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Pastimes : A CENTURY OF LIONS/THE 20TH CENTURY TOP 100 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (752)	10/27/1999 12:03:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

I see one struggle: the struggle against totalitarianism, with the Soviets being the greater threat. I believe history - world scope, money spent, people killed and potential for world destruction - confirms that.

To: Neocon who wrote (752)	10/28/1999 5:29:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

I want to thank you for an incredible and challenging thread, NeoCon. I'm having difficulty keeping up with it, but still make sure to read it all. I especially thank you for your messages on the framework. I tried to formulate my own framework the other day before the thread moved so swiftly beyond me and before I'd read your superb restatement of your view. On your first point -- the geopolitical -- I would subsume those two "titanic struggles" of the century into a single trend. My different framework, of course, would prompt me to place different folks on the list and in a far different positions of relative importance. (Churchill, for instance, falls lower in this view.) But here's a bit of what I wrote the other day on the geopolitical framework: In a broad-brush geopolitical sense, the stunning change in this century is the dissolution of colonial empire and the rise of the nation-state. At the beginning of the century, a world map could have been drawn with a dozen colors. The colors for France and Britain would dominate. Borders in most places (even in Europe itself) were often ill-defined so that a water-color wash might be the best way to distinguish between the different areas. This process had gone on for centuries. It seemed to be the defining characteristic of the modern period. There was little to indicate that this tendency would change anytime soon. In fact, it had accelerated at the end of the 19th Century. Germany was making belated headway in matching its two European rivals in colonial land. The US, Russia, and Japan had all served notice that they might wish to play in the same game. The Ottomans, Holland, and Portugal still played a significant role. Italy and Belgium had joined the land race. The Americas represented a special case, but the US seemed to be moving toward the European model. There were movements within the centers of empire opposing the trend and sporadic uprisings in the colonies, but little indication that the idealistic revolutionary outbursts of the 18th Century would be rekindled. Despite the colonial rivalries, Britain was still the great world power at the start of the 20th Century, but its dominance was shrinking under a new world economy. So that's a part of what things looked like in 1900. By 1999, something extraordinary had happened. For the most part, the empires that had defined the modern period are gone. A map would show hundreds of distinct colors with sharp borders in most places. Those borders that were occasionally under pressure in several spots, but the form of the pressure was, at the end of the century, a symptom of the profound changes that had taken place. It's possible, of course, to argue that the imperial world of the 18th and 19th centuries had merely taken on a different form. But that change in form is itself significant.