POST-MODERNITY, MULTICULTURALISM AND EX-IMPERIAL HINTERLAND: HABSBURG AND OTTOMAN LEGACIES REVISITED

Authors : Ali Fuat BOROVALI

Pages : 0-0

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Publication Date : 1997-12-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The end of the Cold War has brought in its wake a conceptual uncertainty as to which way the ‘world’ ought to go. This always seems to happen, though in different modes, when a major war is terminated. The First World War had its Versailles and World War II had its Yalta and Potsdam, intimating the kind of order, rightful or not, to come. Of course, the Cold War was not a war in the literal sense, so it is not surprising that its termination was somewhat unorthodox. It did not end with a bang but a whimper, as it were. The current travails in defining the ‘new world order’ seem somehow to be the product of a war which never happened. Since the systemic imperatives of the post-Cold War era are rather loose and under-determining, the range of options as to which way the world should be going gets wider—a more varied menu of possible worlds. This kind of systemic structure combined with the currents of post-modernity makes the world even less of a predictable place. Post-modernity, the defining zeitgeist of the present, can only help exacerbate the uncertainty inherent in the post-Cold War era.1 The two forces, conceptual and structural, combine to make the world more resistant to any imposition of a new order. There is simply no compelling idea of a particular order. Subsequently, the scene is ripe for various forms of historiographic revisionism.
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