The End of Grand Narratives: Legitimation of Truth and Sovereignity

The paradigm of the modern state started to be more widely criticised in the 1960s and 1970s, when it became clear that many Enlightenment ideas were losing their relevance in the rapidly changing contemporary world. Criticism of the modern paradigm declared an end to grand narratives.1 This included narratives about sovereignty and the state, freedom, truth and progress. The desire for an object and objectivity came to be replaced by a focus on the subject. Variety, fragmentation and difference are the key words of postmodern society. The goals and desires of the subject living in a particular society and culture are those that construct the world we live in, including the concept of national sovereignty. The author agrees with Lyotard that the actual great values—freedom, truth and progress that were born in the Enlightenment and ‘hovered’ in western culture for almost one and a half centuries, and now that the paradigm of globalism is changing—have turned against themselves in crisis. Whilst postmodernism in the midst of the 1980s and 1990s was still optimistic and saw the grand narratives of modernism as surpassed, one could notice signs of deep pessimism in postmodernism from the start of the 21st century. Such emotions have particularly expanded since the terrorist attack on the WTC in New York on 11 September 2001, and also since Western intervention in Iraq in 2003.