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A gaggle of students are driving at high speed to Berlin. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven,” wrote Wordsworth about the French Revolution. The year is 1989, not 1789, but the poet’s sentiments capture our mood. Having grown up under the Cold War’s nuclear shadow, the temptation to catch a glimpse of its physical demise was irresistible. The instant we heard East Germany had opened Checkpoint Charlie, uniting Berlin, we were on our way. Within 18 hours we were chipping at that wall alongside tens of thousands of others, young and old, German and foreign. With chisels and pickaxes we made our tiny contributions. Two days later we returned to England, hungover, astonished to have avoided any speeding tickets, each carrying a small chunk of the wall.
We were infected with optimism. As a student of philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, I imagined I possessed insight into the significance of the moment. PPE’s detractors called it a “pretty poor education”. They may have had a point. But in that moment, studying it seemed pertinent. We subscribed to progress, or rather Progress — belief in which is the closest thing the modern west has to a religion. In 1989 its schism was healed. By unifying its booming western wing with the shrivelled post-Stalinist eastern one, a monumental roadblock had been cleared from our future. No longer would nuclear-armed camps face each other across the 20th-century bloodlands of central Europe. That riven continent, from which Britain no longer stood aloof, would unify. Democracies would take the place of the Warsaw Pact, whose regimes were falling like dominoes to peaceful demonstrators. It was not just autocracy that was dying but nationalism. Borders were opening up. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm was to write, the short and genocidal 20th century, which began with the first world war in 1914, was about to come to an end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Humanity had proved it could learn from its mistakes. It was a good time to turn 21.
***
Almost three decades later, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, I found myself in Moscow. I had been invited to attend a conference on the “polycentric world order”, which is Russian for “post-American world”. It was hosted by the Primakov Institute, named after the man who had been Russia’s foreign minister and prime minister during the 1990s. Yevgeny Primakov was displaced as prime minister in 1999 by Vladimir Putin. While my friends and I had danced on the rubble of the Berlin Wall, a brooding Putin had watched his world crumbling from 100 miles away, at his KGB office in Dresden, a city in what was still East Germany. Later he would describe the USSR’s dissolution as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”. It was Primakov who championed the term “multipolarity” in a vain bid to dampen America’s oceanic post-Cold War triumphalism. Putin picked up the concept and made it his own.
Now here I was at an event attended by the likes of Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB (successor to the KGB), and by Putin himself. Though unsmiling, it was the Russians’ turn to celebrate. America had just elected a president who was a fan of walls and an admirer of Putin. While Putin was surveying his wrecked world in 1989, and we were racing down the autobahn, Trump was launching a board game. It was called Trump: The Game. With its fake paper money and property-based rules, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Monopoly — except that the number six on the dice was replaced with the letter T. There is no record that Trump said anything about the fall of the Berlin Wall. At any rate, all that seemed a long time ago.
What followed was a crash course in how to see the world differently. Still a student of history, though I hope by now a more sceptical one, I was struck by how often our Russian hosts referred admiringly to the Congress of Vienna. This was the 1814–15 conference that sealed the end of the Napoleonic Wars and launched almost a century of stability, which held until the outbreak of the first world war. The new order was underwritten by the Quadruple Alliance of Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia. Trump’s victory had opened up the prospect that Russia could return to its historic role as a great power in a polycentric world — one in which each forswore doing anything to undermine the internal legitimacy of any other. No more talk of the inevitability of democracy, or the US-led global order. That was what Putin craved. Others, in Beijing, Ankara, Cairo, Caracas, and even Budapest, share Russia’s hostility to western notions of progress, as do growing numbers of apostates in the west. Are they wrong?
***
To a person whose life has coincided with the rise of democracy, the spread of market economics and signs that the world had finally subscribed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, merely to pose this question is troubling enough. Wasn’t that debate settled a long time ago? Doesn’t the whole world crave to be western? We can no longer have any confidence in that. It was remarkably arrogant to believe the rest of the world would passively adopt our script. We must cast a sceptical eye on what we have learnt never to question.
