The decline of communism in the final decades of the
century brought an end to an era, not only in the Soviet
Union but in much of the rest of the world as well. For
more than a generation, thousands of intellectuals and
political elites in Asia, Africa, and Latin America had
looked to Marxism-Leninism as an appealing developmental
ideology that could rush preindustrial societies
through the modernization process without the painful
economic and social inequities associated with capital-
ism. Communism, many thought, could make more effective
use of scarce capital and resources while carrying
through the reforms needed to bring an end to centuries
of inequality in the political and social arenas.
The results, however, were much less than advertised.
Although such diverse societies as China, Vietnam, and
Cuba got off to an impressive start under Communist regimes,
after a generation of party rule all were increasingly
characterized by economic stagnation, low productivity,
and underemployment. Even before the collapse of
the Soviet Union, prominent Communist states such as
China and Vietnam had begun to adopt reforms that
broke with ideological orthodoxy and borrowed liberally
from the capitalist model.
To many historians, the disintegration of the Soviet
Union signaled the end of communism as a competitive
force in the global environment. In some parts of
the world, however, it has survived in the form of Communist
parties presiding over a mixed economy combining
components of both socialism and capitalism. Why
have Communist political systems survived in some areas
while the Marxist-Leninist economic model in its classic
form has not? In the first place, it is obvious that one of
the consequences of long-term Communist rule was the
suffocation of alternative political forces and ideas. As
the situation in Eastern Europe has demonstrated, even
after the passing of communism itself, Communist parties
often appeared to be the only political force with the experience,
discipline, and self-confidence to govern complex
and changing societies.
That monopoly of political experience, of course, is
no accident. In its Leninist incarnation, modern communism
is preeminently a strategy for seizing and retaining
power. The first duty of a Communist Party on seizing
control is to determine “who defeats whom” and to establish
a dictatorship of the proletariat. As a result, even
when perceptive party leaders recognize the failure of the
Marxist model to promote the creation of a technologically
advanced industrial society, they view the Leninist
paradigm as a useful means of maintaining political stability
while undergoing the difficult transition through the
early stages of the Industrial Revolution. In such countries
as China and Vietnam today, Marxism-Leninism has
thus become primarily a political technique—a Marxist
variant of the single-party or military regimes that
arose in the Third World during the immediate postwar
era. It is still too early to predict how successful such regimes
will ultimately be or what kind of political culture
will succeed them, but there is modest reason to hope
that as their economic reform programs begin to succeed,
they will eventually evolve into pluralistic societies such
as are now taking shape elsewhere around the world.
The wave of optimism that accompanied the end of
the Cold War was all too brief. After a short period of euphoria—
some observers speculated that the world had
reached the “end of history,” when the liberal democratic
system had demonstrated its clear superiority and the major
problems in the future would be strictly economic—
it soon became clear that forces were now being released
that had long been held in check by the ideological
rigidities of the Cold War. The era of conflict that had
long characterized the twentieth century was not at an
end; it was simply in the process of taking a different form
(see the box on p. 319).
Nowhere was this trend more immediately apparent
than in Southeast Asia, where even before the end of the
Cold War, erstwhile allies in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia
turned on each other in a fratricidal conflict that
combined territorial ambitions with geopolitical concerns
and deep-seated historical suspicions based on the
memory of past conflicts. Ideology, it was clear, was no
barrier to historical and cultural rivalries. The pattern
was repeated elsewhere: in Africa, where several nations
erupted into civil war during the late 1980s and 1990s;
in the Balkans, where the Yugoslavian Federation broke
apart in a bitter conflict that has yet to be fully resolved;
and of course in the Middle East, where the historical disputes
in Palestine and the Persian Gulf have grown in intensity
and erupted repeatedly into open war. The irony
of this explosion of national, ethnic, and religious sentiment
is that it has taken place at a time when it is becoming
increasingly evident that the main problems in
today’s society—such as environmental pollution, overpopulation,
and unequal distribution of resources—are
shared to one degree or another by all humanity. In a
world that is increasingly characterized by global interdependence,
how can it be that the world is increasingly being
pulled apart?
World History
