Edward Luce - The Retreat of Western Liberalism

THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM

A lso by Edward Luce

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India

Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent

THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM

EDWARD LUCE

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2017 by Edward Luce

Jacket design by Duncan Spilling - L,BBG

Fig. 1, The Elephant Chart, printed with the permission of Branko Milanovic.

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Little, Brown

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: June 2017

Library of Congress Cataloguing - in - Publication data available for this title.

ISBN -- 8021 - 2739

eISBN -- 8021 - 8886

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

FRIEDRICH HEGEL

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 poets sentiments captured our mood. The year was 1989. Having grown up under the Cold Wars nuclear shadow, the temptation to catch a glimpse of its physical demise was irresistible. Being students, we did not inform anyone of our absence. The instant we heard East Germany had opened Checkpoint Charlie, uniting Berlin, we were on our way. Four hours later we had boarded a ferry from Dover to Zeebrugge. Within eighteen hours we too three boys and two girls 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 to this orgy of historic vandalism. Friendships were forged with people whom we had never met, nor would again. One group of West Berliners hugged us and shared their bottle of champagne. Could there have been a more fitting way to toast the new era than with champagne from strangers? Two days later we returned to England, chronically hungover, astonished to have avoided any speeding tickets, carrying a small chunk of the wall apiece. I have since mislaid my souvenir. But my tutor, who had noted my absence, was mollified by my excuse. I suppose its better than the alternatives, he said when I showed him my bit of the wall. Did you have fun?

We were infected with optimism. As a student of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, I imagined that I possessed the key to the historic significance of the moment. PPEs detractors called it a Pretty Poor Education. They may have had a point. But in that moment, all the late - night essay crises seemed to come together. A less derogatory phrase for PPE is Modern Greats, in reference to Oxfords venerable Greats degree in classics. In content, there is little comparison: Sophocles tragedies bear scant relation to the desiccated logic of Oxford economics. But they share a conceit about the primacy of Western thought. On this, if little else, there is no quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. We called it 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, there was no longer any quarrel between the present and the present.

Shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama published his famous essay, The End of History?. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War... but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankinds ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government, he wrote. Though I did not subscribe to Fukuyamas view of the ideal society I shared his relief. A monumental roadblock had been cleared from our future. No longer would nuclear - armed ideological camps face each other across the twentieth - 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. Global horizons beckoned. A unipolar world was dawning. At a stroke, and without a shot being fired, our generation was staging the funeral rites for the twin scourges of Western modernity, communism and fascism. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm was to write, the short and genocidal twentieth century, which began with the Russian revolution in 1917, came to an end in 1989. Though still alive, history was smiling. The human species had proved it could learn from its mistakes. It was a good year to turn twenty - one .

Nearly three decades later, in the aftermath of Donald Trumps 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. The conference was hosted by the Primakov Institute, named after the man who had been Russias 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 130 miles away, at his KGB office in Dresden, a city in what was still East Germany. Later he would describe the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. It was Primakov who championed the term multipolarity in what at the time seemed like a vain bid to dampen Americas oceanic post - Cold War triumphalism. Putin picked up the concept and made it his own. As the worlds one indispensable power, Americans never warmed to the idea of multipolarity. Such was Washingtons self - confidence that it even came to disdain the word multilateralism. As Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State in the late 1990s, put it, It has too many syllables and ends with an ism.

Now here I was in Moscow at an event attended by the likes of Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB (successor to the KGB), and Vladimir Putin himself. Though unsmiling, it was Russias turn to celebrate. The institute had sent me its invitation several months earlier and I had promptly forgotten about it. On 9 November, the morning after the US presidential election, as I tried to make sense of the dawning new reality I recalled that invitation. By eerie coincidence, it was twenty - seven years to the day since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The worm had turned. America had just elected a president who was a big fan of walls and a big admirer of Vladimir Putin. While Putin was surveying his wrecked world in 1989, and we were racing down the Autobahn , Donald 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. Unsurprisingly, it was a flop. There is no record that Trump said anything positive or negative about the fall of the Berlin Wall. At any rate, all that seemed a long time ago. America had just elected a man who admired the way politics was done in Russia. His campaign had even profited from Moscows assistance. Would the Russians kindly agree to my belated acceptance? They would indeed.