follow the USSR into history

  • Samuel Geddes Samuel Geddes
  • Source: Al Mayadeen Net
  • 25 Dec 2021 20:55
  • 8 Shares
7 Min Read

The reality the US is stuck with is that its global system of economic, political and military control is ever more precipitously disintegrating.

  • x
  • Thirty years on, the western ‘liberal international order’ looks set to follow the USSR into history
    Thirty years on, the western ‘liberal international order’ looks set to follow the USSR into history

The Soviet collapse signaled the end of not just Marxism-Leninism as a political force, but western Liberalism itself.

In historical terms, the twentieth century could be said to have been relatively short in that its defining events happened closer to each other in time, certainly in comparison to the ‘long’ 16th and 19th centuries. 1914 is typically taken to be the beginning of this period, given the outbreak of the First World War, setting in motion everything that was to follow, the carnage of the trenches, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Great Depression and the Second World War, the second act of what began in 1914. 

Europe emerged from 1945 in ruins and no longer dictating the world’s destiny for the first time in five centuries. In its place, the globe was divided between two supposedly ‘anti-colonial’ powers, the USA and USSR, championing their own versions of national self-determination and economic ‘modernization’ within the context of a worldwide ideological struggle between their respective national religions. 

For the American-led west, this religion was Liberalism, a political response to the democratic movements of the 19th century that declared the “ignorant herd", in other words the majority of the populace, to be unqualified and unsafe decision makers for society. Direct participation in the national political life was to be limited to a privileged clique of qualified technocrats; the social scientists, the journalistic class, and captains of industry and their lobbyists serving as the titular heads of the approved political parties. 

In opposition to this ideology, we are told, was Marxism-Leninism as promulgated by the leadership of the Soviet Union where power was held by a ‘revolutionary vanguard’ of the Communist Party leadership. The great mass of society, it was concluded, had to be led by force, through what were thought to be the inevitable stages of economic development culminating in socialism on the ever-receding horizon. One of the many perversities of the twentieth century was the creation of much the same exploitation of labor and environmental destruction under the pretext of eventually transcending it. 

Beneath the rhetorical differences, the two ideologies were more alike than different in the ways they functioned in the real world and especially in the assumptions they had about how much of society was qualified to have a political voice. The late American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, in his post-mortem of the USSR in ‘After Liberalism’ went so far as to claim that they were one and the same ideology. Going still further, he asserted that in the Cold War, the USSR acted as a de-facto American proxy in the way that it steered potentially dangerous third world nationalisms into a more politically attractive variant of western Liberalism, maintaining their country’s place in the existing world system. 

Related News

News from Nowhere: The death of trust

Reluctant to be refugees in the US, some Afrikaners demand their own two-state ‘solution’

Where mass-movements escaped the control of either superpower as in Civil-war era Spain, the Maoist seizure of power in China or the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the superpowers invariably found themselves both trying to sustain the forces of the status-quo. 

Of course, we well know that this highly constrained system of governing the world did not last. The Cold War, and by extension the historical twentieth century, came to an abrupt end in 1989. In a state of internal disintegration, the USSR withdrew in humiliation from the quagmire of Afghanistan and then from its own designated sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, allowing its satellites in East Germany, Poland, Romania, and others to be overthrown. Such was its state of collapse that it did not survive long enough to be digested by Western capital. The Union, stripped of its empire, disintegrated in the second half of 1991, its last leader Mikhail Gorbachev resigning in disgrace and declaring the Soviet Union dissolved on Christmas Day. 

Exactly 30 years have now passed since the death of the only power ever credibly presented as a challenger to the United States and 33 years since the end of the post-World War II global order and the twentieth century as a whole. Still all these years later, these momentous events, unforeseen by the Western security and military establishments, are still paraded as the final triumph of the western capitalist system and the dawn of a new unipolar American century. 

