Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA:
A SECOND LOOK
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.*
I am delighted to be back in Puerto Rico, especially in this lull between
hurricanes, and I am greatly honored to be invited to speak on this ceremonial
ocassion. You must forgive me for not speaking in Spanish.
The title of my remarks requires some explanation. Half a dozen
years ago I published a small book entitled The Disuniting Of America.
This year a revised edition book came out. You may perhaps wonder what
recent developments call for a second book and a new edition. You may
also perhaps wonder how Puerto Rico fits into my slant on problems on
the mainland. I will try to answer the first question at the beginning and
will offer a few tentative suggestions about the second question toward
the end.
For nearly half a century our planet was dominated by the Cold War.
Then a decade ago the Cold War came abruptly to an end. For a golden
moment the future looked bright. Democracy seemed everywhere triumphant.
Francis Fukuyama wrote about “the end of history.”
But, all of a sudden, almost out of nowhere, new problems arose. One
set of hatreds replaced another. The end of the Cold War released a torrent
of pent-up ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, national, tribal antagonisms,
long repressed by the ideological grid of the Cold War and now bursting
out of angry history and bitter memory. We live, it is evident, in a time of
the shattering of nations, and in a world where peoples are more mixed up
than ever before. Swifter modes of communication and transport, population
growth, the breakdown of traditional social structures, the flight from
chaos, from tyranny, from poverty, from famine, from ecological disaster,
the dream of a better life somewhere else—all these factors drive people in
mass migrations across national frontiers and multiply suspicions, tensions
and antagonisms within countries.
* “Lección magistral”, Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, 2 September
1998.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 115