Writing soon after 9/11, Francis Fukuyama seemed more convinced than ever that ‘modernity is a very powerful freight train that will not be derailed by recent events, however painful and unprecedented. Democracy and free markets will continue to expand over time as the dominant organizing principles for much of the world.’ As late as 2008, Fareed Zakaria could declare in his much-cited book, The Post-American World, that ‘the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions’ and that ‘the world is going America’s way’, with countries ‘becoming more open, market-friendly and democratic’, their numerous poor ‘slowly being absorbed into productive and growing economies’.
Such beliefs in historical inevitability, however, can no longer be sustained. Nor can the selective histories they were based on. The extraordinary hegemonic power of naive ideas helped them escape rigorous examination when the world could still be plausibly presented as going America’s way, and modernity’s freight train appeared to be unloading its goodies in the remotest corners of the globe.
A long economic crisis followed by the nihilistic violence of ISIS, the implosion of nation states in North Africa and the Middle East, the rise of far-right movements at home, igniting such disasters as Trump’s victory, have now plunged political and media elites in the West into stunned bewilderment. The op-ed pages of Anglo-American newspapers on any given day are still awash with clichés about the waning of Western power/will and the urgent need to reassert it. Nevertheless, we are now entering an era of frank admissions and blunt reckonings. For it is blindingly clear that ‘so far, the twenty-first century has been a rotten one for the Western model’, as even John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editors at The Economist, have written.
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Unable to discern a rational design in worldwide mayhem, many intellectuals seem as lost as politicians today, their concepts and categories sounding more and more like ineffectual jargon. ‘Whatever our politics,’ Michael Ignatieff, a self-described ‘liberal internationalist’, confesses in a recent article on the Marxist thinker Perry Anderson, ‘we all stand in need of a historical vision that believes there is a deep logic to the unfolding of time’. For the bearers of ‘Enlightenment humanism and rationalism’, liberal or Marxist, can’t ‘explain the world we’re living in’.
As Ignatieff coyly admits, the liberal internationalist cult of progress plainly mimicked the Marxist dream of universal revolution. The origins of both Comintern and its ‘Liberal-Intern’ lay in the original eighteenth-century fantasy of a rationally organized and logically ordered world: the expectation that reason would replace tradition and drift as the determining element in history.
Very little in Europe’s own intellectual and political history actually supported the assumption that the Atlantic West’s liberal institutions would spread eastwards. It was in fact vigorously contested throughout the nineteenth century by writers of many different ideological commitments: for example, Walter Bagehot, editor of The Economist, as well as the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen. Liberal democracy could not even be lodged securely in the continent’s own soil: not even the West was ‘Western’ for a long time.
War, conspiracy, mob violence, repression and authoritarian rule defined the first six decades in Europe after the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). Writing after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, Herzen was convinced that Western European dominance, arrived at after much fratricidal violence and underpinned by much intellectual deception and self-deception, did not amount to ‘progress’. He warned his compatriots that ‘our classic ignorance of the Western European will be productive of a great deal of harm; racial hatred and bloody collisions will develop from it.’ The brutality that Herzen saw as underpinning Europe’s progress turned out, in the twentieth century, to be a mere prelude to the biggest bloodbath in history: two world wars, and ferocious ethnic cleansing that claimed tens of millions of victims.
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In her 1950 preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt admitted that not only was it futile to hope ‘for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared’. We were actually condemned to ‘watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth’.
The ‘Western model’, however, offered a story of painless improvement. Generations to come may wonder how a mode of wish-fulfilment came to be conventional wisdom; how an ingenuous nineteenth-century philosophy, which posited universal patterns and an overarching purpose in history, managed to seduce so many intelligent people in the twenty-first century. It won’t be possible to understand its appeal without examining the post-1945 climate of ideas in the United States.
For in Europe, the nineteenth-century’s certainties – primary among them Western universalism, the old Jewish-Christian claim to be able to create a life of universal validity now transposed into secular millenarianism – had been undermined by historical calamities. The First World War exposed liberal democracy as fragile; the Great Depression revealed the costs of unregulated capitalism. The Second World War dealt a serious blow to Britain’s capacity to export or implant its institutions. But, in a strange twist of history, the fantasy of disseminating Anglo-American ideals and institutions worldwide was revived after 1945 and made central to political and economic thinking by Britain’s successor, the United States.
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The United States, the Spanish-American writer George Santayana wrote, ‘has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves’. Santayana had watched from his perch at Harvard University as commerce, industrialization and imperialism turned post-Civil War America into a powerful country, and the drearily respectable Yankee found himself replaced by the ‘pushing, cosmopolitan orphan’ with dreams of universal Americanization. He was disturbed by America’s aggressive new individualistic culture, in which human beings suddenly seemed to have no higher aim in life than diligent imitation of the rich, and leaders in higher education as well as business, politics and the press were judged by their ability to make that opportunity widely available.