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Namah Taking Stock....

work of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo? And (4).” Speaking to the League of Nations in
can we learn something from Sri Aurobindo’s 1919, American President Woodrow Wilson
analysis of geopolitics in the early 20 century defended the “equality of self-governing
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to make sense of the apparent chaos of world peoples, whether they were big or little”,
movements today? This article offers some calling his fellows to walk “out into pastures
(all too) brief reflections. of quietness and peace such as the world never
dreamed of before (5).”
The Dream of Liberal Internationalism

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s, The End of History?
propelled him to worldwide fame as the
poster-boy of hope and optimism. Liberal
democracy, he argued, “may constitute the
end point of mankind’s ideological evolution
(1).” As liberal democratic ideals — of science,
liberty and moral progress — covered the
globe, the wasteful expenditure of blood
and treasure by countries occasioned by the
timeless struggles of international politics
would be at an end. Their “irrational desire” to
be greater than others would be replaced by
the “rational desire” to see them as equals (2).

Few would subscribe to this rose-tinted view
today. But even we if make appropriate It is another story that liberal internationalism
concessions for American triumphalism after somehow made its peace with imperialism,
the fall of the Berlin Wall, what is striking but come the mid-20 century and these
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is that Fukuyama was far from the first, heady currents of Enlightenment optimism,
nor will he be the last, to entertain some preaching the gospel of reason and humanity,
version of this utopian dream of liberal were eviscerated in the totalitarian horrors
internationalism. Writing in the 18 century, of the Holocaust. This led British historian
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German idealist Immanuel Kant saw, “a Peter Laslett to proclaim in 1956 that,
perfect civil constitution”, “a law-governed “political philosophy is dead (6).” That is
external relation between states” at the end till, so we are told, it was reborn in 1971
of human “wickedness and destructiveness” in America with John Rawls’ exposition of
in his, Universal History with a Cosmopolitan liberal values in his influential, A Theory of
Purpose (3). In the 19 century, British liberal Justice and The Law of Peoples, emblematic of
th
John Stuart Mill foretold the rising tide of the resurgent optimism of the baby-boomers.
international cooperation and progress, laying But this “resurgent faith”, as Katrina Forrester
out his doctrine of sovereign equality, “the wrote, was “full of contradictions” — think the
good of no country can be obtained by any Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs invasion targeting
means but such as tend to that of all countries Cuba, support for Saddam Hussein’s chemical

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