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Understanding the World as We Have Known It
- University of Massachusetts Press
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This page intentionally left blank [34.200.248.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:52 GMT) 15 The first cluster reviews what we learned from the wars of the past century and establishes some benchmarks for gauging whether knowledge translates into changes in the behavior of our political cultures. In “What Have We Learned from the Wars of the Twentieth Century” Winston Langley suggests that those wars are best understood in two contexts: relative deprivation (RD)—the perceived incongruity between what a nation-state believes it is entitled to and what it actually has—and “othering ”—the propensity for human beings to divide themselves along the lines of “them” and “us”—to exclude from our group those whom we deem to be different and less vulnerable. The three great ideologies of the twentieth century, nationalism, liberalism, and Marxism, Langley argues, all competed against each other and in so doing contributed in profound ways to the perception of individuals and groups that they were deprived . He advocates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an instrument that promises to lessen the conditions that marginalize people and cause war, even while acknowledging that more people have died in wars and conflicts in the second half of the twentieth century (after the creation of the United Nations) than in the first half. Without the authoritative tools to make of its provisions something more than noble aspirations, the Declaration of Human Rights remains an idealistic proclamation in a very untidy world. The degree of inequality between North (roughly what we think of as the developed world) and South (the less developed world) is increasing. The ratio of incomes of the richest 20 percent of people living in the world in the richest countries to those of the 20 percent of people living in the poorest countries increased from 30:1 in 1960 to 74:1 in 1997.1 Such disparity augurs for resentment, anger, and a desire to strike back on the part of developing countries. The young are enticed by the allures of consumer goods they cannot access, which are more pronounced because of the global dominance of Western consumer culture and its accoutrements, and they protest. Some go further. Relative deprivation and resource deprivation affect social cohesion both within developing countries, among developing countries, and within developed countries, fostering alienation, exploitation, and dependency—a recipe for violence. The riots that engulfed France in November 2005 when the accidental death of two Muslim teenagers fleeing police triggered a wave of riots, first in the poor Arab-Muslim suburbs of Paris, then in copy-cat attacks across the country, are but the latest harbinger of what the future may hold for countries where social and economic grievances, pervasive discrimination, and exclusion go unaddressed. 16 UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD AS WE HAVE KNOWN IT Global television feeds the envy and resentment that disparities in income generate . Violent conflicts are most likely to occur within countries with weak social cohesion , that is, in countries where the informal sectors of the economy are most pervasive, where surviving and protecting one’s meager assets requires guile, alliances with gangs. In poor and extremely poor countries where informal sectors of society are expanding , adherence to the rule of law is mostly an abstraction because there is no rule of law, only excessive consumption by the elites and the petty corruption that survival in the informal world necessitates. The link between poverty and terrorism is not easy to demonstrate. Poverty expands the political appeal of terrorist causes and provides fertile grounds for nurturing recruits. Yet, the countries most in need of aid for development rarely receive it. The limited resources that developed countries are prepared to allocate to development aid is sent to countries where the infrastructure exists that offers the prospect for a high return on the aid they receive, that is, countries already some significant way up the developmental ladder. Those countries at the lowest rungs lack the basic capacity to utilize aid or aid ends up in the coffers of corrupt officials. Such countries are too difficult to aid and too often are simply written off. The failure of the United States to construct a security policy that is not entirely reliant on military and intelligence sectors is addressed by Brian Atwood. In “The Link between Poverty and Violent Conflict,” Atwood calls for “a new ‘culture of prevention’ that will reorder resources and create institutions capable of taking cooperative, preemptive steps...