Whose world order?: Russia's perception of American ideas after the Cold War

Abstract

Intellectual ideas on the international community can make important contributions to how cultures perceive one another. Yet these same ideas can also be misunderstood by other societies when they are framed in a culturally exclusive manner. In Whose World Order? Andrei P. Tsygankov examines how Russian elites engage American ideas of world order and why Russians perceive these ideas as unlikely to promote a just or stable international system. Tsygankov focuses on Francis Fukuyama's end of history thesis, which argues for the global ascendancy of Western-style market democracy, and Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations, which drew attention to what Huntington perceived to be an increasingly dominant global disorder. Tsygankov argues that Russian intellectuals received the ideas of these two prominent American scholars critically. Despite Huntington's and Fukuyama's intentions to contribute to the development of freedom and stability in the world, Russians viewed their theories at best as limitations to social and cross-cultural creativity and at worst as justification for a war-mongering, West-centered global dictatorship.