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. 3 3 1 R A C I A L T I M E A N D T H E O T H E R Mapping the Postsocialist Transition In 1991 the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who rose to fame at the height of the Cold War as the chronicler of the Kennedy administration’s days in the White House, published a controversial book on multiculturalism , The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.1 Presenting a dystopic vision of America’s future, in which multiculturalism exceeds the desire for national unity among distinct cultures and turns to separatist aspirations, Schlesinger warns that “at the end of the Cold War, [when] we have an explosion of long repressed ethnic, racial, religious, national antagonisms . . . Yugoslavia is a murderous portent of the future.”2 As a major Cold War liberal thinker, Schlesinger’s concerns in the early 1990s, articulated through his fears of global ethnic, racial, and religious conflict in “murderous” places like Yugoslavia, encapsulate the postsocialist predicament faced by the United States: how to characterize the potential for U.S. national progress and a new moral imperative in the absence of the Soviet enemy. Debates about racial, religious, cultural, and civilizational difference were at the center of the crisis. In the vacuum left by the passing of the Three Worlds geopolitical and developmental episteme, the United States’ racial present and its racist history were reframed in relation to the story of the postsocialist world and its possible futures.3 Certainly the consolidation of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s came, for some, to symbolize the fulfillment of the promises of U.S. democracy and its commitment to the ideals of equality and liberty enshrined in the nation’s founding documents. As multiculturalism emerged as the national racial ideology that had the potential to resolve the contradictions that slavery, segregation, and racism posed in U.S. history, the nation portrayed itself as a beacon of racial progress, pluralism, and coexistence in the face of global horrors stemming from ethnic and religious violence. Beginning in the 34 . r a c I a l t I m e a n d t h e o t h e r 1990s, therefore, one crucial task of U.S. nationalist, liberal multiculturalism was to distinguish normative modes of inhabiting and representing diversity from aberrant ones, which could lead to “tribalism” and separatism of the kind witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and Rwanda. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought about two competing figurations of racial and historical development and the postsocialist future. On the one hand, the demise of communism was seen as a triumph of American liberalism and the fulfillment of the promises of civil rights and the Cold War struggle for global freedom, individualism, and diversity. On the other hand, ethnic and religious conflicts, often dubbed primordial and natural in certain parts of the world, came to represent the rejection of liberal democratic values and racial and economic modernity. For Schlesinger, “The fading away of the Cold War has brought an era of ideological conflict to an end. But it has not, as forecast, brought an end to history. One set of hatreds gives way to the next.”4 In his refutation that we are seeing the “end of history,” Schlesinger refers to Francis Fukuyama’s by now well-rehearsed 1989 prediction that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”5 For Fukuyama, as for Schlesinger, the end of the Cold War signaled the need to reconceptualize the narratives of history and futurity as a way of refiguring the meaning of U.S. national projects and geopolitical interests. However, Fukuyama’s perspective represented a celebratory vision of communism’s demise, one in which no new ideological alternative to parliamentary liberal democracy threatened U.S. values as communism once did.6 Fukuyama’s critics, meanwhile, including most famously Benjamin Barber, Samuel Huntington, and Arthur Schlesinger, emphasized that the ethnic and religious conflicts that came to the fore after communism, displacing the older ideological battle between communism and capitalism , were just as dangerous to the principles of liberal democracy as the previous threat of totalitarianism.7 The problem, according to U.S. media, political, and...

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