With the benefits of hindsight, it is understandable that people would have interpreted events in that way. Since the onset of near permanent economic crisis in 2008, the deeply divisive Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in the US in 2016, Wallerstein’s prognoses seem ever more eerily prescient. Rather than being the defeat of an alternative to western Liberalism, the fall of Marxism-Leninism as a viable political system signalled the beginning of the end of the West’s ideological hegemony. Into the ideological vacuum of the former Soviet Union has flowed all manner of radical, democratic, neofascist, indigenist, and nationalist political movements. From the Zapatista uprising against NAFTA in 1994, to the birth of the nascent pan-Islamic, pan-Arabist Ansar Allah Movement in Northern Yemen the same year to the return of narrow European nationalisms, the rising anti-systemic movements are far less co-optable by the global North since they generally reject the basic assumptions of Liberalism that have gone unchallenged for some two centuries.  

The American-led west has spent the last 30 years scrambling to find a substitute for the ‘communist menace’ with which it justified its global military, economic, and cultural footprint. From 2001 up to around the election of Donald Trump the chosen enemy was "Islamist terrorism", a conveniently vacuous category that swept up all religiously oriented Arab and Islamic popular movements of which Washington disapproved. Since 2016, the United States seems to have been pivoting to its old red-baiting tactics surrounding non-existent or inconsequential Russian and Chinese ‘interference’ in western elections. The Biden administration may well believe that US hegemony will rest more securely on a Cold War 2.0 and a theatrical power-struggle with China and Russia. The world, however, has not and will not return to the world of pre-1989. Russia is a shadow of its Soviet incarnation and a strategic threat to the west insofar as it continues to be cornered by NATO. Meanwhile, China remains deeply enmeshed within the global capitalist system which the US principally constructed. 

Finally, the degree of internal division and unrest in the US itself negates the possibility of returning to the old Liberal consensus, however much Biden may fancy himself another FDR or LBJ. With a previously unthinkable number of Americans questioning the legitimacy of their own elections, the inexorable centrifugal forces that tore the communist world apart and are now clawing at the EU have finally reached the heart of the global capitalist system itself. 

If the United States could wish about its ideal century, it would be a renewed Cold War against Moscow and Beijing. The reality it is stuck with is that its global system of economic, political and military control is ever more precipitously disintegrating.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Mayadeen’s editorial stance.
  • US President Donald Trump
  • romania
  • Poland
  • Russia
  • East Germany
  • USSR
  • Ansar Allah
  • US President Joe Biden
  • President Joe Biden
  • Trump
  • Marxism
  • China
  • Biden
  • The Biden Administration
  • liberalism
  • Joe Biden
  • Donald Trump
  • European Union
Samuel Geddes

Samuel Geddes

Journalist

Most Read

All
It may well be due to the longstanding relationship between MI6 and HTS, via Inter Mediate, that Britain was the first Western country to recognise their assumption of government in Syria. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)

How MI6 helped HTS seize Syria

  • Opinion
  • 31 May 2025
The two countries need to sit down and resolve the crisis with maturity, to consider carefully that they could be being manipulated to be easily dominated. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Algeria and Mali, divided and almost conquered

  • Opinion
  • 25 May 2025
Trump and Biden both pretended to be fighting Netanyahu

Trump and Biden both pretended to be fighting Netanyahu

  • Analysis
  • 28 May 2025
Not only has Germany not learned from its Nazi and bellicose history, it is actively falsifying it by infringing upon long-standing traditions of memory culture. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Nothing learned, nothing gained, Germany is at it again

  • Opinion
  • 3 Jun 2025

Coverage

All
The Ummah's Martyrs

More from this writer

All
Trump’s GCC tour shows growing US dependence on petro-surplus recycling

Trump’s GCC tour shows growing US dependence on petro-surplus recycling

Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem could succeed Pope Francis, bring deeper Vatican involvement in the region

Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem could succeed Pope Francis, bring deeper Vatican involvement in the region

If Gazans can be allowed to return to homes which no longer exist in the northern Strip, why should returning to the sites of their own, or their elders’ original displacement be an impossibility? (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Refugees’ return to northern Gaza sets blueprint for return to '48 territories

Trump’s apparent push for Gaza ceasefire only magnifies Biden’s wickedness

Trump’s apparent push for Gaza ceasefire only magnifies Biden’s wickedness

Al Mayadeen English

Al Mayadeen is an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel.

All Rights Reserved

  • x
  • Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Authors
Android
iOS