Over the broad era of the past century and a half, the world witnessed four major developments that we have come to recognize as major setbacks.
In 1914, the First World War broke out and "crowned" Europe’s "belle epoque" in a manner no one had anticipated. Indeed, since the Franco-Prussian War and Germany’s unification in 1871, it seemed that promise had settled in the continent. Its national borders had been drawn, especially since Italy also unified during this same period. After the Napoleonic Wars had become a very distant memory, the revolutionary events of 1830 and 1848 also became a thing of the past.
However, the "belle epoque" was also a period of economic prosperity during which the population started to reap the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, it was a time of tremendous scientific and technological progress that connected, for the first time in history, different parts of the world through roads, bridges, railways, and canals, as well as linking the distant corners within European countries.
Politically, it seemed that the democratic model was consolidating and expanding, while the backward, isolated Russian Empire in the East looked more and more like a major and unwelcome exception.
After the League of Nations was established by US President Woodrow Wilson, who had drawn inspiration from Immanuel Kant’s ideas (and had been a professor at Princeton teaching Kantian philosophy), it seemed that new rules had been set for the world after World War I and that they would shield humanity from wars and disasters.
But no. Fascist and Nazi brutality grabbed Europe by the throat and threatened the entire planet, while Stalinism hardened into a profoundly oppressive model that governed millions. Then came World War II, killing between 50 and 60 million people, after World War I had killed nine million, and resulting in an unprecedented ratio of civilian deaths relative to combatants.
That war ended with the defeat of Nazism. Then emerged the United Nations, a stronger and more effective successor to the League of Nations. The Nuremberg Trials were held; the cry of "Never Again" spread and became a lesson learned from the Holocaust. In turn, Polish legal theorist Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide," which was internationally recognized. Meanwhile, starting with India in 1947, movements for independence and decolonization spread across the "Third World."
However, it was not long before the third setback reared its head, in Germany and Korea, as the Cold War began in the early 1950s. By the late 1980s, as the Cold War came to an end and the notorious wall collapsed, we saw the emergence of a universal sense of optimism that democracy would spread, racist regimes would collapse, and chronic regional issues would be settled.
Progress was indeed made in these regards, but massacres that accompanied state collapse accelerated as well. From Bosnia, Rwanda, and Myanmar to Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, and Sudan, it became evident that it was indeed "happening again," and that the Cold War had only ended to be replaced by many hot wars across the globe.
Meanwhile, the political scene in the majority of the world’s influential countries, and in many others, was overwhelmed by populism. The pitiful and sad spectacle presented by the American presidential candidates, as well as the results of European parliamentary elections in France, alert us to the hellish state of politics in the countries that had invented politics in the modern sense.
Of course, causal explanation and analysis are always supremely important. However, perhaps now more than ever, a greater degree of modesty may be required, enough for us to accept that analyzing problems does not necessarily solve them. This is especially the case when analysis- through the efforts of hardened ideologues- attributes every problem, without exception, to the same single factor.
Moreover, as we enumerate the reasons, we could almost consider each one of them to bear a share of responsibility for the setbacks, and many of those reasons come in antithetical pairs: from a lack of modernity to excessive modernity, irrationality to pure reason, the dissolution of empires to the construction of new ones, colonization to a failure to attain colonial possessions, exporting capital to not exporting it, neoliberalism to communism, political Islam to Islamophobia, anti-Semitism to Zionism, and erasing identities to inflating them...
Valid explanations of our past and current setbacks abound. It is as though we humans are plagued by a flagrant inability to identify the points at which meanings and responsibilities can be balanced, and to maintain or build upon them.
If we set talk of "human nature," "the modes of races," and "the root of evil" aside, a degree of analytical agnosticism could prove useful. Indeed, what we call setbacks are just periods of history no less authentic and entrenched than what we label booms, periods of progress and stability, or any other favorable terms used to describe episodes that last no longer than the setbacks.
