“On the other hand, progress also has its downsides. The process of globalization has brought the countries of the world closer together, but at the same time the gap between rich and poor has widened enormously. The age of wars between the great powers that have shaped the world since the dawn of modern times seems to be over. Both sides avoided the direct military confrontation that would have led to total nuclear destruction during the Cold War. But the violence has not abated since 1945. Instead of the big wars, there have been many smaller ones in which ethnic and national differences have been fought out mercilessly, almost always between smaller ethnic groups, such as in the Balkans, in Israel, in Central Asia or in Sri Lanka. In Central and parts of South America and Africa there have been bloody civil wars for years, which have economic but often also ethnic causes. During the Cold War, it was often proxy wars involving the Western and Eastern alliances. The world looked on as people were slaughtered in Cambodia and Rwanda. The rapid pace of modernization in the context of technological development and globalization has created new tensions. Poverty and - even more dangerously - cultural malaise with the modern world have produced new forms of fundamentalism, and not only in Muslim countries. The old colonialism has been replaced by global capitalism. But although economic factors play a large role, the international and local conflicts cannot be explained in simple Marxist terms. Cultural, ethnic and religious motives, often misused for political purposes, make a reasonable long-term solution, whether in Kashmir or in the Middle East, unlikely.
The terrible attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 showed what new destructive forms the current conflicts have assumed. International terrorism must be fought, but the shockingly uncritical wave of patriotism in America currently sweeping the country tends to prevent a rational analysis of the causes of terrorism and the policies that contributed to its emergence. The interventions of France and the USA in Vietnam, France in Algeria, Russia in Chechnya and Israel in Lebanon and in both intifadas prove that military action is not suitable for solving political and ethnic problems. As an American, it pains me that since 1945 the USA, under the ideological cloak of protecting human rights, has pursued an imperialistic realpolitik, to which human rights in particular have repeatedly fallen victim. The same reproach applies to the world politics of the former Soviet Union.
I never believed in inevitable progress, but I was confident that reason would prevail in the end, a reason whose core is human dignity and self-determination. Almost regularly, at intervals of ten years, I have expressed myself in scientific articles on the limits and contradictions of progress and have always maintained the hope that, according to the words of the prophets Isaiah and Micah, the time would come “when no nation would fight against nation take up the sword” and “everyone will dwell under his vine and under his fig tree without fear”. Perhaps human nature is such that this goal is unattainable, and certainly modern technology and the progressive manipulation of the masses make the role of violence all the more ominous. The twentieth century, which began with such high hopes, has turned out to be the bloodiest in world history. Since the Jacobin reign of terror in the French Revolution, we have had to watch time and again how radical utopias that wanted to liberate people, such as in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin and in China under Mao, have turned into their opposite.
So I’ve gotten closer to Wilma’s pessimism over time. But I remain convinced that we should work to improve people’s situation, that there can be no progress as such, but there can be progress.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 312f (translation)