The Penguin History of the World

Another aspect of women’s struggle for equality was a new feminism that broke away from the liberal tradition in which its predecessors had been rooted. Arguments for traditional feminism had always had a liberal flavour, saying that for women to live unencumbered by laws and customs which were not imposed on men but only on them was merely a logical extension of the truth that freedom and equality were good things unless specific cause otherwise were to be shown. The new feminism took a new tack. It embraced a wider spectrum of causes specific to women – the protection of lesbians, for example – laid particular stress on women’s sexual liberation, and, above all, strove to identify and uncover unrecognized instances of psychological, implicit and institutionalized forms of masculine oppression. Its impact has been substantial, even if its radical elements are unlikely to be accepted by most women, not to mention by men.

In some societies any feminist advance at all has been fiercely contested. Parts of the Islamic world maintain restrictions and practices that protect an ultimate male dominance, and adherents of other great religions have attempted to hold back female liberation, too. Yet only some Muslim societies impose specific forms of dress on women and, in some cases, headscarf-wearing or even chador-wearing women are fierce defenders of female rights. Whether such facts turn out to establish sensible compromise or uneasy equilibrium will differ from one society to another. It should not be forgotten that violent contrasts in what is thought appropriate behaviour for women have until recently existed in European societies, too. It is not easy to relate such paradoxes as they have sometimes presented to what are supposed to be uniformities of faith.

Whether organized religion and the notion of fixed, unchanging moral law have or have not lost some of their power as social regulators, the state, the third great historic agent of social order, at first sight seems to have kept its end up much better. In spite of challenges from its opponents, it has never been so widely taken for granted. There are more states – recognized, geographically defined political units claiming legislative sovereignty and a monopoly of the use of force within their own borders – than ever before; between 1945 and 2010 the number increased from less than 50 to almost 200. More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains.

One of the most visible institutional marks left by Europe on world history has been the reorganization of international life as basically a matter of sovereign (and now, in name at least, often republican and usually national) states. Beginning in the seventeenth century, this was already in the nineteenth century beginning to look a possible global outcome, and the process was virtually completed in the twentieth century. With it went the diffusion of similar forms of state machinery, sometimes through adoption, sometimes through imposition first by imperial rulers. This was assumed to be a concomitant of modernization. The sovereign state is now taken for granted, as in many places it still was not even a century ago. This has been largely a mechanical consequence of a slow demolition of empires. That new states should come into being to replace them was scarcely questioned at any stage. With the collapse of the USSR almost half a century after the dissolution of other empires, the global generalization of the constitutional language of the sovereignty of the people, representative institutions and the separation of powers reached its greatest extent.

The aggrandizement of the state – if we may so put it – thus long met with little effective resistance. Even in countries where governments have traditionally been distrusted or where institutions exist to check them, people tend now to feel that they are much less resistible than even a few years ago. The strongest checks on the abuse of power remain those of habit and assumption; so long as electorates in liberal states can assume that governments will not quickly fall back on the use of force, they do not feel very alarmed. But although there are more democracies around the world now than ever before, there is now a rich undercurrent of opinion in the developing world claiming that authoritarian regimes are best for the initial growth phase of a country’s economy. They often point to post-Mao China as an example. But most dictatorships are not economically successful, and almost all developed countries are democracies.