At stake is a quasi-religious reading of western history that stretches back to the Magna Carta, whose 800th anniversary was celebrated at Runnymede in 2015. By limiting the power of the king, the Magna Carta set a precedent for what would later be known as “no taxation without representation.” This short medieval document was lost to the mists for several hundred years — Shakespeare did not even mention it in his play King John. Yet since the 17th century, when the Magna Carta was dusted off by opponents of Stuart tyranny in England, then made its way to America’s 13 colonies, it has morphed into the founding myth of western liberalism. As Dan Jones, a historian of the Magna Carta, describes it, the year 1215 is today seen as the “year zero” of liberal democracy. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued after the second world war, Eleanor Roosevelt said that it “may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere”.
For centuries, westerners have held a linear faith in which time is always marching us towards a happier place. The Greeks called it teleology. For Christians, it was the Second Coming of Christ. For Marxists, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat. For nationalists, it was seizing control of their Volk destiny. For Georgian and Victorian liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, and their modern heirs across the western world, it was the progress of human liberty to individual freedom. In 1989 most people believed that last version. The others were either dead or in retreat. Today, only Marxism is dormant. Belief in an authoritarian version of national destiny is staging a powerful comeback. More to the point, non-western visions of history, which were overshadowed by colonial rule, are restaking their claim to relevance. In different ways, China and India have traditionally taken a circular view of history. They still do. Material conditions may improve. But humanity’s moral condition is constant. There is no political finale towards which history is guiding us. To the rest of the world, which accounts for almost nine-tenths of humanity, most of whom are now finally starting to catch up with the west’s material advantages, humankind’s moral progress is a question that can never be settled. History does not end. It is a timeless repetition of folly and correction.
Those who doubt the circular view should look at US history. In 1789, the newly independent American colonies had a life expectancy of barely 40. It took 12 days by coach and boat for Thomas Jefferson to make the journey from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia. Today life expectancy is nearly twice that and Jefferson’s route takes five hours. Now measure America’s story by another yardstick. America’s first president, George Washington, was a world historical figure who cemented America’s democratic character by refusing to wear his general’s uniform for his inauguration. Against all exhortations, he stood down after two terms. He feared a third would set the wrong precedent. Can we say America’s moral progress has matched its material advances? In some ways it undoubtedly has. The US was born with slavery and women had no voice. But faith in the march towards “a more perfect union” is hard to sustain after President Trump’s election. Washington chose to be a modest statesman when the laurel was his for the taking. Trump, on the other hand, is a self-promoter without peer.
Of course, Trump and his counterparts in Europe, did not cause the crisis of democratic liberalism. They are a symptom. This may be hard to digest. Many comfort themselves that Trump’s victory was an accident delivered by the dying gasp of America’s white majority — and abetted by Putin. History will resume normal business after a brief interruption. They are too sanguine. Almost a quarter of America’s white working classes who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 switched to Trump in 2016. Had they, in Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate word, suddenly turned “deplorable”? Or were they driven by a desire to blow up a system that had routinely blamed them for their plight? The same can be asked of the Nissan employees in Sunderland who voted against their economic interests for Brexit. It may have been poetic coincidence that both David Cameron and Clinton stumbled on to the same campaign line: “Stronger together”. It should be little surprise that so many voters on both sides of the Atlantic responded so cynically. The Clintons have earned $235m in speaking fees since Bill Clinton left office — much of it from the same Wall Street banks who foreclosed on so many middle class homes. Within weeks of leaving office Obama accepted a $400,000 fee for a speech to a Wall Street firm — the same as the president’s salary. In the age of Trump, the appetite for Obama’s thoughts is likely to grow. But his fees are an all-too familiar monetisation of public office. The median US income only regained its pre-recession level at the end of Obama’s term in 2015. It is still below where it was at the turn of this century. Meanwhile, almost half of Americans now describe themselves as “lower class” — up from a third in 2000.
The backlash of the west’s middle classes, who are the biggest losers in a global economy that has been rapidly converging, but still has decades to go, has been brewing for many years. In Britain we call them the “left-behinds”. In France, they are the “couches moyennes”. In America, they are the “squeezed middle”. A better term is the “precariat” — those whose lives are dominated by economic insecurity. More than 160m westerners now work in the so-called gig economy, according to the management consultancy McKinsey, a multiple of where it was five years ago. Of these, about a third do so “out of necessity”. Their numbers are forecast to rise sharply. Their share of US wealth keeps going the other way. The bottom 50 per cent of Americans now own just 1 per cent of the nation’s wealth.
