A quarter century after the USSR – a state based on enforcing an extremely radical and violent version of those universalist Enlightenment ideals -- disintegrated, is it any wonder that the politics of the various successor states are dominated by nationalism? How much ordem e progresso was achieved by the modernizing military juntas of Central and South America? What about the modernizing elites of Africa’s de-colonizing societies, after taking over the administrative and security institutions already established by the colonizing powers, intoning après nous le déluge in order to obtain weapons and massive development credits from those former colonizers? Did the native administrators – subordinate to the colonizers but lords over their own peoples -- of the South and Southeast Asian British, Dutch, and French colonial empires quickly provide liberté, egalité, fraternité to all of the masses they inherited regardless of caste, gender, ethnicity, or religion? Unfortunately, the vast majority of Westerners have little idea about the details of how these questions have continued to develop over the past century.
