Word: conquests
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...basis for doubts about Russia's long-term commitment to "Westernness" lies not in Yeltsin or his democratic supporters but in the ambivalence about the West that still seems endemic to many Russians. Admiration has historically been tinged with resentment of Western arrogance and conquest in the past (Napoleon and Hitler) and with misgivings about the West's spiritual values. Freedom, democracy and rampant market economics seem palpably Western; but so do political anarchy, street crime and the Mafia. Underlying doubts about the supposed social advantages of a Western-style way of life are shared by a wide audience...
Yugoslavia, says a U.S. State Department official, is the horrible example of "self-determination gone mad." He and others accuse Serbia of adopting a poisonous nationalism that demands ethnic purity at home, enforced by deporting "foreigners" if necessary, and conquest of any lands -- portions ) of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example -- to which one's brethren have migrated. Once that spirit takes hold, says the official, "anything becomes justifiable in the name of your kind: expulsion, devastation, murder...
...promised a new era of collective responsibility, Yugoslavia heralds its early demise." But the gulf war promised no new era of collective responsibility. The gulf war was no more collective than the Korean War, also fought under the U.N. flag. It was not the U.N. that reversed Saddam's conquest of Kuwait. It was the U.S. Army, based in Saudi Arabia, helped by Britain and France. Everything else was window dressing...
...nation-state is also exploding upward, into larger units, notably the European Community. It has not eradicated national rivalries, or xenophobia, or protectionism, or the danger of international trade wars. But the historic fact is that Western Europe has learned the momentous lesson: that war and conquest no longer lead to economic prosperity. Bending sovereignty, states are increasingly joining to cope with such common problems as the environment, communications, nuclear proliferation and a whole range of issues that used to be "internal affairs" -- including human rights...
...This has been the story of the past 500 years, ever since the European conquest of the Middle East 500 years ago," he said...