Part 2: The Great Arenas of Contention8

Chapter 8: Contention and the Balance of Power: When Survival Hangs on Scales That Hold for No One

A superpower whose flag came down from the Kremlin without a single war, brought down by its own internal weight; a wall in Berlin before which fear broke in the streets of Leipzig before the concrete did; a crash on Wall Street that produced a new world order. The chapter reads these events as evidence that dominance is not destiny and that supremacy is not the end of the road. It then follows the rise of the peripheries, the great alliances, the stock exchange as an arena of contention, the quiet rise of China, and the ability of small non-state actors to shake the great. The rule it arrives at: contention keeps neither the victor victorious nor the marginal on the margins.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

• 22

  The collapse of the Soviet Union

  When a totalitarian system exhausts itself until it falls

  1991Chapter 8Power and states
• 23

  The fall of the Berlin Wall

  When the wall of fear breaks before the wall of concrete

  1989Chapter 8Civil society
• 24

  The Great Depression

  When catastrophe produces a new order

  1929Chapter 8Power and states

The Cases