Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971–2017
by Simon Reid-Henry  (Author)

About the Author
Simon Reid-Henry is a writer and prize-winning scholar. He is Associate Professor at Queen Mary, University of London and a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo.

About this book
The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day, Empire of Democracy is the story for those asking how we got to where we are.
Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amidst a world economic crisis, the Western democracies were forced to undergo a profound transformation. Against what some saw as a full-scale “crisis of democracy”— with race riots, anti-Vietnam marches and a wave of worker discontent sowing crisis from one nation to the next— a new political-economic order was devised and the postwar social contract was torn up and written anew.
In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and western history with it, was profoundly reimagined when the postwar Golden Age ended. As the institutions of liberal rule were reinvented, a new generation of politicians emerged: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, Kohl. The late twentieth century heyday they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the Cold War and into the economic boom of the 1990s. But equally it led them into the fiasco of Iraq, to the high drama of the financial crisis in 2007/8, and ultimately to the anti-liberal surge of our own times.
The present crisis of liberalism enjoins us to revisit these as yet unscripted decades. The era we have all been living through is closing out, democracy is turning on its axis once again. As this panoramic history poignantly reminds us, the choices we make going forward require us first to come to terms with where we have been.

Brief contents
Introduction
Prologue: Two Helicopters
Part I: Democracy Unbound (1971–)
1. The Unraveling
2. The Crisis of Capitalism
3. The Reckoning
4. A Split in the World
5. “Let Fury Have the Hour”
6. The Victory: Remaking Europe
Part II: Novus Ordo Seclorum? (1989–)
7. America and “A World Transformed”
8. The Great Convergence
9. A Democratic Peace?
10. The New Prosperity
11. Farewell to All That
12. Blueprints for the New Millennium
Part III: Victory without Peace (2001–)
13. The Assault on Freedom
14. In the Shadow of War
15. The Great Recession
16. Back to the Streets
17. Crisis upon Crisis
18. Epilogue: The End of an Era?
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Index

Pages: 880 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 25, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451684967
ISBN-13: 978-1451684964