In 1966 Barrington Moore, the American sociologist, wrote, “No bourgeoisie, no democracy.” In the coming years his proposition will be tested. Since the turn of the millennium, and particularly over the past decade, no fewer than 25 democracies have failed around the world, three of them in Europe (Russia, Turkey and Hungary). Poland may not be far behind. In all but Tunisia, the Arab Spring was swallowed by the summer heat. “It is an open question whether this is a market correction in democracy, or a global depression,” says Francis Fukuyama, the scholar who back in 1989 asked whether history had ended. The answer will be found in the US and other western democracies.
Ed Luce, right, on the Berlin Wall
Journalists are always liable to over-interpret the latest big thing. We are also prone to interpret what we did not foresee as serenely inevitable in hindsight. Bear in mind that Brexit was not destined to happen. Holding the referendum was a rash throw of the dice by an inept prime minister. Nor was Trump’s victory inevitable. If just 77,000 Midwestern votes had gone the other way Hillary Clinton would now be president. But it works both ways. Should Marine Le Pen lose the French election and Angela Merkel retain power in Germany, the crisis of western liberalism will not have suddenly ended, though I suspect it will be broadcast as such. Nor, for that matter, would America be secure if Clinton were now in the White House. The self-belief of western elites saps their ability to grasp the scale of the threat.
Last December, Norbert Hofer, a hard right nationalist, came within a whisker of winning Austria’s presidency. We nevertheless celebrated his defeat as the crashing of the populist wave. We are likely to do the same if a French neo-fascist loses with about 40 per cent of the vote on Sunday. Le Pen’s Front National remains France’s largest party in two critical regional strongholds — the industrial north and Provence. As millions more French, British, American and other westerners move from secure jobs with pensions in the years ahead to contractual status without benefits, their sense of precariousness will intensify. “Take back control” may be an empty slogan in a world of inter-dependent sovereignty. But it means something tangible to those who have lost what they once thought was economic security. The western state used to insure individuals against the vicissitudes of the market. It is increasingly withdrawing from that role. Should Emmanuel Macron win the French election, supporters of liberal democracy, including me, must pray that he — and other leaders like him — will succeed. But he will have won on the basis of issuing vague, catch-all promises without a majority party to carry out his wishes. Obama offered similar hope in 2008 when his party was in full control. Eight years later America elected Trump.
The west’s crisis was not invented in 2016. Nor will it vanish in 2017. It is structural and likely to persist. Those who gloss over this are doing liberal democracy no favours.
Edward Luce is the FT’s chief US columnist and commentator. His book, ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ is published now in the UK (Little, Brown) and on June 12 in the US (Atlantic Grove)
We were infected with optimism. As a student of philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, I imagined I possessed insight into the significance of the moment. PPE’s detractors called it a “pretty poor education”. They may have had a point. But in that moment, studying it seemed pertinent. We subscribed to progress, or rather Progress — belief in which is the closest thing the modern west has to a religion. In 1989 its schism was healed. By unifying its booming western wing with the shrivelled post-Stalinist eastern one, a monumental roadblock had been cleared from our future. No longer would nuclear-armed camps face each other across the 20th-century bloodlands of central Europe. That riven continent, from which Britain no longer stood aloof, would unify. Democracies would take the place of the Warsaw Pact, whose regimes were falling like dominoes to peaceful demonstrators. It was not just autocracy that was dying but nationalism. Borders were opening up. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm was to write, the short and genocidal 20th century, which began with the first world war in 1914, was about to come to an end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Humanity had proved it could learn from its mistakes. It was a good time to turn 21.
***
Almost three decades later, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, I found myself in Moscow. I had been invited to attend a conference on the “polycentric world order”, which is Russian for “post-American world”. It was hosted by the Primakov Institute, named after the man who had been Russia’s foreign minister and prime minister during the 1990s. Yevgeny Primakov was displaced as prime minister in 1999 by Vladimir Putin. While my friends and I had danced on the rubble of the Berlin Wall, a brooding Putin had watched his world crumbling from 100 miles away, at his KGB office in Dresden, a city in what was still East Germany. Later he would describe the USSR’s dissolution as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”. It was Primakov who championed the term “multipolarity” in a vain bid to dampen America’s oceanic post-Cold War triumphalism. Putin picked up the concept and made it his own.
