Myths of the post-1945 world order
the brief history of the multipolar world continued
When people speak about the post-1945 world they practice mythology more than history. It is a strong form of myth, it is true. But nonetheless, three big stories about the post-1945 world are myths that conceal the true history of the multipolar world between 1945 and 1991.
I sketch those myths below the line for paid subscribers.
If you are not ready to boost your subscription to the Burning Archive, there are other ways you can support my work, and to advance the cause of generous storytelling to help us all live in tune with a changing world.
You can share and recommend the Burning Archive on the Substack network and other social media.
You can like, share, and subscribe to the Burning Archive YouTube channel, including my new initiatives of videos and livestreams discussing my substack essays, as well as readings of some of the finer history and writing I discuss here, such
You can become a patron of fine literature by “buying me a coffee” at this Tip Jar.
You can even join my online history school, where I have introduced two new courses starting in June - an introductory guide to understanding geopolitics through world history and a deep dive into the rise and fall of empires.
Coming up on Saturday, my views on the historical crime drama series, Babylon Berlin, now screening on SBS Australia.
Image: Bandung conference 1955
Now, back to the history of the multipolar world
The three myths of the post-1945 world express forms of democratic idealism, but they also reveal the shadows of that world which are repressed in most accounts of the rules-based international order.
I do not mean myths to mean fantasies.
They are plausible, moving stories that express an emotional truth
But these myths harden into fixed views of a flat world. We need to loosen the grip of these myths with a little bit of quality history to rediscover the more subtle historical truth about the multipolar world. As Indian External Affairs Minister Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar wrote in 2021:
“We have been conditioned to think of the post-1945 world as the norm and departures from it as deviations. In fact, our own pluralistic and complex history underlies that the natural state of the world is multipolarity.”
(Jaishankar, The India Way)
1. A world of nations… and empire denied
The first myth is that after 1945 a new world of united, free nations was born, and the old world of empires was gone.
Of course, after 1945 the world did have its first genuine, effective institution of world government, the United Nations, which was underpinned by a charter guaranteeing sovereign equality of nations and declaring universal human rights of individuals. For the first time in the history of a multipolar world, there was a genuine world order, not just great powers anchored by treaties with their regions. But it was a very imperfect, and frequently changing world order. There was no simple, settled post-1945 world.
Of course, the UN was given a tough job, and made more difficult by the economic and military dominance of America, and its ideological competition with both communist and anti-colonial powers. There are some crazed libertarian-oriented Americans who like to rail against the United Nations as world government, and a gigantic conspiracy against the home of the brave. Even many progressive Americans resent the United Nations expressing any view that is countermanded by the leader of the “free world”.
The best history of the United Nations and the idea of world government is written by Mark Mazower provides the best account of the development of the idea of UN and world government. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (2013) provides many insights into the history of the multipolar world after 1945, and the ideas of world government since Kant. It offers instruction in the tragically flawed role played by Anglo-American historians in compromising the United Nations charter, almost from birth. He uncovers the role of Arnold Toynbee in reviving the old British Russophobic ideas of Mackinder in the looming struggle between the democratic “oceanic powers” and the continental Eurasian horde. The world needed to be governed he said by a “democratic Anglo-American world-commonwealth,” tinged with the deceitful dreams of post-war British imperialists. The United Nations could not function democratically by its charter therefore. It needed a “world directorate… of the United States and the British Commonwealth… a World-Hegemony temporarily in the hands of the English-speaking peoples.”
So was the dreamt the International Rules Based Order and Western Hegemony. The post-1945 world then was an unstable world of nations, in which its other players - empires, shadow-empires, world systems, international organisations and corporations - were decisive. And this order was unstable since it came from the hell of war. Mazower wrote:
“Large international organizations such as the League of Nations and the UN did not grow up gradually. On the contrary, sponsored by Great Powers, their births were abrupt, and war was their midwife.”
(Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present)
The war that midwifed the post 1945 world order has recently been reinterpreted and renamed by the distinguished British military historian, Richard Overy. In Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War 1931-1945 reconceives the war that was the anvil of the post-1945 world. He extends the duration of the war, and shares the blame around. Imperial objectives of allied and axis powers before, during and after the war shaped the post-1945 world. He calls this war the last imperial war since he argues nations overcame nation-empires in this struggle. When empires became nations, legally equal partners in a new global age, an old shadow of dominion fell from the world.
