Highlights
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The World of Yesterday, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked back on Europe before the First World War. That was, he wrote, the Golden Age of Security, when institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever. Zweig lived to see much of his world swept away by first one war and then another, even more devastating, which was raging when he died by suicide in 1942.
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The Europeans of Zweig’s youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order.
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Many of us in today’s West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States
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Warnings beforehand can tell us, if we pay attention, that the old structures and rules are giving way.
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I n his memoir,The World of Yesterday, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked back on Europe before the First World War. That was, he wrote, the Golden Age of Security, when institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever. Zweig lived to see much of his world swept away by first one war and then another, even more devastating, which was raging when he died by suicide in 1942.
The Europeans of Zweig’s youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today’s West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States, which was a model for much of the world, and international institutions and norms that allowed many nations to work together to avoid war and confront shared problems, such as climate change and pandemic disease.
As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today’s world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and “the weak suffer what they must.” Imperialism, which never really disappeared, is back. Governments and think tanks now speak of spheres of influence, something the U.S. long opposed. If history is a guide, this will not be an easy or pleasant transition.
T he past holds many examples of great change: regimes ending, monarchies becoming republics, whole civilizations vanishing, ways of managing relations between peoples and states swept aside, to be replaced by new ones.
Change can come slowly or suddenly. The Roman empire and its successor in the East decayed gradually, with intervals of revival. The French Revolution of 1789, Russia’s in 1917, and, much more recently, the end of the Soviet regime and the Cold War happened within weeks or months.
Warnings beforehand can tell us, if we pay attention, that the old structures and rules are giving way. As with an apparently solid house, the foundations start to shift, the roof leaks, and greedy neighbors start to encroach on the grounds. When old regimes fall, the causes tend to be economic: France before 1789 was effectively bankrupt. Sometimes governments have ceased to function, and large sections of society, including elites, have become disaffected. By 1917 in Russia, housewives were marching in city streets to protest a lack of food, peasants were seizing land, and many Russians saw the czarist government as irrelevant, even treasonous. Soviet citizens in the 1980s could no longer ignore the glaring differences between the utopian promises of communism and the reality of an autocratic and incompetent regime. Even party members no longer believed.