Now here I was at an event attended by the likes of Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB (successor to the KGB), and by Putin himself. Though unsmiling, it was the Russians’ turn to celebrate. America had just elected a president who was a fan of walls and an admirer of Putin. While Putin was surveying his wrecked world in 1989, and we were racing down the autobahn, Trump was launching a board game. It was called Trump: The Game. With its fake paper money and property-based rules, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Monopoly — except that the number six on the dice was replaced with the letter T. There is no record that Trump said anything about the fall of the Berlin Wall. At any rate, all that seemed a long time ago.
What followed was a crash course in how to see the world differently. Still a student of history, though I hope by now a more sceptical one, I was struck by how often our Russian hosts referred admiringly to the Congress of Vienna. This was the 1814–15 conference that sealed the end of the Napoleonic Wars and launched almost a century of stability, which held until the outbreak of the first world war. The new order was underwritten by the Quadruple Alliance of Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia. Trump’s victory had opened up the prospect that Russia could return to its historic role as a great power in a polycentric world — one in which each forswore doing anything to undermine the internal legitimacy of any other. No more talk of the inevitability of democracy, or the US-led global order. That was what Putin craved. Others, in Beijing, Ankara, Cairo, Caracas, and even Budapest, share Russia’s hostility to western notions of progress, as do growing numbers of apostates in the west. Are they wrong?
***
To a person whose life has coincided with the rise of democracy, the spread of market economics and signs that the world had finally subscribed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, merely to pose this question is troubling enough. Wasn’t that debate settled a long time ago? Doesn’t the whole world crave to be western? We can no longer have any confidence in that. It was remarkably arrogant to believe the rest of the world would passively adopt our script. We must cast a sceptical eye on what we have learnt never to question.
At stake is a quasi-religious reading of western history that stretches back to the Magna Carta, whose 800th anniversary was celebrated at Runnymede in 2015. By limiting the power of the king, the Magna Carta set a precedent for what would later be known as “no taxation without representation.” This short medieval document was lost to the mists for several hundred years — Shakespeare did not even mention it in his play King John. Yet since the 17th century, when the Magna Carta was dusted off by opponents of Stuart tyranny in England, then made its way to America’s 13 colonies, it has morphed into the founding myth of western liberalism. As Dan Jones, a historian of the Magna Carta, describes it, the year 1215 is today seen as the “year zero” of liberal democracy. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued after the second world war, Eleanor Roosevelt said that it “may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere”.
For centuries, westerners have held a linear faith in which time is always marching us towards a happier place. The Greeks called it teleology. For Christians, it was the Second Coming of Christ. For Marxists, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat. For nationalists, it was seizing control of their Volk destiny. For Georgian and Victorian liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, and their modern heirs across the western world, it was the progress of human liberty to individual freedom. In 1989 most people believed that last version. The others were either dead or in retreat. Today, only Marxism is dormant. Belief in an authoritarian version of national destiny is staging a powerful comeback. More to the point, non-western visions of history, which were overshadowed by colonial rule, are restaking their claim to relevance. In different ways, China and India have traditionally taken a circular view of history. They still do. Material conditions may improve. But humanity’s moral condition is constant. There is no political finale towards which history is guiding us. To the rest of the world, which accounts for almost nine-tenths of humanity, most of whom are now finally starting to catch up with the west’s material advantages, humankind’s moral progress is a question that can never be settled. History does not end. It is a timeless repetition of folly and correction.
Those who doubt the circular view should look at US history. In 1789, the newly independent American colonies had a life expectancy of barely 40. It took 12 days by coach and boat for Thomas Jefferson to make the journey from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia. Today life expectancy is nearly twice that and Jefferson’s route takes five hours. Now measure America’s story by another yardstick. America’s first president, George Washington, was a world historical figure who cemented America’s democratic character by refusing to wear his general’s uniform for his inauguration. Against all exhortations, he stood down after two terms. He feared a third would set the wrong precedent. Can we say America’s moral progress has matched its material advances? In some ways it undoubtedly has. The US was born with slavery and women had no voice. But faith in the march towards “a more perfect union” is hard to sustain after President Trump’s election. Washington chose to be a modest statesman when the laurel was his for the taking. Trump, on the other hand, is a self-promoter without peer.
