Professor Hassner's impressive dissection of the world after 11 September 2001 is the sequel to a volume he published in 1995 covering world events between the atom bomb and the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s. The Cold War, he contends, merged primacy of power with potential brutality in the main theatres of conflict. But not so after the demise of the Soviet Union, he says, when “fluidity, uncertainty, ambiguities” prevailed. Yet while “force is not to be taken lightly”, nor should peace be.
In a philosophical analysis ranging widely from Thucydides to Hobbes, Kant, then Nietzsche, and counterpoising the contemporary Robert Kagan with Francis Fukuyama, author Hassner seeks to explain how the “dialectic between bourgeois and barbarian” has become little more than “a geopolitics of passions” – an expression that the author confesses he has borrowed from political scientist Stanley Hoffman. Hassner's “terror” is easily understood, while his “empire” refers to the USA, so overwhelmed by the turn in historical events that it risks reproducing the very menaces that it seeks to combat.
After a detailed disquisition of political philosophies past and present, Hassner asks (p. 363) if today's international relations bear ethical standards. His first reply is affirmative, characterized in his mind by the 1986 work, Nuclear Ethics, by Joseph Nye of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Hassner's second response is far more nuanced than the first, when he asks if there is not a fundamental incompatibility between international relations and ethics. “Morals,” he reminds, “are universal,” but then asks if they are not contested by the world's diversity of communities and their national interests? Our innate optimism in regard to multi‐nation ethics, in other words, is sorely tempered by political reality.
Hassner's latest book is food for profound and demanding thought; it complements the critical analysis by Chaliand Blin (above) of terrorism in its many variants.
