Americans tend to have three preoccupations about the recent past: the rights revolutions of the 1960s; Ronald Reagan, his conservative movement, and its legacy; and American-led globalization.1 Remarkably, to an American reader, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, the new book by the distinguished journalist Christian Caryl, does not explore any of these American preoccupations. America is itself a footnote to Carylâ??s book, as are the Soviet Union and the European Union. Globalization may be Carylâ??s subject, but he does not see it as a process advanced by American foreign policy and the American economy. Globalization reflects â??the twin forces of markets and religion,â? most vividly, the Chinese market and political Islam.
The bookâ??s temporal frame is intended to provoke. Caryl accords the Paris or Berkeley or Prague of 1968 no lasting political stature. Nor is 1989 the year in which everything happens. Those years imply a Eurocentric emphasis, too rooted in the socialist dream or too disconnected from the salience of modern religion. Caryl argues that market capitalism and political Islam were the primary forces shaping the past 34 years. Embodying these forces were Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The successive collapse of Western-style modernization and of Soviet-style communism in Afghanistan completes Carylâ??s story.
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