“The long Second World War, from the 1930s to the violent post-war years, ended not only a particular form of empire, but discredited the longer history of the term… The Second World War, more than the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, or the First World War, created the conditions for transforming not just Europe, but the entire global geopolitical order. That final stage of territorial empire was not, as Leonard Woolf had speculated in 1928, to be ‘buried peacefully’, but with a surfeit of ‘blood and ruins’. (Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 878)
Let us hope our current geopolitical order, a world of nations and non-territorial empires, does not end with more flame, blood and ruins.
Overy’s insertion of the qualification of ‘territorial’ into the empires disappearing from the Earth is a small sleight of hand. For empires of other kinds had not fled the new global age. The British Empire would rebrand itself a democratic Commonwealth, and still claim, up till today, a global role, the Falkland Islands and the rock of Gibraltar. The Soviet Union, a federation of national socialist republics that had primarily defeated Hitler and his many accomplices in Europe in the Great Imperial War, would be rebranded by the American emigre theorists of “totalitarianism” to be an evil empire. And of course, the United States of America became the empire that dare not say its name; an empire of democracy that claimed to be a republic, not a democracy; a beacon of freedom that persecuted leftists and sang of Mississippi, Alabama.
I differ then from Overy’s assessment that imperial wars ended in 1945. I prefer the argument put by John Darwin in After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000.
Darwin’s chapter on this era (which he defines as post 1942, the abyss of the British imperial collapse) is empire denied. It is a phrase with many meanings. The German empire was denied and defeated. The Soviet Empire, the last evil empire, until the next one, in the view of the American ideologists, was denied, and by 1989 demoralised. The old European colonial empires were denied their hops that they could hang on, as Churchill hoped, for a few generations yet. Their dreams were crushed by America; first in the indebtedness of Bretton Woods, then in the humiliation of the Suez Crisis, and finally in the vassalage of NATO.
But empire had not been extinguished from the world. A new empire denied its own reality and propounded the mythology of the post-1945 world in thousands of Hollywood movies. Over time virtual reality came to replace memory of the bitter memory of war, and the early idealism of the United Nations, By 1991 the USA had come to believe it could make its own reality, end history, and flatten the multipolar world in its image. Its over-stretch and demented resentment today threaten world peace. We have never been closer in the history of the multipolar world to a world-ending catastrophe of flame, blood, and ruins.
I will write about the next two myths of the post-1945 world in my next Wednesday post. They are:
America’s victory for democracy… and its endless cold war for supremacy
The Bipolar world and the multipolar world concealed in the shadows
But let me add a small post-script related to the historical realities of the multipolar world in the 1950s that were revealed in the Suez Crisis about which I wrote last Saturday.
During the week I consulted Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: a World History to see his take on the Suez Crisis. He pointed out that the Suez Crisis came on the heels of the Bandung conference, the 1955 conference of non-aligned powers that sought to assert the world’s natural multipolarity, as an alternative to America’s disastrous, endless Cold War. The main countries leading the Bandung conference and the non-aligned or anti-colonial resistance to the new shadow empires were India, Indonesia, and Egypt. President Nasser of Egypt’s action in the Suez Crisis were the initiative of this resurgent multipolar world, not merely the counterpoint to a fading British Raj.
The British intervention in the Suez Crisis, and the subordination of the West European powers to the USA, were also condemned by the President of India Nehru. Westad quotes Nehru’s speech to the Indian Parliament on the Suez Crisis.
“The use of armed forces by the big countries, while apparently [achieving'] something, it has really showed its inability to deal with the situation. It is weakness which has come out…. The greatest danger which the world is suffering from is this Cold War business. It is because the Cold War creates a bigger mental barrier than the Iron Curtain or brick wall or any prsion. It creates barriers of the mind which refuses to understand the other person’s position, which divides the world into devils and angels.”
Be wary of those empires roaming the earth again, dividing the world into devils and angels, democracies and autocracies, good and evil. Free your mind, and practise that most essential of all historical skills, empathy, and the quintessential virtue of governing, talking to strangers.
Thanks again for supporting the Burning Archive, and remember, what thou lovest well will not be reft from thee.