Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971 - 2017 by Simon Reid-Henry
Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971 - 2017 by Simon Reid-Henry
Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amid a world economic crisis, the Western democracies underwent a profound transformation. Against the backdrop of what some saw as a full-scale "crisis of democracy" -- with student protests, race riots, massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War, a rights revolution, and a wave of worker discontent sowing unrest from one nation to the next -- a new liberal order emerged.
In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our times, award-winning scholar Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and Western history with it, was profoundly reimagined in the 1970s. As the institutions of liberal rule were transformed and globalization took hold, a new generation of politicians emerged on the world stage: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterand, Kohl, and others. The late-twentieth-century heyday of globalism they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the Cold War, to the creation of the European Union, and a new economic boom in America in the 1990s. But the energies unleashed by globalization also led to the fiasco of the Iraq War, to the catastrophic financial crisis of 2008, and, amid tensions over identity, inequality, and migration, to the nationalist, antiliberal surge of our own times.
The current slew of political crises across the liberal democratic West urges us to revisit these decades. Democracy is turning on its axis once again. As Reid-Henry's panoramic history poignantly reminds us, the choices we make going forward require that we first come to terms with where we have been.
Simon & Schuster, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2019
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK. THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.