Ferenc Laczó reviews Andreas Rödder’s Der verlorene Frieden. Vom Fall der Mauer zum neuen Ost-West-Konflikt [The Lost Peace. From the Fall of the Wall to the New East-West Conflict], (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2024)
Andreas Rödder’s new book, Der verlorene Frieden (The Lost Peace), addresses a vexing, much-debated question: why have the hopes raised at the end of the Cold War been so gravely disappointed? Why have those hopes been replaced by the threats of today’s “tendentially bipolar” (Eurasian autocrats versus the Western alliance) but also highly unpredictable and dangerous world? To offer a substantial response, Rödder approaches international relations from a historical perspective.
Beyond describing key conflicts from the end of the Cold War until the end of what he labels “the world order of 1990,” Der verlorene Frieden considers counter-factual scenarios and aims to draw lessons for the future politics of Western democracies as well.
The result is a compact, ambitious, and innovative book that wears its erudition lightly and formulates clear theses.
The book begins with a succinct presentation of four previous world orders (Weltordnungen) – those of 1648, 1815, 1919-20, and post-1945 – to clarify the specificities of the post-1990 order. Drawing on the typology of Kyle M. Lascurettes and Michael Poznansky, the author shows that the order of 1990 was concentrated (as opposed to dispersed) in terms of the distribution of power and can be qualified as intentional (as opposed to spontaneous) when it comes to its emergence. Rödder adds to this comparison the observation that the various orders have not simply replaced one another but have left significant legacies as well – such as the integrity of sovereign states (1648), stability via legitimation (1815), the problem of revisionism (1919-20), and multilateral institutions – and also a certain immobility thereof (post-1945).
Der verlorene Frieden subsequently highlights that the order of 1990 was not contractually regulated, via a new major treaty or otherwise, and did not yield new institutions either. In Europe post-1990 institutions were instead based on Western international organizations from the times of the Cold War that were subsequently reformed (as was the case with NATO) or deepened (as happened with what came to be renamed the European Union), with both of them also being enlarged, Rödder argues. This is not incorrect but underestimates the novel ambitions of the 1990s – whether in the shape of the EU, the WTO or the ICC. More generally, the order of 1990 had four rather implicit bases, the book suggests: it was (1) a liberal order with Western institutions and values at its center and (2) with the US exerting global dominance at a time when (3) globalization was advancing and (4) Russia and China both found themselves in a rather weak position (p. 43).
Russia was not humiliated at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union through the imposition of harsh new terms, but nor was it treated as an equal thereafter, the book explains; not unlike the Habsburg Empire in Central Europe after 1866, Rödder notes, it was spared but reduced to the role of a potential junior partner. The author’s comparison is insightful, but it also exhibits the well-known limitation of all comparisons across time: irreducible differences in historical context. After all, as we are only too aware these days, Russia remained a nuclear power and a member of the UN Security Council beyond 1991 – and, despite its sense of insecurity and disruptive imperialism, it is unlikely to be dismantled in the way the Habsburg Empire was half a century later, at the end of World War One.
Given the aforementioned four bases of the Western-led liberal order, the crucial question that emerged after 1989-91 was whether Russia and China could be sufficiently integrated therein – and could continue to be so even after their relative positions had started to improve.
As we now know, the question of whether Russia would reconcile itself to its reduced status, especially given unclear relations in the post-Soviet space, would prove a particularly thorny and indeed decisive issue. After all, as Rödder explains, the end of an order may come about through shocks, wars or revolutions, or – more simply – via a momentous evolutionary transformation. However, such an end can be safely declared when crucial actors actively reject the entire system and its basic principles in the way that Russia has done in recent years.
Der verlorene Frieden develops a multilayered and nuanced perspective on how this great betrayal of hopes and expectations came to be.
Its wide-ranging narrative of contemporary history shows that the high point of the unipolar moment – the invasion of Iraq – also amounted to a turning point: the US lost a substantial part of its credibility as a result, which was soon followed by the increasingly vocal assertion of revisionist agendas (p. 83).
In a central chapter of the book, the years 2001 to 2008 are indeed depicted as Wendejahre (literally: years of a turn) that ended with a real rupture. Rödder ponders here how the consequences of the Bucharest NATO summit of 2008 might have been even more decisive than those of the Iraq war (pp. 184-5). The compromise formula reached in Bucharest was responsible, he elaborates, for creating a gray zone between the West and Russia and for opening a time window for the latter that, in effect, made the situation of Ukraine – and also that of Georgia – much more precarious, with familiar and all too tragic consequences.
While Der verlorene Frieden repeatedly critiques – in an unmistakably conservative fashion – the universalizing assumptions and hubris of Western elites, especially when they resulted in attempts at “democracy export,” its central concerns lie elsewhere. Andreas Rödder instead aims to persuade his readers of two main points: that a) fundamentally different – liberal and imperial – conceptions of order continued to contest each other after the Cold War, with the new security architecture in Eastern Europe opening a wide field of potential conflicts in particular, and that b) this contestation came to exert a decisive influence as power relations shifted and specific decisions were made to revise the world order of 1990 (p. 12).
Rödder is ready to admit that the lack of sufficient regard for Russia after 1989-91 was unwise (p. 65). More importantly though, he reminds his readers that the idea of a Western betrayal of Russia is little more than a politically motivated, retrospective construction (p. 61). No causal relationship existed between “Western actions” and “Russian reactions”: Putin and the Russian leadership in fact need to be viewed as the key actors in that much-debated story of estrangement.
