Why political Islam is winning

At the same time, in the assemblies, cafes and faculty lounges of the West the intelligentsia of the post-Cold War period declared the state to be outmoded and sovereignty irrelevant; we were to welcome a new era of nongovernmental activism, of diplomacy without need of strength, of global issues that would transcend small-minded national interests. The European Union epitomized these yearnings as it proceeded to dismast national ships of state and amass bureaucratic powers in a supranational entity whose nature was and remains undelineated. The very word “modern” seemed unserious, giving way for a while to “post-modern,” which then, in turn, went out of fashion, leaving the age we inhabit with nothing but “contemporary” to describe our time and its meaning.

Much of the current situation can be summed up by the recent U.S. decision to recognize Castro’s Cuba, autocratic government and all.  The international state system, beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia, set out a small number of procedural requirements that a state would have to sign onto in order to be a member in good standing of the system.  What political form the state chose for its internal governance didn’t matter to the stewards of the system. The United States and the course of the major wars of the 20th century, following the thinking of Kant and Tocqueville, increasingly made the case that democracy was not just one of the many political forms of governance around the world but was itself a necessary “procedure.”