Of course, Trump and his counterparts in Europe, did not cause the crisis of democratic liberalism. They are a symptom. This may be hard to digest. Many comfort themselves that Trump’s victory was an accident delivered by the dying gasp of America’s white majority — and abetted by Putin. History will resume normal business after a brief interruption. They are too sanguine. Almost a quarter of America’s white working classes who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 switched to Trump in 2016. Had they, in Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate word, suddenly turned “deplorable”? Or were they driven by a desire to blow up a system that had routinely blamed them for their plight? The same can be asked of the Nissan employees in Sunderland who voted against their economic interests for Brexit. It may have been poetic coincidence that both David Cameron and Clinton stumbled on to the same campaign line: “Stronger together”. It should be little surprise that so many voters on both sides of the Atlantic responded so cynically. The Clintons have earned $235m in speaking fees since Bill Clinton left office — much of it from the same Wall Street banks who foreclosed on so many middle class homes. Within weeks of leaving office Obama accepted a $400,000 fee for a speech to a Wall Street firm — the same as the president’s salary. In the age of Trump, the appetite for Obama’s thoughts is likely to grow. But his fees are an all-too familiar monetisation of public office. The median US income only regained its pre-recession level at the end of Obama’s term in 2015. It is still below where it was at the turn of this century. Meanwhile, almost half of Americans now describe themselves as “lower class” — up from a third in 2000.
The backlash of the west’s middle classes, who are the biggest losers in a global economy that has been rapidly converging, but still has decades to go, has been brewing for many years. In Britain we call them the “left-behinds”. In France, they are the “couches moyennes”. In America, they are the “squeezed middle”. A better term is the “precariat” — those whose lives are dominated by economic insecurity. More than 160m westerners now work in the so-called gig economy, according to the management consultancy McKinsey, a multiple of where it was five years ago. Of these, about a third do so “out of necessity”. Their numbers are forecast to rise sharply. Their share of US wealth keeps going the other way. The bottom 50 per cent of Americans now own just 1 per cent of the nation’s wealth.
In 1966 Barrington Moore, the American sociologist, wrote, “No bourgeoisie, no democracy.” In the coming years his proposition will be tested. Since the turn of the millennium, and particularly over the past decade, no fewer than 25 democracies have failed around the world, three of them in Europe (Russia, Turkey and Hungary). Poland may not be far behind. In all but Tunisia, the Arab Spring was swallowed by the summer heat. “It is an open question whether this is a market correction in democracy, or a global depression,” says Francis Fukuyama, the scholar who back in 1989 asked whether history had ended. The answer will be found in the US and other western democracies.
Ed Luce, right, on the Berlin Wall
Journalists are always liable to over-interpret the latest big thing. We are also prone to interpret what we did not foresee as serenely inevitable in hindsight. Bear in mind that Brexit was not destined to happen. Holding the referendum was a rash throw of the dice by an inept prime minister. Nor was Trump’s victory inevitable. If just 77,000 Midwestern votes had gone the other way Hillary Clinton would now be president. But it works both ways. Should Marine Le Pen lose the French election and Angela Merkel retain power in Germany, the crisis of western liberalism will not have suddenly ended, though I suspect it will be broadcast as such. Nor, for that matter, would America be secure if Clinton were now in the White House. The self-belief of western elites saps their ability to grasp the scale of the threat.
Last December, Norbert Hofer, a hard right nationalist, came within a whisker of winning Austria’s presidency. We nevertheless celebrated his defeat as the crashing of the populist wave. We are likely to do the same if a French neo-fascist loses with about 40 per cent of the vote on Sunday. Le Pen’s Front National remains France’s largest party in two critical regional strongholds — the industrial north and Provence. As millions more French, British, American and other westerners move from secure jobs with pensions in the years ahead to contractual status without benefits, their sense of precariousness will intensify. “Take back control” may be an empty slogan in a world of inter-dependent sovereignty. But it means something tangible to those who have lost what they once thought was economic security. The western state used to insure individuals against the vicissitudes of the market. It is increasingly withdrawing from that role. Should Emmanuel Macron win the French election, supporters of liberal democracy, including me, must pray that he — and other leaders like him — will succeed. But he will have won on the basis of issuing vague, catch-all promises without a majority party to carry out his wishes. Obama offered similar hope in 2008 when his party was in full control. Eight years later America elected Trump.
The west’s crisis was not invented in 2016. Nor will it vanish in 2017. It is structural and likely to persist. Those who gloss over this are doing liberal democracy no favours.
Edward Luce is the FT’s chief US columnist and commentator. His book, ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ is published now in the UK (Little, Brown) and on June 12 in the US (Atlantic Grove)
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