In this context, Rödder explains that Russia’s leaders have proven unable to accept their country’s notable loss of international significance after 1989-91 and have demanded the recognition of their “equal status” in global affairs. However, that demand for “equality” has consistently presupposed the inequality of others and has thus been fundamentally at odds with a very basic principle of the liberal order.
It was through Russia’s negative, even pathological, overreaction and destructive revisionism that the world moved from the tipping point of 2003 to the crushing point of 2022, and the country’s genuine security concerns appear to have been less decisive than its nationalistic preoccupation with status, Der verlorene Frieden asserts.
It must be considered thoroughly ironic, then, that the formation of a “global East” via the revisionist convergence of Eurasian autocrats – a convergence based on their shared anti-Western orientation, victim narratives, and neo-imperialist violence – is currently only helping to turn Russia into a junior partner of China.
The book is thus clear about where blame ultimately lies for the end of the world order of 1990. Equally importantly, Rödder proves a judicious observer of Western ambiguities and shortcomings. Western powers have recurrently absolutized their own values after 1989-91 and have ended up ignoring other perspectives and systems of cultural reference, he complains. They have repeatedly misrecognized the limits of their power too. However, more realism, empathy, and modesty on their part was unlikely to solve the more fundamental conflict, Rödder is quick to add.
The order of 1990 might well have ended by now even without all the conspicuous manifestations of Western hubris, even if that hubris made Western actors underestimate the potential for conflict and consequently fail to develop mechanisms and instruments for the moderation and management of revisionism, he argues in a nuanced manner.
In this context, the author also articulates a rather sharp critique of the European Union, which partly diverges from the main thrust of his critique of Western illusions, arrogance, and misjudgments. The EU, he argues, has not only lacked military capabilities and convincing leadership but also the mere political will to punch at least in its own weight class on the global stage (p. 159). He shows, more specifically, how European lack of preparation in 2014 and ambiguous actions afterwards ended up looking much like appeasement of Russia – and how Germany, in particular, unwittingly helped undermine Europe’s security architecture via its lack of realism and proper strategy, its narrow pursuit of its supposed economic interests, and the unjustifiable perpetuation of its energy dependency on a revisionist Russia (p. 131).
History is not fate. Andreas Rödder rehearses several key points that realist scholars of international relations are particularly fond of emphasizing – he reiterates that resources and relations between different powers are crucial and constantly changing, that conflicts of interest between them are unavoidable, and that the ambitions of states almost inevitably grow as their opportunities multiply. He does so without thereby underestimating alternatives and the key historical role of choice.
It is among the merits of Der verlorene Frieden that it combines insights from three major streams in the discipline of international relations – realism, liberal internationalism, and constructivism – to assess questions of power, rules, and institutions as well as mutual perceptions and ideas all at once.
Rödder thereby manages to show that the key preconditions for action that realists tend to focus on are assigned specific meanings via changing perceptions of oneself and others, perceptions that thereby co-determine decisions of historical import.
Was there a serious chance, though, to achieve something much more preferable? An alternative might have been, Rödder suggests, to separate internal and external dimensions: to insist that there has to be a liberal order between states without trying to export democracy (p. 182). While such a compromise – autonomy in one’s own relations in exchange for acceptance, in the spirit of liberal toleration or otherwise, of the sovereignty and integrity of others – might indeed have sounded reasonable enough to both the liberal democratic status quo powers of the West and the autocratic-revisionist powers of the global East, it is less clear to me how Western “support for self-determination” could have been neatly separated from the agenda of “democracy export” (p. 196). It seems to me that, according to Rödder’s own interpretation, the crucial case of Ukraine may serve as a stark reminder of just how difficult it can be to fully separate the two in practice.
In its brief conclusion, Der verlorene Frieden proposes lessons. Rödder asserts here that the West needs more thorough self-critique and a greater openness to correcting its course. It needs new robust forms of civility and a true competition between arguments to avoid both the cynicism of dominating voices and the unhelpful moral posturing that has come to shape so many discussions in recent years. The ultimate goal should be, the author proposes, to develop responsible liberal democratic statesmanship that would base international politics on values derived from historical experience.
Such a course correction ought to yield strength both internally and internationally, he explains. It ought to imply the development of European capabilities and the simultaneous reassertion of transatlantic solidarity. It should also result in more productive forms of German responsibility via a historic change (Zeitenwende) in self-understanding. These are well-articulated and generally agreeable if not particularly inventive aims.
Where the book could have done more, though, is by reflecting more substantially on the implications of one of its key insights: that Germany and Europe were at the very center of the remaking of the world order in 1990 but have been decreasingly important since (p. 12).
In sum, what Der verlorene Frieden offers is a broad overview of contemporary international history and a nuanced explanation of interdisciplinary inspiration. Both its historical overview and its explanation via theories of international relations are convincing on their own terms; however, they might have been connected more organically – discussions of Middle Eastern cataclysms or the multiple crises and weaknesses of the EU, for instance, are valuable but add surprisingly little of direct relevance to answering the main question, whereas a more thorough examination of the massively heightened role of China might well have contributed more in that regard.
Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Andreas Rödder’s new book develops a learned, accessible, and sufficiently complex answer to a crucial and vexing question, and can indeed help refine the self-understanding of Western societies, which is one of its explicit goals.
