CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
489
ternational politics, it was no more than a way of attempting to make
the realpolitik of the Versailles settlement acceptable to the American
public.
Wilsonianism is not as important as Kissinger suggests; it is always
mostly a matter of formulation, of rhetoric . But especially in conditions
of confusion and rapid change, such rhetoric can have dangerous effects
on the making of actual policy, leading to excessive commitments, at
variance with interests, and then precipitating retreats from such com–
mitments, also damaging
to
interests and
to
the stability of alliances in
particular. This was evident in the first phase of the post-Cold-War pe–
riod, at the beginning of our decade. The idea of the End of History
and the New International Order blended together in a kind of woozy
millennium, without moorings in global reality. Democracy and freedom
of expression were seen as on the march everywhere, and if they should
seem to get stuck anywhere, for a time, America would just give them a
good shove and they would get moving again.
That was the mood of those days. Heads were so swollen in the
West, among politicians and commentators alike, that feet could be no
longer kept on the ground. The mood of 1994 has to be more chas–
tened than it was then, but habitual rhetoric, especially in America, keeps
the Fukuyama mood alive, or half-alive, despite what four years of un–
remitting historical continuance should have done to the theory of the
end of history. The rhetoric , therefore, remains dangerous. The great
conti nuing illusion of the post-Cold-War period is that America, work–
ing through NATO and the United Nations, or the UN alone, can
conve rt other cu ltures into something different from what they are.
Examples of that illusion in practice are: the illusion that China can be
made amenable to the First Amendment; the illusion that the whole of
the former Soviet Union can be made safe for democracy, and safe also
from both further disintegration and restored centralism; the illusion that
some form of external intervention can eliminate ethnic strife from for–
mer Yugoslavia. The most pervasive illusion of all is that nationalism can
be made to fade away, yielding place to a new universal order.
The trend has of cou rse been the other way in recent years in the
former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, with the supranational
yielding place to the national. That trend in itself, however, is not neces–
sarily or universally irreversible. In the former Soviet Union, for example,
we can now discern a cen tripetal pattern beginning to prevail over cen–
trifugal ones in some places, while interacting unpredictably with them in
others. Many groups in the former Soviet Union would rather be in the
Russian Federation than subjected to new ethnic or religious masters in
