Post-Berlin Wall uncertainties

THE sudden ending of the Cold War in 1989 was the proverbial “game-changer” in thinking about international relations and the ideas which inform the making of foreign policy.

The fall of the Berlin Wall – the structure that symbolised the bipolar world – ended a long period of certainty in international relations. It was followed by the question: “what’s next?” What ideas for organising the world could replace an almost Archimedean idea that had underpinned Cold War thinking. This was that communism would be permanently pitted against capitalism, and vice versa.

The resulting vacuum was filled when the idea of “globalisation” entered the discourse. This view was anchored in the 18th-century idea that it was possible for history to end and, if this happened, countries (and their peoples) could live in harmony.

In the revised version, advanced by Japanese-American thinker Francis Fukuyama, the free market and regular democratic elections could build prosperity and so secure a more peaceful world.

And it was the Clinton administration’s enthusiastic embrace of liberalising trade worldwide that drew the theory of globalisation into practice. It did this by underscoring the notion that the defining motive of foreign policy was to pursue free market economics.

The ANC government, prompted by business, were quick to embrace this idea.