The American Century: From Sarajevo to Sarajevo

Abstract

When Gertrude Stein dogmatically asserted that the twentieth century began in 1920, she did not know that it also marked the beginning of modern U.S. foreign policy. The First World War and its aftermath set in motion on its bloodthirsty course what would become the American Century. The century proclaimed American in 1941 by publisher Henry R. Luce commenced in the 1920s because the nineteenth century did not end until 1914 with the events following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which led to World War I. The century ended in 1991 with acts of destructive ethnic cleansing that began in the same historic city. In both 1914 and 1991, the killings in Sarajevo were inextricably associated with violent national self-determination. Given the horrors of this century it is conceivable that we should not want to remember it as American. The worldwide ramifications of occurrences in Sarajevo at the beginning and end of what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “short twentieth century” (with the American portion of this century being even shorter) are sobering rather than uplifting and say more about the irrational human conditions leading to self-determined nation-states than the rational practice of democracy so prominent in the rhetoric of American diplomats during these same time periods. Moreover, there is little reason to believe, other than on the grounds of ethnocentrism, that democracy as a political base for nation-states was divinely intended to triumph in any enduring sense at the end of the American Century. In the globalized economy of the next century, oligarchic city-states, regional states within national borders sometimes referred to as regional fiefdoms, or nomadic, one-dimensional, anarchistic communities without territory and only spasmodic political power, rather than democratic nations, could become the norm as the New World Order develops along the paradoxical lines of globalism and tribalism. Neither development is promising in terms of democratic practice or theory. It may well be that the common end result of globalism and tribalism will be international anarchy rather than “common will and that conscious and collective human control under the guidance of law [which] we call democracy.” According to Robert Kaplan, “democracy may not be the system that will best serve the world – or even the one that will prevail in places that now consider themselves bastions of freedom.” Not only are contemporary democracies of relatively recent origin, most having emerged after 1914, but there are probably more anarchistic anti-democratic forces at work undermining the nation-state in the 1990s than there are reinforcing ones, despite the insistence of the United States to the contrary.1